The Lyre of Orpheus Page 9

  April 18, 1822

  “My God,” said Arthur; “I foresee trouble.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Geraint. “This is all familiar stuff to me. Theatre people go on like that all the time. It’s what’s called the creative ferment from which all great art emerges. At least that’s what it’s called when you are being nice about it. There’s more, I suppose?”

  “Lots more,” said Penny. “Wait till you hear Letter Number Two.

  My dear Kemble:

  When I had conquered my understandable chagrin—for I make it a principle never to speak or write in anger—I wrote again to our friend Hoffmann, in what the Bard calls a ‘condoling’ manner, repeating my principal points and supporting them with some passages of verse which I put forward as the sort of thing we might use in the opera. For instance, I proposed a Hunting Chorus as a beginning. Something spirited, and with plenty of brass in the orchestration, along these lines:

  We all went out a-hunting

  The break of day before,

  In hopes to stop the grunting

  Of a most enormous boar!

  But he made it soon appear

  We’d got the wrong pig by the ear,

  Till our Fairy Knight

  To our delight

  In his spare rib poked a spear!

  —this to be followed by a thigh-slapping song for Pigwiggen (Madame Vestris, did I say?) about the hunting of the boar (with some double entendre on ‘boar’ and ‘bore’) and the Huntsmen to sing the chorus again.

  I want the fairy element to be very strong, and Pigwiggen’s power to be deft and quick, like Puck’s, in contrast to the heavier comic magic of Merlin. Perhaps a song here? Pigwiggen should appeal to both the ladies and the gentlemen in the audience—to the former as a charming boy, and to the latter as a charming girl in boy’s dress—a trick the Bard knew so well. I suggested to Herr H. that Pigwiggen’s song might be along these lines:

  The Fairy laughs at the wisest man

  There’s none can do as the Fairy can;

  Never knew a pretty girl in my life

  But wished she was a Fairy’s wife.”

  “That could get a very bad laugh in a modern opera,” said Darcourt. “I don’t mean to interrupt, Penny, but nowadays all fairy business has to be handled very carefully.”

  “Just you wait, my boy,” said Penny, and went on with the letter.

  The love scenes between Lancelot and Guenevere provide the chief romantic interest in the opera, and I sketched out a duet for Hoffmann to think about. I am not a composer—though no stranger to music, as I have said—but I think this might bring out something really fine in a man who is a composer, as we have reason to believe Hoffmann is. Lancelot sings under Guenevere’s window:

  The moon is up, the stars shine bright

  O’er the silent sea;

  And my lady love, beneath their light

  Has waited long for me.

  O, sweet the song and the lute may sound

  To the lover’s listening ear:

  But wilder and faster his pulse will bound

  At the voice of his lady dear.

  Then come with me where the stars shine bright

  O’er the silent sea:

  O, my lady love, beneath their light

  I wait alone for thee.”

  “I wonder if I might trouble you for a drop more whisky?” said Hollier to Arthur in an undertone.

  “Indeed you may. Much more of this and I shall want a very big one myself,” said Arthur, and circulated the decanter. Darcourt and Powell seemed to need it, as well.

  “I must say a word for Planché,” said Penny; “no libretto reads well. But listen to what Guenevere replies, from her balcony window:

  A latent feeling wakes

  Within my breast

  Some strange regard that breaks

  Its wonted rest.

  Let me resist, in heart,

  However weak

  What love with so much art

  Can speak.

  And then I suppose he means to follow with a love scene in prose, Lancelot mooning under Guenevere’s window.”

  “Oh, not mooning, I hope,” said Powell. “First fairy knights, and then mooning ladies. You’ll have the show closed by the police.”

  “No coarse jibes, if you please,” said Penny. “Not all the love songs are so sentimental. Listen to what the Grand Turk sings, when the Round Table party arrives in his court. He is immediately smitten by Guenevere and here he goes:

  Though I’ve pondered on Peris and Houris,

  The stars of Arabian Nights,

  This fair Pagan more beautiful sure is

  Than any such false Harem Lights;

  No gazelle! no gazelle! no gazelle!

