Valley of Decision Read Online Free PDF Page A

standards.’
    â€˜That performance was no better and no worse than I expected. Given the . . .’
    â€˜Make it known to your people.’ Sir Edward seemed almost biblical conveying his wife’s tablets of stone.
    â€˜And have them flustered?’
    Sir Edward opened a door, closed it behind the departing visitor and said not a word more.
    Leonard Silver was no fool; he knew the value of a hate figure, and Elizabeth Falconer would do. He gathered male chorus with female and made the criticisms he would in any case have levelled, but associating them with the prima’s anger. The orchestra he dealt with differently in that most of the violins were professionals, and his imports, so that his strictures were closely technical, and noted. To the other principals he offered a suggestion or two, mentioned la Falconer’s dissatisfaction, and left them to it; he went down to his cubbyhole and cigarettes, congratulating himself on his diplomacy. A shrewd young man, he’d make his way in the world.
    The performance began on time, again it was rumoured at Elizabeth Falconer’s ukase. The hall was uncomfortably crowded, but the heat or hardness of chairs or lack of legroom or thoughts of the cost of tickets transformed the audience, who keenly attended, lifted performers, made themselves worthy of Purcell. These middle-class lay figures swooned with shy love, vigorously hunted, did not quite hiss the witches but frowned a displeasure across their ready faces, reeled with the boozy sailors, and in finality at Dido’s lament were locked forward in their seats, held, mastered as Falconer’s mellow pain-racked voice took on the steadiness of the falling ground bass, moved against it, over the bar lines in a frozen ecstasy of grief, that dissipated high living, gorgeous array and evening wear, unhurriedly but with immediacy spoke the sorrow that sooner or later cuts all humanity to the bare bone.
    David Blackwall in the orchestral enclosure watched his colleagues; their faces did not reflect the rapt grief of stage or audience, but they were intent, responsive to the end of Silver’s baton, which itself held emotion in check, in exact obedience to that golden plea of voice. ‘Remember me, but, ah, forget my fate.’ Purcell’s heavenly invention soared, against logic, against expectation with the, the complacency of achieved supremacy. Liz Falconer seemed outside, unlike herself; nothing of pride intervened; she became faultless, the channel of Purcell’s genius, both plangent and restrained, in a laceration of grief that grew keener because of the order by which hurts were expressed. ‘When I am laid in earth.’ She begged them to forget her fate, the rejection of love, the lover’s flight, but to recall her, her goodness or generosity to them in music that wrote her death across the heated air of the hall and into the spirits of a cramped and food-plumped audience.
    The strings completed the chacony; the chorus gathered in a half-circle to sing their farewell in restraint, scattering roses on her and all tombs before the orchestra took on the repeat without voices as the lights were dimmed, the rosy twilight became bleaker, the statuesque figures held in stonily cold light for a time, faded, were visible, disappeared, were gone with her to the shades on the final bare fifth as the curtain fell.
    The audience, released, cheered, stood, stamped, shouted, hardly aware of themselves, distracted by what they had heard, by each other. They sweated as they clapped. Someone forgot himself so far as to let rip a piercing yobbo’s street whistle as the diva bowed low, taking with her Aeneas and Belinda, dominating witches and courtiers, dwarfing the Carthaginian pillars, the temples, the blue and cloudless North African sky. Silver, next to them, modestly incongruous in evening dress, beamed, stood his orchestra up; Elizabeth Falconer led their applause. There was no doubt of