Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Bonner snickers. There’s no other reasonable response.

We can go next season, Els says . Or later this—

Peter. Get real. We’ve put these people three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. Even a two-night delay would kill them.

Truth is, since the standoff in Texas became a headline, sales for the show have gone from poky to brisk, and opening night now has a reasonable chance of selling out. Marketing has gotten behind the opera with renewed vigor; they’ve started plastering stickers across the existing posters and flyers: Come See the News That the Past Already Knew .

Innocent children, Els says . Burnt to death by American law enforcement agents.

There’s confusion onstage, an altercation over the scene’s blocking. Bonner trots toward the crisis. Els dogs him.

Not our fault, Bonner tells him, without turning.

Els grabs him by the elbow. Listen to me. The minute people see. . We can’t capitalize on this. It’s obscene.

True bafflement crosses the director’s face. The accusation is so bizarre it interests him. This is your story, Maestro. You want to quit, now that it’s real?

THERE’S SOMETHING TO say for a short third act: rapid rising action and a race to the finish. It takes only a recitative and two arias for the Prince Bishop to rally support in the north and tighten the snare of death around the crazed kingdom. The City of God can do nothing but play out its fate in a succession of otherworldly choruses. The siege seals up; food vanishes. A gentle siciliana in the harps and flutes predicts starvation. The believers hold out by eating every dog, cat, and rat within the walls. Then grass, dirt, and moss, shoe leather and old clothes, and finally the flesh of the dead, all to a lilting 12/8 dance.

John, the Messiah, the World’s King, retreats into his beloved amateur theatricals. He turns the final days into a great masque. Revels fill the town square, and the cathedral hosts an obscene Mass. Raunchy figures in the high winds grope and snipe at each other. Chopped-up snatches of sacred chant circle and rise until the entire orchestra turns into a spinning bacchanal.

In a flurry of brass, a group of the tailor King’s starving subjects flee the city. But the Prince’s armies pin them in the shallow meadows between the siege works and city walls. The refugees drag about, foraging the grass like desperate animals until they coat the ground with corpses. The music goes mad; sul ponticello harmonics slither through the strings.

Every player in the orchestra plunges into the surging tutti. The attackers enter a city turned to walking dead. They offer the citizens safe passage for surrender, then slaughter them the moment they lay down their arms.

Knipperdollinck and John, the amateur thespian, are tortured with red-hot irons and hung in cages from the tower of Saint Lamberti. But throughout his ordeal, the fallen savior makes no sound. His final aria — his last public performance — is total silence accompanied by a halo of strings.

The music falls away to a pianissimo mime. Then, from nowhere, it comes back glorious. The anticipation theme from the opening bars of the opera returns, anchored by the cellos and trombones. Augmented now, it unfolds in growing astonishment. A chorus of dead souls fans across the stage singing the De Profundis . The tune bends ten centuries of musical idiom into stunned wonder. Few in the first-night audience can follow the harmonic vocabulary. But the house breaks into applause as soon as the conductor drops his arms.

His colleagues force Els up onstage. He stumbles up in his white tie, blinded by the shining blackness. There’s sound everywhere, like the hiss of his father’s records that he woke to, as a child, on those nights when he’d fall asleep listening. He can’t make out what the static is saying or what this audience has heard. He hears only the cries of burning children, the snickering of fate, the great sucking sound of his endless vanity.

He looks out over the audience, sick. This is what he has wanted his whole life — a roomful of grateful listeners. And now the room wants something from him. An explanation. An apology. An encore.

Someone to Els’s right — a crazy man, an old friend — takes Els’s fist and lifts it into the air. To his left, a resurrected John of Leiden beams. The conductor, the choral director, the choreographer, all the assembled leads and chorus flank him. Massacred believers and besieging mercenaries hold hands and bow, smiling at each other and at Els, the maker, celebrated at last, vindicated after all his long years outside . Els turns and plows through the happy cast, trying to escape into the gap in the velvet curtains before the contents of his gut come up into his mouth. In this, too, he fails.

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

The man-made peak of Monks Mound loomed up from along the interstate. Once it had been the center of a city larger than London or Paris, a site for communal and dangerous art. Now it was part of a museum visited only by schoolchildren under duress. Its massive cone made Els want to turn off the highway, get out of the car, and climb. Cahokia seemed as good a place as any to be captured. But he was too close to his goal to be taken now.

The road bore hard to the right, and the Mississippi, without warning or comparison, spread in front of him. Water filled the landscape in both directions, and he saw that flowing lake as if he were the first fugitive ever to stumble across it.

The Voice took him by divine convolution deep into St. Louis’s southwestern suburbs. All Els had to do was stay on the road and obey. The neighborhood, when he reached it, surprised him: so different from what he’d pictured for thirty years. Stately homes sat back from the street behind moats of lawn. Brick and dressed stone, half-timbering, Federal, Tudor, Greek Revival, Queen Anne — houses as adept at faking styles as Stravinsky.

A weekday afternoon, and the streets betrayed no habitation. Even the corner park was empty. Everything human had taken itself indoors. The capering gray squirrels might as well have inherited the Earth.

The Fiat nosed up to the empty curb. Els had seen pictures over the years — his daughter and her parade of misfit friends, standing in front of the house in all seasons. Soft yellow lights shone out from the discreet façade. He sat in the car, thinking how this ambush might be the worst idea he’d had since setting up his home microbiology lab. He dialed the long-memorized number.

The phone rang, but the lights and shadows in the house didn’t change. At last, a deep, professional, and suspicious voice demanded, Hello?

The once-soubrette had turned contralto. Who’s calling? Two accented eighth notes and a quarter: a descending fifth followed by a rising sixth. The soothing three-note tune turned exquisite, and Els took two beats too long to answer, Maddy.

The rise and fall of her breath reverberated in the air of her cavernous house. Far away, Els heard what sounded like an exercise tape, the spritely orders of health fascism.

I’m sorry , she said, unapologetic. Who is this?

It’s Peter , he said, not recognizing his own voice.

Silence came from the other end, in timbres beyond Els’s powers to orchestrate. That was the thing about sounds. Even their absence had more shades than any ear could hear.

Peter, she said.

He wanted to tell her: It’s all right; life happens.

But the ID says Kohlmann.

Yes, he said, in a way that suggested how many parties might be listening in. She’d always had a good ear.

Where are you? Maddy asked, her voice thick.