Magic Flutes

3

Though she was both emancipated and in a hurry, Tessa began the day by brushing, with three hundred regular strokes, her almost knee-length, toffee-coloured hair. Her country upbringing had been strict and even though her glorious new life in Vienna was now devoted to the service of art in general and opera in particular, she found it hard to break the habits of her childhood. Moreover, it was true that lacking the height, the Rubenesque and potentially heaving bosom and the Roman nose she so desperately craved, she could find a certain consolation in the rich, fawn tresses which she could most comfortably have sat on had her employer, Jacob Witzler, ever given her the time.

Whether Tessa would have appeared on the payroll of the International Opera Company as under wardrobe mistress, assistant lighting engineer, deputy wigmaker, A.S.M., prompter or errand girl, remained a theoretical question since she did not, in fact, get any pay. That it was an inestimable privilege to be allowed to work in the opera house and learn her craft, Tessa, her auburn eyes burning with artistic fervour, had assured Herr Witzler — a view which he entirely shared and had in fact suggested to her in the first place. And though she did not actually have any money to speak of, it had all worked out marvellously because Frau Witzler, a former Rhinemaiden and spear-carrying soprano of distinction, had found a family in the Wipplingerstrasse who, in exchange for a little help with their three young children, had offered Tessa one of the old servants’ attics. A beautiful room, she thought it, with its views over the roofs of the Inner City and the soaring spire of the Stefansdom.

Now she quickly braided and pinned her hair, washed her hands and face, dressed in her working smock of unbleached linen, and ran downstairs to where the three infant Kugelheimers in their cots greeted her with cries of satisfaction.

During the next half-hour she changed the baby, lugged the three-year-old Klara on to the gigantic, rose-adorned chamber-pot, ran into the kitchen to heat some milk, dressed the four-year-old Franzerl, made coffee for Frau Kugelheimer — and, finally, grabbing a letter from the postman which she thrust unread into her pocket, was safely out into the street.

It was just growing light, the city lifting itself out of sleep. A row of tiny choristers walked across the cobbles to sing Mass in the Peterskirche; the pigeons on the Plague Memorial, safe again after years of being potted at by hungry citizens, began to preen themselves for the day. A baker, pulling up his shutters, called ‘Grüss Gott!’ and Tessa gave him a smile of such radiance that he stood watching her like a man warming himself in a sudden shaft of sun until she turned into the Kärntner-strasse. It never failed her, this sense of awe and wonder at belonging… at working here in this city which had been Schubert’s and Mozart’s, and now was hers.

The Klostern Theatre, which now housed the International Opera Company, had once been the private theatre of a nobleman whose adjoining palace had been pulled down at the time the old ramparts were destroyed and the Ringstrasse built. The auditorium with its enchanted painted ceiling of obese and ecstatic nymphs, its red velvet boxes and gold proscenium arch, invariably wrung a sigh of pleasure from connoisseurs of Austrian high baroque. Backstage, the theatre resembled a cross between the Black Hole of Calcutta and the public lavatory of an abandoned railway terminus. The pit was too small for the orchestra, the manager’s office was a windowless kennel, merely to approach the dimmer board was to take one’s life in one’s hands. Everyone who worked there cursed the place from morning to night and resisted with vituperative ferocity all suggestions of a move to more salubrious quarters.

Tessa let herself in by the stage door, sighing happily at the familiar smell of glue and size and paint and dust. As always she was the first to arrive and the sense of the sleeping theatre, dark and cold, waiting to be brought to life — and by her — was an ever-recurring delight. Today was a particularly exciting day: the last day of Lucia di Lammermoor in which Raisa Romola, losing her reason as only a two-hundred-kilo, red-haired Rumanian soprano knew how, had scored a triumph; then the announcement by Herr Witzler, after curtain down, of the new opera they would begin to rehearse next week.

Quickly she sorted the mail into the appropriate pigeonholes, took the director’s letters upstairs to his office, emptied the mousetraps under his desk, riddled and filled the ancient, rusty stove. Then downstairs again to the front of the house to turn on the light, admit the cleaning ladies and ring the police to inform them that a handbag containing three thousand kroner and a ticket to Karlsbad had been left in row D of the stalls.

Then she hurried back through the orchestra pit, pausing to tidy up the poker school which the trombonists had set up under the stage… up two flights again, round a curving iron staircase to the star soprano’s dressing-room, to change the water for Raisa Romola’s roses, scrub out her dachshund’s feeding bowl and collect for repair the bloodstained Act Three nightdress through which an idiot stage hand had put his foot as the heaving diva waited in the wings to take her curtain call.

And downstairs again to find that the wigmaker, Boris Slatarski, had arrived and was staring gloomily at ‘The Mother’.

Boris was a Bulgarian and thus committed to longevity and yoghurt. The latter he made from a culture of great ethnicity and ripeness which originated in some shepherd-infested village in the Mirrovaroan Hills. Known as ‘The Mother’, it lived in a jamjar on the draining-board of the laundry room, smelling vilely, flocculating, turning blue and generally showing all the signs of the artistic temperament.

‘I don’t like the look of her this morning, Tessa,’ he said now, unwinding his long, yellow face and bald skull from the folds of a gigantic muffler. ‘She’s precipitating much too fast.’ He rummaged in a hamper, ripped the muslin sleeve out of a peasant blouse from The Bartered Bride and began to filter The Mother through it. ‘Have you got the milk yet?’

‘I’m just going,’ said Tessa. She fetched the can, ran to the dairy three streets away, and back, hiding the egg she had managed to wheedle out of the dairyman in a box labelled ‘Spats’.

The theatre was fully awake now. Hammering resounded from the scene dock, pieces of scenery suddenly flew upward. Cries of ‘Where’s Tessa?’ came with increasing frequency — from Frau Pollack, the wardrobe mistress, who wanted to know why Tessa had not brought down the costumes for Tosca, had not sorted out the buckle box, had not made the coffee… from the lighting assistant who wanted her to hold a spot, from the carpenter who had a splinter in his eye.

At eleven the Herr Direktor, Jacob Witzler, arrived and began to go through the pile of bills, of notices threatening to cut off the water, the telephone and the electricity, which constituted his morning mail.

This frog-eyed Moravian Jew, with his ulcer and his despair, quite simply was the International Opera Company. Jacob’s dedication, his sacrifices, his chicanery, cajoling and bullying had steered this unsubsidized company for over twenty years through crisis after financial crisis, through war and inflation and the machinations of his rivals.

In a way the whole thing had been bad luck. Jacob came of a wealthy and not particularly musical family of leather merchants in the Moravian town of Sprotz. His life was marked out almost from birth — a serene progress from bar mitzvah to entry into the family firm, marriage to a nice Jewish girl already selected by his mother, a partnership…

Jacob was deprived of this comfortable future in a single afternoon when at the age of eleven he was taken, scrubbed to the eyeballs and in his sailor suit, to a touring company’s performance of Carmen.

All around him, dragged in by their culture-hungry parents, sat other little boys and girls, Christian and Jewish, Moravian and Czech, wriggling and fidgeting, longing for the interval, thirsting for lemonade, bursting for the lavatory.

Not so Jacob. The Hippopotamus-sized mezzo dropped her castanets, Escamillo fell over his dagger, the orchestra was short of two trumpets, three violins and the timpani. No matter. Alone of all the infants of Moravia Jacob Witzler was struck down, and fatally, by the disease known as Opera.

Now, some thirty years later, his fortune gone, his health ruined, his faith abandoned, he reached for a dyspepsia pill and settled down to work. The claque was clamouring to be paid but that was absurd of course. Raisa would get enough applause tonight; the mad scene always got them and next week they were alternating Tosca with Fledermaus, old war horses both. Frau Kievenholler had put in a perfectly ludicrous claim for cab fares for her harp…

The phone rang: a tenor wanting to audition for the chorus. And rang again: someone was coming round to inspect the fire precautions! And rang again…

At noon Jacob put down his pen and sent for Tessa.

‘Good morning, Herr Witzler.’

The under wardrobe mistress stood respectfully before him. There was a smut on her small and surprisingly serious nose, her hair was coming down and her smock was liberally spattered with paint, but as he looked at the little figure emitting as always an almost epic willingness to be of use, Jacob at once felt better. His blood pressure descended; his ulcer composed itself for sleep.

Allowing Tessa to come and work for him was one of the best things he had done and if the police did come for her one day he, Jacob, was going to fight for her tooth and nail. True, she had obviously lied to him about her age — he doubted if she was twenty, let alone the twenty-three she had laid claim to. Nor had she remembered to respond, within half an hour of her interview, to the surname she had offered him. She appeared to have no relatives to vouch for her, no documents, certainly no references of any sort; that she had run away from some institution in the country seemed clear enough. He had told himself that he was mad to take her on, but he knew this was not true.

Since then his hunch had paid off a thousand times. It was not simply that this fragile looking waif with her earth-brown eyes worked a fifteen-hour day, trotting indefatigably through the labyrinthine corridors with loads which would have tired a mountain pony. Nor, even, that she herself had no personal ambition to sing or act or dance but only and always to help and to learn. It was, perhaps, that her patent ecstasy at being allowed to serve art somehow vindicated his own absurd and obsessive life. He and this foundling were fellow sufferers from the same disease.

‘Have you seen to Miss Romola’s bouquet for tonight?’ he began.

‘Yes, Herr Witzler. It’s ordered and I’m going to fetch it after lunch.’

‘You don’t think we could make it a bit smaller?’

Raisa’s bouquets had been steadily shrinking on the principle of the horse from whose feed one removes each day a single oat. It was Tessa’s opinion, now delicately voiced, that they were down to the stage where the horse was in danger of dropping dead.

‘But I could get Herr Klasky’s buttonhole out of it, I think,’ she said, referring to the conductor, ‘which would save a little?’

‘Good, do that. What about the wine for the party tonight?’

‘It’s just arrived and I’ve put it in the wig oven, very low, to make it chambré.’

‘And you’ve remembered my wife’s reservations at Baden-Baden?’

‘Yes, Herr Witzler. A room for one week from June the eighteenth at the Hotel Park, with a cot for your son.’

Jacob nodded gloomily. He had married Leopoldine Goertl-Eisen after that lady, suspended aloft (and in the act of singing ‘Weie, Wiege, Wage die Welle’) had been horribly precipitated by the snapping of her steel cable on to the stage of the Klostern Theatre during a matinee of Rheingold. If he had espoused the massive, bruised Silesian soprano mainly to stop her from suing the International Opera Company, there was no doubt that the marriage was a success. Understandably, however, his Rhinemaiden’s nerves had been affected. When they gave Rheingold anywhere in Vienna, Jacob was compelled to send her to Baden-Baden and the expense was appalling.

‘Then there’s a tenor auditioning at three,’ he went on. ‘Respini can’t come, so you’ll have to accompany him.’

‘Ah, but I don’t play well enough.’

‘For a tenor you play well enough,’ said Jacob firmly. He sighed. ‘I was wondering about a ballet for Tosca?’

Tessa screwed up her waif-like countenance, pondering. Sylphides in the torture scene? Swans in the prison yard?

Jacob’s efforts to insert a ballet into almost everything were herculean and disinterested since he himself was indifferent to ‘the Dance’. He employed, however, three delectably pretty and available ballet girls known collectively as The Heidis (since two of them were christened thus) in the hope that their presence would lure in the rich patron he so desperately craved.

‘If the Heidis were in the stage box dressed in their tutus with rosebud wreaths and some gauze on their shoulders, you know?’ suggested Tessa. ‘We could keep the lôge light on low above them. Then the gentlemen could see them and if they wished to… afterwards… they could…’

Jacob beamed. ‘Yes! That’s what we’ll do. Now that leaves the new Fledermaus programmes to be fetched from the printers, and I want you to go round and tell Grabenheimer that if I don’t get those poster designs by Friday I’m not interested and if he’s in the Turkish bath, get him out!’

At six the conductor arrived and demanded his button-hole. Zoltan Klasky was a Hungarian with tormented eyes, a shock of long, dark hair and the kind of divine and profound discontent which has sent Magyars through countless centuries galloping westwards and giving everybody hell. He was a brilliant musician who loathed sopranos, tenors and everything that both moved and sang except the occasional nasal and impoverished Gypsy.

Though he conducted even the lightest operettas with maniacal expertise and care, Klasky’s own being was dedicated to the composition of an expressionist opera, now in its seventh year of labour. The libretto of this work, authentically based on a newspaper clipping, concerned the wife of a village policeman who is seduced by a millowner, bears him a son and hangs herself, after which the policeman goes mad and tries to murder the baby and serve it to the millowner in a fricassée.

While Tessa had doubts about the operatic qualities of the fricassée, like the rest of the company she was a staunch believer in Klasky’s opera which was scored for strings, mandolins and thirty percussion instruments and would herald a new era in atonal music drama, when it was at last performed.

Now, however, there was a peremptory screech from the star dressing-room, announcing Raisa Romola’s arrival. Within five minutes, Raisa’s dachshund (who inexplicably had remained uneaten during the hardest years of the war) had made a puddle, the state of her head notes made it impossible for her to go on and the tenor, Pino Mastrini, had accused her of stealing his egg.

Tessa dealt with the dachshund, rushed down to the spats box to fetch the egg so vital to the tenor’s larynx, ran up to the chorus dressing-room to help Lucia’s clansmen with their tartan plaids…

And the curtain went up.

Three hours later Tessa, leaning humbly against an upstage tombstone holding her glass of wine, heard Jacob Witzler announce that their new production would be Debussy’s lyrical masterpiece, Pelleas and Melisande.

The clock was striking two when she let herself back into the house in the Wipplingerstrasse. It was not until she was standing at her attic window, once again brushing her hair, that she remembered the letter which had come that morning and was still unread in the pocket of her smock.

She opened it, noting with approval that her aunt had learned to address her in the way that Tessa had instructed, read it through once, then read it through again.

The news was wholly and absolutely good. It was necessary for Tessa to repeat this to herself with resolution because there was no denying that she did feel… well, a pang, and that her stomach seemed to be plunging about in a rather uncomfortable way. It was rather as though the whole of her childhood had suddenly dropped into a void. But that was absurd, of course; just sentiment and a failure of courage — and anyway she had no choice. The thing to hold on to was that she was free now… free for work, for art, for life!

And opening the window, allowing her long hair to ripple over the sill, the Princess Theresa-Maria of Pfaffenstein leaned her head on her arms, blinked away the foolish tears that threatened her and smiled at the moon.