Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

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  JACOB BELTANE

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  THERE WAS a time (time out of mind) in the sempiternal progress of divadienst, at that suspensory pause in its career just prior to the advent of what was to be known as “Mawrdolatry,” when the cult of Morgana Neri flourished in the hothouse ambiance of the Crossroads Café, in the shadow of the old Times building, across Broadway from the very hotel (a ghostly renovated ruin) where Caruso had sojourned in the great days, whose palmy lobby, once ormolu and velvet, had been transformed into a vast drugstore, and in Caruso’s suite a podiatrist had been installed. There at the Crossroads Café, November after November (for Neri was a dead-center Scorpio), the great world’s concerns were blithely ignored, controverted by ponderous, grimy rituals. The rolling electric Times sign might proclaim in its career the end of the modern world; I Neriani, unbothered, would rant on over the latest Neri triumph at the house, on record, in Paramus, at the stadium. Neri’s opinions on everything and everyone in music were recited in antiphon over tables littered with clippings, reviews, vile coffee, and majestically autographed glossies of the diva, in black and white and in sepia (none of a later vintage than the last year before the war). Neri was considered ageless, her voice deemed eternal. The elders, who could actually speak of the Neri debut, were revered by initiates as prior saints. Wire recordings of Neri broadcast performances passed like transcripts of the Orphic mysteries from fool to fool. For many years Neri recordings outsold those of her every rival at Macy’s, at the Gramophone Shop, on Mulberry Street and Mott. With a degree of justification the partisan critic Francobolli could speak of the “seemingly endless Neri Era.”

  It ended. Time told on Neri, whence the Neriad took a turn for the tragic, thought better of the route, and devolved into near-farce. A contretemps absolute in its severity beset I Neriani. The walls fell from the fantasy temple of Morgana I’Ultima. Mawrdew Czgowchwz had come to town. Mawrdew Czgowchwz became the diva of the moment and the moment went on. She gave a new meaning to “presence,” becoming, as Halcyon Paranoy decreed, “of the moment its life, its persona emblematica, itself.” She wedded music to mimicry to create “musicry.” She was the definitive diva; she still is.

  Time may be said to waste and to lose and to kill; all the rest is precious. One saw truth, heard it in key perhaps three times in one perfect week, then perhaps (like as not) not again for the entire season. One relished, one hoarded the grand moments as the hints of a promise that would leave no “Next?” in its wake, whence there would be sufficient remembrance. Meanwhile, one waited on lines...

  Her picture was on every front page that week, just prior to the vernal equinox, the full moon, and the earliest Easter there could be. The Times spread, four columns across at the bottom, featured a studio photograph of her Octavian, bearing the silver rose:

  NEW YORK, March 17—The celebrated “falcon contralto” Mawrdew Czgowchwz landed last night at midnight from Rome at International Airport to be met by a crowd of some three thousand persons. Miss Czgowchwz arrived here a scant day prior to her first appearance of the season, tonight at the Metropolitan.

  Miss Czgowchwz’s public feud with the management was settled amicably last weekend in the wake of a hunger strike in which several thousand of her admirers had participated, and which resulted in a two-week sitdown demonstration in front of the opera house on Broadway and 39th Street. Placards proclaimed the strikers’ intention to sit out the season unfed. (Miss Czgowchwz acknowledged this tribute last week by singing Mahler’s “Kinder otenlieder” from the steps of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.) A settlement has now been reached and Miss Czgowchwz has decreed that “all is forgiven.”

  In addition, the diva has made the startling announcement that she now feels ready to move into a new vocal category, that of the dramatic soprano “d’agilità.” In a daring artistic move Miss Czgowchwz will appear tonight for the first time in her career as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata.” The performance is completely sold out. Standing room was sold yesterday to five hundred persons out of the thousands who had remained on the sidewalk in weakened condition after their hunger strike. The performance is to be broadcast on the opera network. Last-minute negotiations for a partial telecast are being held through the night.

  Miss Czgowchwz does not intend, however,

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  to forsake the realms of the mezzo-soprano repertoire in which she has won triumphant notices in every capital of the Free World. The diva has coined a new category for herself, which she calls the “oltrano.” Explaining the move in her press conference at the airport early this morning, she announced: “I am nearing my fortieth year. I will this year sing forty roles, three times each, here and there.” The roles are:

  Violetta, in “La Traviata”; Desdemona, in “Otello”; Leonora, in “Il Trovatore”; Azucena, in the same opera; Lady Macbeth, in “Macbeth”; Mistress Quickly, in “Falstaff”; Amneris, in “Aïda”; the Princess of Eboli, in “Don Carlo”; “Norma,” the title role; Elvira, in “I Puritani”; Donna Elvira, in “Don Giovanni”; Donna Anna, in the same opera; the Countess, in “Le Nozze di Figaro”; the Queen of the Night, in “Die Zauberflöte”; Orfeo, in “Orfeo ed Euridice”; Poppea, in “L’Incoronazione di Poppea”; the Marschallin, in “Der Rosenkavalier”; Octavian, the title role in the same opera; “Elektra” and “Salome,” the title roles; the Dyer’s Wife, in “Die Frau ohne Schatten”; Sieglinde, in “Die Walküre”; Brünnhilde, in the same music drama; Elisabeth, in “Tannhäuser”; “Manon” and “Thaïs,” the title roles; “Louise,” the title role; Dalila, in “Samson et Dalila”; “Carmen,” the title role; Cassandra, in “Les Troyens”; Dido, in the same opera (in the same performance); “Rusalka,” the title role; “Turandot,” the title role; Minnie, in “La Fanciulla del West”; Cio-Cio-San, in “Madama Butterfly”; Marie, in Berg’s “Wozzeck”; Jocasta, in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex”; Emilia Marti, in Janác̆ek’s “The Makropoulos Affair”; Leonore, in “Fidelio”; and Romeo, in Bellini’s “I Capuletti ed i Montecchi.”

  Miss Czgowchwz currently claims a working range of three and a half octaves, from C below middle C to F sharp in alt, and frankly admits to having three register breaks and four “voices.” “One for each season of the year,” she explains, “like the air.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz was given police escort to the Plaza Hotel while many of the crowd at the airport marched back. Some went barefoot. At the hotel a mob filled the lobby while the singer was further interviewed and photographed by the press. Early this morning the crowd was dispersed, and most of the demonstrators retired to Central Park or sat on the grandstands put up for today’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

  Miss Czgowchwz is to be carried from the Plaza to the opera house at noon today in an elaborate sedan chair especially constructed for the occasion by the prominent furniture designer and “découpagiste” Gaia della Gueza, a close friend of Miss Czgowchwz. A party of café society and theater celebrities is expected to join stars of the musical world for lunch at Louis Sherry’s restaurant in the opera house, at which time Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, will discuss her plans in more detail.

  Before retiring, Miss Czgowchwz appeared at the window of her tower suite to sing Schubert’s “An die Musik,” accompanied by Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, the renowned British keyboard virtuoso. Her final words were, “Yes, it is good to be back.”

  That was Czgowchwz, her story, history. But out of it the Czgowchwz people forged differences. They dealt in genre, discovering that tragedy lay in the quotidian depiction of anything (anything gorgeous); that comedy, conversely, swelled to bursting, in proud dimensions. All the rest, the reportage, was waste.

  It had all begun at and in a certain place and time, as Paranoy was to demonstrate in The Czgowchwz Moment. But waiting for Czgowchwz was quite outside history; it was the thirty-fourth day of the sixteenth month, in the seventh season. Later seasons they were to remember, to chronicle, seasons informed by the eac
h and every time that she, herself, stessa, would mount the boards, made up from assorted paint pots at a table mirror ringed in merciless bulbs ablaze, and heap upon music a variety of disguises, none of which could ever hope to equal or to obscure what she was in her immutable self. So many times Czgowchwz, or Czgowchwz to this or that root or power, was still Czgowchwz, as is the number one; and Czgowchwz over Czgowchwz, like Czgowchwz in an infinite hall of electric Czgowchwz mirrors, was but Czgowchwz.

  In the late summer of 1947 Ralph had returned from a loft party on lower Seventh Avenue, fed up. Flipping on the predawn FM airwaves, he picked up a transcription of the Midsummer Night Prague Festival Gala. A scant hour later he came ranting through the heat to the front door of a particular brownstone kibbutz on St. Marks Place, under the Dog Star, carrying a paper-based tape in both hands as if it were alive. He was smoking two cigarettes. None inside had been prepared for the sublime, all being together in bed. It had to be heard, he told them all. Gin-milk cocktails and coffee were made while Ralph went on declaring, nearly pleading, which seemed hardly necessary. He had only the last part of it, but it had to be heard. (Ralph was and remains the truest of devotees, keeping a recorder plugged into a radio receiver day and night, day in, day out, until the end of time just in case and on the off-chance that anything diverting should fly in from anywhere on earth, and if beyond...) At that moment in time a certain seven first heard together the art and voice of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. What could they say?

