Dead, Mr Mozart

by Bernard Bastable

  ‘What did she say the piece was?’ asked Mr Popper.

  ‘Cherubini’s Médée. A fine opera.’

  ‘And her name?’ he asked, turning to Lord Hertford.

  ‘Betty Ackroyd.’

  She sang as finely as she acted, in a clear, full soprano that seemed equal to any dramatic or musical demands she made on it. When the piece finished the singer rose to her feet, went upstage, and stood with her back to us. I heard from the pianist the opening bars from Act II of my Figaro. It was many years since I had heard them, and I confess I was moved. The singer turned, and, moving downstage with consummate grace and aristocratic deportment, she launched into the opening phrases of ‘Porgi Amor’ with such control, such dignity and style, that I had to wipe away a tear. Yes, she chose the piece because she knew I would be listening to her. But oh! she knew how to sing it to tear at the heartstrings.

  ‘Pretty piece,’ said Popper. ‘What is it?’

  When my heartbreaking lament for a love that has faded was over, she came centre-stage and winked at us.

  ‘Here’s something for t’gallery.’

  And the pianist threw himself into – again he came up! – Rossini. But not just any jangly piece familiar from the barrel organs, but the finale of La Donna del Lago – new music, unknown here, not known to me except in the score, and done by the singer with such affecting grace, both of voice and of personality, that even my heart leapt.

  When she finished the piece she curtsied to us, the pianist bowed, and they both left the stage.

  ‘What’s your opinion?’ asked Popper, turning to me. His musical ignorance is legendary. He could have heard the great Farinelli and not been sure what to think of him. I knew I had to speak in superlatives to get through to him.

  ‘Exceptional. Quite exceptional. A brilliant voice, excellent musicianship, and a wonderful stage presence and ability to convey the drama of a piece.’

  ‘Ah, you like her. You think we could use her?’

  ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘What in, do you think? Susan and Frederick?’

  ‘NOT Susan and Frederick. And not The Wizard of Wolverhampton. All you need for them is pretty voices. This is not a pretty voice: it is a great voice, a voice for connoisseurs.’

  ‘I agree with Mr Mozart,’ put in Lord Hertford. ‘It is not a voice for burlesques. She is trained for opera, temperamentally suited only to great music – or at least dramatic music. She is singing in The Creation in September.’

  ‘Then we must find her something,’ said Mr Popper, mindful of who his paymaster was. ‘Leave it to me and Mr Mozart. We shall find her something suitable. Do you, My Lord, find her an Italian name before she sings in the Haydn.’

  He knew who composed The Creation. Marvel of marvels!

  ‘Why not emphasise her Englishness?’ I suggested. ‘The prima donna from – where is she from, My Lord?’

  ‘From Bradford.’

  But even as I said it, it didn’t sound quite right. Mr Popper groaned, and waved the suggestion aside.

  ‘It’s been tried before, and it never works. The English expect their opera singers to be Italian – continental, anyway. No, no, call her Mme Montezuma or something.’

  ‘Montezuma was a native Mexican emperor,’ I put in acidly. ‘It would suggest, musically, nothing so much as primitive chants.’

  ‘Well, anyway, something of the sort. And now, Mr Mozart, Lord Hertford and I have financial matters to talk over…’

  He looked at me as if I knew nothing about money – I who have made an art form out of managing slender resources! I took the hint and withdrew.The financing of an opera season is something I have no desire to be involved in. My personal finances take up quite enough of my time. As I trod the steps down to the foyer I saw that the young couple were there, and apparently waiting for someone. As I gained the bottom Betty Ackroyd came over to me, sank into a curtsey, and said: ‘Allow me to salute the greatest musician of our age!’

  Now that was gratifying! She had discarded the Northern speech which I had already decided was a tease or an affectation and spoke with simple admiration. The young man too came over and shook my hand.

  ‘Bradley Hartshead. I am honoured to meet you, Mr Mozart.’

  ‘It is equally a pleasure to meet two such fine musicians,’ I said with truth. ‘There are not too many people who can coax expressiveness from that “tinny instrument”.’ I turned to Betty Ackroyd. ‘And you, Ma’am: such fire and intelligence from one so young! I have seldom in my life heard so promising a singer. And not just a singer: you took to the stage of the Queen’s as if you had been on it all your life.’

  ‘We came on Monday,’ said Bradley Hartshead, ‘to hear you directing the performance of Janet and Michael.’

  ‘How does it come about,’ asked Betty Ackroyd, without the intention of giving offence, ‘that the greatest composer of our age is forced to grub for a living directing offal?’

  A good question! Because my revered father was dazzled and beguiled by a purse of fifty guineas from the sovereign of these benighted islands. But I could not say that.

  ‘Ah well, as it happens that was offal I composed,’ I said.

  ‘Put together, perhaps. Dashed off while your mind was mainly occupied with the pleasures of a game pie or a glass of good claret. The music you have composed differs from that as fine linen differs from shoddy.’

  She had gone to the heart of the matter at once.

  ‘Well well, you may be right,’ I said.

  ‘If I should be so happy as to sing one of the roles in an opera by you, I should consider it the greatest honour in my life!’

  ‘Then let us hope that you do, and let us hope that I direct you. In fact, I anticipate with great pleasure working with you – you both – in the future.’

  I bowed. He bowed. She curtsied, and they left the theatre, walking in the direction of the park. Clearly they had been waiting for me. I turned down towards St James’s, feeling warm and flattered, but my mind ticking away the while.

  Bradford. I know a little about these Northern towns, through my son Charles Thomas who teaches in Wakefield, having married a lady of that town. Bradford is not very far from Wakefield. It is also not very far from Leeds. And Leeds is the city close to which Lord Hertford, through Lady Hertford, has one of his several grand houses.

  Clearly he had found something to interest him up there.

  It was with reluctance that evening that I wrote to Lady Hertford. I have no relish for the role of spy. The business of My Lord Hertford is his own business, and I would have thought that his wife would, in view of her own relationship with His Majesty, allow him a certain latitude. However rationality flies out the window when love is involved, or that is my experience: così fan tutte – or rather tutti. Unfortunately in the present case I had no choice. The purse which Her Ladyship had slipped to me at Brighton had indeed contained no less than forty guineas – making, with the King’s measly reward, a satisfying sixty guineas. I could not, of course, compromise my honour. But neither could I accept the money and not send her some kind of a report. And the money had certainly been accepted, because somehow it had been spent. After prolonged consideration I penned the following note.

  To The Most Hon. The Marchioness of Hertford.

  Madam,

  At Your Ladyship’s request I hereby send you a report of the progress of the proposed Italian Opera Season at the Queen’s Theatre. At the meeting on Thursday Mr Popper informed us that the negotiations with the prime donne who will undoubtedly form the backbone of the proposed company are well under way, and Mmes Ardizzi, Pizzicoli and Hubermann-Cortino have all expressed their great interest. Mr Popper and My Lord Hertford also had discussions about the financial aspects of the season, though that was a discussion I did not feel inclined – or qualified – to attend.

  Lord Hertford introduced us to the talents of Miss Elizabeth Ackroyd, from Bradford. These seemed to me to be very considerable, and I have no doubt she will be
an asset to the company in the proposed season.

  Your Ladyship’s generous acknowledgment of my concert at Brighton is greatly appreciated. I have the honour to remain Your Ladyship’s obedient servant

  Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart.

  I sent the letter on its way, uncertain whether I had given the lady what she wanted but hoping that she would expect no more from me for her forty guineas. Knowing the fashionable world as I do I had the sinking feeling that she would in fact expect a great deal more.

  4. The Queen of the Night

  The months that followed were among the most curious of my life, for never before (apart, perhaps, from the time of the Gordon riots, when I felt particularly threatened on account of my religion) had I had the sense that I and the rest of polite London were in the hands of the mob. A Frenchman told me that it reminded him of Paris in 1789. Please do not misunderstand me: I have nothing (well, little) but admiration for Englishmen of the lower order. As a Mason I believe that enlightenment must with time spread to all classes, and that with education and an enlargement of his understanding the English worker will be as sober of judgment as an Englishman of the better class or a workman in my beloved Germany.

