Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt

Author:James McCourt [McCourt, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music
ISBN: 9780940322974
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 1975-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Achille Plonque lay finishing his dictation. It had become his habit in the months since he had first sung leading tenor roles in four languages opposite Mawrdew Czgowchwz to record his continual amazements into a small portable Dictaphone. The feverish heldentenor had thrown himself down for a few hasty minutes on the dressing-room couch, in costume for Act III, to deliver his recollection of the Liebesnacht. In Ralph’s English version: “These are again the immediate dazzled reactions of one who by the most fortunate exigency in the working out of intention into realized occurrence [Ralph was wrestling here with a quantity of German chain words, since it was Plonque’s habit to record his thoughts in the language of the performance involved] has been partner and as it were catalyst perhaps to the creation of dramatic-musical effects nearly as disturbing as they are perfect. We are told somewhere that such is always the necessary way of revelation, is that not so? [Nicht wahr?] Mawrdew Czgowchwz’s Isolde...”

Tangent Percase had returned to his perch in the Paranoy box to scribble a few heartfelt, deathless appreciations of his own onto vellum (in a tastefully calf-bound pocket daybook), in a microscopic hand (in authentic mollusc-mauve ink). He commenced puzzling out some half thoughts (“To teach is merely to learn”) on what must now become the matter of his next public inquiry at the New School: “The Function of Ecstasy.”

Never once that night, from the time the curtain rose on the first act until the middle of the Liebestod, did Pèlerin Deslieux either rise from his seat in the center of the front row of the Dress Circle or allow anyone to disturb him by passing either way in front of him as he sat there. A complete and utter repose possessed him (sitting there) so that he became, in the midst of so much eddying conflict, the keystone of endurance.

Neither did the Countess Magdalen O’Meaghre Gautier either leave her box or answer any questions. Nor did either of these so much as look back or forth to one another at the intermissions. There was no good reason to, and all good reason not to: each had a premonition...

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