Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I came to know many of the singers in that season, spent time with the tenor Luigi Alva and the bass-baritone Franco Calabrese, a man who offstage always looked unshaven and dissolute. We had a discussion in the Deux Garçons after the performance one night when each of us chose a historical character he would like to be. Franco chose Voltaire and then Jesus Christ. “What a painful life and death!” I exclaimed. “Ah, oui. Mais quelle vie intéressante,” he replied.

  There were wonderful singers that year. They included Consuelo Rubio, Mariella Adani, Antonio Campo, Rolando Panerai, Mario Spina and Giorgio Tadeo in Don Giovanni, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry, Mimi Coertse, Ernst Wiemann and Sylvia Stahlman in The Magic Flute – many of these, as well as names mentioned above, also singing in the Rossini. Bettina had made friends with the local jeunesse doreé and in particular with the abandoned young wife of a local chateau owner with a large swimming pool, where we disported ourselves. The chatelaine was always half drunk to help deal with her tragedy and remain a cheerful hostess. Bettina, staying in the shade, tried to keep Sylvia Stahlman sitting by the pool in the sun and constantly talking, perhaps in the hope that sunburn would ruin her voice and enable her to take over the part of Papagena. She was also chased by a fashionable young man with whom, to my annoyance, she went to a dance outside the town. Among the concerts I attended, Pierre Boulez conducted the world premiere of his Marteau sans maître. I was impressed by the music, not by his conducting. His iron will would change that in the coming years.

  Bettina joined me in London shortly after the Aix Festival, where in the end, although part of the company and paid as contracted, she never sang a note in public. We then went together to the Brussels World Fair, much hyped at the time, and visited the Skylon and other new buildings in odd shapes that had been erected. On the whole I found the occasion a great bore, the British tent perhaps the least interesting of all. I did see Maria Golovin, Menotti’s opera which was part of the American contribution, but failed to record the cast other than Patricia Neway in the title role.

  During that year, I saw Bettina frequently in Paris, and she came to know some of my authors, in particular Sam Beckett, with whom we often dined in Montparnasse restaurants. Then her German agent managed to get her, after a series of auditions, a year’s contract at the Opera in Kiel, which would include guest performances in other towns and the possibility of occasionally singing at the Hamburg Opera. I must have met her a few times in Germany during early 1959, as I have recorded seeing a memorable Elektra in Hamburg with Astrid Varnay in the title role as well as a lacklustre Carmen, but also operas in Munich, Frankfurt and Vienna. The latter occasion, in May, was the triannual meeting of the International Publishers Association, to which normally the larger publishers of Europe and America, and a few of the more adventurous smaller ones, would go if they could afford a fairly expensive week.

  My first problem on arrival in Vienna was about the room I had booked. You had to show your passports on arrival, and as Bettina’s passport had a different name from mine, they would not let us share a room. Nor could I get a second room, because the hotel was full. We managed to get in somehow in the end, although we may have had to take separate rooms. The congress itself consisted, as far as I was concerned, in a reception given by the Bürgermeister at Schönbrunn Palace and another somewhere else, a fabulous Don Giovanni and Figaro with Schwarzkopf, Zadek, Seefried, Güden, London, Wächter, Ludwig and other luminaries in the casts, and a Walküre with Nilsson, Brouwenstijn, Windgassen, Hotter, Greindl and Jean Madeira. Karajan conducted the Figaro and Die Walküre. I never went to a single session of the discussion programme, and I am not sure that I even knew it existed. The Figaro was the official opera as far as the congress was concerned, tickets being part of the participation in the occasion.

  At the Bürgermeister’s reception, which was in lounge suits, I ran into George Braziller, who moaned that he could not go to the opera the next night because he did not have a dinner jacket and, he went on, this was the opera he had always wanted to see. I omitted to ask why he had never tried in New York, but suggested he could easily hire a dinner suit. But no, he could not do that, and was unwilling to let me help him. So the next day I went to a rental shop, described George’s height, girth and width and rented him a black tie and everything that went with it. I then went to his hotel and arranged to have it sent to his room.

