His work is over now. The brainstorming, the interminable phone conferences, the fights over cuts and simplifications. The score has been frozen for weeks, past fixing. Still, he hangs around in the cavernous hall, sitting twenty rows back from the orchestra pit, keeping the final stages of production together on the sheer force of his teeth-gritting will.
Behind the singers, in the recesses of the great stage, carpenters complete the cathedral’s west portal. Siege engines slide by on dollies. Artisans in overalls snap a pair of volutes into place on a towering flat that hangs from a batten. It panics Els, still, to count the people employed to bring to life something that began on his cabin’s drawing table. He still can’t quash the urge to jump up and shout, Oh, no, thank you! Please don’t bother.
The goal seemed simple enough: raise the dead and make them sing. And Els has done that, these last three years. His ghost dictation filled hundreds of pages. For forty months, he has hoarded the pile of manuscript, showing it to his collaborators only under threats of violence. Every few months, he glimpsed something worthwhile in the growing score. Once, near the finish, he caught his breath at the sounds of real inspiration.
Bonner and his thugs came and took the pages away from him by force. And somehow in the course of a few more months, the team of craftsmen have turned his obscure secret formulae into theater. He’s stunned, sitting in the crepuscular hall, to discover how good the first act sounds — how often it captures the bright, poisonous, ample world he lived in during his thousand-day trance.
The pit orchestra is a special forces team. Four decades ago, Els’s tricky polyrhythms and kaleidoscope of keys would have been unplayable. But these seventy crack musicians, raised from infancy on perfect recordings, tear through his score as through a show-tune medley. The leads, too, are superb. The self-styled prophet and his sexy consort, the ousted bishop returning at the head of a powerful army, the demented tailor-king: all sung by shining young singers.
Bonner is everywhere at once — upstage, downstage, offstage in the wings, charming, berating, flattering, cajoling. He seduces the singers of both sexes, reblocks their entrances and exits. He sinks into dark reveries or belts out their arias the way he hears the phrases in his mind’s ear. The man strides through the theater the way the bedecked prophets parade through rebel Münster, and the awed cast regards him with that same wavering reverence that Münster gives the rogue Anabaptists.
He confesses to Els, far out of earshot of the cast, Every show I’ve done in the last two decades has been warm-up for this. You’ve served me up the perfect pitch, and I intend to hit it out of the park.
And a city rises up at his bidding: walls and towers, council chamber, the nave of a great cathedral. The set has all Bonner’s favorite mechanical gimmicks. It rotates and reassembles itself. There’s scrim projection, of course, with thousands of now digitally driven images. The costumes are way over budget. The production adds several hundred thousand dollars of debt to the company’s already shaky ledger. The businessmen try to rein in the uprising, but Bonner tells them what any good rebel prophet knows: every rich donor on earth will follow you to the stars, if they think you can reach God on His unlisted number.
Three months into composing, Els discovered that the opera had already been written: Meyerbeer’s Le prophète. Any real composer would have learned the mid — nineteenth century drama in school; but Els’s education was hijacked by the avant-garde. He called Bonner in a panic.
Richard, I’ve sunk you. We’re finished.
When Els calmed down enough to give the details, Bonner just laughed.
Peter, are you shitting me? Meyerbeer? That piece of fluff? It’s a damn love story.
It’s John of Leiden, Matthias, the siege. Everyone’s going to think we ripped it off.
Your point? Bonner asked. Of course it’s a rip-off! The cave paintings of Lascaux were a rip-off. Everyone who’s ever made anything is ripping off somebody, living or dead.
More fires followed, which Bonner had the time of his life running around putting out. He turned an angry cast uprising into a cathartic breakthrough. In three days of shuttle diplomacy, he resolved an ego war between the conductor and the choral director. He threw the crew’s continuous litany of insults and injuries into Münster’s cauldron and let the flavors simmer.
Now Els settles in to watch the master work an eleventh-hour miracle on the second act. Bonner channels the scene as if he’d been there when it first unfolded, four and a half centuries ago. The prophet Matthias and his raven-haired wife Divara stand in a plaza blue with night. The music is an ethereal vesper. They and their disciple, John of Leiden, strike a pact with Knipperdollinck, the leader of the guilds. Together, the men dash through the streets, urging the populace to repent. And in one quick fantasia, the Anabaptists occupy Town Hall.
The council takes no arms against the uprising. They mean to exploit the chaos for their own ends. They pass a law protecting liberty of conscience. The rebels rise up ascendant, and sanity is finished.
A brass fanfare launches the crowd into a midnight saturnalia. They tear through the cathedral smashing paintings and sculptures. To a deep, carnal surge in the strings, they set the city library ablaze. Matthias sings his scourging aria, Get out, you godless ones, and never come back! In the dark auditorium, the tune again sounds to Els like a gift from nowhere, a thing he wrote from dictation.
The chorus picks up where the aria leaves off. By scene’s end no one is left in the city but the Children of God. They make the rounds, pilgrims of the future, greeting each other as Brother and Sister. They sing, a community forging itself anew on pure love. Els springs from his seat and staggers up the aisle to hear how the madness sounds at the back of the house. It sounds good. Scary good. Even inspired.
Knipperdollink, Matthias, and John celebrate inside the seized palace. In a noble trio, they praise the divine plan that has handed them an entire city. From a balcony above a crowded square, Knipperdollink decrees that all property will be held in common, in warehouses, to be given to the poor. The crowd takes up the decree in a gathering fugue. Those who object are seized by soldiers and led away.
On the thrust stage, a solo messenger sings of the spread of the millennial dream across the north. Scarcely a village or town where the torch is not glowing in secret. . But in fact, Münster is surrounded. A coalition of neighboring states sends armies and digs earthworks. Els paces in the aisle, watching the noose close around his breakaway city. The siege music needs more horns — he can hear that now — more glee for the Prince’s armies, closing in on the believers. But the measures are set, and they seem to be flying.
On the city ramparts, Matthias receives an Easter order from God. The world’s end is under way. He leads a handful of men on a sortie against the entrenched invaders. They’re cut into bloody chunks and scattered for vultures. Poetry, prophecy, and slaughter run together in an interlude so beautiful Els can’t believe he wrote it.
The city devolves to John, the bastard, failed tailor. When the man sings, his words almost don’t matter. From childhood, he has loved only theater. He has wasted years writing, producing, and performing plays, acting the hero in his innermost fantasies. And now fate gives him an entire city as a stage on which to turn that fantasy real.