Magic Flutes

The Klostern Theatre, which now housed the International Opera Company, had once been the private theatre of a nobleman whose adjoining palace had been pulled down at the time the old ramparts were destroyed and the Ringstrasse built. The auditorium with its enchanted painted ceiling of obese and ecstatic nymphs, its red velvet boxes and gold proscenium arch, invariably wrung a sigh of pleasure from connoisseurs of Austrian high baroque. Backstage, the theatre resembled a cross between the Black Hole of Calcutta and the public lavatory of an abandoned railway terminus. The pit was too small for the orchestra, the manager’s office was a windowless kennel, merely to approach the dimmer board was to take one’s life in one’s hands. Everyone who worked there cursed the place from morning to night and resisted with vituperative ferocity all suggestions of a move to more salubrious quarters.

Tessa let herself in by the stage door, sighing happily at the familiar smell of glue and size and paint and dust. As always she was the first to arrive and the sense of the sleeping theatre, dark and cold, waiting to be brought to life – and by her – was an ever-recurring delight. Today was a particularly exciting day: the last day of Lucia di Lammermoor in which Raisa Romola, losing her reason as only a two-hundred-kilo, red-haired Rumanian soprano knew how, had scored a triumph; then the announcement by Herr Witzler, after curtain down, of the new opera they would begin to rehearse next week.

Quickly she sorted the mail into the appropriate pigeonholes, took the director’s letters upstairs to his office, emptied the mousetraps under his desk, riddled and filled the ancient, rusty stove. Then downstairs again to the front of the house to turn on the light, admit the cleaning ladies and ring the police to inform them that a handbag containing three thousand kroner and a ticket to Karlsbad had been left in row D of the stalls.

Then she hurried back through the orchestra pit, pausing to tidy up the poker school which the trombonists had set up under the stage . . . up two flights again, round a curving iron staircase to the star soprano’s dressing-room, to change the water for Raisa Romola’s roses, scrub out her dachshund’s feeding bowl and collect for repair the bloodstained Act Three nightdress through which an idiot stage hand had put his foot as the heaving diva waited in the wings to take her curtain call.

And downstairs again to find that the wigmaker, Boris Slatarski, had arrived and was staring gloomily at ‘The Mother’.

Boris was a Bulgarian and thus committed to longevity and yoghurt. The latter he made from a culture of great ethnicity and ripeness which originated in some shepherd-infested village in the Mirrovaroan Hills. Known as ‘The Mother’, it lived in a jamjar on the draining-board of the laundry room, smelling vilely, flocculating, turning blue and generally showing all the signs of the artistic temperament.

‘I don’t like the look of her this morning, Tessa,’ he said now, unwinding his long, yellow face and bald skull from the folds of a gigantic muffler. ‘She’s precipitating much too fast.’ He rummaged in a hamper, ripped the muslin sleeve out of a peasant blouse from The Bartered Bride and began to filter The Mother through it. ‘Have you got the milk yet?’

‘I’m just going,’ said Tessa. She fetched the can, ran to the dairy three streets away, and back, hiding the egg she had managed to wheedle out of the dairyman in a box labelled ‘Spats’.

The theatre was fully awake now. Hammering resounded from the scene dock, pieces of scenery suddenly flew upward. Cries of ‘Where’s Tessa?’ came with increasing frequency – from Frau Pollack, the wardrobe mistress, who wanted to know why Tessa had not brought down the costumes for Tosca, had not sorted out the buckle box, had not made the coffee . . . from the lighting assistant who wanted her to hold a spot, from the carpenter who had a splinter in his eye.

At eleven the Herr Direktor, Jacob Witzler, arrived and began to go through the pile of bills, of notices threatening to cut off the water, the telephone and the electricity, which constituted his morning mail.

This frog-eyed Moravian Jew, with his ulcer and his despair, quite simply was the International Opera Company. Jacob’s dedication, his sacrifices, his chicanery, cajoling and bullying had steered this unsubsidized company for over twenty years through crisis after financial crisis, through war and inflation and the machinations of his rivals.

In a way the whole thing had been bad luck. Jacob came of a wealthy and not particularly musical family of leather merchants in the Moravian town of Sprotz. His life was marked out almost from birth – a serene progress from bar mitzvah to entry into the family firm, marriage to a nice Jewish girl already selected by his mother, a partnership . . .