  When Bettina and I turned up at the opera we met George, but in a lounge suit, and he was not the only one. “Why aren’t you wearing the dinner jacket?” I asked. “Thank you,” he said. “It didn’t fit. But I came anyway.” I had at least forced him to come, and I hope he enjoyed a perfect performance of a perfect opera.

  I first visited Bettina in Kiel in September. She was staying at a boarding house with a Frau Schmidt, whose daughter Helga was later to work at the opera at Covent Garden. I stayed with her there several times, and then she moved into a flat, sharing it with another singer, Maria Hall, an American, whose first husband had been an American Evangelist preacher. Her career had started when she sang gospel songs at his services. He had made her kneel down on their wedding night to ask God to take away her lust, and the marriage was short-lived. She was now married to a German ballet dancer, who most of the time was on tour and worked from another opera house. The two of them performed Carmen together, Bettina singing the smaller part of Micäela, who has two lovely arias.

  Personally I do not like applause in the middle of an opera, and normally save my clapping until the curtain comes down and the last note has been played, but singers want it. Micäela has no break after her arias: the music goes straight on, and the audience, which may be prepared to applaud, cannot do so without interrupting the music. I was therefore given the task, at the performances I attended, of coming in with a loud burst of clapping immediately as the last note was dying, which would halt the performance and bring in the applause of the rest of the audience. This I did quite effectively, but I do not think it made me a friend of the conductor.

  The other opera I heard Bettina sing in Kiel was Boris Godunov, which was performed in the full version. The two Polish scenes, in which Bettina sang Marina, the Catholic Princess who is urged by a Jesuit to marry the pretender Dmitri, are often cut, but they were given in Kiel.

  One night the company was playing in a small market town, Flensburg, not too far from Kiel. As I went with them, I was invited to the supper given after the performance in the Rathauskeller, which is usually under the town hall. I found myself sitting opposite the Bürgermeister, our host, who on hearing that I was British tried to get me into an argument as to which country had the better writers and poets. He told me that Shakespeare was nothing compared to Goethe. I declared my admiration for both without comparison, but as it was soon clear that I had a familiarity with both, while he knew nothing of either other than their names, he hastily brought our exchange to a close. In fact he seemed anxious to end the party and send us all back to Kiel. I have often come across similar Germans, whose bullying pedantry is based on cultural nationalism and near-total ignorance of what they claim to love. I was reminded of my near-duel in Zurich.

  After performances in Kiel, I usually went to eat with some of the cast and Bettina. One night the two of us were alone with Maria Hall, and I was of course staying in the flat. It was at that late supper that she told us all about her problems with her first husband and her relations with the absent current one.

  During that summer of 1959, in spite of financial difficulties, I was busy and active and felt myself to be a free man with friends everywhere, interesting work to do and enough scope to indulge my tastes and enjoy myself at the same time. I had then a certain confidence that whatever was the trouble that came along, I could deal with it. I still had friends in the film industry, in music, in the theatre and in the literary world.

  One person I knew well, because she and her husband Terence – a film director who had made some of the early James
Bond films – had lived in a mews opposite Wilton Terrace, was Dosia Young. She had a habit of giving cocktail parties at lunchtime on Sundays when I first knew her. She would stay in her bath, and her guests would take turns to come in and chat, sitting on the edge. She was a tall, handsome redhead. When her husband decamped with one of his female stars, Nadia Gray, she had no trouble in finding substitutes.

  That summer she had moved to South Kensington, and she invited me to a party. It was full of film people, mainly men, and I had a long talk with Christopher Lee, who specialized in playing monsters in horror films. While chatting to him I noticed an attractive blonde, one of the only half dozen women in the room, surrounded by a large group of men. “I wonder if I can beat them all and leave with her,” I said to myself, and went over, when I had the opportunity, to join the group. I cannot remember how I managed to get her attention and chat with her alone, but I did, and I took her to dinner and then home, where she was due to be picked up later. I then dated her for the next day: we had dinner at Otello in Soho on Dean Street, my first time there. Her name was Sally; she was a model, and inhabited a very different world to mine, that of bright young things with affluent parents and rather lighter tastes than mine.

