Maile and Karl walked back to Getreidegasse, where he took her hand, nodded in farewell, and went on down the street. She stood for a moment, still enveloped by the quietness; everything had been done in the briefest and simplest way, with light and music. Although what had really happened? The event wasn’t on Advent schedules posted throughout Salzburg, was not part of the Midnight Masses held later in all twenty-seven churches. A little cemetery full of tiny lighted trees and visitors: for the ancestors, she realized, so they too shared in Christmas. It felt like a small, unexpected gift that didn’t need to be fully understood. For now, that was enough.
SEVERAL TIMES A day Maile crossed the icy river bridge so hatted, scarved, coated, gloved, and booted that only her eyes were visible. She craved hot food. For lack of a place to go, sex remained at a distance, in a world of sun on skin that she could hardly recall. Classrooms were heated only enough to take the worst edge off the cold, which seemed to lurk just outside like the bears and wolves that Frau Metzger described coming down from the mountains before the war. Consulates were shuttered, their gardens heaped with snow.
Finally Jann assigned Maile arias to perform at recitals, but the joy she’d expected to feel was muted: same small concert hall, same piano accompaniment rather than orchestra, no costume or partner. From time to time she spotted the Rosenkavalier in the last row of the balcony, unnoticed by the audience below; now part of the city’s background, simply a strange little figure. Then other singers began jealously saying she had the rare voice a dramatic soprano. This Maile from the Pacific would become a Konstanze, a Fiordiligi, a Donna Anna.
The nickname Super-Sopran spread through the Mozarteum and gave her new confidence. She longed for massive sound, drama, arias with blazing coloratura. Professor Jann considered Super-Sopran a clever but vulgar term, something out of the Vienna tabloids. He assigned her the Rose Aria from The Marriage of Figaro.
She practiced the piece over and over: Dah—dee—dah in a dragging andante with low notes she had to scrape from the bottom of her register. No matter how hard she worked, the aria’s calm midrange gentleness eluded her.
Jann claimed it was an understated masterpiece of seduction, even though the soloist stood alone on a dark stage without the aid of props. “You must learn to understand simplicity,” he said. “From an entire production, this aria is often the one thing an audience recalls. A servant girl is saying, ‘Return to me, my love, and I shall crown you with roses.’ But there is no begging. The character has the most beautiful soul in this opera.”
Hour after hour Maile slaved on it. Two scant pages. No change in dynamics or rhythm from start to finish. No climactic high notes, no technical difficulties other than creating a single unwavering line. She imagined performances shimmering in theaters throughout Europe while she was forced to poke along with a piece based on simplicity. In revenge she found a room in the depths of the Mozarteum where Jann would not accidentally hear her. There she became Aida, Elvira, Violetta; flung herself at fate, tempted men and gods, suffered and died for the glorious sake of love. Singing was athletic, ecstatic. She would never work at a hated office job, with music as a hobby after the meals were made, the dishes washed, the laundry folded, the car insurance paid.
One afternoon the door to her secret practice room flew open and Jean-Paul marched in saying, “I cannot bearrr the sound of Bizet with yourr Frrrench.” He pushed her away from the piano and stamped his cigarette underfoot.
His face had a drinker’s brick-colored puffiness, and his clothes stank of rancid tobacco, but he was known as an excellent critic for any singer able to put up with his temperament. “L’a—mour,” he shouted, playing and singing along with Maile, then in speaking voice, “Non, non!” He turned to her with a wide-eyed stare of pain. “You use the coarse Piaf accent. Never for opera! Répétez après moi.” She copied his r, no tongue flip at the back of the throat, and Jean-Paul let out a snarl of approval.
They worked through the aria five times until both of them were breathing hard. “You see, you see!” He jabbed the score. “To be vulgar in this role you must lose your natural vulgarity.” He glanced up, no hint of humor or spice in his expression.
She wanted to bite him and kiss him at the same time, shove him into a shower with his clothes on and listen to him wail. “Out, you frog-swine. Is that vulgar enough?”
He rippled off a lovely Tschaikovsky cadenza. “I myself cannot play without exuding élégance. You are a mere Algerian, doomed to worship European culture. Men will always want your brown skin. I want a snow white Circassian.”
“Who stinks like you? Who bathes once a week?” Maile struggled to recall a slur. “Ule hawa ‘oe!” Filthy penis, the best Papakōlea insult. She snatched her score and hit him over the head with it.
Jean-Paul leaped up and vanished into the hall, saying he was going to see Brrrenda, the perrrfect Amerrrican, not a mongrrrel like yourrrself.
Maile kicked the door shut so hard one of her high heels spun off across the floor. She retrieved it, thinking he was headed for the dingy schnapps bar across the street. Brenda would fetch him before he made a scene and the police came. Brenda, who’d decided he was cute after she wore her high school cheerleader’s sweater and he couldn’t get enough of hearing her describe varsity sports. A baby mezzo with an unusually rich, deep voice. Her tremendous low A-flat could rattle the door of a practice room. Fooling around with Carmen, a prize mezzo role, was wasting time.
IN THE EARLY morning, when fresh snow blanketed the sloping fields and Karl went out to milk the cow and feed the pigs, the farm felt like a dream of peaceful beauty. But he learned that in Prague, two sprinters bound for the Mexico City Olympics next summer had been arrested for refusing to join the Party. The clandestine group in Salzburg could do nothing. He kept up a demanding schedule of practicing both horn and piano, the one instrument involving head, neck, hands, arms, torso and feet, with huge chords and multiple melody lines as intertwined as masses of wire; the other instrument based on a single melody line that vibrated his teeth, skull, shoulder and arm bones, and so dependent on breath that playing forte drained his lungs to the point of blacking out.
Prisoners of harsh weather, conservatory students gathered daily in the main corridor. It was their lounge, their bulletin board, an imaginary clubhouse without a trace of intimacy. Karl had no classes with Maile. Often he recalled her Christmas Eve question on a dark, snowy street: There’s no place to go, is there? Being a European stuck in Austria felt like a nasty trick of fate. In American movies—and Hawaii was officially American—couples drove their cars to lovers’ lanes or out-door film screenings, or they went to motor lodges, or to spacious apartments where no godmother guarded the entrance. In Salzburg, the miserable economy and the Catholic stranglehold on morality made all that impossible. Spring, spring, he craved it.
During those shut-in months, Professor Jann followed developments in Czechoslovakia with increasing concern. The sheer size of the Soviet army unnerved him. Newspaper editorials from Salzburg to Berlin asked, “Safety in Diplomacy?” and “What Next: The Avalanche?” Instead of European politics, he discussed the American civil rights movement with his wife. He felt fortunate that Dora was educated, unlike most upper-class women of her generation, and she shared his interest in Negroes. If she was oddly reticent about the ’36 Olympics and a famous handshake, Jann didn’t press her for details. His own behavior during the Nazi years had been far from laudable.
One morning after Dora went out, a package arrived. Last week Jann had written a colleague in Vienna, an elderly tenor who owned a large collection of folk music records, everything from Irish penny-whistle tunes to Japanese ritual drumming. Had Maile Manoa made any recordings in Hawaii? It was just a guess. The quick response came as a surprise.
Jann opened the package with a spy’s curiosity and wariness. For months he’d been puzzled by her ability to perform with ease at recitals, and progress so rapidly. Other voice teachers remarked that he didn’t have
to do much with such a natural talent. But all knew that natural talent stalled unless backed by work, work, work. He unfolded an enclosed note.
Greetings, Zander, and may you never encounter the gout that presently holds me captive indoors. Oh, the dietary restrictions, the humorless attitude of my physician. However, on to more pleasant themes: this time you gave me a difficult task tho’ it is the sort of puzzle I enjoy. My collection grows ever more complete, and will be the subject of a lecture in the fall if I am ambulatory by then. The name you provided is not listed on any of these albums. That is often the case with folk music. As usual in the American manner, there are a number of photographs, so perhaps you will recognize a face. I did not include recordings of obviously male artists.
The first of six long-playing albums was entitled Voices from the Reef. The cover pictured four handsome, fat brown women in long red dresses and red flower necklaces. “All songs in English,” he read. “Your favorites to the strains of native guitars. When the Lurline Sails, Your Moon and Mine . . .” The next two albums were by a trio of girls from a place named Hilo. Then a warm shock of recognition: on the fourth album Maile stood at the center of the Voices from the Reef, described only as the Polynesian Princess of the Airwaves. Lovely, no more than sixteen.
