Mephisto Aria (11 page)

How delicious it was to play at falling in love with Octavian, letting her Sophie character ramble on while the glittering rose cavalier sang back, “My God, how lovely she is.” That they were on a brightly lit stage in front of press and dress rehearsal invitees did not dilute the thrill of playing at romance.

Anastasia sang with the full conviction of a young man falling in love, looking directly at her and then away, as if caught in too great an intimacy. Then she faded back, stage left, to allow the husband-to-be to ply his troth. Hans von Stintzing played the boorish Baron Ochs with gusto, and his hands were all over her.

Then Octavian was at Katherina’s side again, and the satin-clad arms held her for their next duet as they looked into each other’s eyes. Their vocal lines interwove, tone for tone, the brief dissonances resolving into thirds, their two agile voices in tense and thrilling interplay. “Your eyes, your noble air…I know nothing more of myself, only you. Oh, stay with me, stay by my side.” Katherina had never sung a love duet with a woman before and was unprepared for the effect it had on her.

Then the Baron returned for the duel, which Hans had finally learned. Baron Ochs was made for him and he milked every drop of humor from the scene. At exactly the right moment, Octavian administered the wounding prick and Ochs collapsed. “Mur-der! Mur-der!” he called out, and was carried away, singing of martyrdom and the need for a nice aged Tokay.

Finally the dress rehearsal was over. Bone weary, Katherina slipped out of her costume and emerged from her dressing room looking for Anastasia. How nice it would be to walk back to the hotel together again, arm in arm, talking about intimate things.

Radu Gavril was suddenly in front of her, still full of energy, as if the day had just begun. “We need to re-block a little bit for the lighting,” he said, urging her back onto the stage to show her the exact spot. “It will just take a moment.”

Ten minutes later she was free again and hurried backstage.

“Oh, Miss Marow, do you have a moment?” A slender man minced toward her.

Katherina exhaled in resignation. “Yes, Detlev?”

“I am so sorry. I know everyone’s leaving, but the director has decided that Sophie’s wig doesn’t go with your face and he wants me to fit another one. Can you spare me just a teensy bit of time?” His voice grew playful. “Or are you late for evening mass?” The tips of his long fingers formed a little tent and his eyes rolled heavenward.

Her annoyance evaporated and she poked him gently on the shoulder. “Does anyone around here go to mass?”

“Not in my circle of acquaintances.” He turned away with a slight flourish and she fell into step behind him, following him down to his subterranean workshop.

The wigmaker’s shop was small and cluttered. On two sides, glass-covered cabinets held Perüken of every size, from mass-produced spear-carrier wigs to flamboyant Baroque monstrosities. On a table to the right, wooden dummy heads wore the various Rosenkavalier wigs, natural-colored ones for the first and third acts, formal white for the second act.

Katherina sat down on the chair at the center of the shop and drummed her fingers on the armrest.

“Just sit still and it will be over before you know it,” he said, tugging her hair back into a tight ponytail and tacking the tail flatly on her head with hairpins. With a single adept movement, he slid a tight nylon cap over the entire mass.

“Here is your new Sophie look,” Detlev announced. He set the wig on her head and adjusted it back and forth until he could match it to her hairline. Though it was pure white and made her look doll-like, it was less extravagant than the previous one, and for that she was grateful. She sat patiently as he traced her hairline with a brown marker, moving only her eyes to study the wigs in her field of vision. One of them caught her attention.

“Is that the Queen of the Night?” She gave a faint tilt of the head toward the wig that took up a whole cabinet shelf.

“Oh, yes. Don’t you just love it?” He finished his work and fetched the wig dummy from the cabinet, setting it on the table in front of her. The wig was enormous, as if inflated, and was surrounded at its edges by glistening white curls. In among the filaments that made up the hair was a sort of metallic confetti, which caught the light and sparkled. A dozen thin wires jutted from the crown like spokes in a wheel, each with a tiny diamond at the center and on its tip. The effect was a sparkling double halo around the wig. On a dark stage, with dramatic spotlights, it must have been scintillating.

“My finest work,” he announced, resting his open hand on one hip, then sighed. “I’ve always wished I could sing Queen of the Night,” he confided “Can you imagine?”

Katherina knew he was serious and didn’t laugh. “Think you could do the high notes?”

“F above high C? Guess not. But, when you’re young, you have your little fantasies, and she was mine.”

“Mine too, actually,” Katherina confessed. “I saw Magic Flute about fifteen years ago. Ruth Welting sang her. This black mountain rolled in from the rear of the stage. There she was on the top, all sparkling with an enormous diadem of diamonds radiating out against the blackness. When she started singing I dissolved into a pool of longing.”

He removed the Sophie wig and held it up like a puppet on the fingertips of one hand.

“Don’t you hate that they made her the villain? I mean, it’s…I don’t know…like a big lie. Something beautiful and natural portrayed as evil, while Sarastro, the kidnapper, for God’s sake, is Mr. Benevolent. I wanted to sing the Queen just to be able to tell him where he could stick his magic flute.”

Katherina laughed. “Actually, I wanted to be her daughter Pamina. I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than having her as my mother.” She stroked one of the sparkling curls.

“I had just lost my own mother, you see. To illness. So I was…” She shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to tell you my life story.”

“Oh no, dear. It’s a beautiful story.” He nodded sympathetically. “And believe me, I know all about longing.” He pressed a fingertip on his lips, as if formulating something.

“Opera is a wonderful place to escape a cruel world, isn’t it? That’s why there are so many people like me in it. In opera everything happens—great love, horrible deaths, tragic sacrifices, terrible crimes—and the music purifies it all.”

She smiled up at his melancholic expression. “A little like being intoxicated, isn’t it?”

“Oh more than a little! It’s a big emotional orgy. And we do it. The singers, musicians, wigmakers, we get a thousand people drunk for the night.”

She giggled. “You make us sound immoral.”

Detlev pursed his lips. “Well, we are. Maybe that’s why Mozart made the Queen of the Night into the villain. On the other hand, she has the best costume and the best aria. And let’s face it, she’s the one everyone wants to hear. Who would you rather go home with after the party, a smug-face, rule-enforcing patriarch, or the Empress of the sparkly Night?” He pirouetted, holding the wig over his own head.

“I’m guessing not the patriarch.”

“No, the Queen!” Detlev retrieved his wig dummy and danced gracefully toward the display shelves. “Long live the Queen. Long live the Night!”

“Long live the night?” a voice in the doorway said. “That sounds ominous.”

XIV
Capriccioso

“Maestro.” Katherina felt like a truant, caught out of school. “I thought everyone had left the theater.”

“Everyone has. We’re the last.” Joachim von Hausen took her cape from her hand and draped it over her shoulders. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your hotel, if you don’t mind making a slight detour to pick up my wife. I’ll give you a little tour on the way.”

Emerging from the subterranean halls, they went through the glass doors of the Grosses Festspielhaus into the frigid evening air. Katherina wrapped her scarf once more around her throat and chin.

Von Hausen began his tour, sweeping his arm in an arc across the square. “This, as you know, is the Max Reinhardtplatz. Did you know that he was one of the founders of the Salzburg Festival? The Austrians thanked him for it by forcing him into exile in 1938. He made a big career in the U.S., though, and after the war, they forgave him for being Jewish and named this square after him.”

“Do I detect a hint of cynicism?” Katherina decided she liked this man.

“Cynical? Me? Just because Salzburg is a blend of museum and toy shop that makes an industry out of Mozart, whom they practically expelled, and whose main products are concerts, kitsch, and chocolate?”

“Aren’t you being a bit harsh? Salzburg is the biggest musical scene in Europe. The public gets to hear some of the best opera, and thousands of musicians and theater people have work.”

“Yes, they do, I admit it. I am one of them. I’m just not enchanted by the city the same way the tourists are. It’s one great big anachronism, and too cute by half.”

They had reached the archway to the St. Peter’s Church courtyard. “My wife, however, is far less critical. She adores Baroque art, and for her Salzburg is heaven. Particularly the Peterskirche. Are you familiar with it? So Baroque, it will give you a headache.” He swung open the heavy wooden door to the sanctuary and they walked side by side down the center aisle.

Piers on both sides of the aisle held murals of saints flanked by faux Baroque columns and fronted by a line of fir trees glittering with tiny yellow lights. Von Hausen was right. The combination of excessive ornament and extreme piety was overwhelming. Presumably, that was the point.

At the last pier to the right side of the altar, a woman stood with a sketchpad.

“Ah, there she is. My lovely wife.”

The woman turned as they approached and smiled recognition. She closed her sketchbook and tucked it under her arm.

“Katherina, this is my wife Magda. Schatz, this is Katherina Marow, our Sophie.”

Magda wiped her charcoal-smudged fingertips on a handkerchief, then offered her hand. “Pleased to meet you.” Katherina set her shoulder bag on the arm of the pew and accepted the handshake.

Magda von Hausen was an attractive, well-kept woman a few centimeters taller than her husband. Her perfectly coiffed hair was artfully blonded to conceal her fifty-something age, and her makeup was flawless. The look of a woman married to a famous man. For all that, her manner seemed sincere, her handshake firm.

Von Hausen turned to a white-haired gentleman who had stood up in the meantime. Katherina had not noticed him. “And I believe you know Mr. Raspin, one of the festival patrons.”

“Yes, of course I remember you. From the Carmina Burana reception.” She recalled his flattery and his mysterious remark, “I support such music—in my way.”

One of the festival patrons. Now it made sense. Her face warmed at her misjudgment and condescension. He was a financier of the festival. He paid her salary.

“How nice to see you again,” she managed, offering her hand. His handshake was the same as before, a tight grasp with cold fingers. She resolved to show more interest in him this time.

“I ran into Madame von Hausen in the square and kept her company while she sketched,” Raspin explained to the conductor, although it did not seem necessary. Von Hausen had opened his wife’s sketchbook and was looking at the most recent drawing. It was a rather good replica of the oil painting over the church shrine. “Who is that?” Katherina asked.

Magda laughed, as she collected her charcoal pencils into a box and dropped it into a shoulder bag. “You’d better not let anyone hear you ask that. It’s Saint Rupert, the patron saint of this city.”

Katherina sat down on the pew and pressed a fingertip on the edge of the sketchbook. “May I take a look?”

“If you like.” Magda drew on a fur coat over the already thick sweater she wore. “I make them just for myself, not to show.”

Katherina turned the pages respectfully. A mixture of very skillful charcoal sketches, sepia drawings, and the occasional watercolor. Fountains and gates, a dozing Salzburg coachman, the glass tomb in one of the churches with its prelate’s cadaver displayed in ecclesiastical regalia and, on the last page, a man with a fur-covered body and a red-painted, horn-topped head.

“Is this also something from Salzburg?”

It was Raspin who answered. “That’s from Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann. Have you ever seen Salzburg’s annual morality play, Fräulein Marow? It’s performed in summer in front of the cathedral in the medieval tradition.”

Katherina shook her head, still studying the curious facial expression on the figure. It was rather soft, almost beguiling.

“Probably not what Hofsmannsthal had in mind, but I don’t care.” Magda took the sketchbook gently from Katherina’s hand. “It’s his play, but my picture, right?” She slipped the volume into her bag next to the pencil box. “In any case, I’m glad you’re here. My fingers are like ice.”

Her attention still on Magda, Katherina reached for her shoulder bag that lay on the armrest of the pew and knocked it over. It dropped with a soft thud and its contents spilled out onto the church floor: rehearsal notes, sheet music for the Rosenkavalier duets, a handful of pencils, and the journal, which fell open as it hit the marble.

Before Katherina could kneel down and gather her scattered belongings, Gregory Raspin was on one knee and already had everything in hand. He shuffled the notes and sheet music back into the canvas bag, then with particular care picked up the battered journal. Closing it gently, he held it out to Katherina. “You keep a journal, Madame Marow?”

“It’s my father’s,” she replied, taking it from him. Embarrassed, she dropped it quickly into the bag, which she hooked over her shoulder. Von Hausen, meanwhile, had collected the loose pencils.

The two men were standing now and brushing dust from their knees. The crash had momentarily ended the banter and so, without speaking, the four of them made their way along the center aisle of the sanctuary.

Stopping just before the narthex of the church, von Hausen took a final look backward, drawing everyone’s attention to the twinkling of the Christmas trees that added to the visual density of the Rococo church. “See what I mean?” he said. “Like marzipan. Too much gives you a headache.”