The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (16 page)

The inner spaces of the theatre were solid, plain and unpretentious. Despite the early start – the performance began at six-thirty – many of the audience were wearing full evening dress, black ties and silken gowns, brandishing small, jewelled evening bags and trailing overblown chains of shining gems, entwined with leaves of gold. The Judge felt slightly underdressed. She never wore bulky costume jewellery. Inside the stalls the theatre felt suddenly smaller and more intimate. The great red curtains plummeted in folds like a waterfall. Yet the illusion of their proximity was so compelling she imagined that she could reach out and touch them. The distances around her shivered and shortened, treacherous, unstable. She identified her seat: six rows back from the stage at the very centre of the house. A quiet escape for a breath of air and to collect her thoughts proved therefore impossible. As she stood at the rim of the great sea of red seats, dismayed by the prospect of imprisonment, she sensed someone surging towards her. The Composer appeared in the still largely empty theatre, magnificent and gigantic in full evening dress, every aspect of his presentation formal and meticulous. The iron discipline of the man, a façade she had so casually shattered, stood remade before her. He bowed, now reconstituted as a handsome, cultivated gentleman, inexorable in his determination to charm. He held out his hand.

‘Madame Carpentier, will you humour a cantankerous, bad-tempered old man and shake hands with me?’

She accepted the gesture and the self-deprecating, shamefaced smile at face value. And she was not wrong to do so. The Composer’s manner gave away his uncertainty at his possible reception.

‘Please forgive me, Madame, for my unpardonable bad manners.’

The Judge bowed and smiled slightly. She had no clear advance plan as to how she should deal with sincerity; there was no doubt that the cordial welcome and diffident apology were both absolutely genuine. He wrapped her small hand in his and drew her down towards the orchestra.

‘Was your assistant unable to come?’

‘Gaëlle? I’m afraid that Wagner’s not exactly to her taste.’

The Composer laughed, and inside the warm embrace of his laughter the Judge felt suddenly included and at ease. He continued, ‘She had the most wonderful spike through her tongue and an array of pierced ear studs that are surely quite uncommon amongst lawyers. She must be a very unusual person.’

Had Gaëlle put her tongue out at the Composer? The Judge felt compelled to present excuses and explanations.

‘She’s discovered a Rockkneipe in the Marlsgrube and is spending the evening with some new friends.’

‘Ah yes,’ he grinned, ‘I know that place. It hasn’t changed in years. The crowd always looks exactly the same – Motorhead T-Shirts with the sleeves rolled up to their armpits, terrific tattoos – smoky air, thrice-breathed, and the music so loud you can’t think. But the clients are all greybeards now. Like myself. I hope she finds someone her own age to play with.’

He took the Judge’s arm, gentle, solicitous, a gesture that suggested old-fashioned manners rather than impudent familiarity, and led her to the middle of the low barrier above the orchestra. The space was cramped and dark, almost beneath the stage, only the lights on the music stands glowed like rafts on a sea of shadows. The brass section was arriving, carrying their huge instrument cases. They looked up at the Composer and his guest, startled and a little anxious. One of them ostentatiously turned off his mobile phone. The Composer’s stand was illuminated from beneath as well as above, like an exhibition case, or the hotplate on a stove. She saw the full score of the opera; there lay the music, a language she could not decipher and had never valued, open at page one.

‘Are you fond of the opera, Madame Carpentier?’

He was still holding her beside him as they looked down into the pit, and this gentle reassurance encouraged her honest response.

‘I’ve never been to one before.’

‘Oh good heavens!
Tristan and Isolde
? Then you are climbing Everest, never before having set foot upon a mountain?’

He chuckled slightly.

‘Madame Carpentier, you are a very courageous woman. I have conducted this opera many, many times in the course of my professional life. Yet each time I find something new, fresh and miraculous in the score. So, even for an old hand like myself, the familiar remains strange, uncharted, even obscure. Let me advise you how to listen. Do not rationalise. I know that you are a very rational person. A Judge must be so, to sift the evidence. But put that part of yourself aside. Do not assess things or calculate. Or really even try to listen. Let go of everything. Like loosening a rope. Is that the right metaphor? Yes, let go. And give the music time to speak to you.’

‘I know nothing about music.’ The Judge tried to disentangle her arm. But he held her more firmly and turned her towards him so that he could see her face. The house lights were up and the theatre murmured with the rustle of arrival, but they stood so close to the orchestra that his features, lit from beneath, took on an eerie magnificence.

‘This opera is dear to me for many reasons. These are young singers; they are utterly dedicated. And I have worked them so hard. The soprano is singing Isolde for the first time. Wagner demands such stamina, I have asked myself again and again whether she is ready to do this. Be indulgent and generous to them, Madame Carpentier. If you are not an aficionado you will be harder to persuade. To win you round will take a great effort. We will give you our best. Our very best.’

The Judge looked up at his fine lean face and registered his terrible intensity. She realised that he was proposing to offer the performance, as a special gift to her, as if she were the only member of the audience. But I know nothing of Wagner, nothing about opera, I cannot even read music; she retreated backwards in her mind, searching for cover. The Composer’s next words disconcerted her utterly, for despite the hesitation in his voice he had grasped the most effective metaphor to silence her. He delivered his masterstroke.

‘You are my Judge. Let this music be my advocate. May the music plead my cause.’ His lips touched her hand. They were in full view of everyone in the house. Then he stepped back, setting her free at last, bowed formally, as if they stood before the Court and the King, then vanished away into darkness. The Judge found herself standing alone before the open score; apparently she had seized power in his absence and taken command of the orchestra. She fluttered hurriedly to her seat, and plunged her nose into the programme, turning each page slowly, understanding nothing.

