The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (4 page)

Joining the ISCM had also caused him some bad moments, even after Sindi had worked him around the political roadblocks. The Society man who examined his qualifications as a member had run
through the questions with no more interest than might have been shown by a veterinarian examining his four-thousandth sick calf.

“Had anything published?”

“Yes, nine tone poems, about three hundred songs, an – ”

“Not when you were alive,” the examiner said, somewhat disquietingly. “I mean since the sculptors turned you out again.”

“Since the sculptors – ah, I understand. Yes, a string quartet, two song cycles, a – ”

“Good. Alfie, write down, ‘Songs.’ Play an instrument?”

“Piano.”

“Hmmm.” The examiner studied his fingernails. “Oh well. Do you read music? Or do you use a Scriber, or tape clips? Or a Machine?”

“I read.”

“Here.” The examiner sat Strauss down in front of a viewing lectern, over the lit surface of which an endless belt of translucent paper was traveling. On the paper was an immensely
magnified sound track. “Whistle me the tune of that, and name the instruments it sounds like.”

“I don’t read that
Musiksticheln
,” Strauss said frostily, “or write it, either. I use standard notation, on music paper.

“Alfie, write down, ‘Reads notes only.’” He laid a sheet of grayly printed music on the lectern above the ground glass. “Whistle me that.”

“That” proved to be a popular tune called “Vangs, Snifters, and Store-Credit Snooky,” which had been written on a Hit Machine in 2159 by a guitar-faking politician who
sang it at campaign rallies. (In some respects, Strauss reflected, the United States had indeed not changed very much.) It had become so popular that anybody could have whistled it from the title
alone, whether he could read the music or not. Strauss whistled it and, to prove his bona fides, added, “It’s in the key of B flat.”

The examiner went over to the green-painted upright piano and hit one greasy black key. The instrument was horribly out of tune – the note was much nearer to the standard 440/cps A than it
was to B flat – but the examiner said, “So it is. Alfie, write down, ‘Also reads flats.’ All right, son, you’re a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can
read that old-style notation anymore. A lot of them think they’re too good for it.”

“Thank you,” Strauss said.

“My feeling is, if it was good enough for the old masters, it’s good enough for us. We don’t have people like them with us these days, it seems to me. Except for Dr. Krafft, of
course. They were
great
back in the old days – men like Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and Jannsen. Real goffin.”

“
Dock gewiss,”
Strauss said politely.

But the work went forward. He was making a little income now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special interest in a composer who had come out of the mind
sculptors’ laboratories, and in addition the material itself, Strauss was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.

It was the opera that counted, however. That grew and grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long, full memory. Finding a libretto had
been troublesome at first. While it was possible that something existed that might have served among the current scripts for 3-V – though he doubted it – he found himself unable to tell
the good from the bad through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly technical production directions. Eventually, and for only the third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a play
written in a language other than his own, and – for the first time – decided to set it in that language.

The play was Christopher Fry’s
Venus Observed
, in all ways a perfect Strauss opera libretto, as he came gradually to realize. Though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical
plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a number of characters who cried out to be brought by music into three dimensions, plus a strong undercurrent of autumnal tragedy, of
leaf-fall and apple-fall – precisely the kind of contradictory dramatic mixture which von Hofmannsthal had supplied him with in
The Knight of the Rose
, in
Ariadne at Naxos
, and
in
Arabella
.

Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted, and the musical opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the fire which ended Act
II; what a gift for a composer to whom orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and water! Or take the moment where Perpetua shoots the apple from the Duke’s hand; in that one
moment a single passing reference could add Rossini’s marmoreal
William Tell
to the musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnote! And the Duke’s great curtain speech,
beginning:

There
was a speech for a great tragic comedian in the spirit of Falstaff: the final union of laughter and tears, punctuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose sonorous snore
(trombones, no less than five of them,
con sordini
?) the opera would gently end . . .

What could be better? And yet he had come upon the play only by the unlikeliest series of accidents. At first he had planned to do a straight knockabout farce, in the idiom of
The Silent
Woman
, just to warm himself up. Remembering that Zweig had adapted that libretto for him, in the old days, from a play by Ben Jonson, Strauss had begun to search out English plays of the period
just after Jonson’s, and had promptly run aground on an awful specimen in heroic couplets called
Venice Preserv’d
, by one Thomas Otway. The Fry play had directly followed the
Otway in the card catalogue, and he had looked at it out of curiosity; why should a twentieth-century playwright be punning on a title from the eighteenth?

After two pages of the Fry play, the minor puzzle of the pun disappeared entirely from his concern. His luck was running again; he had an opera.

Sindi worked miracles in arranging for the performance. The date of the premiere was set even before the score was finished, reminding Strauss pleasantly of those heady days
when Fuestner had been snatching the conclusion of
Elektra
off his worktable a page at a time, before the ink was even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication deadline. The
situation now, however, was even more complicated, for some of the score had to be scribed, some of it taped, some of it engraved in the old way, to meet the new techniques of performance; there
were moments when Sindi seemed to be turning quite gray.

