The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Read online

  The old tricks came swarming back by the thousands, to be sure: the sudden, unexpected key changes at the crest of a melody, the interval stretching, the piling of divided strings, playing in the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax, the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from one choir of the orchestra to another, the flashing runs in the brass, the chuckling in the clarinets, the snarling mixtures of colors to emphasize dramatic tension – all of them.

  But none of them satisfied him now. He had been content with them for most of a lifetime and had made them do an astonishing amount of work. But now it was time to strike out afresh. Some of the tricks, indeed, actively repelled him: Where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unison somewhere in the stratosphere were a sound interesting enough to be worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them?

  And nobody, he reflected contentedly, ever approached such a new beginning better equipped. In addition to the past lying available in his memory, he had always had a technical armamentarium second to none; even the hostile critics had granted him that. Now that he was, in a sense, composing his first opera – his first after fifteen of them! – he had every opportunity to make it a masterpiece.

  And every such intention.

  There were of course, many minor distractions. One of them was that search for old-fashioned score paper, and a pen and ink with which to write on it. Very few of the modern composers, it developed, wrote their music at all. A large bloc of them used tape, patching together snippets of tone and sound snipped from other tapes, superimposing one tape on another, and varying the results by twirling an elaborate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the composers of 3-V scores, on the other hand, wrote on the sound track itself, rapidly scribbling jagged wiggly lines which, when passed through a photocell-audio circuit, produced a noise reasonably like an orchestra playing music, overtones and all.

  The last-ditch conservatives who still wrote notes on paper did so with the aid of a musical typewriter. The device, Strauss had to admit, seemed perfected at last; it had manuals and stops like an organ, but it was not much more than twice as large as a standard letter-writing typewriter and produced a neat page. But he was satisfied with his own spidery, highly legible manuscript and refused to abandon it, badly though the one pen nib he had been able to buy coarsened it. It helped to tie him to his past.

  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:

  Shall I be sorry for myself? In Mortality’s name

  I’ll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs,

  Brown hills, the valleys faint with brume,

  A burnish on the lake . . .

  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:

  “. . . the souls of all men great

  At times pass through us,

  And we are melted into them, and are not

  Save reflexions of their souls.

  Thus I am Dante for a space and am

  One François Villon, a ballad-lord and thief,

  Or am such holy ones I may not write,

  Lest Blasphemy be writ against my name;

  This for an instant and the flame is gone.

  ’Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere

  Translucent, molten gold, that is the ‘I’

  And into this some form projects itself:

  Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine;

  And as the clear space is not if a form’s

  Imposed thereon,

  So cease we from all being for the time,

  And these, the masters of the Soul, live on.”

  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.

  His eyes filled;
his body was young, but he was an old man, an old man. Another thirty-five years of this? Never. He had said all this before, centuries before. Nearly a half century condemned to saying it all over again, in a weaker and still weaker voice, aware that even this debased century would come to recognize in him only the burnt husk of greatness? – no, never, never.

  He was aware, dully, that the opera was over. The audience was screaming its joy. He knew the sound. They had screamed that way when Day of Peace had been premiered, but they had been cheering the man he had been, not the man that Day of Peace showed with cruel clarity he had become. Here the sound was even more meaningless: cheers of ignorance, and that was all.

  He turned slowly. With surprise, and with a surprising sense of relief he saw that the cheers were not, after all, for him.

  They were for Dr. Barkun Kris.

  Kris was standing in the middle of the bloc of mind sculptors, bowing to the audience. The sculptors nearest him were shaking his hand one after the other. More grasped at it as he made his way to the aisle and walked forward to the podium. When he mounted the rostrum and took the composer’s limp hand, the cheering became delirious.

  Kris lifted his arm. The cheering died instantly to an intent hush.

  “Thank you,” he said clearly. “Ladies and gentlemen, before we take leave of Dr. Strauss, let us again tell him what a privilege it has been for us to hear this fresh example of his mastery. I am sure no farewell could be more fitting.”

  The ovation lasted five minutes and would have gone another five if Kris had not cut it off.

  “Dr. Strauss,” he said, “in a moment, when I speak a certain formulation to you, you will realize that your name is Jerom Bosch, born in our century and with a life in it all your own. The superimposed memories which have made you assume the mask, the persona, of a great composer will be gone. I tell you this so that you may understand why these people here share your applause with me.”