  Has such eyes as of me took the measure!

  She’s a belle! she’s a belle! she’s a belle!

  I could ring with the greatest of pleasure!”

  “Penny, are you offering this seriously?” said Maria.

  “Planché was certainly offering it seriously—and confidently. He knew his market. I assure you this is in the real early-nineteenth-century vein, and people loved just this sort of thing. It was the Regency, you know, or as near as makes no difference. They whistled and sang and barrel-organed and played Grand Paraphrases de Concert of stuff like this on their lovely varnished pianofortes,” said Penny. “It was a time when they used to do Mozart with a lot of his music cut out, and jolly new bits by Bishop interpolated. It was before opera went all serious and sacred and had to be listened to in a holy hush. They just thought it was fun, and they treated it rough.”

  “What was Hoffmann’s response to this muck?” said Hollier.

  “Oh, muck’s a bit strong, don’t you think?” said Penny.

  “It’s so God-damned jocose,” said Arthur.

  “He seems to be patronizing the past, which I can’t bear,” said Maria. “He treats Arthur and his knights as if they had no dignity whatever.”

  “Oh, very true. Very true,” said Penny. “But do we do any better, with our Camelots and Monty Pythons and such? Pretending your great-great-infinitely-great-grandfather was a fool has always appealed to the theatrical mind. Sometimes I think there ought to be a Charter of Rights for the Dead. But you’re quite right; it is jocose. Listen to this, for Elaine to sing to Lancelot when he gives her the mitt:

  On some fine summer morning

  If I must hope give o’er,

  You’ll find, I give you warning,

  My death laid at your door.

  And if at your bedside leering

  Some night a ghost you spy,

  Don’t be surprised at hearing

  ’Tis I, ’tis I, ’tis I!”

  “She sounds very like Miss Bailey—unfortunate Miss Bailey,” said Arthur.

  “What about the grand patriotic conclusion?” said Darcourt.

  “Let’s see—where is it? Yes:

  From cottage and hall

  To drive sorrow away,

  Which in both may befall

  On some bright happy day

  Reign again over me, reign again over thee,

  The good king we shall see!

  Oh! long live the king!”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” said Hollier.

  “It’s patriotism—doesn’t have to,” said Penny.

  “But is this what Hoffmann set to music?” said Hollier.

  “No, he didn’t. There is a final letter which seems to put an end to the whole business. Listen:

  My dear Kemble:

  I wish I had better news for you from our friend Hoffmann. As you know, I sent him some sketches for several songs for the Arthur piece, with the usual librettist’s assurances that I would alter them in any way he felt necessary, to fit music he had composed. And of course that I would write additional verses for theatrical situations we agreed on, and when everything else was finished, I would pull it all together with passages of dialogue. But as you see he keeps nagging away at his
idée fixe. I felt that any differences there were between us were a matter of language; I do not know how well he understands English. However, he has chosen to reply to me in English, and I enclose his letter—

  Honoured Sir:

  In order that I may make myself as plain as possible I am writing this in German, to be translated by my esteemed friend and colleague Schauspieldirektor Ludwig Devrient, into English, of which I have myself only the most imperfect knowledge. Not so impefect, however, that I cannot seize the spirit of your beautiful verses, and declare them to be utterly unsuited to the opera I have in mind.

  It has been my happiness during my life to see great changes in music, and many musicians have been so generous as to say that I have been not unhelpful in bringing such changes about. For as you doubtless do not know, I have written a great deal of musical criticism and have been happy in the commendation of the eminent Beethoven, to say nothing of the friendship of Schumann and Weber. It was Beethoven’s regret that he had at last completed his Fidelio as an opera with spoken dialogue—a Singspiel as we call it. Since the completion of my last opera, Undine, of which Weber was so generous as to speak in the highest terms, I have thought much about the nature of opera, and now—when I assure you time is running out with me, for reasons I shall not elaborate here —I greatly wish either to write the opera of my dreams, or to write no opera at all. And, distinguished Sir, though I am sorry to speak so bluntly, your proposed libretto is no opera at all, for any purpose known to me.