But
Venus Observed
was, as usual, forthcoming complete from Strauss’ pen in plenty of time. Writing the music in first draft had been hellishly hard work, much more like being
reborn than had been that confused awakening in Barkun Kris’ laboratory, with its overtones of being dead instead, but Strauss found that he still retained all of his old ability to score
from the draft almost effortlessly, as undisturbed by Sindi’s half-audible worrying in the room with him as he was by the terrifying supersonic bangs of the rockets that bulleted invisibly
over the city.

When he was finished, he had two days still to spare before the beginning of rehearsals. With those, furthermore, he would have nothing to do. The techniques of performance in this age were so
completely bound up with the electronic arts as to reduce his own experience – he, the master
Kapellmeister
of them all – to the hopelessly primitive.

He did not mind. The music, as written, would speak for itself. In the meantime he found it grateful to forget the months-long preoccupation with the stage for a while. He went back to the
library and browsed lazily through old poems, vaguely seeking texts for a song or two. He knew better than to bother with recent poets; they could not speak to him, and he knew it. The Americans of
his own age, he thought, might give him a clue to understanding this America of 2161, and if some such poem gave birth to a song, so much the better.

The search was relaxing, and he gave himself up to enjoying it. Finally he struck a tape that he liked; a tape read in a cracked old voice that twanged of Idaho as that voice had twanged in
1910, in Strauss’ own ancient youth. The poet’s name was Pound; he said, on the tape:

He smiled. That lesson had been written again and again from Plato onward. Yet the poem was a history of his own case, a sort of theory for the metempsychosis he had undergone, and in its formal
way it was moving. It would be fitting to make a little hymn of it, in honor of his own rebirth, and of the poet’s insight.

A series of solemn, breathless chords framed themselves in his inner ear, against which the words might be intoned in a high, gently bending hush at the beginning . . . and then a dramatic
passage in which the great names of Dante and Villon would enter ringing like challenges to Time . . . He wrote for a while in his notebook before he returned the spool to its shelf.

These, he thought, are good auspices.

And so the night of the premiere arrived, the audience pouring into the hall, the 3-V cameras riding on no visible supports through the air, aud Sindi calculating his share of his client’s
earnings by a complicated game he played on his fingers, the basic law of which seemed to be that one plus one equals ten. The hall filled to the roof with people from every class, as though what
was to come would be a circus rather than an opera.

There were, surprisingly, nearly fifty of the aloof and aristocratic mind sculptors, clad in formal clothes which were exaggerated black versions of their surgeons’ gowns. They had bought
a block of seats near the front of the auditorium, where the gigantic 3-V figures which would shortly fill the “stage” before them (the real singers would perform on a small stage in
the basement) could not but seem monstrously out of proportion, but Strauss supposed that they had taken this into account and dismissed it.

There was a tide of whispering in the audience as the sculptors began to trickle in, and with it an undercurrent of excitement, the meaning of which was unknown to Strauss. He did not attempt to
fathom it, however; he was coping with his own mounting tide of opening-night tension, which, despite all the years, he had never quite been able to shake.

The sourceless, gentle light in the auditorium dimmed, and Strauss mounted the podium. There was a score before him, but he doubted that he would need it. Directly before him, poking up from
among the musicians, were the inevitable 3-V snouts, waiting to carry his image to the singers in the basement.

The audience was quiet now. This was the moment. His baton swept up and then decisively down, and the prelude came surging up out of the pit.

For a little while he was deeply immersed in the always tricky business of keeping the enormous orchestra together and sensitive to the flexing of the musical web beneath his
hand. As his control firmed and became secure, however, the task became slightly less demanding, and he was able to pay more attention to what the whole sounded like.

There was something decidedly wrong with it. Of course there were the occasional surprises as some bit of orchestral color emerged with a different
Klang
than he had expected; that
happened to every composer, even after a lifetime of experience. And there were moments when the singers, entering upon a phrase more difficult to handle than he had calculated, sounded like
someone about to fall off a tightrope (although none of them actually fluffed once; they were as fine as troupe of voices as he had ever had to work with).

But these were details. It was the overall impression that was wrong. He was losing not only the excitement of the premiere – after all, that couldn’t last at the same pitch all
evening – but also his very interest in what was coming from the stage and the pit. He was gradually tiring, his baton arm becoming heavier; as the second act mounted to what should have been
an impassioned outpouring of shining tone, he was so bored as to wish he could go back to his desk to work on that song.

Then the act was over; only one more to go. He scarcely heard the applause. The twenty minutes’ rest in his dressing room was just barely enough to give him the necessary strength.

And suddenly, in the middle of the last act, he understood.

There was nothing new about the music. It was the old Strauss all over again – but weaker, more dilute than ever. Compared with the output of composers like Krafft, it doubtless sounded
like a masterpiece to this audience. But he knew.

The resolutions, the determination to abandon the old clichés and mannerisms, the decision to say something new – they had all come to nothing against the force of habit. Being
brought to life again meant bringing to life as well all those deeply graven reflexes of his style. He had only to pick up his pen and they overpowered him with easy automatism, no more under his
control than the jerk of a finger away from a flame.