Magic Flutes

by Eva Ibbotson

  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 a
rt 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.

  4

  In the breakfast room of Schloss Spittau, watched from the banks of the moat by a pair of moulting swans, Dorothea, Princess of Spittau, was reading a letter.

  From the turreted windows of the room, as from all the windows of the castle, one looked out on water. Spittau’s long, low, yellow-stuccoed main front, with its flanking pepper-pot towers, was lapped by the waters of the Neusiedler See, a large, reedy and melancholy lake stretching away to the Hungarian border. The north, west and south sides of the ancient Wasserburg were surrounded by a wide and scummy moat. Only a single causeway connected the castle with the swampy, pool-infested marsh, which in that desolate, aqueous region had to pass for land.

  ‘Pfaffenstein is sold!’ said the princess now, looking across the table at her son. ‘And well sold. To a foreigner. A millionaire!’

  Prince Maximilian of Spittau, thus addressed, momentarily stopped chewing and said, ‘Putzerl will be pleased.’

  ‘Not only pleased,’ said his mother, ‘but rich. There is no longer anything to wait for. You must act, Maxi. Act!’

  Maxi’s blue, poached eyes bulged with a certain apprehension; his vestigial forehead creased into furrows. He was in fact a man of action, having shot a large number of people during the war, and, with the cessation of hostilities, an infinitely larger number of snipe, mallard, teal, godwall, pochard and geese which he pursued virtually from dawn to dusk in punts, rowing boats and waders. Even now his feet, under the table, rested on a huddle of soaking wet pointers, retrievers and setters who had been out with him since sunrise.

  But action as understood by his mother was a different thing.

  That the prince had been dropped on his head as a baby was unlikely. Kaiser Wilhelm II had attended his christening; a series of starched and iron-willed nurses had handed him from room to room in the gargantuan palace in Schleswig-Ho
lstein, now confiscated by the Allies, in which he had been born. His lack of cerebral matter seemed rather to be inborn, the price he had paid for being related to both Joan the Mad who brought Castile and Aragon to the House of Austria, and to the Emperor Charles II whose Habsburg chin and Bourbon nose had locked in a manner that made the ingestion of food almost impossible. But though his intellectual activity was limited to weekly visits to the village hall in Neusiedl where they showed the latest films from Hollywood, there was nothing unattractive about Maxi. True, his duelling scar had gone awry a little, but enough of it was visible above his left eye to give him a slightly rakish look; his blond moustache waved pleasantly and except when he was dealing with his mother, his expression was amiable and relaxed.

  ‘I have been very patient with you, Maxi,’ continued his mother, whose nickname ‘The Swan Princess’ referred rather to her beady eye and savage beak than to any grace or beauty, ‘and so have Putzerl’s aunts. But enough is enough. There is going to be a house party at Pfaffenstein in June. Putzerl is sure to be there for that, so you must propose to her formally then and announce your engagement on the spot.’

  ‘But, Mother, I have proposed to Putzerl three times. When you told me to, on her eighteenth birthday, and then again that spring. And only three months ago, when I was in Vienna, I invited her out for lunch and proposed again. Without you telling me! She doesn’t,’ said Maxi, a trace of pardonable puzzlement in his voice, ‘love me.’

  ‘Don’t talk like a waiter,’ snapped the princess. ‘Putzerl knows perfectly well that she must marry you. I must say she isn’t quite what I had hoped for from the point of view of character, but her lineage is impeccable, and with the money she brings in from Pfaffenstein we will be able to shore up the east wing and mend the roof. Anyway, no one not bred to the life would fit in at Spittau.’