  But yet a mob in the grip of a wrong-headed notion is a fearsome thing. And on the surface their sympathy for the Queen seemed both just and generous. For the King to propose to put her, in effect, on trial before the House of Lords for licentious conduct was to invite scrutiny of his own morals, about which the whole nation knew all too much. The mob had no doubts that, at best, he was as guilty as his spouse, and they greeted him on his infrequent public appearances with boos and catcalls, so that he retreated to Royal Lodge, Windsor, thus adding cowardice to the legion of charges against him. Yet for all its generosity, the verdict of the mob was decidedly wrong-headed: the stories in the highest circles about her behaviour, and the behaviour she tried to encourage in her own daughter, proved that the current darling of the streets was a woman of the most tawdry and shop-soiled variety.

  All this is a matter of public record. On a personal level the consequences of ‘Queen fever’ were perhaps no worse than being forced to cheer the Queen, toast the Queen, give public testimony to the virtue of the Queen. My Lord Hertford was worst affected, being the husband of the King’s mistress, and his town house was frequently the target of the mob’s wrath and contempt.

  ‘I blame the King,’ said Mr Popper.

  It is of course usual for the common people (and people, in my experience, are rarely more common than opera impresarios) to blame their rulers for every ill under the sun, including bad weather. But Mr Popper did have a point.

  ‘If the silly man had simply ignored his wife none of this would have happened,’ he went on.

  It was quite true that if the King had not been determined to divorce his Caroline, cut her out of the Prayer book, prevent her attendance at his lavish (i.e. totally ostentatious and unspiritual) Coronation ceremony, the opera season would not have been threatened as it was.

  Let me explain. The Queen had spent much of her time since her separation from the King in Italy, where she had collected around her an entourage of dubious and insalubrious characters, among them her lover Pergami. When in due time the House of Lords came to consider evidence for her licentious conduct, most of the witnesses against her were inevitably Italians, testifying in their own language or a most curious version of English (often learned from the Queen herself, who had never mastered it). The mob drew their own irrational conclusions, and all Italians became potential victims of their wrath. Innocent ice-cream sellers were stoned and organ-grinders and their monkeys pelted with rotten vegetables. Potential witnesses were met at Dover with terrifying evidences of the mob’s hatred. Quite soon the Crown’s supply of witnesses simply dried up. They refused to come and testify, no matter what the financial inducement was.

  News of the anti-Italian feeling got quickly back to Italy. Prime donne are not the bravest of individuals. Vain, blatant, greedy, promiscuous, vulgar – in my experience they can be any (or, frequently, all) of those things, but brave, very seldom. First Mme Pizzicoli wrote to Mr Popper saying she had heard of the unspeakable outrages inflicted on her fellow countrymen by the disgraceful English mob, and in sympathy for the sufferings of those poor innocents she would deny the English the joy of hearing her voice. ‘No great loss,’ I said, remembering her previous letter. ‘I believe she has no taste at all.’ A week later came a letter in similar vein from Mme Ardizzi. The Coronation season was left with the prospect of Mme Hubermann-Cortino as its sole prima donna. Mr Popper decided she would be known as Mme Hubermann. ‘Simpler,’ he said. He clearly expected the anti-Italian feeling to last.

  In the meantime my acquaintance with Betty Ackroyd and Bradley Hartshead was ripening. Some days after our first meeting she wrote me a sweet little note saying that she was singing my Exsultate Jubilate with an amateur band in Clerkenwell, and wondered whether she could sing it for me first and get my advice. Thus began an association that brought me nothing but pleasure. During those hot summer months of the Queen’s ‘trial’ Betty or Bradley Hartshead or both together would come to my rooms to play and sing my music to me and discuss finer points of interpretation or wider questions of music theory. I coached Betty in the soprano part of The Creation, which brought poignantly back to me the London visits of my dear old friend Haydn. When she sang the role of Eve, with great success, it was as Elizabeth Ackroyd: Mr Popper would in other circumstances have preferred her to adopt a foreign name nobody could pronounce for the opera season, but now an assumed Italian name was out of the question, and as to a German one – who could know what was about to be alleged about the Queen’s girlhood years in Brunswick?

