"Blish, James - A Work of Art" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

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 autum-
nal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fallprecisely 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 musi-
cal opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the
fire which ended act two; 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 footnotel 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, punc-
tuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose son-
orous snore (trombones, no less than five of them, con sor-
dini?) 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 Fuerstner had been snatching the conclusion of Elek-
tra off his work table a page at a time, before the ink was
even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication dead-