The Libretto realized by Simon Darcourt, assisted by Penelope Raven and Clement Hollier.

The public relations people had done their job efficiently. The house was decently full and not with an audience of despair, recruited from nurses’ residences and old folks’ homes. Darcourt found himself sitting next to Clement Hollier; he reflected that he had never seen Hollier in evening dress before, and the learned man stank pungently of some spicy toilet water or after-shave. This may be hard to endure, thought Darcourt. But he could not ponder long on this, for the house lights dimmed, and Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot strode into the orchestra pit, shook hands with the concert-master, and bowed elegantly to the audience.

The audience responded eagerly. They had never seen anything like Gunilla, with her masculine good looks, her magnificent green tailcoat, and her ample white stock, and their expectations for the evening rose. The show, they felt, had begun.

Gunilla raised her baton, and the first heavy chords, stating the theme of Caliburn, were heard, and gave way to a firm but melancholy theme, the theme of Chivalry, which was developed for perhaps three minutes, until the point in the score marked by Letter D was reached; then the splendid red curtains swept upward and back, to disclose King Arthur and Merlin standing on the brink of the Enchanted Mere.

This was something for which the audience was wholly unprepared. Geraint, Waldo Harris, and Dulcy Ringgold had laboured faithfully to reproduce the stage dressing of the early years of the nineteenth century—the stage as Hoffmann would have known it. From the footlights—for there were footlights—the stage rose in a gentle rake which reached backward to the full forty feet of stage space, and on each side were six sets of wings, painted to represent a British forest in springtime as perhaps Fuseli might have imagined it; at the back, in front of a splendidly painted backcloth, the rollers which had been so much trouble a few days before were revolving silently, giving an impression of gently heaving water. It was a perspective scene in the nineteenth-century manner, designed to be beautiful and to complement the stage action, rather than to persuade anyone that it mimicked some natural reality.

An “objective correlative” to the music, thought Al Crane, and scribbled a note in the darkness. He was not entirely sure what the phrase meant, but he thought it meant something that helped you to understand something else and that was good enough.

The audience, which had never seen anything like it, burst into loud applause. Canadians are great applauders of stage settings. But Gunilla, who was not aware of this national custom, turned upon them with the face of a Gorgon. She gave a hiss of menace and waved a hand as if to quell the sound. Assistance came from an unforeseen quarter; there were gentle shushings, not angry but politely rebuking, from all over the house. Yerko’s Claque had moved into action and from then onward it directed the applause with fine certainty of taste. The clappers were quieted, and the voice of Oliver Twentyman, high and pure as a silver trumpet, was heard invoking the power of Caliburn to elevate and refine the life of Arthur’s Court, and to give a new meaning to Chivalry. Darcourt breathed with relief. A very tricky corner had been turned. He gave himself up to the music, and in time the curtains closed, and the Overture—for it was a true Hoffmann overture, employing the voices of singers—moved to its completion.

When the curtains rose immediately on Act One, the scene was a hall in the Court of Arthur, and a fine sight, but not one that suggested chivalry, particularly; the Knights and their Ladies had not that look of stricken consecration which is associated with chivalry on the stage. Nutcombe Puckler was, as Geraint had directed him, “horsing around and playing the goat” with a cup-and-ball, but not too distractingly. The Knights paid him little heed. The Ladies—Polly Graves’ splendid jugs well downstage and Primrose Maybon equally prominent—declared themselves, and their situation, in the best operatic manner. Darcourt was well pleased with the old ballad he had adapted to a theme of Hoffmann’s and which put the opera off to a somewhat folkloric start.

Thus sang the Knights. “So bright of what?” hissed Hollier in his ear.

“Blee! You know—blee! Complexion. Shut up!”

The Ladies took up the ballad strain:

The Knights, pleased with this handsome compliment, make what might be called a statement of policy, joined by the Ladies:

But they are not permitted to take their ease in this Kater Murr conception of their society. Preceded by four pages holding in check four very large Irish wolfhounds, King Arthur and his Queen appear, and Arthur tells them of the revelation at the Enchanted Mere:

And he charges them with his chivalric code, in which noble blood must be partnered by noble deeds. Let them henceforth be bons, sages et cortois, preux et vaillans. And as an act of good faith, he pledges himself to the service of the Christ of Chivalry, and in only slightly less degree to the service of his Queen, as the Vessel of his Honour, the scabbard of Caliburn. The scene ends when the Knights bind themselves in the same terms to their Ladies.

This was received with warm approval by the audience, and Darcourt began to feel somewhat more at ease. But—what is this? Darcourt knew, but the audience did not, and Darcourt could not have foreseen their astonishment when, with no interfering curtain, and the barest minimum of mechanical sound, the scene changed visibly from Arthur’s Court to a nearby chapel, where Morgan Le Fay and her son Modred were plotting the theft of the scabbard of Caliburn. What happened, if you knew, was that the twelve wings that flanked the court scene were drawn silently back out of sight, and wings suited to the ruin were left in view; at the same moment a drop scene was lowered at the back of the stage, and the great hall seemed to have melted imperceptibly into its successor.

“Those nineteenth-century people knew a trick or two,” whispered Hollier.

Indeed they did, thought Darcourt, but he said nothing, for the scenery-applauders were hard at it, and Yerko’s Claque were quietly reducing them to silence. Morgan Le Fay and her son plotted. Good stuff, thought Darcourt, as Modred—Gaetano Panisi, a splendid bass, though a stumpy figure—gave velvety utterance to his scorn for Arthur and the chivalric ideal: