"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

The tinkling of falling mirror glass had hardly ceased when a harsh and gravelly voice hailed her from her
office. "Bravo!"

She dropped the practice tripod and whirled, aghast. "Matt!"

"Just thought it was time to come in. But if you want to bawl a little, I'll go back out and wait. No?"
Without looking directly at her face or pausing for a reply, he tossed a packet on the table. "There it is.
Honey, if I could write a ballet score like your Nightingale and the Rose, I wouldn't care if my spine
was knotted in a figure eight."

"You're crazy," she muttered stonily, unwilling to admit that she was both pleased and curious. "You don't
know what it means to have once been able to pirouette, to balance en arabesque. And anyway"—she
looked at him from the comer of her eyes—"how could anyone tell whether the score's good? There's no
Finale as yet. It isn't finished."

"Neither is the Mona Lisa, Kublai Khan, or a certain symphony by Schubert."

"But this is different. A plotted ballet requires an integrated sequence of events leading up to a climax—to
a Finale. I haven't figured out the ending. Did you notice I left a thirty-eight-beat hiatus just before the
Nightingale dies? I still need a death song for her. She's entitled to die with a flourish." She couldn't tell
him about The Dream—that she always awoke just before that death song began.

"No matter. You'll get it eventually. The story's straight out of Oscar Wilde, isn't it? As I recall, the
student needs a red rose as admission to the dance, but his garden contains only white roses. A foolish, if
sympathetic, nightingale thrusts her heart against a thorn on a white rose stem, and the resultant ill-advised
transfusion produces a red rose...and a dead nightingale. Isn't that about all there is to it?"

"Almost. But I still need the nightingale's death song. That's the whole point of the ballet. In a plotted
ballet, every chord has to be fitted to the immediate action, blended with it, so that it supplements it,
explains it, unifies it, and carries the action toward the climax. That death song will make the difference
between a good score and a superior one. Don't smile. I think some of my individual scores are rather
good, though of course I've never heard them except on my own piano. But without a proper climax,
they'll remain unintegrated. They're all variants of some elusive dominating leitmotiv—some really
marvelous theme I haven't the greatness of soul to grasp. I know it's something profound and poignant,
like the liebestod theme in Tristan. It probably states a fundamental musical truth, but I don't think I'll
ever find it. The nightingale dies with her secret."

She paused, opened her lips as though to continue, and then fell moodily silent again. She wanted to go
on talking, to lose herself in volubility. But now the reaction of her struggle with the mirror was setting in,
and she was suddenly very tired. Had she ever wanted to cry? Now she thought only of sleep. But a
furtive glance at her wristwatch told her it was barely ten o'clock.

The man's craggy eyebrows dropped in an imperceptible frown, faint, yet craftily alert. "Anna, the man
who read your Rose score wants to talk to you about staging it for the Rose Festival—you know, the
annual affair in the Via Rosa."

"I—an unknown—write a Festival ballet?" She added with dry incredulity: "The Ballet Committee is in
complete agreement with your friend, of course?"