Eva Ibbotson - Magic Flutes

It was an honour with which she was to become increasingly familiar.

Rehearsals for the new opera began immediately, despite the fact that they were playing their full repertory each night. Enthusiasm ran high for what was undoubtedly a work of genius but, as always, there were those who scoffed. Notably Frau Pollack, asking testily, ‘What is a fricassée, anyway?’

‘It’s a sort of stew… meat chopped up very small in a white sauce,’ said Tessa, cutting the legs off a boiler suit intended for the Littlest Heidi. Though promoted to the role of patroness, she continued to work exactly as before. ‘It’s sort of symbolic, too, because it’s about the disintegration of capitalist society.’

‘I don’t fancy all this chopping up babies and eating them,’ said Boris, shaking The Mother who had not cared for the return to Vienna and was going through a Blue Period.

‘But the baby doesn’t really get chopped up,’ explained Tessa. ‘The porter means to kill it but then the chief engine-greaser — that’s the one who’s a kind of Holy Fool — has this fit and one of the cleaning ladies saves it. The mill-owner thinks he’s eaten it, which is why he jumps out of the window, but he hasn’t.’

‘Thinking’s bad enough,’ said Frau Pollack darkly, remembering the episode of her great-uncle Sandor’s ashes, and continued to refer to the opera gloomily as ‘Stew’.

Any doubts that Raisa might have had about tackling an atonal role were set aside by Jacob, who said that if she did not feel up to the part of the railway porter’s wife, he was sure that the young soprano who had done so well as Papagena would be willing to try. As for Pino, nothing on earth would have induced him to relinquish a role in which he was on stage, alone, for fifteen minutes, going mad to the sound of thirty-seven percussion instruments.

Nevertheless, there were difficulties. The Oldest Heidi fell off the tubular steel scaffolding, turning her ankle, and when her protector (an influential geheimrat) threatened to sue Jacob, the entire set was scrapped. Klasky proved extremely cooperative about the débâcle and said he was perfectly prepared to have a more realistic set, provided it was designed by Rayner-Meierhof and no one else. The famous constructivist was summoned from Düsseldorf and built a set on five different levels, using significant skeletal structures which could become railway platforms, signal boxes, decadent mill-owner’s apartments or lunatic asylums, always supposing they did not jam the turntable or get stuck in the lifts.

Through the whole of July and August, while houses fell disasterously in the summer heat and there were ten empty rows even for Fledermaus, work on Fricassee continued at fever pitch. And the pivot, the centre of this turning world, was an object which took on an increasing and almost mystical significance to the members of Witzler’s company: Tessa’s cheque book.

It lived, tattered, paint-spattered and lightly smeared with chocolate (for Bubi regarded it as especially his own) in the pocket of her smock. Often mislaid, for she was liable to pencil measurements on its covers, it was rushed back to her, much as an unweaned baby kangaroo might be hurried back to the maternal pouch. And several times a week, Tessa would repair upstairs to be settled solemnly at a table in Jacob’s office and sign cheques.

She signed a cheque for the steel scaffolding and for the wages of the men who subsequently took it away for scrap. She signed a cheque for nine hundred yards of denim, for twenty singers engaged to augment the plate-layers’ chorus, for a gigantic kettle-drum (two outsize Tyrolean cows having given their lives for the cause). She signed a cheque for Rayner-Meierhof’s awe-inspiring fee and for the bonus he had demanded for kindly casting his eye over the old sets for Traviata and pronouncing them disgusting. Sometimes, too, she was allowed to help a little with other productions, signing a cheque for Raisa’s claque — who had reorganized along trade union lines — and for new costumes for the ball scene in Fledermaus in the hope (unrealized) that these would improve attendances.

And as each cheque book was reduced to a battered collection of stubs, Tessa, her head held high, went out to the bank to fetch another and another and another.

That something ailed their patroness and under wardrobe mistress was first put to the company by Boris and listened to with attention, for he was regarded as something of an expert on the Princess of Pfaffenstein.

‘I tell you, there’s something the matter with her,’ he said. Tessa had gone out to negotiate for three dozen luggage trolleys from Austrian Railways and some of the company were in the fitting-rooms, kitting out the principals.

‘Yes, I think you are right,’ said Pino, pulling a pair of dungarees over his portly stomach. ‘During Fricassee rehearsals she is all right, but last night when she was in the wings waiting to blow out Mimi’s candle she looked like my grandmother has looked when they have told her that my grandfather was buried in the earthquake.’

Raisa nodded. ‘And in Traviata, in Act Two, when I am up-giffing Alfredo, and she waits to make ze noise for ze ’orses — she ’as been crying zen, I tink.’

‘And in “Addio del passato”,’ put in the tenor, his head vanishing under a peaked porter’s cap, ‘where you are dying and think you will see me no more; I am waiting to go on then and though you are a quarter-tone flat, she has looked terrible.’

Witzler and Klasky, who had come to supervise the fittings, frowned.

‘She’s as thin as a cat, too,’ said Boris. ‘I tell you, she’ll crack up if we aren’t careful.’

‘Is she ill, do you think?’ Jacob demanded.

‘No!’ Raisa’s eyes flashed. ‘It is badder zan zat, my friends. She is in lof !’

There was a stunned silence. Then, as her listeners pieced together their own vignettes of Tessa since the company’s return from Pfaffenstein, Klasky’s black, dishevelled head, Jacob’s bald one and Boris’s yellow skull nodded agreement.

‘Mein Gott!’ Jacob was shaken. Having failed to marry the nice Jewish girl selected by his mother, Jacob, though riddled with guilt, had found plenty of rewards with his Rhinemaiden. But this was something else.

‘We must protect her,’ said Boris. Years and years ago, when he was a small boy in Sofia, he had fallen over and grazed his knee. A small blonde girl in white knee socks had come up to him and said ‘Does it hurt?’ looking at him with wide, sad eyes. It had been a devastating experience, quite shattering, and in no way connected with the life he now shared with a typist in a flat in Ottakring.

Klasky’s exopthalmic eyes bulged even more violently than usual. That his patroness should be taken in this way was deplorable. Screwing up his Magyar countenance, he remembered suddenly a girl with chestnut pigtails who had sat next to him at the Academy of Music in Budapest. Klasky had been precocious and attended the harmony class while still in shorts. The impact of the fronded end of Ildi’s pigtail on his bare thigh had been quite terrible, and he had suffered agonies of love for a whole year. Nothing so painful had ever happened to him again.

‘I vill make zo zat lazy porkling, Zia, bring to me my wrapping robe,’ said Raisa, referring to her lethargic dresser. ‘Zen Tessa must not ’ear me zink “Adio del pas-sato” — in vich I am never flat!’

‘I’ll keep her down in the laundry room in Act One of Bohème,’ said Frau Pollack. ‘One of the stage-hands can blow out Mimi’s candle.’

But even as they prepared to protect Tessa from the pangs of music, the question that Klasky now asked was in all their minds.