Mephisto Aria

by Justine Saracen

Katherina endeavored to make conversation. “I understood you are to be anonymous. Why is that?”

  “Mr. Raspin has requested that I remain unknown. He has compensated me for that discretion and I have no objections. He has also contributed a number of his own ideas.”

  “Morning, all!” The bass, Matti, waved at them from farther down the platform. Other cast members were joining him, and Katherina spotted Radu Gavril among them.

  The sound of a steam-locomotive whistle pierced the air, and a moment later the train became visible in the distance, chugging up the incline to Drei Annen, pouring out sooty black smoke. When it drew into the station and stopped, the soot disappeared and gray steam escaped into the icy air.

  It was a wonderful antique locomotive, a massive black iron-and-steel barrel covered with countless fixtures, valves, wheels, pipes, and lights. The lower portions of the steam engine were painted red, along with the fully exposed wheels and the armature that turned them. Three lights burned at the front, now superfluous in the snow-augmented morning light, and a wide steel plate between the lights bore the engine number. An open red car directly behind the locomotive held coal, and behind the coal car were six small green passenger cars. Like a child’s train set replicated in real-life format.

  A conductor opened the passenger-car door from the inside and reached out to help her up. The moment seemed fairy-tale-like. As she clasped the proffered hand, she glanced sideways down the platform, taking one last look at the charming nineteenth-century train station.

  With a jolt, she saw Sabine Maurach stepping into the next passenger car.

  Katherina stared out the train window at the Alpine landscape, listening to the ever-accelerating bedattabedatta of the train wheels. The morning sunlight that shone with double intensity on the snow cheered her immensely and allowed her to forget about Sabine Maurach and most of her other cares. Some of the trees, she noted, had collected snow on only one side. The constant wind had blown it outward and it had frozen in ragged horizontal shapes. They made her think of witches flying into the wind. Could the strange phenomenon be the source of the Witches’ Sabbath legends? She wished that Anastasia were at the window with her, explaining snow myths.

  “May we join you?” Katherina smiled welcome as Radu Gavril and Friedrich Diener sat down on the seats across the aisle from her. When the train passed through clearings in the line of trees, the newly risen sun was just high enough to shine through the coach window, warming the side of her face.

  “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Radu said. “Is this your first trip up to the peak?”

  Katherina nodded. “Yes. But I’m curious why we are allowed to perform on the Brocken Peak. As I understood it, it’s a high-security area used by the East German government and the Soviets.”

  “You’re quite right, Fräulein Marow,” Friedrich Diener said, small now on his seat, all mustache and coat. “It’s surrounded by a concrete wall, too. The transmission tower there not only broadcasts East German television, but probably monitors signals from the West. Nasty business.”

  “It’s hard to believe they would allow something like this. I mean the orchestra and conductor are from the DDR, but the soloists are West German.”

  Diener nodded pedagogically. “Quite so, but it is a work that from its conception was intended to be performed at this location. Mr. Raspin has spent a lot of money and called in a lot of favors to get the DDR to agree to this production. An amazing achievement.”

  “We’ll have to go through border control, then?”

  “Yes, two times, in fact. At the Brocken station and again as we pass through the security wall around the transmission station. You have your temporary visa, don’t you?”

  “Of course. My agent took care of all that.” She held up her shoulder bag, which now had a fastener holding it firmly shut.

  Friedrich Diener bent toward her from his seat across the aisle. “I trust Herr Raspin has discussed with you the…uh…novel aspects of this opera.”

  “Yes, briefly. But perhaps you can fill me in on more of the details.”

  He clasped his hands in front of him. “The novelty is both in the musical structure and in the staging. You see, we return to the roots of the theatrical experience. The performance will be anti-Goethe, even anti-Brecht. We don’t want any intellectual detachment. That is the art of the weakling. We wish to initiate a complete abandoning of the self to the musical experience.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t follow you. I don’t know what that means.”