  It was Amneris’s Judgment Scene, sung in what one of the seven thought of at the time as “perfect something—vaguely Slavic,” with B’s to singe the gums, and chest tone, as Ralph put it, “for days.” Dawn shrieked in through slits in louvered wood shutters as the tape was played a second time. The Gem Spa emporium on Second Avenue was raided for cigarettes a short time later and the tape was played a third time. When Ralph left, at noon, the pact had been drawn up, sealed in tears, and taped: FIND MARDU GORGEOUS!!! (Despairing of ever knowing their heroine’s name, which the dozy DJ had spelled but had not dared attempt pronouncing, they called her “Gorgeous,” a name the way she sounded demanded, and let it go for the time. Time has not changed it. Ralph settled the issue, for all time, with his authoritative transliteration: MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ.)

  They played that first tape at parties for months and got letters off to every management on Fifty-seventh Street, to the Metropolitan, to the festivals, begging for more (in fraught yet tempered phrases after the fashion of the forties). That same first morning they had composed the first Czgowchwz fan letter, in every language they knew, and had sent it off to Prague.

  It happened slowly, but it happened. She sang in the Soviet Union, at Omsk in September, at Minsk and Vitebsk in October and November, and in December at Nizhni Novgorod in what had once been a smallish winter palace. The seven had their reply for the New Year, a letter which hangs framed on Ralph’s wall, written in Czech and signed

  January on the wane, despair threatened. There had been no Czgowchwz news for weeks. Her seven American friends languished in a cold and uninspired late-forties New York season. No other person in Gotham seemed to have heard the predawn August broadcast.

  Then history took over for a time, cruelly, efficiently, with few stylish flourishes. On the tenth of March, a person of eminence was thrown or fell from a window in Prague. Prague itself fell directly thereafter. Czgowchwz reacted. The flawless gesture of her crash landing on the Champs-Elysées at dawn on Bastille Day, after a precarious solo flight in a single-engine prewar flying machine, was no more to be believed, nor less great art, than her first appearance at the Opéra, singing Amneris in French. It took the rest of the summer to fetch her to America. The Secret Seven met her at the pier at Hoboken, together with the managers, many and various; they took control at the start, teaching her English. (Ignorant as she was at the time of her true origin, she seemed to be remembering, although in almost anguished reluctance. She spoke English in just three weeks, albeit persisting in her Eastern European intonation. It was thought uncanny, but no more.)

  The career blazed. The Carnegie Hall recital, where she sang the Erwartung in fully open chest, tore the lid off. She debuted at the Metropolitan the next week as Amneris, singing it in Czech, on a whim. Luigi Francobolli, in one of the now defunct dailies, proclaimed the next day, with characteristic gush, that “a voice of the size, sweep, impact, and delineation of a flaming angel, projected with the pathos, premonition, and despair of a dying swan, was encountered by your correspondent last evening in a debut to sear the mind, obliviating comparisons.” Tompkins proclaimed himself speechless, and went on gorgeously for three columns. Certain hags in the late afternoon had reservations. On Saturday, Kölnischwasser said: “One could hardly object to her singing it in Czech with capework of such pointed brilliance; a contralto with every difference.” (K.’s summation was, of course, absolutely sibylline in its prescience...)

  Those first years began: the Czgowchwz Era. Neri commenced to frazzle; lines were drawn. It was given out that a frantic contralto could never presume to dethrone Neri, “La Serena” (an idle prediction). Czgowchwz went to London, Rome, Bayreuth, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Chicago, Stockholm, Naples, Venice, Paris, Boston, and returned. Ralph went along; everything she did is on Ralph’s tapes. They wept who did, to realize they belonged to someone like Czgowchwz. They saw her in New York on Sundays for tea, sherry, and the rest.

  The forties ended, and they did not. The Czgowchwz moment endured in centripetal dream time, its zithery sonority reverberating through the corridors of the hastily tumbling twentieth century, somehow counteracting “time’s relentless melt.” In history, meanwhile, at some thrall-time-frame’s least auspicious point, the opera house came under new management. A certain presence (it shall be nameless) intervened in glowering dyspeptic manner, to direct and otherwise disrupt the vital affairs of operatic state. Neri kowtowed, cow that she was; Czgowchwz, mulish, stood her ground, as graciously as she might. Yet eventually the impasse devolved. They fired Czgowchwz by a wire to Rome, where she was in secret recording sessions on a new disc.

  The hunger strike began at once, in late February of the year of the Czgowchwz Return. Ralph lost forty pounds. Others ate saltines, matzos, drank distilled water. The rest boozed, guzzled, and moaned. Carmen stood her ground as always, and Arpenik the Wise and Kind persevered; she kept the best Armenian restaurant in New York going along, although she herself would not touch so much as a dollop of ekmek. Gaia della Gueza’s being socially prominent and the Countess Madge O’Meaghre Gautier’s sudden spontaneous endorsement of the “causa Czgowchwz” started a riot of talk, as each would arrive by night in mink and sable wraps to sit with the others, munching occasional grapes. Sympathy arrived in headline tributes from the notables about Gotham. Dolores, dead now, was publicly appalled outright for three weeks, daily, although ignorant of the issues.

  On the Tuesday of the strike’s second week Ralph received a package on the line; it was postmarked Paris. Opening the box in tremolo, he discovered a loaf of nut bread, a note in the wrappings reading: “Mangele, bimbo, ti prego!—M,” and the first inscribed studio demo of M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano. He passed out. The remaining Secret Seven carted him on the BMT down to St. Marks Place, where was heard in New York the first Czgowchwz F sharp in alt. The entire record was Czgowchwz, unmistakably, but Czgowchwz in a new register. The voice had thinned to a spearhead shaft on the top; it had opened like the portals of doom at the bottom. It had breaks, or creases, never before heard in any voice. Yet what endured was somehow more essential Czgowchwz. “Quintessential Czgowchwz!” Alice screamed. “Definitive in its own right,” Paranoy insisted in the April Opera. Ralph, revived, lamented, “She wobbles in thirds!” Dixie, defiantly opposed to the transformation that first day, moaned, “She sounds like an Electrolux; the tops are like steel wool!” Others gagged on saltines, and a new era was upon the world, for the better or for doom...

  The Secret Se
ven rode out to International Airport with the nameless fiend, who sat mute as stone the way out and the way back. He carried the contract that must yet be signed before the Traviata could be sung. On the way back, the Seven nibbled a second nut loaf Czgowchwz had had baked in Paris. She had altered mysteriously. They stood beside her as she flung jonquils down to the assembly, and recorded the “An die Musik” on Ralph’s portable machine. (The jonquils, relics now, came from Max Schling’s.) It was gorgeous, as gestures go.

  The Secret Seven and the Countess Madge were to have a box. The Countess had had the same one, number 7, for every Czgowchwz performance. The Secret Seven normally stood, staying faithful to the line, keeping in touch with rumor, its labyrinthine progress toward the inner chamber known variously as “the truth” and “absolute fiction.” On occasion one or another of them would drop into the wings, or claque for Dulcinea Regalia, or descend into the pit of hell backstage and “super,” helping out in small ways. The Countess took a fancy to this last diversion, and she and Alice became the two whores in the window at Lillas Pastia’s in every Czgowchwz Carmen. The Countess managed to get a coarse horselaugh in during the Chanson Bohème on a broadcast. It’s all on Ralph’s tapes.

  The March 17 afternoon was chilly. The Irish swept endlessly up Fifth Avenue as if replenished hourly by fresh shiploads of immigrants. The odd-thousand Czgowchwz lot were gathered around the “Czgowchwz fountain” singing a cacophonous mélange of favorite aria snatches against the chill wind off the river. The Secret Seven, less Ralph, huddled in a hansom on the far side of Central Park South. Distracted fans with shrieky tendencies encircled the barouche, begging at once for confirmation and denial of incalculable rumors, all of them mutually exclusive, but many too close to certain waters of truth to be answered with anything but knowing sideways glances. Ralph arrived, majestically, the crowd instinctively parting before him, falling this way and that. He climbed into the carriage with customary unbothered aplomb. He directed the driver to circuit the Park and then proceed to Magwyck, chez Gautier, leaving the fans to rant as the coach rattled off westward, overfull. All entrances to the hotel were covered against the threat of vulgar display on the part of I Neriani.