But Miss Intrepidi was a real pro, and having made a mess of her words she cried, “I’ll get it; don’t worry—I’ll get it!” and Powell assured her that nobody had the least doubt she would.

When the reading was completed, late in the afternoon, Gunilla spoke to the company for the first time.

“You see what our Director is doing?” she said. “He wants you to sing words, not tones. Anybody can sing the music; it takes an artist to sing the words. That’s what I want, too. Simon Darcourt has found us a brilliant libretto; Hulda Schnakenburg has realized a fine score from Hoffmann’s notes, and we must think of this opera as, among other things, an entirely new look at Hoffmann as a composer; this is music-drama before Wagner had put pen to paper. So—sing it like early Wagner.”

“Ah—Wagner!” said Miss Intrepidi. “So now I know.”

All of this, and the careful rehearsals which followed—on the floor, as Powell said, meaning that he was planning the moves and when necessary the gestures of the singers—was victuals and drink to the Cranes. (They were always referred to as the Cranes, though Mabel took pains to explain that she was still Mabel Muller, and had sacrificed nothing of her individuality—though she had obviously sacrificed her figure—in their spiritual union.) Al cornered and buttonholed everybody, and made himself conspicuous in his desire not to be obtrusive. He was on the prowl to capture and note down every motivation, and the notes for the great Regiebuch swelled to huge proportions. Oliver Twentyman was a Golconda to Al.

Here was tradition! Twentyman had, in his young days, sung with many famous conductors, and his training had become legendary in his lifetime. He had worked, when not much more than a boy, with the great David ffrangcon-Davies, and repeated to Al many of that master’s precepts. More wonderful still, he had worked for three years with the redoubtable William Shakespeare—not, he explained to the gaping Al, the playwright, but the singing-teacher, who had been born in 1849 and had worked with many of the great ones until his death in 1931—who had always insisted that singing, even at its most elaborate, was based upon words, upon words, upon words.

“It’s like a dream!” said Al.

“It’s a craft, my boy,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who was still waiting for a decisive word about the Blurt, or possibly just the Sneeze. “And never forget the funny stuff. Wagner hadn’t much use for it; he thought Meistersinger was a comic opera, of course, and you should have seen my Beckmesser in St. Louis a few years ago! I stopped the show twice!”

Al was a special nuisance to Darcourt. “This libretto—some of it gets close to poetry,” he said.

“That was the idea,” said Simon.

“Nobody would take you for a poet,” said Al.

“Probably not,” said Darcourt; “when are you expecting the baby?”

“That’s a worry,” said Al. “Sweetness is getting pretty tired. And worried, too. We’re both worried. We’re lucky to be sharing this great experience, to take our minds off it.”

Mabel nodded, hot, heavy, and dispirited. She longed for the move to Stratford, out of the terrible, humid heat of a Toronto summer. As she lay on the bed in their cheap lodgings at night, while Al read aloud to her from the macabre tales of Hoffmann, she sometimes wondered if Al knew how much she was sacrificing to his career. As women have wondered, no doubt, since first mankind was troubled by glimmerings of what we now call art, and scholarship.

“Will you give my feet a rub, Al? My ankles are killing me.”

“Sure, Sweetness, just as soon as we finish this story.”

Why, he wondered, was Sweetness crying when, twenty minutes later, he got around to rubbing her feet?

What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters! No, no; that sounds like Kater Murr! But I have enjoyed myself more in the past few weeks than at any time since my death. Homer was quite wrong about the gloomy half-life of the dead. The remoteness, the removal, of my afterlife is vastly agreeable. I see all the people who are preparing my opera; I comprehend their feelings without needing to share them painfully; I applaud their ambitions and I pity their follies. But as I am wholly unable to do anything about them, I am not torn by guilt or responsibility. It is thus, I suppose, that the gods view humankind. (I apologize if, by speaking of “the gods” in the plural, I am being offensive to whatever awaits me when I move into the next phase of my afterlife.) Of course, the gods could intervene, and frequently did so, but not always happily from a human standpoint.

The trials of Powell and Watkin Bourke are very familiar to me. How often have I wrangled with singers who thought Italian was the only language of song, and who cried down our noble German as barbarous. Of course they made exquisite sounds, some of them, but they had a limited range of meanings for their sounds; Italian is a dear language and we owe much to it, but our northern tongues are richer in poetic subtlety, in shadows, and shadows were the essence of my work both as composer and as author. How I have struggled with singers whose one desire was to “vocalize”—a word that had just come into fashion and seemed to them the height of elegance and musical refinement. How deliciously they yelled when one wished that they should utter some meaning! How pressingly they would urge me to change German words to others with which they could make a prettier sound! And how incomprehensible was the word that lay ravaged at the bottom of any sound they made, as they roared, or cooed, or squalled, or sobbed with such richness of inane musicality! “Gracious lady and supreme artist, “ I would say to some fat bully of a soprano, “if you pronounce the word on the tone no louder than you could speak it, it will be sound enough, and replete with significance that will ravish your hearers.” But they never believed me. Nothing encourages self-esteem like success as a singer.

And why not? If you can stir an audience to its depths with your A altissimo, what need you care for anything else?

Or if you can make an audience laugh, is it surprising if you cease to care how? This man who wants to sneeze, or blurt his wine in somebody’s face, is different only in kind from the Jack Puddings of my time. With them all comedy was rooted in sausage; give them a sausage to eat and they would undertake to keep a sufficient part of the audience in roars of mirth for five minutes; allow them to add an onion to the sausage and it was eight minutes. How sad such merriment is! How divorced from the Comic Spirit!

I am becoming devoted to Schnak. Devoted, that is to say, only as a spirit may be; she is cleaner since the Swedish woman seduced her, but she is without charm. It is her musical genius that enslaves me. Yes, genius is the word I shall use. By that word I mean that she will have enough individual quality to impose herself upon the music of her time as a truly serious artist, and she may achieve fame, even if it follows her death. After all, Schubert is now known as a genius of the first order, yet when I became aware of his work very few people in my part of Germany had heard of him, and he did not survive me by more than five years. Of all the music I know, Schnak’s, working on the foundations I laid down, most resembles that of Schubert. When she has done it best, our work together has that melancholy serenity, that acceptance of the pathos of human life, that speaks of Schubert. Dr. Dahl-Soot knows it, but the others say the music is like Weber, because they know that Weber was my friend.

That strange ass Crane is tracing all the music to Weber. He is one of those scholars who is certain that everything in art is laboriously derived from something that came before it. Much as I admired Weber, I never saw a Weber score to which I would willingly have signed my own name.