On the final two albums she appeared in front of the women, their featured singer, although still unnamed. Until she went to New York in 1967, he figured, she had been a local entertainer for most of her life. The staged photos and liner notes seemed as fraudulent as Alpine romances or marzipan portraits of Mozart.
He placed a record on the stereo and clicked the player arm. String instruments strummed a tinny introduction. A soprano voice floated in: “The surf is sighing, calling you, you, you . . .” He clicked forward to the next selection. “I stand—on the shore, My love—is no more...” Again he stopped the sound.
Maile’s voice was a sweet, pure, crooning head tone, rehearsed but not trained, a limited, natural sound used to please tourists gathered for . . . what? Once more he studied the photographs. The “Banyan Courtyard” seemed to be a kind of daytime beach cabaret, like those in southern France, with people in swimwear seated at outdoor tables for a live radio broadcast. Singing for an audience with drinks in hand must have toughened her, he thought, but it had not made her coarse. She had no trace of a café singer’s shallow vanity—desired by different men every night, giving favors to the owner and his friends to keep her job. The record albums did not suggest that sort of desperation. Even so, a woman on a stage of any size was forced to deal with the fascination she generated. Had a husband or a baby been left behind on a distant Pacific island? Musicians obeyed impulses the middle class could not understand.
He repacked the records, wondering with whom Maile slept, and how often. Any conservatory was a natural hotbed for affairs, an outlet for the furious joy and frustration of music. First in line would be Karl Holzer, that spectacularly gifted young man. Jann’s emotions flared at the thought of them as lovers. But music was cruel, and those destined to be soloists invariably became competitors, then love flew out the door.
MAILE’S CLASS IN nineteenth-century composition was cancelled, and she wandered outside. The softness of the April air crept over her like an assurance of life’s underlying beauty. The trees and the ground, and the clothes and hats that people wore had changed from heavy to light, from black to green. Frau Metzger no longer barged into her room to tend the Kachelofen. Recital schedules no longer offered Winterreise. Her savings would stretch to July, at least to the start of the Festival.
In the Old City she passed the Silver Fawn and told herself that one day she would go there for a grand meal. She paused outside a café with a window box of miniature irises, delicately scented. Each slender green stem was topped by a dot of white, like a piece of popcorn on the tip of a straw. The display window held an array of pastries on a shelf covered with white linen. The polished glass formed a teasing barrier between Maile and a Sachertorte on a silver pedestal. One slice was missing from the small, thick wheel of dark chocolate, revealing thin strips of apricot jam seeping from between each layer. To the left stood an airy froth of cream cheese cake sprinkled with wisps of orange peel. On the right a porcelain plate held glistening wild strawberry tarts, bright red clusters of tiny fresh fruit, three, six, nine, a dozen of them. A bouquet of violets and a small watercolor portrait of Werner von Wehlen completed the arrangement.
UNSER DIRIGENT, a card under it read. Our Conductor. A few striking black brushstrokes on a pale blue wash formed a three-quarter profile dominated by a stare of authority. The opera performances Maile had attended were led by second-rank conductors. She thought that von Wehlen’s fame was no doubt deserved. Once Karl had said he controlled the Berlin-Vienna-Salzburg axis of music. A weak interpreter of Mozart? She couldn’t believe it. Even in a small watercolor, Maestro von Wehlen exuded artistic potency.
June came in swaths of pink and yellow wild flowers that filled the grassy hillsides on Mönchsberg and Reinberg and Nonntal, and the Kapuzinerberg meadows above the whores’ street. Strawberries, apricots, and cherries appeared for sale in the open market. Three thousand Festival workers arrived to set up stages, sets, sound systems, and a complex government administration. Wealthy foreigners installed themselves in large villas where they stayed year after year, couples in Pucci silks and sleek suits who strolled along the banks of the Salzach and lounged on outdoor terraces. Shop owners selling luxury goods fetched chairs, coffee, water for lap dogs, a newspaper for mein Herr while meine Dame looked at antique clasps for capes. Consulates were aired out in preparation for the arrival of diplomats.