She had not reckoned with the audience. Nobody else was there for the first time. These were the opera lovers for whom music-theatre in general, and Wagner in particular, was not just a passion, but a drug. The excitement in the stalls smothered her like a fragrant cocoon. Despite craning her neck till the veins stood out and ached, she could catch only the faintest glimpse of the Composer when he greeted the audience and the assembled musicians in the pit. The level of the orchestra sank until all that remained was an expectant rustle and the gleaming lights above the unreadable music, the sounds locked up in hieroglyphs.

Opera remains a miracle; partly because the cost of producing a performance is so prohibitive it can never be met by the price of the tickets. The art requires princely subsidies; its origins are aristocratic, and so is the grandeur of its spectacle. The plots may be improbable and the emotional content may well defy all sense and reason, but the form, infinitely mutable, remains extraordinary, subversive, insidious. Canny producers know that naturalism is the enemy of opera. We demand the big symbols and the gestures of excess. This particular production of
Tristan and Isolde
, set on a derelict Cunard liner manned by a chorus of mutinous, lecherous sailors, confronted the Judge with a vision so unlikely and bizarre that, for the first forty minutes, she stared, transfixed, in affronted amazement. Had she unwittingly attended a mass gathering of the sects she so effectively liquidated, she could not have been more disconcerted or perplexed. The singers wore formal modern dress with a
1920
s atmosphere; yet the costumes achieved a shimmer that was both timeless and imprecise. The Judge crouched in her seat, baffled by the action and the incoherence of the music. Yet everything unrolled according to her prejudiced expectations: forbidden love, desperate conflicts of loyalty and trust, she loves this one but has to marry that one, who is this one’s lord and master. So far, so predictable. But the music unsettled her nerves; a monolith of sound, oddly broken and discordant. Each theme she picked out modulated, mutated, dissolved and escaped, so that she could never keep hold of the threads. The Judge confronted a structure, which resembled the barrage in the mountains above Montpellier, a giant man-made dam behind which the waters mounted, pressed. She could hear the danger rising, rising. And so two conflicting emotions bubbled within her: anger and irritation at being forced to listen to something that she neither liked nor understood, and hypnotised fascination. Her gaze flickered across the rapt and concentrated audience: another sect, another sect. The Judge refused to silence her canny, analytic intelligence, as the Composer had advised her to do, for this gift operated not only through judgement, evidence and selection, but also out of an unacknowledged feral cunning. I am here for a purpose. This man is showing me something that I need to see, and presenting me with an argument that I need to hear. This is the fulfilment of that interrogation that was broken off, and the subject before me, a great secret love and a suicide pact, is both pertinent and sinister. She nestled into her red velvet perch, an animal on the watch, her muscles tensed, intent.

The effort did her no good at all. She could make no sense of that huge, impenetrable wall of strange, discordant, contorted patterns. She could hear the structures of logic building great towers of sound, but grew impatient; the action proved too static to engage her attention. Every one of the singers flung themselves into the enterprise with a passionate desperation that suggested the Composer would flay them alive if they didn’t. Yet still they failed to reach her. Why am I sitting here? To what end? She decided to slip away at the interval. But no sooner had the house lights risen and the mountainous clamour of applause sunk away, than she found herself looking up at a young woman, elegant as an elf in black, with a short slick haircut, murmuring her name.

‘Madame Carpentier?’

The Composer’s assistant whisked her away to a small table in the restaurant attached to the theatre, where she was awaited by a light salmon salad and a bottle of champagne.

‘Are you enjoying the performance?’ The Judge decided to take pleasure in the bribe. She had suffered quite enough. And so, mellowed by supper and the expensive champagne, which had the decency and intelligence to be French, the Judge sauntered back through the well-dressed crowds and reclaimed her central position, to await the final denouement. These desperate lovers are surely doomed.

Wagner always comes home to roost. There is a method that underwrites his power: complicate, prevaricate, withhold. Let the water’s seepage through the dam become palpable, visible, viscous to the touch. Then unleash all that has been promised and desired in a mighty flood. Deliver the goods. The Judge had already sat through a lot of noisy, worthless posturing. She expected more of the same and nothing unforeseen. Yet she paid attention, much against her better judgement.

Das Schiff? Das Schiff?

Isoldes Schiff?

Du mußt es sehen!

Mußt es sehen!

Das Schiff? Sähst du’s noch nicht?

Can you not see Isolde’s ship?

The last act of
Tristan and Isolde
is about waiting, waiting in impatience and frustration, waiting, waiting for life to ebb, waiting for the dawn, waiting to see the one you love for the last time, waiting for death. And the music makes you wait. Was it simply the effect of the champagne? The Judge felt the tension easing from her jaw and shoulders. She let the cashmere shawl slip down across her back. Let go.
Let go of everything. Like loosening a rope. Is that the right metaphor? Yes, let go
. And this was her undoing. The action of the piece remained static and improbable, but the music began to tell another story. We will not always be condemned to wait, forgotten at the gates. This forbidden love, which we have sacrificed, will be returned to us tenfold. We see the one we love, the one who has gone on before us, striding ahead, stepping away into darkness, but we know in our flesh, in the kingdom of this world, that we have but to take one step, one single step across that threshold, to seize the glory that awaits us in that eternal, endless night.