  Diener continued with what was apparently a little speech he often gave. “Since the onset of the technological age, people have become emotionally lazy, intellectualized. They sit passively in movie theaters having their excitement poured into them from outside. We’re going to excite them from the inside. Using the historical-literary nomenclature, we offer a return to pre-classical Greek drama, which was a religious rite—the sacrifice of Dionysius.”

  Pre-classical Greek drama? Katherina realized now who the composer resembled. Friedrich Nietzsche. Had the man read so much of the nineteenth-century philosopher that he decided to grow a bushy mustache to look like him? Or did the mustache come first?

  “How, exactly, will you do this?” she asked.

  He smiled with his eyes, though it was not possible to see whether his lips did as well. “Mr. Gavril will be taking care of that.”

  Radu Gavril cleared his throat as if being handed a microphone. “Part of the performance design is for you to provoke the audience to join in simple tunes and chants. We’ll be blocking that out today.”

  “How can you rehearse that aspect without an audience?”

  “We can’t really, but spontaneity is part of our challenge and our strength. Dress rehearsal will have an invited audience selected by the East German government, and by opening night, with a different audience, you will all be veterans. You’ll see.”

  An ominous question occurred to Katherina and she felt foolish not having wondered about it sooner. “Mr. Diener, if the Brocken is a restricted high-security area, how do you plan to invite a public to see the performance?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, dear,” Diener responded gently. “You just concentrate on the music. We’ll address the question of the audience when the time comes.”

  Katherina was a little put off by the condescending answer, but saw no point in pushing for more information. It was, as he said, their problem.

  “Well, hello,” a familiar voice sounded over Katherina’s head. The shadow, two shadows, moved along the aisle into view. Sabine Maurach stood next to a tall, pale-skinned man. His square face with its somewhat large nose and cleft chin gave him a certain masculinity, offset by a wide mouth with high-arched sensuous lips that all but rippled. He seemed unable to hold them still for very long, first pressing them together, then running his tongue quickly over them. The effect was a sort of drawing of attention to his mouth rather than to his whole person. He had also shaved away his eyebrows.

  Sabine laid her hand on his shoulder, positioning him for introduction. “Have you met Gustav?” she asked. “He’ll be your Mephisto.”

  XXV

  Pericoloso

  The guards of the Grenzpolizei at the Brocken Peak sprang to life as the steam train disgorged its passengers into the station. The soldiers were all young men in medium brown, lightly patterned field camouflage with the usual chest pockets and epaulets. They wore soft caps, and their unmilitarily long hair offered a stark contrast to the severe haircuts of the Wehrmacht. Each one had an assault rifle slung on his shoulder, which seemed excessive for monitoring an opera company. Two of them had huge binoculars hanging from their necks, and a third stood off to the side taking photographs with a bulky camera. Though Katherina suspected they were glad to have something official to do, the guards scrutinized each pass and visa meticulously, as if the safety of the entire DDR depended on their weeding out spies from among the opera crew.

  The pass controllers asked every one o
f the newly arrived visitors the same two questions: “What is your reason for entering the Brocken security zone?” and “Are you carrying instruments that could be construed as dangerous to the installation?” Then, after a brief pat-down of each person, carried out with the same gravity as the interrogation, they stamped the papers presented and waved the visitor on.

  Gustav, who stood just behind Katherina, seemed to share her annoyance. “Amusing for the first time,” he whispered, “but two times every day will become boring fast.”

  After some twenty minutes, all the company members had passed through control without incident, and they moved in clusters up the long path to the performance site. Though the sun was already high, the temperature was still at freezing and the snow on the path was frozen hard.

  Long before they arrived at the opening in the concrete security wall, Katherina could see the two transmission towers: the old concrete block tower and the newer and far higher one. The column of steel painted in three bands of red and white and standing on three legs looked more modern but was just as ugly as its predecessor. Katherina had a vague idea that the two structures were for broadcasting both television and the FM radio system of the DDR but was not sure if both were operational.

