If the opera venture seemed madness to Darcourt, it was more and more true and compelling to Schnak and the Doctor, who now had enough completed music to be nipped and tucked and patted and dowelled into an opera score. The final form had not been achieved but it was in sight. Not one of Hoffmann’s themes and rough notes had been neglected, and the important part of the music rested upon them. But inevitably there were gaps, seams to be sewn and then concealed, bridges to be contrived to get from one piece of authentic Hoffmann to another. These were the tests that would show Schnak’s quality. The Doctor suggested nothing, but she was quick to reject anything Schnak produced which seemed unworthy or unsuitable to the whole. Developing and orchestrating Hoffmann’s notes was child’s play to Schnak; finding Hoffmann’s voice in which to devise her new material was a different matter.

The exactions of the Doctor and the exasperation of Schnak made life a hell for Darcourt. His job was to tinker scraps of language into appropriate lengths for the music which was written every day, and changed every day, until he lost all sense of a coherent narrative, or intelligible utterance. Sometimes the Doctor scolded him for the banality of what he prepared; sometimes she rejected it because it was too litterary, too hard to comprehend when sung, too obtrusively poetic.

Of course the Doctor, who was an artist of considerable quality, was merely expressing her dissatisfaction with herself and what she could squeeze out of her pupil; Darcourt understood that, and was prepared to put up with it. But he was not ready to take snarling impudence from Schnak, who assumed she was privileged to be rudely capricious and exacting.

“This is shit!”

“How would you know, Schnak?”

“I’m the composer, I suppose?”

“You’re an illiterate brat! What you call shit is the verse of a poet of great gifts, slightly adapted by me. It’s utterly beyond your comprehension. You take it and be grateful for it!”

“No, no, Simon; Hulda is right. It won’t work. We must have something else.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know what else. That’s your job. What is wanted here is something that says the same thing, but says it with a good open vowel on the third beat of the second bar.”

“That means reshaping the whole thing.”

“Very well; reshape it. And do it now, so we can get on. We can’t wait till tomorrow while you brood over a dictionary.”

“Why can’t you reshape your bloody music?”

“The shape of music is something you know nothing about, Simon.”

“Very well. But I won’t take any more lip from this stupid kid.”

“Shit!”

“Hulda! I forbid you to use that word to the professor. Or to me. We must work without passion. Art is not born of passion, but of dedication.”

“Shit!”

Then the Doctor might slap Schnak across the face, or, under other circumstances, kiss her and pet her. Darcourt never slapped Schnak, but sometimes it was a near thing. Not all the work proceeded in this high-stomached mode, but it did so at least once a day, and sometimes the Doctor had to fetch champagne for everybody. The bill for champagne, thought Darcourt, must be mounting at a fearful rate.

He persisted. He swallowed insult, and in his new notion of himself as the Fool, he frequently gave insult, but he never gave up. He was determined to be a professional. If this was the way artists worked, he would be an artist in so far as a librettist was permitted such presumption.

It was not the way all artists worked. At least once a week Powell dashed up from Stratford in his snorting little red car, and his artistic method was all oil and balm.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely! Oh, this is very fine stuff, Simon. Do you know, when I am working on my other production—I’m getting up Twelfth Night, you know, for a May opening—I find words coming into my head that are not Shakespeare. They are unadulterated Darcourt. You’ve missed your calling, Sim bach. You are a poet. No doubt about it.”

“No, Geraint, I am not a poet. I am exploiting a poet to produce this stuff. The arias, and the long bits, are all his—with some tinkering, I admit. Only the recitativo passages are mine, and because of the way Nilla wants things, they are absolute buggers, because they have to have all this loose accompaniment underneath, and stresses falling in places that defy any sort of poetic common sense. Why can’t the singers just speak those parts, and sound like human beings and not crazed parrots?”

“Come on, Sim bach, you know why. Because Hoffmann wanted it otherwise, that’s why. He was an adventurer, an innovator. Long before Wagner he wanted an opera that was sung clear through, not broken up with spoken passages or recitative that is simply gabble to bustle on the plot. We must be faithful to old Hoffmann, boy. We must never betray old Hoffmann.”

“Very well. But it’s killing me.”

“No it isn’t. I’ve never seen you looking better. But now I’m going to talk against everything I’ve just said. We must have one big number for Arthur in Act Three, where he says loud and clear what Love is, and why he’s forgiving Guenevere and Lancelot. And there isn’t a damned scrap of Hoffmann that does it.”

“And so?”

“Well, it’s obvious. Dear little Schnaky-Waky is going to have to write a tune all by her dear little self, and you’re going to have to find words for it.”

“No, no,” said the Doctor. “That would indeed be untrue to Hoffmann.”

“Listen, Nilla. More operas have been spoiled by too much artistic conscience than have ever been glorified by genius. Just for the moment, forget about Hoffmann. Or no, that’s not what I mean. Think of what Hoffmann would do if he were still alive. I see him now, the wonderful bright-eyed little chap, chewing his quill and thinking, ‘What we need in Act Three is a great big, smashing aria for Arthur that pulls the whole thing together, and knocks the audience out of their socks. It’s got to be the one that everybody remembers, and that the barrel-organs play in the streets.’ We don’t have barrel-organs now, but he wouldn’t know that. It’s got to get the young, and the old, and if the critics despise it the critics of the next generation will hail it as genius.”

“I will not agree to anything that has a cheap appeal,” said the Doctor.

“Nilla—dear, uncompromising Nilla fach–there is the truly cheap art, and we all know what it is, but there is another kind of art, that goes far beyond what critics call good taste. Good taste is really just a kind of aesthetic vegetarianism, you know. You go beyond it at your peril, and you end up with schmalz like ‘M’appari’ in Marta. Or maybe you come up with ‘Voi, che sapete’, or ‘Porgi amor’, which is genius. Or you get the Evening Star aria out of Tannhäuser or the Habanera out of Carmen–and you can’t say Wagner dealt in cheap goods, and Bizet wrote the one sure-fire opera. You artists really must stop kicking the public in the face. They’re not all fools, you know. You’ve got to get something into this Hoffmann job that will lift it above a fancy academic exercise to earn Schnak a degree. We’ve got to wow ‘em, Nilla! Can you resist that?”

“This is very dangerous talk, Powell. I’m not sure I should let Hulda listen. These are dirtier words than any even she knows.”

“Come on, Nilla. I know this is the voice of the Tempter, but the Tempter has inspired some damned good stuff. Now listen carefully, Nilla. Have you ever heard this?

Darcourt, who had been listening with delight to the spellbinder, roared with laughter. He lifted his voice in imitation of Powell’s bardic chant, and continued: