Murderers and Other Friends (27 page)

I also came to opera with all my prejudices intact. I had been led to believe that the plots were improbable and that no rational audience could take to a drama in which lawyers, soldiers, cigarette-makers and courtesans not only fall instantly in love on first clapping eyes on each other, but are able to burst into elaborate song about it without exciting the instant mirth of their friends and relatives. The words of these songs, I suspected, would not be tolerated if translated into ordinary dialogue. In short, I agreed with Beaumarchais that if a thing is not worth saying then people sing it. But two of the greatest operas ever written derive from works by Beaumarchais and no one would dream of complaining that the singing in
The Marriage of Figaro
spoils the play.

In that first season of opera my enlightenment began. I discovered many of the plots are about real people in recognizable situations. The stories of Carmen, Violetta and Rigoletto are true and moving, and Da Ponte's libretti for Mozart are among the best plays ever written. I also began to understand the dramatic role of the music; for what is sung is what we all feel beneath the flat and polite surface of our lives. The aria is the subtext of our trivial conversations; only in the opera house does it come out into the open. A man and a woman may meet and say no more than ‘What was the traffic like in the Marylebone Road?' but somewhere inside one of them may be singing ‘How strange this is',
‘Sia per me sventura un serio amore?
/
Che risolve, o turbata anima mia?'
(‘Would a real love be a misfortune for me? / What do you say, my troubled spirit?'). Opera is all subtext; we are spared the chat about the weather and the traffic information. The tenor or soprano within us all, and struggling to get out, is released.

So our deepest feelings, but not our spoken comments, easily translate into operatic numbers. Who would not recognize the crying aria from
La Festa Dei Bambini
(The Children's Party),
the terrible, vengeful lament
‘O
la mia alimonia
from
II Divorzio,
the seductive duet ‘Are you / Am I coming up for a drink?' from
L'Appuntamento
(The Date),
the fearful ‘Is He after My Job?' quartet from
La Conferenzia Dei Venditori (The Sales Conference
)? These and many other old favourites are the perpetual accompaniment of our inner lives.

I had learnt these important lessons about the operatic theatre and came to play Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini in the car, in the bath, when I was working or getting dressed. I had no idea that I would ever be fortunate enough to take part in a production at Covent Garden. I was extremely surprised when John Tooley rang and suggested I might translate
Die Fledermaus,
an opera which Covent Garden used to perform in a strange assortment of languages, each character apparently speaking his or her favourite tongue, around Christmas time.

My experience of translating was limited to Feydeau farces, which had achieved some success at the National Theatre (mainly due to the genius of the French author) and a German play called
The Captain of Kopenick,
the end of which I changed, much to the author's surprise. Translation seems to me a matter of finding an English equivalent to the play's period, keeping as closely as possible to the spirit of the original. The ideal is that the audience should think they are watching a play in a foreign language which they happen to understand perfectly. Although full of pitfalls, this is a far easier task than writing a play of your own. Accordingly I accepted John Tooley's suggestion with enthusiasm. I would have, he told me, about four years before the first night. Accustomed to write for papers coming out tomorrow or television shows due to go into rehearsal next month, I said that would probably be enough time.

I had, I realized, been over-confident. I should have read Auden's essay on the extraordinarily difficult business of translating opera libretti. He starts with a quotation from an old translation of
Ernani,
which illustrates the depths of banality into which the translator may fall in pursuit of rhyme and words which have to be forced to fit the music:

 

SILVA:
The cup's prepared, and so rejoice;

And more, I'll let thee have thy choice.

[He proudly presents him a dagger and a cup of poison.]

After this dire warning Auden goes on to define the task:

In comparison with the ordinary translator, the translator of a libretto is much more strictly bound in some respects and much freer in others. Since the music is infinitely more important than the text, the translator must demand no change of musical intervals or rhythms to fit it. He, therefore, has to produce a version which is rhythmically identical, not with the verse prosody of the original as it would be spoken, but with the musical prosody as it is sung. The difficulty in achieving this lies in the fact that verse prosody is both quantitative like Greek and Latin verse and accentual like English and German.

This means that your translation must not only have exactly the right number of syllables to fit the musical phrase, but the long and short syllables must be properly positioned and the accents, or emphases, must fit the appropriate musical notes. No doubt the author of the original libretto had a far easier task. He could ask the composer to write for his words. The modern translator is entirely bound by the long-established and much-loved music, and there was no possibility of my asking Johann Strauss if he could see his way to giving me a couple of extra notes or moving an accent a couple of centimetres to the left.

So I began my task, ignorant of Auden's warning, but I was soon faced with the difficulties he describes. I sat on an Italian beach with my literal translation and my Walkman and started to fit English words to the German libretto. I would think of what I hoped was a joke, but when it was reduced to the exact number of syllables as there were in the German, when I tried to follow the German rhymes and get the stresses on the same syllables as the German, the joke began to look a little contorted, not to say strangled. So I started again, this time in Switzerland on a balcony in the snow. My family grew used to seeing me on our holidays sitting with an extremely worried expression and an opera in my ears. I found the big solo arias the easiest. The trios were like solving a difficult crossword puzzle in a foreign tongue.

At last I had what I thought was right and fitted, and then I spent happy days with a charming lady
répétitrice
and a piano in the catacombs below Covent Garden. She was exceedingly generous, and if my words didn't quite fit she would pop in an extra note or two that Johann Strauss never thought necessary. Later I was handed over to Covent Garden's learned and brilliant head of music, who was far stricter with me. He took away my extra notes, all except one, which I challenge any musicologist to discover. Then, one happy day, I sat in a big rehearsal room where the opera chorus, taking various parts, sang the whole of my translation to me. By this time, miracle of miracles, it seemed to fit, more or less, but the carpet could not yet be tacked down; the supreme test was yet to come.

Weeks before Christmas I was in another rehearsal room, at a read-through with the cast. Now read-throughs are part of my life. I'm used to the draughty rooms, the instant coffee, the set plan taped to the floor and actors who murmur, ‘I don't think I'd say this.' But a cast who said, with great politeness, ‘This has got too many consonants,' or ‘If I say “divorce” on a high note it comes out as “divorce”,' or ‘Please don't give me a “th”,' added a new and alarming complexity to a writer's life. The confusing thing is that the rules don't seem to be universally applicable; while one singer abominates a ‘th', another can put up with it and give it welcome.

There are general rules, however, which Auden has stated: ‘An aria contains a number of high notes, long runs and phrases which repeat like an echo. Any English version, therefore, must provide open vowels for the high notes and runs and phrases which can sound like echoes.' So there is yet another burden the joke or moving phrase has to bear; it's no good its ‘ee' sound coinciding with a high note. Once again the music is of supreme importance. It also seems to me that the singer's task is so indescribably difficult, that if the likes of Carol Vaness and Thomas Allen, who sang my
Fledermaus,
shy at a ‘th', they must be accommodated by the translator. So far as I am concerned they were welcome to all the open vowels they needed.

Just to be in the great gilt and plush horseshoe of Covent Garden was a pleasure, and a lot of rehearsals seemed to take place on the stage, with the conductor in command and the director wandering about, quietly moving the singers as though they were pieces in a gigantic game of chess. I had strayed into a new world and, when I thought I shouldn't be there because I can't sing, I comforted myself by remembering that Johann Strauss the younger couldn't waltz.

Entertainments vary from the sublime to the deeply embarrassing, venues from the glories of Covent Garden to a huge gathering of fairly elderly comics at a dickie-bow and rubber chicken do in a London hotel. The invitation to speak at their dinner came as I queued up with an actor in a canteen during a rehearsal; like death it seemed sufficiently far away to be acceptable. As with death, the date inevitably came.

I looked round the vast room and saw that every one of what seemed hundreds of comics was male. The one I was sitting next to, who enjoyed, for the evening, the title of Commander, told me that this was so the jokes could be ‘free and easy with no holds barred'. It was then I realized that I was in hell. ‘I only played in a small family circus' – the Commander was as nervous as I was – ‘and a function like this scares the wits out of me. What's more, I do not read with fluency.'