  As they approached the gateway, two guards stepped forward to check their papers yet again, though this time with less rigor. By their uniforms it was evident that one was an East German “Vopo” and the other a Soviet. Katherina had heard that the Red Army maintained a barracks on the Brocken Peak, but had not thought about it until now. One of the women walking ahead of her addressed the German guard but he looked away from her, refusing to reply. Obviously they had been ordered not to talk to the visitors. An unpleasant welcome.

  At the foot of the new transmission tower, cars and service trucks were pulled up in a circle. Trabants painted in camouflage had the circular emblem Grenzpolizei DDR on their sides, and dull green minivans were stenciled in black on the rear with Fernsehen der DDR. Shabby air-polluting vehicles Katherina had not seen in the West for years. A third building stood next to the towers, she presumed for administrative functions, and attached directly to its wall, a row of cages held German shepherd dogs. They erupted into a frenzy of barking as the visitors streamed through the gate.

  Some hundred paces away Katherina and the other cast members stopped and formed a loose semicircle around the performance space. It was as primitive a thing as Katherina could imagine. A natural rock formation, which she assumed was the Witches’ Altar the stationmaster had talked about, formed the center. Behind it, temporary wooden flooring had been laid over the rocky ground for the orchestra and conductor. Directly in front of it, a pit had been dug. The only stage was a thin strip of platform a few centimeters off the ground, which surrounded the rock pile and the pit. A circular pine roof supported by beams covered everything but the fire pit, and the wide hole in the middle of the roof, some two meters in diameter, was obviously for smoke ventilation.

  Two rings of wooden pillars supported the roof, though the inner pillars were doubly thick. She quickly saw why. Four of them held small platforms where a person could crouch. A narrow ladder ran along the column from ground to roof. A technician with Fernsehen der DDR on the back of his overall had just climbed down one of them with a coil of cable over his shoulder. She could see now that he had just installed a length of cable along the column up to the elevated workspace.

  “What are those for?” Katherina asked, pointing to one of the platforms.

  “Camera emplacements,” Radu answered. “DDR television will be filming from three of them.”

  “Hollywood on the Brocken, dear,” Gustav quipped. “Aren’t you excited?”

  In fact she was a little excited, but also a little unnerved. Any error would be recorded forever. Every note and action, for better or for worse, would be irrevocable.

  She was also not particularly happy to note that the audience had no seats but only narrow benches. Mere planks, the kind that did not encourage sitting. The audience would thus be standing, just as the chorus would do. Like Medieval spectators. It was an arrangement that encouraged noise.

  “Where will we dress and make up?” a dancer asked.

  “There are rooms and toilets down there.” Radu pointed to a long rectangular shed lower on the peak. “It’s not what you’re used to, of course, but don’t worry. It will serve for dressing rooms for that one performance night.”

  One of the younger singers warmed her hands under her armpits. “I don’t know how we’ll be able to sing for two and a half hours in this air. This ‘theater’ has no walls and it’s freezing up here.”

  Radu shook his head. “It won’t be. There will be a fire right here in this pit, a big one, as well as a ring of torches around the whole theater. That, plus some two hundred spectators will provide all the heat you’ll need. More than you’ll want. You’ll see.”

  Katherina exchanged glances with the singer, who shrugged, obviously unconvinced.

  Sabine Maurach was suddenly at her elbow. “So, how have you been?”

  “Fine, just fine.” Katherina mumbled, her eyes wandering again to Gustav, who stood nearby. The two seemed connected, although the dancers had only just arrived a few days before. Had Sabine already made yet another conquest? Katherina’s face burned as she considered the possibility that Sabine had already told him of her Carmina Burana seduction.

  Sabine touched Katherina’s forearm, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “Look, why don’t we get together this evening after rehearsal, you know, for dinner?”

  Katherina tried to formulate an evasive answer.