Frau Metzger couldn’t understand why such a fuss was made about student riots in Paris when the Russki Bear was awakening from winter hibernation just north of Linz. She remembered Maile’s consulate invitation and called in a favor to get a free Festival ticket for her tenant. The Rosenkavalier renewed his contacts with border police and customs officials, in case Soviet troop movements endangered the Festival and forced him to adjust his livelihood. Late one afternoon he put on his uniform and went out to Schloss Wasserstein to arrange with the greenhouse manager to receive his regular allotment of roses. Each year he looked forward to refreshing this obligation of the castle’s owners, acquired years ago after he disposed of a cache of bones found in their garden maze; residue left by the SS.
The Mozarteum’s summer session began and Maile plunged into the rigors of study. One morning she went downstairs to see that Frau Metzger’s brass doorknob had been polished until it shone like a golden goose egg. The bell button also gleamed. Across the street, housewives washing windows chatted about a Sicilian mezzo. Girls pushed scrub brooms and glistening soapy water over the cobblestones. All along Getreidegasse, women at upper-floor windows set out boxes of geraniums with long strands of red and pink blossoms that hung down to the pavement. Café waiters arranged streamers of burgundy velvet over an entryway.
A group of men passed in front of Maile to go inside, each wearing a breast-pocket pass: FESTSPIELHAUS/WIENER PHILHARMONIK. Professionals, she thought with an envious thrill. The main window featured an oil painting of a man with a baton, and a card inscribed in delicate calligraphy: WERNER VON WEHLEN.
She walked on, aroused by the assurance that leading artists were filling the city. Tickets, however, were criminally expensive, and there were no student discounts or standing room. In a shop she saw a large photograph of von Wehlen, one arm outstretched in command over a section of violins. Briefly she admired it and continued down the street. He was in nearly every window, in formal poses or action shots with orchestra, dramatically profiled, baton raised. Always with a brooding scowl, never smiling.
The Beethoven look, she decided. He’s overdoing it.
Within three short streets she counted fifteen more von Wehlens— in banks and government offices, staring at passersby from beside sewing machines and bolts of fabric, looming over rows of sausage. One man, again and again. Why so f
ew pictures of sopranos, she wondered, pianists, violinists?
A book set on a stand under a small spotlight had the title, Das Wunder von Wehlen. The Von Wehlen Miracle. The cover showed the conductor emerging from a Formula One racing car in a crash helmet and asbestos jumpsuit. Such an obvious show of masculinity, of ego— of mana, Maile had to admit—offended her. It was Hollywood rather than concert hall. Still, his glamour could not be denied—an internationally famous musician in his mid-fifties, thick silver hair combed straight back, a dead-on gaze, strong brows, nose, and chin, firm mouth. No doubt a fascinating man. Would it be possible to meet him? Ha. Every woman in Salzburg wanted to meet him.
9
ON THE OPENING day of Salzburg Festival 1968, a drizzling rain kept everyone indoors through the morning and afternoon. Porters wearing oilskin capes ventured out to make deliveries, but people with money and leisure crowded into cafés. Horse-drawn carriages on Dom Platz stood idle. Awnings at the open market dribbled miniature waterfalls onto pyramids of tomatoes and plums. High above the city the castle remained hidden behind a mass of clouds, then shortly after five o’clock, the marshy atmosphere thinned into a rising mist. By six, the grayness of the day rolled away to reveal a deepening blue sky. Townsfolk joked that von Wehlen even had a grip on the weather.
At the Mozarteum Maile worked ten more minutes on the Countess’ aria from Figaro. Professor Jann had again mentioned entering her in a summer music competition, although he would choose the piece she sang. She finished quickly, wanting dinner: bread, cold cuts, and fresh peaches, all waiting in her room on a natural-refrigerator windowsill never touched by sunlight. After that, back to the conservatory’s radio room for the premiere broadcast of von Wehlen conducting Beethoven at the Grand Festival House, an event sold out since January. Six other performances elsewhere in the city had opening nights— solo recitals, chamber music, Jedermann staged on Dom Platz—all of which increased her sense of excitement even though she had no hope of attending.
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