Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays Part 49

VALET [_at the door_]. No, sir.

GERARDO. Even if she offers to settle a fortune upon you.

VALET. No, sir. [_He goes out._]

GERARDO [_singing_]. _"Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du...."_ Well, if women don't get tired of me--Only the world is so full of them; and I am only one man. Every one has his burden to carry. [_He strikes a chord on the piano._]

[_Prof. Duhring, dressed all in black, with a long white beard, a red hooked nose, gold spectacles, Prince Albert coat and silk hat, an opera score under his arm, enters without knocking._]

GERARDO. What do you want?

DUHRING. Maestro--I--I--have--an opera.

GERARDO. How did you get in?

DUHRING. I have been watching for two hours for a chance to run up the stairs unnoticed.

GERARDO. But, my dear good man, I have no time.

DUHRING. Oh, I will not play the whole opera for you.

GERARDO. I haven't the time. My train leaves in forty minutes.

DUHRING. You haven't the time! What should I say? You are thirty and successful. You have your whole life to live yet. Just listen to your part in my opera. You promised to listen to it when you came to this city.

GERARDO. What is the use? I am not a free agent--

DUHRING. Please! Please! Please! Maestro! I stand before you an old man, ready to fall on my knees before you; an old man who has never cared for anything in the world but his art. For fifty years I have been a willing victim to the tyranny of art--

GERARDO [_interrupting him_]. Yes, I understand; I understand, but--

DUHRING [_excitedly_]. No, you don't understand. You could not understand. How could you, the favorite of fortune, you understand what fifty years of bootless work means? But I will try to make you understand it. You see, I am too old to take my own life. People who do that do it at twenty-five, and I let the time pa.s.s by. I must now drag along to the end of my days. Please, sir, please don't let these moments pa.s.s in vain for me, even if you have to lose a day thereby, a week even. This is in your own interest. A week ago, when you first came for your special appearances, you promised to let me play my opera for you.

I have come here every day since; either you had a rehearsal or a woman caller. And now you are on the point of going away. You have only to say one word: I will sing the part of Hermann--and they will produce my opera. You will then thank G.o.d for my insistance.... Of course you sing Siegfried, you sing Florestan--but you have no role like Hermann in your repertoire, no role better suited to your middle register.

[_Gerardo leans against the mantelpiece; while drumming on the top with his right hand, he discovers something behind the screen; he suddenly stretches out his arm and pulls out a woman in a gray gown, whom he leads out of the room through the middle door; after closing the door, he turns to Duhring._]

GERARDO. Oh, are you still there?

DUHRING [_undisturbed_]. This opera is good; it is dramatic; it is a financial success. I can show you letters from Liszt, from Wagner, from Rubinstein, in which they consider me as a superior man. And why hasn't any opera ever been produced? Because I am not crying wares on the market-place. And then you know our directors: they will revive ten dead men before they give a live man a chance. Their walls are well guarded.

At thirty you are in. At sixty I am still out. One word from you and I shall be in, too. This is why I have come, and [_raising his voice_] if you are not an unfeeling brute, if success has not killed in you the last spark of artistic sympathy, you will not refuse to hear my work.

GERARDO. I will give you an answer in a week. I will go over your opera.

Let me have it.

DUHRING. No, I am too old, Maestro. In a week, in what you call a week, I shall be dead and buried. In a week--that is what they all say; and then they keep it for years.

GERARDO. I am very sorry but--

DUHRING. To-morrow perhaps you will be on your knees before me; you will boast of knowing me ... and to-day, in your sordid l.u.s.t for gold, you cannot even spare the half-hour which would mean the breaking of my fetters.

GERARDO. No, really, I have only thirty-five minutes left, and unless I go over a few pa.s.sages.... You know I sing Tristan in Brussels to-morrow night. [_He pulls out his watch._] I haven't even half an hour....

DUHRING. Half an hour.... Oh, then, let me play to you your big aria at the end of the first act. [_He attempts to sit down on the piano bench.

Gerardo restrains him._]

GERARDO. Now, frankly, my dear sir.... I am a singer; I am not a critic.

If you wish to have your opera produced, address yourself to those gentlemen who are paid to know what is good and what is not. People scorn and ignore my opinions in such matters as completely as they appreciate and admire my singing.

