Orfeo (34 page)

The pit orchestra is a special forces team. Four decades ago, Els’s tricky polyrhythms and kaleidoscope of keys would have been unplayable. But these seventy crack musicians, raised from infancy on perfect recordings, tear through his score as through a show-tune medley. The leads, too, are superb. The self-styled prophet and his sexy consort, the ousted bishop returning at the head of a powerful army, the demented tailor-king: all sung by shining young singers.

Bonner is everywhere at once—upstage, downstage, offstage in the wings, charming, berating, flattering, cajoling. He seduces the singers of both sexes, reblocks their entrances and exits. He sinks into dark reveries or belts out their arias the way he hears the phrases in his mind’s ear. The man strides through the theater the way the bedecked prophets parade through rebel Münster, and the awed cast regards him with that same wavering reverence that Münster gives the rogue Anabaptists.

He confesses to Els, far out of earshot of the cast,
Every show I’ve done in the last two decades has been warm-up for this
.
You’ve served me up the perfect pitch
,
and I intend to hit it out of the park.

And a city rises up at his bidding: walls and towers, council chamber, the nave of a great cathedral. The set has all Bonner’s favorite mechanical gimmicks. It rotates and reassembles itself. There’s scrim projection, of course, with thousands of now digitally driven images. The costumes are way over budget. The production adds several hundred thousand dollars of debt to the company’s already shaky ledger. The businessmen try to rein in the uprising, but Bonner tells them what any good rebel prophet knows: every rich donor on earth will follow you to the stars, if they think you can reach God on His unlisted number.

Three months into composing, Els discovered that the opera had already been written: Meyerbeer’s
Le prophète.
Any real composer would have learned the mid–nineteenth century drama in school; but Els’s education was hijacked by the avant-garde. He called Bonner in a panic.

Richard, I’ve sunk you. We’re finished.

When Els calmed down enough to give the details, Bonner just laughed.

Peter, are you shitting me? Meyerbeer? That piece of fluff? It’s a damn love story.

It’s John of Leiden, Matthias, the siege. Everyone’s going to think we ripped it off.

Your point?
Bonner asked.
Of course it’s a rip-off! The cave paintings of Lascaux were a rip-off. Everyone who’s ever made anything is ripping off somebody, living or dead
.

More fires followed, which Bonner had the time of his life running around putting out. He turned an angry cast uprising into a cathartic breakthrough. In three days of shuttle diplomacy, he resolved an ego war between the conductor and the choral director. He threw the crew’s continuous litany of insults and injuries into Münster’s cauldron and let the flavors simmer.

Now Els settles in to watch the master work an eleventh-hour miracle on the second act. Bonner channels the scene as if he’d been there when it first unfolded, four and a half centuries ago. The prophet Matthias and his raven-haired wife Divara stand in a plaza blue with night. The music is an ethereal vesper. They and their disciple, John of Leiden, strike a pact with Knipperdollinck, the leader of the guilds. Together, the men dash through the streets, urging the populace to repent. And in one quick fantasia, the Anabaptists occupy Town Hall.

The council takes no arms against the uprising. They mean to exploit the chaos for their own ends. They pass a law protecting liberty of conscience. The rebels rise up ascendant, and sanity is finished.

A brass fanfare launches the crowd into a midnight saturnalia. They tear through the cathedral smashing paintings and sculptures. To a deep, carnal surge in the strings, they set the city library ablaze. Matthias sings his scourging aria,
Get out, you godless ones, and never come back!
In the dark auditorium, the tune again sounds to Els like a gift from nowhere, a thing he wrote from dictation.

The chorus picks up where the aria leaves off. By scene’s end no one is left in the city but the Children of God. They make the rounds, pilgrims of the future, greeting each other as
Brother
and
Sister
. They sing, a community forging itself anew on pure love. Els springs from his seat and staggers up the aisle to hear how the madness sounds at the back of the house. It sounds good. Scary good. Even inspired.

Knipperdollink, Matthias, and John celebrate inside the seized palace. In a noble trio, they praise the divine plan that has handed them an entire city. From a balcony above a crowded square, Knipperdollink decrees that all property will be held in common, in warehouses, to be given to the poor. The crowd takes up the decree in a gathering fugue. Those who object are seized by soldiers and led away.

On the thrust stage, a solo messenger sings of the spread of the millennial dream across the north.
Scarcely a village or town where the torch is not glowing in secret . . .
But in fact, Münster is surrounded. A coalition of neighboring states sends armies and digs earthworks. Els paces in the aisle, watching the noose close around his breakaway city. The siege music needs more horns—he can hear that now—more glee for the Prince’s armies, closing in on the believers. But the measures are set, and they seem to be flying.

On the city ramparts, Matthias receives an Easter order from God. The world’s end is under way. He leads a handful of men on a sortie against the entrenched invaders. They’re cut into bloody chunks and scattered for vultures. Poetry, prophecy, and slaughter run together in an interlude so beautiful Els can’t believe he wrote it.

The city devolves to John, the bastard, failed tailor. When the man sings, his words almost don’t matter. From childhood, he has loved only theater. He has wasted years writing, producing, and performing plays, acting the hero in his innermost fantasies. And now fate gives him an entire city as a stage on which to turn that fantasy real.

From the back of the cavernous auditorium, Els flinches from the coming attack. One swift downbeat releases a percussive hailstorm that sends the playwright prophet screaming naked through the streets. The eerie lighting, Bonner’s projections, and Els’s manic music leave the man flat on his back, staring up at heaven, mute with ecstasy. When he comes to, Act Three has begun, and with it, the end.

The failed tailor proclaims himself King. He sings,
All the works of men give way now to the work of God.
He establishes polygamy and takes Divara, Matthias’s stunning widow, as the first of his fifteen new wives. One quick change of tempo, and the communal kingdom of God on Earth embraces free love.

Prepared by a life of amateur theatricals, John assumes military command. He beats back an assault by the Prince Bishop’s forces in a scene that leaves even the stagehands holding their breath. His followers pour into the Town Hall square to sing one more broad chorus of belief:
The Word has become Flesh and dwells in us. One King over All . . .

A dim thought forms at the base of Els’s brain. He has been here before. He himself has taken part in this ecstatic uprising gone wrong.

The breaking wave of this music pulls him back down the aisle. He lowers himself into another seat, mid-house, testing the scene from yet another vantage. It’s still good. It dizzies him to think: This time, the revolution might just work. Two hundred people have combined to revive a story half a millennium old, and tonight, in this late dress rehearsal, the tale feels ready, at last, to open.

Then Bonner slides into the seat next to his. Three beats ago, the director was deep in the wings, climbing the scenery and herding the cast with a list of rehearsal notes longer than God’s grievances against humanity. Now he holds a folded-over newspaper in one hand and smacks it with his other. There’s glee in Richard’s eyes. Vindication. Fear, maybe, and a little true madness.
Maestro. You’re not going to believe this
.
You’re a damn prophet. Art predicting life, with two weeks to showtime!

You’ll walk by as if there’s nothing there: In the grout of your bathroom tiles. In the air you breathe.

Moderato
, to begin with. The opening measures of a condemned man’s testimony played across a landscape of black earth and brown stubble. Relentless midwestern farmland and Shostakovich’s Fifth: both spread in front of Els, pliant, empty, and terrifying, made for each other.

The jagged theme and its canonic echo tore out of the Fiat’s speakers. He’d heard the movement too many times in this life to count. He knew how the thing was built; he’d long ago analyzed every phrase to death. He’d memorized the spare counterpoint, the canonic echoes, the chromatic ambiguity, the concision, the relentless reworking of that blunt first theme. But the piece that played across three Illinois counties was altogether new to him.

Once, when he was young, Els had believed that music could save a person’s life. He could think of nothing now but all the ways it might get a person killed.

From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.

Despite himself, in that first bleak figure in the strings, the one that would reappear in so many guises before the end, Els made out the maker’s miserable life: driven into the public arena, forced to choose between penance and revolt, heresy and faith, while his life hung on whatever story the state imagined that it heard.

Els piloted the car toward the setting sun, back into the firestorm of 1936. An adventurous composer, at the top of his Orphic game, brilliant, unpredictable, admired by everyone. For two years,
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
played to near-total acclaim. Then the
Pravda
article—“Muddle Instead of Music”—a rabid, all-out attack on Shostakovich and everything his music stood for. Problem was, the anonymous author turned out to be that culture fan and amateur music critic, Stalin.

From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing . . . The music grunts, moans, pants, and gasps . . . leftist muddle instead of natural, human music . . .

In one clean sweep, the killer of millions names the twenty-nine-year-old composer an enemy of the people.

The people expect good songs . . . Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all . . .

Stalin saves a final flourish for the end.
This is playing at things beyond reason that can end very badly.

Overnight, the official press is thick with condemnations. It calls for an end to formalist cleverness. It commands Shostakovich to reform and embrace a simple, affecting realism. The opera—
a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds—
drops from sight, worse than dead.

Nothing for the man to do but pack his bag and wait for the two a.m. knock on the door.

Disappearance is epidemic that year. Mass arrests and exiles—the Kirov flow. Tens of thousands are plucked from their apartments every month. Artists, writers, directors—Erbshtein and Gershov, Terentyev, Vvedensky and Kharms. The poet Mandelstam, jailed for terrorist acts. Shostakovich’s own mother- and brother-in-law, arrested for sedition.
The NKVD does not make mistakes
. And all of society, guilty of complicit silence.

Then the shadow falls on Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed.

Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere
,
Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go on living.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.

Through the windshield to the west, Els looked out on a featureless gulag only waiting for him, the latest public enemy.

Shostakovich:
Cut off my hands, and I will still write music holding the pen in my teeth
. But kill him, and the only tunes left would be the ones the state picked out for his funeral. Forced, then, to surrender or die. And so, the Fifth:
A Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism
.

For a few dozen miles, Els followed that response into its final, surprise freedom. He kept to the speed limit; every car on the road blew past him with scorn. Light traffic headed back East, from where he came. The futility of the interstate came over Els: you all stay there, and we’ll stay here, and let’s call an end to it.

The ominous tune and empty miles concentrated him. Deep inside a traumatized country still dreaming of security, he listened. The sounds would soon be like those stone-carved glyphs so eroded no one could read them anymore. But over the Fiat’s worrisome new rattle, for one last time Els heard the Fifth choose between truth and survival.

The tune wandered as if in shock: strident minor sixths and thirds, then murmuring fourths. Fragments flared up, alternating between fight and surrender. At last there arose something like a pulse, a timid motor rhythm driving toward a goal as amorphous as the one Els now chased. There came a lassitude, a yielding to chance. The music pressed on toward some still-deniable
cri de coeur
. It barreled forward, now a march, or perhaps a parody of one, lumbering on like a huge, blind beast.