The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  This is the container which should never be opened, that element common to myth and fairy tale, the test impossible to pass. This is the backseat of Tom Lupone’s father’s Chrysler. Naturally Princess Falena can’t resist. She picks up the tin. She shakes it, and sings a charming, brief duet with herself (Yes I will, No you won’t, Yes she will, No we won’t, etc.). The first act ends as the princess opens the lid, out fly the moths, and into a mouth still wide open with the final “Ye-es” (fortissimo, fermata—an unfeasible combination, since, by nature, the louder the sound, the more rapidly the human voice will decay) flies the tiny, winged agent of her destiny.

  At the beginning of Act Two we’re still in the farmhouse kitchen, although now our perspective has shifted: what we see when the curtain opens is the cupboard shelf, and the principals are Moth, Sugar, Salt, Tin, and Cat. Interestingly, Helle’s use here of this “zoom” technique not only anticipates the overall design of her 1953 opera, Fuglespil, but also the sophisticated cinematic effects which influenced that later work. “A woman ahead of her time,” in the words of Peter Sellars, whose recent revival of Det omflakkende Møl set the first two acts in the sauce kitchen of Lutèce. “A woman who, at the very start of this century, understood the dark turn toward greed we’d take at its end.” Moth is the Princess Falena, a white mask dominated by two immense gray eyes covering her face. It is nighttime, and she is singing an aria to her new companions—a jarring composition, mean-tempered both musically and emotionally, in which she describes the consequences of her metamorphosis. “I might have known love,” Moth sings, “without love’s bite, wingless I might have flown. As the hand seeks the glove, the moth seeks the Worm, whose skin she once called home.” Sugar, Salt, and Tin listen sympathetically; Cat, formerly the Nisse, crouches off to stage right, sharpening her nails, licking her chops.

  Or at least that was the composer’s original intention. But original intentions are rarely realized; according to Helle, the Muse’s secret name was Disappointment, and the sooner an artist learned that fact, the better. In the first public performance (June 3, 1911) of Det omflakkende Møl, Sugar, played by Bodie Nissen, became restless and began fiddling with the hem of the bran sack in which she was costumed, unraveling lengths of hemp which she dropped down Salt’s back, causing Salt (Hans Fog, Inger’s future husband) to collapse, insofar as it was possible for him to collapse in his boxlike suit, on top of Tin (Torben Toksvig). Helle herself was singing the part of Moth, and despite the fact that she had perfect pitch, her voice was, by her own admission, “froglike,” and all of the arias were overlong.

  Of course an opera as produced could never live up to the composer’s expectations; how could it do so when Helle herself couldn’t manage to suggest even remotely the magnificence of her original dream? Didn’t the very act of pinning the dream down, of assigning it form, serve to ruin it? Helle used to show me the notices sent by her agent that described “innovative” stagings of her operas such as the one Sellars was to mount, productions for which she had nothing but scorn. The great tidal wave which is the culminating image of The Harrowing of Lahloo was for some reason transposed by the Deutsche Oper into the wing of an enormous angel; the part of Fortune, in the Houston Grand Opera’s production of Fortune’s Lap, was “sung” by a tape deck. Nor was it so very long ago that a woman at Glyndebourne expressed interest in staging The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf in Greenham Common, with the bog represented by a nuclear waste dump. “Even God was disappointed,” Helle said. “He made a world full of pleasant and colorful toys, and the next thing he knew they were stabbing him in the back. Two little girls in a beech grove, at least one of them plotting His demise.”

  If I recall correctly, this conversation occurred not long after the peculiar tea party at the Blackburns’, during the period Helle came to refer to as our “courtship.” Chances are we were walking somewhere—out toward the quarries?—either alone or with the twins and William in tow. Helle loved to walk, her daily routine having been built around a walk at nine in the morning and another at four in the afternoon. Before she met me these were solitary excursions up a steep trail leading off Quarry Road and onto West Hill. She would tread lightly through snow or mud or brambles, gratified by the continuing flexibility of her body; then, at the crest of the hill, she would pause among the apple trees to smoke a Lucky before heading back down the hill to her desk. After we met, however, she would walk by herself in the mornings and with me in the afternoons. Sometimes we’d make a circuit of the town, or hike out the Branch Road, or wander along Route 71 as far as the railroad bridge. But no matter where we went, three things remained constant: we smoked, we stopped to identify birds, we talked. Which is no doubt why my memory of the walks themselves is a little vague. Helle’s descriptions of her past always had the uncanny effect of obliterating the present, as if all she had to do was open her mouth and say “In Jutland,” and a persistent northern wind would instantly spring forth, sweeping the blacktop clean of fast-food containers and compact cars and young men on ten-speeds, turning high-voltage towers into lighthouses, fields dotted with new corn into sand dunes, Pocket Lake into the sea.

  In any event, I’m pretty sure it was on one of these walks that Helle first told me about the beech grove at Krageslund, the place she used to retreat to when she was trying to solve a difficult problem of composition. Danish beech groves! Really, she said, we had nothing like them in America, which explained the undisciplined quality of the American imagination, our preference for the unruly growth of an idea at the expense of sustained reflection. American forests were large and filled with deadfall, whereas the only sign of intemperance in a Danish beech grove was high overhead, in the contorted, twisting corkscrews of the upper branches. Below, all you could see were those evenly spaced trunks, their gray-green bark as smooth and unlined as the skin of young girls, their trunks like the pillars of an airy hall whose floor was blanketed with hundreds of the little white star-shaped flowers called anemones.

  Helle would lean back against the smooth gray-green trunk of the largest of the trees, her skinny legs crossed Indian-style, and Inger would generally be lying on her stomach in front of her, her elbows firmly planted in the thick anemone-studded grass, her small chin cupped in the palms of her hands. Helle waiting for inspiration to strike, Inger off on a cloud—the usual relationship between artist and muse. Chak chak chak went the magpies, busily feeding their young in Ida’s nesting boxes. Chak chak chak. Some days must have been overcast, but what Helle remembered was the enclosing tent of the tree’s shadow, her body and Inger’s speckled with wavering disks of sunlight. They ate fruit from Ida’s untended gardens, the juice of the currants staining their teeth; occasionally Inger would bring damp rounds of cheese, each marked with a pattern of tiny squares by the gauzy cloth in which it was wrapped.

  It might be a sentence she’d come upon the night before in a reference work—for example, “The antennae in the moth are feathery and unknobbed”—and that, together with the sight of Inger’s juice-stained lips, would cause a sound to stir within Helle, a thread of melody sensed rather than heard, a thrilling and plaintive juxtaposition of the beautiful and the rapacious. C-sharp minor, or maybe something in the Dorian mode? Possibly a major key, but with the intimation of an impossibly high final note, yearned for yet never met? Sam, Helle claimed, would see in this situation evidence for the Platonic ideal, but men were fascists by nature. Wasn’t that, when you got right down to it, the real source of the conflict between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night? All you had to do was listen to their music: Sarastro’s rigid and self-contained measures, the Queen’s heartbreaking coloratura runs.

  As Helle described it, she was struggling to catch hold of the tail of just such an elusive thread of melody, when all of a sudden the magpies took off in their lavish, iridescent cloaks, their former casual chatter replaced by noisy “alarm notes.” Bounding toward her from the edge of the grove she saw Viggi Brahe’s dog—uglier than usual because it had been swimming
, and its coat was flecked with mud and grit and frog spawn. First she saw the dog; it took a few moments before she noticed its owner. Who knew how long he’d been standing there on the edge of the grove, his bony face shadowed by the brim of a straw hat, his bony arms sticking out of the rolled-up sleeves of his smocked shirt?

  For several years now, Viggi Brahe confessed, he’d been spying on Helle. Like many men of a solitary and romantic disposition, he’d allowed himself to nurse along a delusion until it had acquired the weight of truth: if he couldn’t have the mother, perhaps he could at least have the daughter. Certainly Helle resembled Ida, although where Ida had been pliant and melancholy, Helle was stiff and ambitious. If she was going to avoid her mother’s fate, Viggi Brahe cautioned, it would require more than an unusual talent for playing the piano. He knew Helle had talent, having followed her progress on Clara’s out-of-tune piano, having eavesdropped through the open morning-room windows. But what she needed, he said, was a patron.

  Thus commenced the first of what Helle referred to as her “mariages faux,” relationships with men characterized by the same warring objectives that drove the plot of Zauberflöte, relationships such as those she was later to form with Oswald Bingger and Rasmus Rundgren. Men were always attracted to Helle, despite her obvious dislike of them. Sam claimed to find her as tantalizing as she was repugnant, an exotic bird that sang like an angel before it ate the tip of your finger, whereas in the case of Viggi Brahe the trade-off was less ambiguous: in exchange for his patronage, he wanted to get credit for the art he was himself incapable of making. Poor Viggi Brahe. It would appear that he’d inherited Tycho Brahe’s ambition without the correlative genius. Like Ruby’s set of nesting dolls, Helle said—a doll within a doll within a doll. The features of the first doll, the biggest one, were always painted with precision and care; by the time you got to the smallest, all you had was a nubbin of wood. Of course Viggi Brahe was more handsome than his illustrious ancestor, and he didn’t have a metal nose, for which he should have been thankful. Not to mention the fact that if it weren’t for Viggi Brahe, Helle’s first opera would have had its premiere in Ove Nissen’s hay barn, not the great hall at Sandhed, and the singers would’ve been accompanied by the plangent cooing of doves and swallows, not Sandhed’s magnificent pipe organ.

  As it turned out, you couldn’t really hear the singers anyway: the hall was enormous, the blocks of stone comprising its walls so huge they seemed to have been set in place by giants. Similarly, what passed for windows—narrow vertical slits—were positioned up near the ceiling, itself two stories high, so only giants could have looked out through them. And the spiders! They, too, were gigantic, like fists, their webs filling the gaps between the stones, obscuring the family motto—IT IS GOOD TO HEAR THE WOLF HOWLING BENEATH THE ASH TREE—carved into the fireplace lintel, wrapping around and around the figures of the Apostles in the four neo-Gothic wall niches. In all, a room made by and for giants—a room designed to drain any semblance of strength or depth from the voices of children, which came out sounding no louder than the muffled buzzing of trapped flies.

  Chairs were set up in rows facing the wall containing the fireplace, the opening of which had been covered by a painted drop cloth. In this way the audience would have their backs to the organ and wouldn’t be distracted by the sight of its twenty-one pipes and two keyboards, its rosewood fittings carved with Alpine flora and fauna, its delicate rosewood bench, on which sat Viggi Brahe, turned out for the occasion in a frock coat of fawn silk and a pair of dove-colored breeches, his long, thin hair tied at the nape of his neck with a black ribbon. He wasn’t too bad as an organist, Helle said, despite the annoying flourishes of wrist and elbow; he knew how to “work his mixtures and mutation stops,” and he “didn’t overdo it with the crescendo pedal and the vox angelica.”

  The performance resembled a bad dream in that everyone Helle knew was there: the mountainlike body of Fru Pedersen, its little outcropping of bald scalp looming over the small furry head of her husband, Junker; Old Clara wrapped round and round with scarves and draperies, like a colorful mummy coming undone; tall, hideous Constable Fog and his unusually pretty wife; Helle’s schoolmates, some in the audience, others on stage; the pork butcher, the undertaker, the preacher, the whole Nissen family. Her father and Gunhild sat side by side in the front row on their delicate gilt-painted chairs, Gunhild’s face as blank as a worn-out coin, indicative of neither origin nor value.

  And meanwhile there was Inger, singing the part of Prince Carissimo in her pure sweet soprano, sweat beading on her upper lip and across her wide cheekbones, the bodice of her white satin jacket straining at its seams as she reached for the higher notes. Inger’s breasts were well developed—unlike Helle’s, who would only have been embarrassed by them—and she carried herself with a stately grace. Even Torben Toksvig appeared to be in awe of her. “Why do you hide, Bright Sisters, North Star, the woods are dark, the journey far,” Inger sang (an eerily ascending segment in the Dorian mode echoed, in contrary motion, by the voice of Moth, as all the while Cat repeats a single note, B-flat, “It’s time to go”). Helle’s intention for the second-act finale was to imply a form of struggle in which the voice of Cat, speaking seductively on behalf of fate, would remain locked in one place even as it urged flight, while the resistant voices of Moth and the prince would never stop moving. The trio expands into a quartet, into a quintet, a sextet. “The juniper boughs are creaking,” the company sings (ensemble), “Listen to what they say” (Moth, solo), “The moon through the clouds is peeking, to guide us on our way” (ensemble), “O banquet! Sweet banquet! Under the light of the moon!” (Cat, solo, addressing the audience, pausing to sharpen her claws on a tree trunk).