DUHRING. My dear Maestro, you may take it from me that I myself attach no importance whatever to your judgment. What do I care about your opinions? I know you tenors; I would like to play my score for you so that you could say: "I would like to sing the role of Hermann."

GERARDO. If you only knew how many things I would like to do and which I have to renounce, and how many things I must do for which I do not care in the least! Half a million a year does not repay me for the many joys of life which I must sacrifice for the sake of my profession. I am not a free man. But you were a free man all your life. Why didn't you go to the market-place and cry your wares?

DUHRING. Oh, the vulgarity of it.... I have tried it a hundred times. I am a composer, Maestro, and nothing more.

GERARDO. By which you mean that you have exhausted all your strength in the writing of your operas and kept none of it to secure their production.

DUHRING. That is true.

GERARDO. The composers I know reverse the process. They get their operas written somehow and then spend all their strength in an effort to get them produced.

DUHRING. That is the type of artist I despise.

GERARDO. Well, I despise the type of man that wastes his life in useless endeavor. What have you done in those fifty years of struggle, for yourself or for the world? Fifty years of useless struggle! That should convince the worst blockhead of the impracticability of his dreams. What have you done with your life? You have wasted it shamefully. If I had wasted my life as you have wasted yours--of course I am only speaking for myself--I don't think I should have the courage to look any one in the face.

DUHRING. I am not doing it for myself; I am doing it for my art.

GERARDO [_scornfully_]. Art, my dear man! Let me tell you that art is quite different from what the papers tell us it is.

DUHRING. To me it is the highest thing in the world.

GERARDO. You may believe that, but n.o.body else does. We artists are merely a luxury for the use of the _bourgeoisie_. When I stand there on the stage I feel absolutely certain that not one solitary human being in the audience takes the slightest interest in what we, the artists, are doing. If they did, how could they listen to "Die Walkure," for instance? Why, it is an indecent story which could not be mentioned anywhere in polite society. And yet, when I sing Siegmund, the most puritanical mothers bring their fourteen-year-old daughters to hear me.

This, you see, is the meaning of whatever you call art. This is what you have sacrificed fifty years of your life to. Find out how many people came to hear me sing and how many came to gape at me as they would at the Emperor of China if he should turn up here to-morrow. Do you know what the artistic wants of the public consist in? To applaud, to send flowers, to have a subject for conversation, to see and be seen. They pay me half a million, but then I make business for hundreds of cabbies, writers, dressmakers, restaurant keepers. It keeps money circulating; it keeps blood running. It gets girls engaged, spinsters married, wives tempted, old cronies supplied with gossip; a woman loses her pocketbook in the crowd, a fellow becomes insane during the performance. Doctors, lawyers made.... [_He coughs._] And with this I must sing Tristan in Brussels to-morrow night! I tell you all this, not out of vanity, but to cure you of your delusions. The measure of a man's worth is the world's opinion of him, not the inner belief which one finally adopts after brooding over it for years. Don't imagine that you are a misunderstood genius. There are no misunderstood geniuses.

DUHRING. Let me just play to you the first scene of th second act. A park landscape as in the painting, "Embarkation for the Isle of Cythera."

GERARDO. I repeat to you I have no time. And furthermore, since Wagner's death the need for new operas has never been felt by any one. If you come with new music, you set against yourself all the music schools, the artists, the public. If you want to succeed just steal enough out of Wagner's works to make up a whole opera. Why should I cudgel my brains with your new music when I have cudgeled them cruelly with the old?

DUHRING [_holding out his trembling hand_]. I am afraid I am too old to learn how to steal. Unless one begins very young, one can never learn it.

GERARDO. Don't feel hurt. My dear sir--if I could.... The thought of how you have to struggle.... I happen to have received some five hundred marks more than my fee....

DUHRING [_turning to the door_]. Don't! Please don't! Do not say that. I did not try to show you my opera in order to work a touch. No, I think too much of this child of my brain.... No, Maestro.

[_He goes out through the center door._]

GERARDO [_following him to the door_]. I beg your pardon.... Pleased to have met you.

[_He closes the door and sinks into an armchair. A voice is heard outside: "I will not let that man step in my way." Helen rushes into the room followed by the Valet. She is an unusually beautiful young woman in street dress._]