Chapter 9

The opera company made its rounds through the small cities that lie between the Danube and the Main, the Saale and the Neckar—and there are many of them,—its stay in any one place depending naturally on the interest shown by the public.

“The province is the enchanted Sleeping Beauty,” said the impresario Dörmaul to Wurzelmann and Daniel, “the province is still asleep, and you must rouse it from its slumbers by pressing the kiss of the Muse on its forehead.”

But the impresario was unwilling to open his pockets. The princes who were to release Sleeping Beauty did not have sufficient means to make a presentable appearance, while their retinue was seedy-looking indeed.

The tenor had long since passed the zenith of his career. His massive paunch placed deadening strictures on his credentials as the impersonator of heroes. The buffo was an inveterate toper who had often been placed behind bars by the police for his nocturnal excesses. The barytone had a big lawsuit on his hands about an estate; his lawyers were two stars of obscurity from a small village; and at times he became so vexed at the cuts of his opponents that he lost his voice. The soprano was incessantly quarrelling with her colleagues, and the alto was an intriguing vixen quite without talent. In addition to these there were a dozen or so super-numeraries and under-studies, who were bored, who played practical jokes on each other, drew starvation wages, and had never learned anything.

The musicians were also a sorry lot. It was not rare that one or the other of them had pawned his instrument. Once a performance had to be postponed because the violinists had stayed over their time at a village dance where they were playing in order to add to their paltry income. The inspector, who was scene-shifter, promoter, ticket seller, and publicity agent all in one, and who was not equal to any of these positions, took French leave in the second year and ran off with one of the chorus girls, taking the box-office receipts for the evening with him.

One time the costumes were sent to the wrong address, with the result that Boieldieu’s “La Dame Blanche” had to be played in woollen frocks, patched velvet skirts, filthy cotton blouses, and French wadding.

Another time the mob in “Martha” consisted of a distempered woman, a waiter brought in at the last minute from a herring restaurant, and the door-keeper of an orphanage: the chorus had gone on a strike because their salaries had been held up.

In Karlstadt the final act of the “Merry Wives of Windsor” could not be played, because during the intermission Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly had got into a fight, and the lady had scratched a huge piece of skin from the singer’s nose.

If these musical strollers, as acting-director Wurzelmann called the company, nevertheless made some money, it was due to the superhuman efforts of Daniel. Wurzelmann was always mixed up in some kind of love affair, introduced in time a ruinous system of favouritism, and became lazier and lazier as the weeks passed by.

Daniel had to pull the singers out of their beds to get them to go to rehearsals; Daniel had to help out with the singing when the chorus was too weak; Daniel had to distribute the rôles, tame down refractory women, and make brainless dilettants subordinate their noisy opinions to the demands of a work which he himself generally detested. He had to drill beginners, abbreviate scores, transpose voices, and produce effects with lamentably inadequate material. And from morning to night he had to wage war eternal against libellous action, inattention, and inability.

Nobody loved him for this; they merely feared him. They swore they would take vengeance on him, but they knuckled under whenever they seemed to have a chance. He had a habit of treating them with crushing coldness, he could make them look like criminals. He had a look of icy contempt that made them clench their fists when his eye fell on them. But they bowed before a power which seemed uncanny to them, though it consisted in nothing more than the fact that he did his duty while they did not.

At the close of each quarter, the impresario Dörmaul appeared on the scene to take invoice in person. His presence was invariably celebrated by a gala performance of “Fra Diavolo,” or “The Daughter of the Regiment,” or “Frou Frou.” On these occasions the buffo did not get drunk, the barytone rested from the torments of his lawsuit, the alto had a charming smile for the sympathetic house, the soprano was as peaceful as a mine immediately after an explosion. Not one of the chorus stayed too long in the café; and since Wurzelmann directed, and the orchestra did not have to feel the burning, basilisk eye of Kapellmeister Nothafft resting on it and floating over it, it played with more precision and produced a more pleasing feast for the ears than ordinarily.

Dörmaul was not stingy with his praise. “Bravo Wurzelmann,” he cried, “one more short year of hard work, and I’ll get you a position in the Royal Opera House.”

“Nothafft will likewise rise to fame and office,” he said, “although I was so stupid as to publish his music, and now all this waste paper is lying in my shop like a pound of brick cheese in a sick stomach.”

The impresario Dörmaul wore black and white striped trousers of imported cut, a vest that looked like a bit of tapestry made of pressed leather, a massive gold watch-chain from which dangled countless fobs, a blood red tie with a diamond as big as the Koh-i-noor and as false as an April sun, and a grey silk tile hat which he lifted only when in the presence of privy councillors, generals, and police presidents.

To a man of this kind Daniel had the boldness to remark: “Had you eaten cheese you would at least have digested it. Your crowded shops are after all more desirable in my estimation than many a head which would remain empty even if some one stuffed the whole of the ‘Passion of St. Matthew’ into it.”

Dörmaul decided to laugh. “Oho, my good fellow,” he said, and pushed his tile hat on to the back of his head, “you are getting all puffed up. Look out that you don’t burst. You remember the story of Hänschen: He was awfully proud of his porridge while sitting behind the stove; but when he went out on to the street, he fell into the puddle.”

The little slave tittered. Daniel had known for a long time that Wurzelmann was working against him. Quite innocently, to be sure, for half souls can admire and betray at the same time.

“Envy is my only virtue,” said Wurzelmann quite openly, “I am a genius at envying.”

Daniel was not equal to such cynicism. He was stupefied by Wurzelmann’s remark, but he did not break with the little slave; he continued to use him. He was the only individual with whom he could speak of himself and his work. And though he was overburdened, owing to his present position, he nevertheless managed to steal a few hours every day for his own work. And the pressure from all sides fanned the flame within him.

It was then that he staked out his field in order to be master in his own realm; he turned to the song; he chose the clear, restrained forms of chamber music; he studied with unwavering industry the old masters; he deduced from their works the right rules of composition; and he set these up before him like a dam against arbitrariness and æsthetic demoralisation.

He was not unmindful of the fact that by so doing he was cutting himself off from association with men, and renouncing, probably forever, the satisfaction that comes from monetary reward and outward success. He knew, too, that he was not making his life easier by adopting this course, nor was he gaining the popular favour of the emotionalists.

When he would sit in a café late at night and show Wurzelmann one score after another, sing a few bars in order to bring out the quality of a song, improvise an accompaniment, praise a melody, or explain the peculiarity of a certain rhythm, he surprised the little slave, and drove him into an attitude of self-defence. All this was fundamentally new to Wurzelmann. If Daniel proved that the new was not new after all, that the trouble lay in the fact that the deranged and shattered souls of the present century had lost the power to assimilate unbroken lines in their complete purity, Wurzelmann at once became an advocate of modern freedom, insisting that each individual should be allowed to do all that his innate talent enabled him to vindicate.

Daniel remained unconvinced. Was not the whole of life, the rich contents of human existence, to be found in the beautiful vessel that had been proved long ago? Could any one say that he was displaying a spirit of greediness in his love for the classical? And were joy and sorrow, however intense, less perceptible when expressed through a concise, well ordered medium? “What a distorted view a man takes when he becomes so narrow-minded,” thought Daniel. “His ambition makes it impossible for him to feel; his very wit militates against clear thinking.”

Thus they went from town to town, month after month, year after year. The company had in time its traditions, its chronique scandaleuse, its oft-tested drawing cards, its regular patrons, its favourite stands, and its stands that it avoided if humanly possible.

The local paper greeted them editorially; the children stood on the sidewalks to gape their fill at the ladies from the theatre; the retired major bought a reserved seat for the first performance; the barber offered his services; and the faculty of the Latin School held a special meeting to decide whether they should permit their pupils to go to the opera or not. The Young Men’s Christian Association voiced its protest against the nude shoulders of the artistes; the members of the Casino turned up their noses at the achievements of the company; the police insisted that the booth or hotel lobby in which they performed should be fireproof; the wife of the mining engineer fell in love with the barytone, and her husband hired a number of hoodlums to take their places in the gallery and hoot and hiss when the time came. And those who nag under any circumstances requested more cheerfulness. They found the “Czar and Zimmermann” too dull, the “Muette de Portici” too hackneyed. They insisted on “Madame Angot” and “Orpheus in the Under World.”

There was always something wrong.

Daniel shuddered at the mere presence of these people; he was repelled by their occupations, their amusements, and the cadavers of their ideals. He did not like the way they laughed; nor could he stand their dismal feelings. He despised the houses out of which they crept, the detectives at their windows, their butcher shops and hotels, their newspapers, their Sundays and their work days. The world was pressing hard upon him. He had to look these people straight in the face, and they compelled him to haggle with them for money, words, feelings, and ideas.

He learned in time, however, to see other things: the forests on the banks of the Main; the great meadows in the hills of Franconia; the melancholy plains of Central Germany; the richly variegated slopes of the Jura Mountains; the old cities with their walls and cathedrals, their gloomy alleys and deserted castles. In time he came to see people in a different and easier light. He saw the young and the old, the fair and the homely, the cheerful and the sad, the poor—and the rich so far away and peaceful. They gave him, without discrimination, of their wealth and their poverty. They laid their youth and their old age, their beauty and their ugliness, their joys and their sorrows, at his feet.

And the country gave him the forests and the fields, the brooks and the rivers, the clouds and the birds, and everything that is under the earth.