The melon balls were hardly on the table before a wispy old comedian got to his feet and yelled, ‘I say, I say, I say, Commander,' at the top table. ‘Yes, Sandy,' the Commander stammered back uncertainly. ‘
What
do you say?' ‘I say, what's the difference between
soixante-neuf
and a terrorist?' ‘I do not know, Sandy. What
is
the difference between
soixante-neuf
and a terrorist?' ‘With a terrorist you can see the bugger coming!' The answer was drowned in a wave of laughter, but the Commander was deeply frustrated. ‘I had a great act worked out with Sandy,' he was telling me. ‘When he said, “I say, I say, I say, Commander”, I was going to ask, “Who the fuck let
you
in here?” It would have been a great gag and, I tell you, we worked on it. But it slipped my mind at the vital moment, you see, and now the act's fucked up.'

From then on the ‘I say, I say, I say's' volleyed and thundered from every distant corner of the vast room and the poor Commander, nervous as ever, stood up, flinching, to the cannonade. Then we had a trip down memory lane, golden oldies, the dirtiest jokes of long-dead comedians, disinterred. At last the Commander's dreaded moment came and he had to stand up to speak. His words were written in very large letters and a kindly fellow comic stood beside him, running a finger under each word, the task Hollywood producers are said to perform for themselves when they read scripts. His speech was frequently interrupted by shouts of ribaldry. ‘How did I do?' he asked his helper when he sat down exhausted. ‘You did fine, Commander,' the kindly comic did his best to be reassuring. ‘All the laughs was at you and not with you. But you did fine.' My speech, which has been considered racy and once caused a blue-rinsed lady to walk out of a literary lunch in Chichester, sounded in that company like the address of a celibate vicar to the Women's Institute.

At the end of the evening a hitherto silent comic got up to propose a vote of thanks to me, the visiting speaker. He was a ventriloquist and he held a sort of Gladstone bag at arm's length, from which emerged a disembodied voice. From then on the evening sunk to even greater depths, for he opened the bag and removed from it a two-foot model of an erect penis, with which he held a lively conversation. ‘Does this chap work much?' I asked the Commander. ‘Not in public,' he assured me. ‘It's mainly private functions.' At which the ventriloquist's doll began to compliment me on my speech. I sat there in full black-tie depression. This is my life, I told myself, surrounded by an all male audience and being thanked by a prick.

What is the 20th of June Group?'

The person who asked this question was the chairman of the fringe meeting at a Labour Party conference. We had eaten at a Blackpool restaurant and were now off to talk. In fact our collection of around twenty writers and journalists got its name because we first met, in a Campden Hill sitting-room, one 20th of June 1988.

‘It's called that,' I said, hoping to raise some sort of laugh in the car as we drove past the Waxworks and the Tower to the conference centre, ‘after the well-known Luxemburg revolution of the 20th of June 1849. A group of intellectuals, you will remember, took part in a failed
coup d'état.
There was a show trial and they were expelled to Paris, where they sat drinking champagne in
La Coupole
and remembering their glorious past.' I didn't get much of a reaction to this at the time, although Penny smiled tolerantly. However, when the chairman introduced me to the comrades and brothers, he said that I would talk about the 20th of June Group, which was named after the well-known Luxemburg revolution of 1849. At this, I heard some murmurings of assent from the audience and whispers of ‘Of course, Luxemburg, 1849.' Our movement was, it seemed, easily misunderstood.

I had known Harold Pinter since the late fifties. Michael Codron had taken the old Lyric, Hammersmith, for a season when it was in its rightful place in the middle of a whirl of traffic and hadn't been moved, in all its beauty, into a grey building where it's stuck like a once-glamorous actress in an old people's home. He put on Harold's
The Birthday Party
and my first plays,
The Dock Brief
and
What Shall We Tell Caroline?,
and a production by Michael Elliott of Ibsen's
Little Eyolf.
Harold was some seven years younger than I and he had the unnerving habit of standing closer to you than you had bargained for. The fates, in handing out qualities, had given him the gift of aggression. He made some use of it, indeed, in life; but it was a boon beyond price in the theatre. It's his characters' aggression, expressed, suppressed, always unexpected and often terrifying, that gives his plays their supercharged energy. He also has, perhaps from his experience as an actor, an infallible a sense of theatre as some people have a perfect ear for music. Added to all this, he has a marvellous feeling for the rhythms of dialogue. With all these gifts it's idle to say that Harold's plays mean less than they hint at, when they hint so effectively at so much.