  I did not go to bed with Sally until the next date. I had to wait for her in the sitting room of her house in Brompton Square. After I had waited some time, having come punctually, someone else came in, went up the stairs past the first-floor sitting room, came down and left half an hour later. It was some time after that before Sally emerged, made-up and very beautiful. We had dinner, and I spent the night in her house and room. By now I knew more about her. She had been twice married before twenty-one, the first time to a peer, the second to an actor, whom she still saw occasionally and respected. She had recently been going out with a young man who ran a mobile chemmy game (chemin de fer), a fashionable but quite illegal pastime at that period, played in private houses by groups of friends. She had been to Mayfield, a top girls’ school for Catholics near Brighton. She obviously did not need to work but enjoyed modelling. All her friends were in their early twenties like herself – rich, upper-class, living for pleasure and spending their time in the most mindless ways possible. She said to me after we had known each other a few days, “You know, I’ve never been to bed with a socialist before. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one.”

  I also received some new knowledge: for instance that models who wear slacks or tight dresses never wear underwear, because it spoils the line. I took her to some concerts, but I do not think she took in much. I was invited to the Austrian Institute, an evening of string quartets. I thought she might have recognized the Austrian hymn or the German national anthem in the Emperor Quartet, but no.

  Sally was a thoroughly nice person, and we developed some common ground over the period I knew her from the summer of 1959 to the autumn of the next year. She knew that I had a liaison with an opera singer in Germany, but assumed it was not too serious, just as I did. She had a frankness that belonged to her generation and milieu. Ours was an unlikely liaison, but somehow it worked.

  Then suddenly, one day, a Sunday, my doorbell rang. It was Bettina, whom I had certainly not expected. She had, she announced, just walked out on her Opera House in Kiel, where she was under a fixed contract for several months more. The reason: they were going to mount La traviata, a role she knew, and that was just right for her voice. The management, however, had brought in a guest artist. The reason given was that she knew it in Italian, but not in German. She protested that she could learn it in German in a week, but it did no good, and she had walked out in a rage. “Here I am,” she said. “Are you glad to see me?”

  It was about five in the afternoon, and while I was considering the position, the telephone rang. It was Sally. She knew instantly from my guarded voice that something was wrong. “I’ll bet your German singer has just turned up,” she said, and put the phone down. She was right. I never saw her again except once in a restaurant, where she pointedly ignored me.

  Bettina simply moved in without another word, and I accepted the situation. But what was she to do? After some thought, I rang Tom Hammond, the chief répétiteur at Sadler’s Wells Opera, the next day. I knew him well, and asked if he could arrange an audition for a friend of mine who had left her German opera house. They liked her at the auditions and contracted her for the next season – which had, if I am correct in my dates, already started. Her first part was as the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, which opened in January 1961.

  * * *

  What happened to the year 1960? Much was published in that year, as was during 1959, when our catalogue listed dozens of books we were distributing as well as those appearing under the Calder imprint. In the earlier year we had brought out Beckett’s three great post-war novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable in a single volume as Sam wanted. They were henceforth to be known as The Beckett Trilogy, and the hardcover was published at twenty-five shillings with a cover of abstract squares and triangles, designed by John Sewell.