  When I speak of the opera of my dreams, it is no forced elegance of words, I assure you, but the expression of what I believe music to be, and to be capable of expressing. For is not music a language? And of what is it the language? Is it not the language of the dream world, the world beyond thought, beyond the languages of Mankind? Music strives to speak to Mankind in the only possible language of this unseen world. In your letters you stress again and again the necessity to reach an audience, to achieve a success. But what kind of success? I am now at a point in my life—an ending, I fear—when such success has no charms for me. I have not long to speak and I can only be content to speak truth.

  I beg you to be so good as to reconsider. Let us not prepare another Singspiel, full of drolleries and elfin persons, but an opera in the manner of the future, with music throughout, the arias being linked by dialogue sung to an orchestral accompaniment and not simply to the few notes from the harpsichord, to keep the singer in tune. And, O my very dear Sir, let us be serious about la Matière de Bretagne and not present King Arthur as a Jack Pudding.

  No, I see the drama as springing from King Arthur’s recognition of the noble love of Lancelot for Guenevere, and the great pain with which he accepts that love. You have all that anyone could need in your English romance Le Morte d’Arthur. Draw upon that, I beg you. Let us have that great love, and also the sorrow with which Lancelot knows that he is betraying his friend and king, and Lancelot’s madness born of remorse. Let us make an opera about three people of the highest nobility, and let us make Arthur’s forgiveness and understanding love for his Queen and his friend the culminating point of the action. The title I propose is Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. Whether that has the right ring in English I cannot tell, but you will know.

  But let us, I entreat you, explore the miraculous that dwells in the depths of the mind. Let the lyre of Orpheus open the door of the underworld of feeling.

  With every protestation of respect and regard I am,

  Honoured Sir,

  E.T.A. HOFFMANN

  May 1, 1822

  Post Scriptum: I enclose a quantity of rough notes I have prepared for the sort of opera I so greatly desire, hoping that they will convey to you a measure of the feeling of which I speak—a feeling, to use a word now coming much into fashion, that is profound in its Romanticism.

  Now, there, my dear Kemble, what do you make of that? What do I make of that? It all sounds to me like Germans who have been smoking their long pipes and sitting up late over their thick, black beer. Of course I know what he is talking about. It is Melodrama, or verses spoken or chanted to music, and it is quite useless for the purposes of opera as we know it at Covent Garden.

  But I kept my temper. Never be out of temper with a musician is a good principle, as you know from your frequent altercations with the explosive Bishop, in which you have always prevailed by your splendid Phlegm. I wrote again, trying to coax Hoffmann to see things from my point of view, which is not to push forward the frontiers of music, I assure you, or plunge into the murky world of dreams. Humour, I assured him, is what the English most value, and whatever is to be said to them must be said humorously or not at all, if music is in question. (I except, of course, Oratorio, which is a wholly different matter.) Indeed, I tried upon him a rather neat little thing I dashed off, proposing it as the song which establishes the character of the Fairy Pigwiggen (Madame Vestris):

  King Oberon rules in Fairyland,

  Titania by his side;

  But who is their Prime Minister,

  Their counsellor and guide?

  ’Tis I, the gay Pigwiggen, who

  Keeps hold upon the helm

  When their spitting and spatting

  Their dogging and catting

  Threatens the Fairy Realm.

  Who, think you, rules in Fairyland?

  Not these who hold the sceptre!

  Nay, devil a bit

  Not Nob and Tit,

  But I, their gay preceptor!

  Pigwiggen, the merry minikin

  Is Nob and Tit’s preceptor!

  Now, I think I may say, not in vanity but as a man who has won his place in the theatre with several pieces, all markedly successful, that this is rather neat. Do you agree?

  Several weeks have elapsed, and I have had no word from our German friend. But time wears on, and I shall stir him up again, as genially as I know how.

  Yours, etc.

  J.R. PLANCHÉ

  June 20, 1822

  There is a notation on this letter in Kemble’s hand, which says: ‘News reaches me of Hoffmann’s death at Berlin, on 25 June. Inform Planché at once, and suggest an immediate council to decide on a new piece and a new composer—Bishop?—as it must be ready for Christmas.’ ”

  There was heavy silence among the Cornish Foundation, as Penny helped herself to a bunch of grapes from the Platter of Plenty.