  Radu Gavril clapped his hands suddenly, interrupting. “Come on, everyone. Let’s get started.” He ushered his cast to the center of the performance space. On a patch of hard-packed ground, the accompanist was just removing the tarp from the small rehearsal piano.

  Radu seemed more edgy than he had been in Salzburg, his rapid-fire manner tense and hurried. He had just finished stage directing in Stockholm a few days before and was obviously under enormous pressure to realize an avant-garde work in a brief period of time. That would take its toll on any man, however brilliant.

  He addressed the four female dancers. “Witches, you’ll be onstage at all times after the opening. Remember, you’ll be the ones to pull people into the ensembles.”

  “We’ll begin with the Prolog,” he said without pause. “God and Mephisto.” He swept his hand in a wide arc across the audience space. “As you wager for the soul of Woman, you will make a full circle around the audience. The chorus will enter at the end.”

  The lyrics of the Prolog sounded familiar, and then Katherina remembered her last course in German literature. Though the drama was about the Witches’ Sabbath, it began with a near duplication of Goethe’s Prolog im Himmel. The difference, which she found gratifying, was that it was not a temptation of Faust standing in for Man, but of herself, standing in for Woman. The difference seemed significant.

  Moreover, the Devil was rather less threatening. In spite of Gustav’s robust stature, Katherina noted, to her amusement, he would sing his Mephisto as a counter-tenor.

  Satisfied with the run-through, Radu turned the page in his score. “All right. The first sin is Envy. Katherina and Stefan, this is your duet and then trio with an audience member. Stefan, give us some good tenor excitement. One of the witches”—he pointed toward Sabine—“will pick out someone and get them to sing the refrain. Don’t worry about how bad they are. They’re there for emotion, not tonality.”

  Since the singers had rehearsed the vocal parts thoroughly in Drei Annen, they performed them only at half voice with the piano, pulling in a random colleague to stand in for the audience member. Radu seemed satisfied.

  He turned his page again. “Let’s move on to Gluttony. Thomas, you’ll start the baritone while the witches distribute doughnuts and gelatin. The orchestra will be at full volume, so at the beginning of the third verse, I want you to start the food fi
ght. Just mime it right now. We’ll have real gelatin on performance night.”

  He signaled the piano and the team rehearsed all three scenes. Even without the pleasure of a gelatin fight, Katherina had to admit, it looked like it would be fun.

  An hour later, Radu called the next sin. “All right. Pride. That’s your first aria, Katherina. Mephisto will spot audience members for you, so you should move toward them. Make eye contact, reach out and touch people.”

  “The witches will bring up more people to the rock to make a pile for you to mount on. Mephisto will help you climb them, where you’ll sing the climax of the aria. Are the volunteers ready?” Four young people, music students from town, as Katherina learned, moved to the center of the Witches’ Altar. The scene had to be rehearsed several times while Katherina learned how to sing at the same time she clambered over the unstable bodies.

  “We’ll work on this again tomorrow.” Radu looked at his watch. “Let’s move on to Greed.”

  “Here the idea is to get the audience angry and ready for the two final scenes. Katherina, on your duet with Barbara, you go with the witches into the crowd and reach into people’s pockets. Whatever you find, wave in their faces before dropping it on the floor. We’ll also have handfuls of coins to throw.”

  The duet worked well musically, with the feigned annoyance of the music students a lively foil. But would a real audience, caught off guard by the singers’ abuse, react with the same docility? Katherina had misgivings. Soon, however, Radu’s confidence in staging their movement and his frequent laughter swept them away.

  It was midafternoon by the time they had rehearsed Sloth and Pride, and Katherina was muscle-sore. Radu’s energy was unflagging. “Wrath. That’s you, Matti.” A bulky, bearded man nodded. “You and Katherina will circulate during this duet, punching and slapping the audience. Just hard enough to get them riled. The vocal range is from forte to fortissimo. The orchestra will be pumping out the rhythm. Bump pah boom, bump pah boom.” He imitated the bassoons.