  It was Betty who brought me the good news about Rossini.

  ‘We hear that Rossini is not coming,’ she said, taking off her cloak as she entered my apartment.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Declines His Majesty’s most gracious invitation.’

  ‘How did you hear?’

  ‘Lord Hertford told me.’

  ‘So cowardice and concern for creature comforts have triumphed,’ I said. ‘I knew they would. What reason did he give?’

  ‘Pressure of work. He is engaged on Matilde di Shabran for a theatre in Rome.’

  ‘Another deathless opus from the hand of the master,’ I said, chuckling. ‘And one who is supposed to rattle them off in five or six days! All the better! More chance for my Donne Gaie di Windsor. With you as Alice Ford – or perhaps Anne Page. Now Popper won’t be able to get out of it.’

  The opera was really going very well, musically speaking. I was already beginning the last scene of all, in the forest. I had banged the head of my doltish (no, extremely cultivated – that was the problem) librettist, and in the end something reasonably shapely and dramatic had been cobbled together by the two of us. I had, fortunately, rare peace in which to compose. Beyond occasional appearances at the fortepiano to direct performances of The Baker’s Daughter of Westminster or whatever piece of nonsense I had let trickle from my pen in a fit of absence of mind, I had little to do. I left to Mr Popper the ordeals of putting together an opera company. He could put up with the tantrums of tenors who never can acknowledge their essential secondariness in an opera company; he could put up with the fumings of husbands of sopranos, who disguise their cuckoldry with furious bluster. All I gathered was that due to the cravenness of the Italian singers Betty Ackroyd and other singers from Northern Europe were to play a bigger part in the season than had been anticipated. This pleased me. I found too that Mr Popper had decided to prepare Betty by giving her parts in the burlesques with which he enriched the cultural life of the capital. This pleased me less. You do not learn how to sing my Countess or Herr Gluck’s Iphigenia by appearing as the baker’s daughter of Wherever. However Betty Ackroyd seemed already to know how to sing my Countess and Iphigenia, so I rejoiced that she had a regular income, and welcomed the fact that I occasionally saw her at the th
eatre, in addition to our sessions when we went through my own music and that of other truly great composers, including that of Handel, without which no festivities of the beef-witted English would be complete.

  Both Betty and Bradley Hartshead were at the Queen’s Theatre on the fateful day. We had in fact been rehearsing a curtain-raiser I had dashed off one day while seated, constipated, on the stool of ease, and we were in the foyer about to issue forth through the main entrance into the Haymarket when a carriage drew up outside. It was a perfectly ordinary, anonymous carriage, so imagine my astonishment when from it stepped, hurriedly and furtively, My Lord Hertford, turning to hand down – something – a woman – a girl, such as I would not have expected to see him publicly associate with. Her face was shaded, but she was dressed in a threadbare grey worsted cloak, with a hood, underneath which one could see a dress that was none of the cleanest, holed hose, and shoes that were cracked. Lord Hertford bundled her through the doors, across the foyer, nodding to us in a preoccupied manner, and straight down the corridor that led to Mr Popper’s office, which he walked into without knocking and shut the door behind him and the mysterious creature.

  We immediately decided that we were not after all in any haste to leave the theatre.

  Our persistence there was rewarded. It was some ten minutes later, when we were still discussing who the woman could possibly be, that Mr Popper issued from his office and approached our little group down the corridor.

  ‘Ah – ahem – Mr Mozart – glad you are still here. I wonder if you could favour us with a few minutes of your valuable time. And Miss Ackroyd too. It is a matter of some delicacy, Mr Hartshead, so perhaps…’