  It was Hollier who spoke first. “What do you suppose poor dying Hoffmann made of Nob and Tit?”

  “A modern audience would certainly see it as jocose indecency. Language has taken some queer turns since Planché’s time,” said Darcourt.

  “Queer’s the word,” said Arthur.

  “Don’t be too sure about a modern audience,” said Powell, who seemed to be the least depressed of the group. “You recall that song in A Chorus Line? Rather a lot about Ass and Tit, sung by a girl with magnificent limbs? The audience couldn’t get enough of it.”

  “I have to agree about the changes of language,” said Penny. “I have spared you Planché’s notes for dialogue, which he sent to Kemble. He wanted Pigwiggen to talk a lot about her Knockers.”

  “Her what?” said Arthur, aghast.

  “Her Knockers. She meant some underground spirits who worked in the mines of Britain, and were called Knockers.”

  “Is there something ambiguous about Knockers?” said Hollier. “I’m sorry. I’m not very well up on the latest indecencies.”

  “Knockers nowadays means breasts,” said Powell. “Door knockers, you know, which show up so prominently on the front. ‘She has a great pair of knockers,’ people say. Probably better known in England than here.”

  “Ah yes. I wondered if it were a misreading for Knackers,” said Hollier. “Meaning the testicles. Perhaps the Magnanimous Cuckold would be the person to talk about those.”

  “For God’s sake try to be serious,” said Arthur. “We are in very deep trouble. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Are we seriously going to spend a great
amount of Uncle Frank’s benefaction to stage an opera that is all about Knackers and Knockers and Nobs and Tits and gay fairies? Is my hair going white, Maria? I distinctly feel a withering of my scalp.”

  “As a student of Rabelais, all this sniggering, half-hearted indecency makes me throw up,” said Maria.

  Penny spat out a mouthful of grape seeds, not very elegantly, on her plate. “Well—you have the music, you know. Or plans and sketches for it.”

  “But is it any good?” said Maria. “If it is on the Planché level, we’re through. Absolutely through, as Arthur says. Was Hoffmann any good? Does anybody know?”

  “I’m not a judge,” said Penny. “But I think he wasn’t half bad. Mind you, music’s not my thing. But when I was in London the BBC broadcast Hoffmann’s Undine in a program called Early Romantic Operas, and of course I listened. Indeed, I took it on tape, and I have it here, if you’re interested. Have you got the right sort of machine?”

  It was Maria who took the tapes and put them in the hi-fi equipment that was concealed in a cupboard near the Round Table. Darcourt made sure that everybody had a drink, and the Cornish Foundation, in the lowest spirits it had known since its establishment, composed itself to listen. Nobody wore an expression of hope, but Powell was the least depressed. He was a theatre man, and was accustomed to abysses in the creative process.

  It was Arthur who first was jolted into new life by the music.

  “Listen, listen, listen! He’s using voices in the Overture! Where have you heard that before?”

  “They’re the voices of the lover and the Water Sprite, calling to Undine,” said Penny.

  “If he goes on like that, maybe we’re not in too much trouble,” said Arthur. He was a musical enthusiast, a bad amateur pianist, and it was his regret that his Uncle Francis had not left him his enviable collection of musical manuscripts. He would then have had the uncompleted opera safe in his own hands.

  “This is accomplished stuff,” said Maria.

  As indeed it was. The Cornish Foundation, according to individual musical sensitivity, roused themselves. Darcourt knew what he was hearing; he had first become acquainted with Francis Cornish because of a shared enthusiasm for music. Powell declared music to be one of the elements in which he lived; it was his desire to extend his experience as a director of opera that had made him urge the Foundation to consider putting Arthur of Britain on the stage. Hollier was the tineared one, and he knew it, but he had a feeling for drama and, though now and then he dozed, Undine was unquestionably dramatic. By the end of the first act they were all in a happier frame of mind, and demanded drinks as cheer, rather than as pain-killers.