  By the beginning of the third act, the threads of the plot had become hopelessly snarled and Helle’s audience was becoming restive. Karen Holst and Elizabeth Albæk were passing notes; Fru Nissen’s thickly braided head kept lolling forward as if it were about to land in her big soft lap; the undertaker was picking lint from his pants; Gunhild was knitting a striped sock. During a scene change, Helle overheard Inger whispering with Hans Fog. Can you believe it, Inger was saying, a cat going to so much trouble just for one little moth? Cats usually only toyed with moths; they didn’t like to eat them. Even Viggi Brahe kept sneaking glances up toward the windows, where large clouds rolled past in a bright blue sky. Outdoors it was warm; birds were singing. The pork butcher’s spindly white-haired sons were drawing pictures with their fingers in the dust on the floor. In fact, Helle told me, only her father appeared to be completely absorbed by the spectacle before him. He sat stiff as a poker in his chair, his hands clenched into fists in his lap, unable to take his eyes off the stage.

  For my own part, paging through the score as I listened again and again to the Angel recording of Det omflakkende Møl, I knew that no matter how impatient I might get, without understanding its ending, I would never be able to meet the terms of my legacy. To undo a curse, to retrieve her human shape and hence the love of her betrothed, a princess must journey to the world’s end. Once she arrives there—with the aid of her traveling companions, each of whom proves to have a talent crucial to her salvation—she crawls back inside the body of the Lindworm, her own hideous place of origin, and thus triumphs over death. A characteristically perverse triumph, however, since it isn’t until the top of the princess’s head is no longer visible that the prince finally arrives. “Foul serpent, hell-root, world-shoot, die!” he sings, drawing his sword and plunging it through the Lindworm’s heart, never realizing that he has plunged it through the princess’s heart as well. We hear her voice, its muffled and sad line of melody—“ahhhhhh”—twining around the discordant wail of the dying worm. And then there spills from the wound a stream of black, undulant creatures, the worm’s grotesque offspring, followed by a fluttering cloud of moths, white and pink and gold. One of them lands on the palm of the prince’s outstretched hand, and he bends to kiss it. One of them lands on the ground in front of Cat,
who winks at the audience before swallowing it whole.

  Hatchings and involutions, resurrections and returns—“My end is my beginning,” according to that famous motet of Machaut’s which Helle sometimes whistled as she cooked. Or, in the words of Fuglespil’s Easter duet, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” I made a list: the figurehead’s overlapping stages of metamorphosis in Lahloo; the reiterated “quivering ring” motif in Waves; the uncanny “Xerox finale” of Fortune’s Lap; the house of mirrors in Delia; the horrifying conclusion of Fuglespil. In this respect the lesson seemed clear enough: the heroine’s ultimate fate in The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf must somehow reflect who she was when she first accepted the bread and put on the shoes.

  And yet why did I keep returning to that second-act finale, as if everything I needed to understand might somehow be contained in its music? Perhaps it was because the music itself never failed to break my heart, that listening to it I could see so clearly those birch saplings sticking up out of milk pails, the moon-speckled ribbon of water Helle had envisioned, an approaching storm. I could see her tense face, her gray eyes squinting through her mask, and—as the music gradually brightened, breaking apart into arpeggios, into sprays of brightly hopeful notes—I could feel myself longing, just as I knew she had, for the actual onslaught of magical, imagined rain. I would listen to that music and, little by little, come to realize how implicit in every fragile human hope is the seed of its transformation into grief—the Lindworm, its triangular head draped across the lip of the well at the world’s end, the rest of its long white body piling, coil upon coil, within the mica-flecked, brackish water, the very tip of its tail (or is it a second head?) dangling down through the roof of hell. Maybe it was the sound of my own grief Helle was forcing me to hear, that grief she’d known how to describe even before she brought it into being. The tip of the Lindworm’s tail. Pale, white. Phallic, of course, the Nisse in its final, most deadly aspect—although I suspected that wasn’t all there was to it. In fact I found myself wondering whether what I was seeing was Inger’s shoeless foot, breaking through the roof of the bog.