Ecstasy by Mary Sharratt

Author:Mary Sharratt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Come June, Alma felt as enormous as the hot-air balloons drifting over Prater Park. But this didn’t stop her from going to the Burgtheater to see Gerhart Hauptmann’s verse play Der arme Heinrich. Drawn from a medieval tale of courtly love, it told of a knight stricken with leprosy who could be healed only by the heart’s blood of a virgin who willingly sacrificed herself for his salvation. The haunting cadences left Alma entranced, forcing her to relive the agony of the sacrifice that she had made for love. But from this catharsis, the very thing she had renounced rose phoenixlike, a pure gift. Music emerged in her head, its vibrations thrumming into her fingertips, her very bones.

Even while she and Gustav walked home together after the play, the melody unspooled inside her. These verses shall be the libretto for my opera. The German composer Hans Pfitzner had already written an opera based on the tale, but hers would be utterly original. She could hear the overture, the arias, plainer than her husband’s voice.

When she went to bed that night, she felt as intoxicated as though she had downed a magnum of champagne. Music filled her dreams, the notes so tangible and real that she could pluck them like jeweled fruits from the Tree of Paradise, singing-ringing rubies and opals that she threaded on spun gold, then wove on a loom of pure sound. My music. My brainchild. I have created this. I contain this. I hold it all inside me and now it wants to emerge.

Now! Alma jolted awake to feel her waters breaking. A glance at the clock told her it was just before five. Gustav would still be asleep in his separate room. Even Elise didn’t rise until six thirty. Let them sleep.

After changing into dry clothes, Alma opened the window to gulp down the fresh morning air. The pale blue sky was washed pink with the first hint of sunrise. All the rosebushes in Belvedere Park were in full bloom—she could almost taste their fragrance on her tongue. The birds’ dawn chorus filled the stillness, and even then, Alma’s music kept washing over her like a waterfall.

She tiptoed to the piano. Her contractions had started, but there was still enough time between them to soft pedal the notes. She must work fast. The contractions were coming on stronger, swelling and subsiding waves in an incoming tide that would soon engulf her. In that clear, free space between the pains, she madly scribbled down her score one note at a time. Gustav slept on—she could hear his snores forming a counterpoint to her high-arching melody as she composed in a blaze of pure white heat. Nothing else existed but this. Exstase, she scrawled across the score. Ecstasy.

“Frau Direktor, has your time come?”

Alma wrenched her head to see Elise open the door and peer in at her with a pale, tight face. Alma couldn’t speak. She only wanted Elise to close the door and leave her alone.

“Let me awaken the Herr Direktor,” Elise said.

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