  Arthur Adamov, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and André Pieyre de Mandiargues all made their debut on the list that year. There were many new classics and books on music in addition to those which have been mentioned before. We published April FitzLyon’s fascinating biography of Pauline Viardot under the title The Price of Genius and announced a number of books that never appeared for a variety of reasons. These included a second volume on the South African treason trial, which was never written, a translated History of Magic that was never translated, Peter Daubeny Presents, a book which Peter Daubeny was meant to write about all the foreign companies he had brought to London over the years (I think he started it and then abandoned it), Harold Hobson’s book about Edwige Feuillère, which was too embarrassing in its fulsomeness, and Evan Senior’s book about the arts in Russia, which he had often visited as a critic (he was the editor of our Concert-Goer’s Annual) and, very sadly, a brilliant book entitled The Lives of the Librettists, covering the careers of the lesser-known and understood partners in the creation of operas. The author, Angus Heriot, had written an earlier book, The Castrati in Opera, first published unsuccessfully by Secker and Warburg in 1956, which we took over in 1960, presumably buying unbound sheets from Secker and binding them to become No. 11 in our Calderbook paperback series. The editor I dealt with at Secker generously waived the permission fee and only asked us to pay royalties to the author. This however was agreed over the telephone. When we reprinted some years later, we were told that the old contract was still valid, as we had kept the book in print, but we must sign a new contract to reprint and pay a new advance. We commissioned the second book directly from the author, who handed in his manuscript and then was killed in a car crash. The manuscript sat on a shelf until we had to move offices in a hurry in 1963 because the lease had expired and the building was being demolished. Much was left behind in the hurry to move: hundreds of manuscripts, proofs, files and archival material, such as piles up with time in every publisher’s offices, were lost. Among that material was the only manuscript of The Lives of the Librettists.

  1960 saw more books from some of our usual authors, and we advertised books that had been announced earlier but delayed, as well as new titles taken on more recently, and some that would never appear, such as Galina von Meck’s incomplete autobiography and Furtwängler’s Collected Essays. But many titles of importance did appear, and they included the first significant critical book on Beckett, by Hugh Kenner, and George Bataille’s Eroticism.

  As far as my personal life was concerned, the year is a blur, except that my opera record shows visits to many German towns and of course to Paris. Since the Paris Opera was then in deep decline, I went far more often to the theatre.

  At Sadler’s Wells Bettina had landed on her feet. She had been well trained, first in America, then in Vienna, and Rodolfo Mele, who had taught her in Vienna, having now moved to London, continued to teach her an
d keep a control on her voice. He had many London pupils and was autocratic with all of them. He also had some influence with conductors, mainly the Italian ones, such as Alberto Erede. He occasionally mounted an opera with his pupils, and before Sadler’s Wells, possibly before Kiel, Bettina had sung, I think, one of the three ladies in The Magic Flute, with his company in Brighton, an ad-hoc orchestra and the imposing and statuesque Mary Wells singing Pamina, whom I remember fancying at the time.

  Bettina was best in Mozart and Richard Strauss, which have very similar vocal demands, and she could be very good when she was good. But she had a problem: as a child she suffered from rickets, which had given her a concave chest. This meant that the volume of air that her body – not just the lungs and chest, but the whole abdomen – could take in – in order to expel long notes that had to be pushed out as if by a bellows – was limited. A dramatic soprano, which is how she presented herself, needs all the air reserves she can muster, whereas a mezzo-soprano, who does not need to achieve the highest notes that give no opportunity to take in more air, has an easier time, can control her air discharge more easily and concentrate on producing a pleasing tone. From early in my acquaintance with Bettina, knowing little of vocal technique, but understanding that she sounded best with her lower-pitched chest tones, I had asked her whether her career might not be more successful if she became a mezzo. She did eventually, but she pooh-poohed the suggestion for years.

  Dussurget had liked her, but had only cast her in small, lighter roles. She had sung the spinto (light) soprano part of Micäela and the basically mezzo role of Marina in Boris Godunov in Kiel. I had enjoyed her in song and Lieder recitals, but thought she was always best in registers other than the highest – in the repertoire of Italian arie antiche for instance. She had the advantage of knowing several languages and had a veneer of sophistication. The conductor for her Ariadne performances was Colin Davis, only just appointed Music Director. At that point in his career he did not know Richard Strauss’s work very well and compared it to a German Puccini. He also mispronounced some German words. Bettina would correct him in front of the full company. This was not very wise, since the Music Director had the power to hire or fire.