Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Morning was long, flat, and straight, with the sun at his back. A double dose of coffee, donuts, and headline radio powered him through Columbus. The fragile alliance between Cairo’s Copts and Muslims was falling apart, days after they’d protected each other from the regime’s police. A twenty-five-year-old Korean beat his mother to death for nagging him about computer games, then played on for hours, charging the session to the dead woman’s card.

Toward noon, outside a town called Little Vienna, long after the AM chatter plunged him into his own chronic focal difficulty, Els heard his name coming out of the radio. Fatigue and malnourishment couldn’t explain the hallucination. A Pennsylvania college professor was wanted for questioning regarding the deaths of nine Americans by bacterial contagion. And as exhibit one of evidence against him, music poured out of the car’s five speakers. Twelve measures of baritone aria:

Nothing is more beautiful than terror,

More terrible than His coming.

All that is high will be made low. .

The second act of The Fowler’s Snare : John of Leiden, King of the New Jerusalem, reaching his crazed zenith. The sole recording Els knew of had sat in the bottom of a cardboard box in his various closets for eighteen years. Some enterprising journalist had found another copy and discovered the incriminating passage. The music had long gone unheard by all but a few listeners. Now it made its belated radio debut, for a panicked audience of hundreds of thousands.

Eighteen years on, Richard’s libretto — that pastiche of Rilke and Isaiah — made Els wince. But the singer’s expansion of the germ motif sounded righteous, even brazen. A good melody was a miracle, with all the surprise inevitability of a living thing. A strange sensation warmed him, and it took Els a moment to name it: pride.

The orchestration cut through his interstate haze — eighty people blowing and sawing away, while a lunatic praised the beauty of terror. The tune was a clear incitement to violence, and Els felt himself being hung in the court of public opinion. Contemporary opera making it onto AM radio: such was the power of threat Level Orange.

After twelve seconds — a broadcast eternity — the aria faded out. The news went on to a story about the boom in black market Adderall sweeping America’s high schools. Els killed the radio. His hands bounced on the wheel. All at once, seventy seemed perilous. He eased his foot off the accelerator. A lion-maned woman on a cell in a dinged-up Volvo pulled out to pass him. A bulging Ford Expedition shot through behind her; two towheaded boys in the backseat flicked obscene gestures as they passed. A caravan filed by, each occupant turning to gawk at the gray-haired moving violation. Els looked down at his speedometer: he’d slowed to forty-eight. A lone highway cop, running his plates for going too slow, would finish him. “Prophet of Beautiful Terror, Apprehended.”

By pure will, he forced the car back up to sixty-two. He flipped the radio on again and fished for pop tunes. He didn’t stop until the gas tank made him. At a truck stop, he stocked up on shrink-wrapped sandwiches. Then he pressed on through Indiana into eastern Illinois. He pulled off for the night at a roadside motel on the north edge of Champaign-Urbana, not ten miles from where he met his wife, conceived his daughter, and befriended the one man in all the world whose opinion still mattered to him.

It seemed as good a place as any to be caught and held forever.

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

He spent his nights composing for Richard. First the film soundtrack, then a pitched percussion accompaniment for a brittle but thrilling piece of voice theater that never made it beyond a few Village apartments. By then Els was going down to New York every few weeks. Maddy never tried to stop him; she was just his wife, after all. But she refused to drive him to the bus station. This is your baby, Peter. You do what you need.

At home, he worked at the electric piano, under headphones, deaf and muted to the world. Sara stamped on the floor in the next room, jealous of this thing he was trying to raise from the dead. Once she came to him and demanded, Let’s make something .

Daddy is, Daddy said.

No, she shouted. Something good.

Good how?

Good like a rose that nobody knows.

They tried, but the rose had plans of its own.

Then one night Maddy, too, stopped by with a commission. She came into his study, so much more slender and circumspect than she’d been in her grad student days, and grazed her fingernails across his back. She glanced at his score in progress and smiled, all their proxy skirmishes of the last few months forgiven. Write me a song, she said.

She meant: Something singable, not art. No occult noises for gatherings of alienated prestige-mongers. A tune that could play on the radio, steeped in desire and mystery. The kind that most people need and love.

Come on, write me something , she said. Almost soubrette again. Something simple. Her eyes said: One last romp. Her mouth said: Bet you can’t.

PETER TOOK THE dare and slept on it. The next morning, while guarding Titian’s Rape of Europa from vandals, he fashioned a melody out of all the rules from Intermediate Theory that he’d long ago discarded. He built his air on top of an expansive descending bass. Anchored by a stirring pedal point, it leapt free to a surprise stunning chord right before the half cadence. The irresistible hook, like a bruised cloud blowing off in a June breeze, left behind a blue swathe that caught the heart and lifted it into a bird’s-eye view of things to come. Song, just song, the enigma of it, the warmth and longing. The three-minute forever.

He took the melody home with him, planed and trued it, fitted it up with irresistible harmonies, and played it for his wife. He had no words: only scat, on a melody that sounded more discovered than invented. By the end, he had his two girls singing descant on the chorus and laughing out loud.

Sara couldn’t get enough of the trivial tune. Even Maddy was caught humming the hook around the apartment. The earworm was as brutal as a bad case of flu. Maddy shook her head at the song’s total delight. Oh, you missed your calling!

So he had. A dozen such tunes over the course of a career, and he might even have saved lives.

The realization softened and saddened them both . It’s good, Peter , Maddy admitted . It’s really good. And for the first time in months, so were they.

Two days later, Peter told his wife that he needed to head down to New York again for a few days, to talk with Richard about a new ambitious work. Maddy recoiled from the announcement. She looked like he’d French-kissed her, only to bite through her tongue. But she recovered quickly enough.

Do what you like, she told him. But be ready to like whatever you do for a very long time.

Richard had secured funds from his fairy godmother to put together a chamber ballet oratorio based on the transhumanist Fyodorov. The plan called for five veterans from the Judson Dance Theater, eight Tribeca new music militants, and four singers — SATB — performing in shifts over the course of twelve hours. Els would do the music, of course: he was now part of the Bonner package deal. They called the project Immortality for Beginners.

Some new, brutal urgency was taking shape in a Lower Manhattan slammed by an oil crisis, mugged by inflation, tattooed with Day-Glo tags, whacked out on blow, buried under uncollected trash, and sliding into bankruptcy. Punk had blown the top of pop’s skull off, and downtown concert music was on high alert. The scene was stripping down — postminimal, pulsed, machinic. The music grew a skin of brushed steel and smoky glass. It sounded to Els almost nostalgic, like a holy cantillation for a city slipping down into the East River ooze.