Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany

Wagner (Tristan, Act II) and all after him with the dark metaphors in which such tales of shadowy obsession traditionally are couched. (Hymnen an die Nacht.)

      It occurs to me that the original mythologic/historic basis for The Phantom of the Opera is quite probably the death of Von Carolsfeld, Wagner’s first, twenty-five-year-old Tristan. The Munich Opera had already made Tristan und Isolde a thing of gossip, well before its first performance, by abandoning it after an untoward fifty-odd rehearsals, even after the music had already been published and various children, such as Nietzsche [fifteen at the time] and King Ludwig [Prince back then], were playing it on their pianos and waiting on pins and needles for an actual performance.

      Six weeks after the actual, first, 1866, royal command performance of the legendarily “unperformable” opera, Von Carolsfeld, devoted to Wagner, died, presumably of typhus, the fever exacerbated during the opera’s brief, royal run (that young King Ludwig had finally commanded in the notoriously cold and draughty wings, where, dripping with sweat after the exertions of Act II, Von Carolsfeld had to lie in the cold (though it was June), waiting for the even more taxing demands of Act III. Von Carolsfeld (Ludwig Schnorr) died raving, believing he was Tristan and calling for Wagner to heal him. (The rather horrid symptoms of his very unpleasant death make it sound more like a case of galloping syphilis. And Wagner and Cosima were both distraught.) But theater gossip was that there’d been some sexual relationship between the rather heavy, hard-working young tenor (probably not true, since Von Carolsfeld’s wife, Malvina, who played Isolde in the same production, was equally devoted to Wagner. But that just made it stranger). One of the reasons for the sexual rumor, however, was that before general rehearsals had begun, the difficulty of the part had obliged Wagner to spend some weeks closeted alone with the young man (whose voice was wonderful and whose enthusiasm was boundless—but whose sight-reading left something to be desired), working with him on the difficult chromaticisms of the Herculeanly taxing part—a most unusual practice that only added to the mythos when, a month and a half later, he died so unexpectedly and unpleasantly.

      But, displaced onto a woman, this is probably the Ur-version behind both The Phantom and its Ur-version, George du Maurier’s melodrama Trilby (1894).

      But little or none of that makes it into the Broadway show.

      At any rate, when the music of the night finally got over with, and the lovers were safely off together, and the Phantom had done his last and poignant disappearing act, and we were squeezing up the crowded theater aisle, over the red carpet and between the maroon seats, my daughter (from the height of her new, week-old fifteen years of maturity) told me: “You know, I think Raoul was … well, just a pain. She should have gone off with the Phantom.”

      I laughed. “Well, that’s what they wanted you to feel. So I guess the show was a success …?”

      “It was okay,” she allowed, as the first cool air from outside finally reached us over the crowd ahead, squeezing before us, around us, into the lobby. “It was sort of silly, though. The story, I mean … I mean, every time stupid, dumb Raoul came on, I just wanted to scream!”

      Then there was only squeezing; and no more talking for a while. But as we hurried up 44th Street toward Eighth Avenue, looking for a midnight cab, I wondered how to explain to Iva that, in historical/allegorical terms, Christine really had gone off with the dangerous, obsessive Phantom, and not with shallow, reactionary Raoul after all. If you take the Phantom as a demonized symbol for the Wagnerian concept of the artist, fighting for possession of Christine’s soul, then, really, in terms of modernist history, things had worked out exactly as Iva’d wished. And the single line of show music, which, that night, was all I’d managed to retain once the curtain had come down, kept playing through my mind, with all its Oedipal edge a-glitter, as Iva and I moved past the theater posters in their glass frames along the wall of the Milford Plaza; “He’s here, the Phantom of the Opera … I am the Phantom of the Opera …!”

      A couple of days later I recreated Judy’s birthday breakfast for John Del Gaizo. (Iva: “How come we’re doing everything so fancy, these days?” Me: “Oh, I don’t know. I just feel like it.” Iva: “Me too! Me too—don’t stop. Could I have some more smoked salmon?” Which tickled Big Del Gaizo Fellow, who had another glass of champagne.) Then, a few days later, while in the nest of my office I worked maniacally at finishing up the last section of the Camera Obscura interview for Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (which interview I’m quite proud of!), John came up and packed stuff for me—a twenty-five pound box of journals and manuscripts to be Federal Expressed up to Boston and a hundred-twenty-five pound box of books/clothes/cooking utensils/general-stuff for me in Amherst.

      Then Iva and Bumper (the cat) went back to Iva’s mother’s, and the next morning I went down to the bus below Grand Central, rode out to La Guardia, then flew to Erie, Pennsylvania, to deliver a cut-down version of my “Introduction to Deconstruction” lecture² for the Mercyhurst College “academic celebration.” It went over pretty well—and I kind of fell in love with the blue-collar town.

      What else? Just the lectures I guess, first off in Lowell, then again, last weekend, in Philadelphia at the meeting of the Associated Writing Programs of America—I sent you the booklet. But its dry account of panels and programs masks some interesting happenings. First off, the overall theme was a celebration of Allen Ginsberg. Though I’ve been in the same room with him a couple of times, and though we have many mutual friends (and once a mutual landlord named Chuck Bergman whom both of us, I believe, were occasionally going to bed with), we’ve never been introduced.

      At the upstairs reception after the Gay/Lesbian Panel, then, I was a bit surprised with the scraggly bearded Professor Ginsberg (he’s taken John Ashbery’s place as Professor of Poetry in the City University System), in his modest brown suit and tie, came up to me and simply said: “Hello, Delany. How’ve you been?” then launched into a chat about the Cherry Valley Farm, the Naropa Institute (that he runs with our mutual friend, Anne Waldman), etc.³ Finally he reached into his canvas shoulder bag and handed me a flyer for a series of readings he was putting on, mostly of black poets.

      I give him points.

      It looks like quite a program he and Gwendolyn Brooks have put together there.

      One of the most pleasant people at the AWP was Honor (Memoir) Moore. The first night we were there, after most of the panelists went out to dinner at a very good—but crashingly expensive—Japanese place called, incongruously, “Ziggy’s,” Honor and I snuck off together to the Hershey Hotel’s cabaret, and heard a couple of her old friends from Yale perform some standard show tunes quite brilliantly.

      Then we went to a reception for them, where the food the hotel supplied was far better than the hors d’oeuvres it had gotten together for the school teachers. A lot of old Yale people had shown up for the evening. And in the course of sitting around chatting, I realized I was talking to Rhoda Levine, director of Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which I wrote you about a couple of years back, when I was at Cornell. (I sent you a copy of the interview I did with the composer one Sunday morning at the home of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).⁴

      Mayhaps you remember, while I very much appreciated the music, I hated the production. In the course of prodding Ms. Levine, who is a very gutsy, New York/Academic theater person, I got some hair-raising stories about the production that certainly put a different light on some of it.

      One of the reasons the thing ever got to Lincoln Center at all was because it came with an assembled cast of pretty professional singers. But the New York State Theater’s stage is huge, and the whole thing had to be revamped for a playing area almost three times the size of any they’d performed on before. And it was assumed that they were also not going to need any rehearsal time to speak of—when what Rhoda actually wanted (she explained to me, as she leaned forward in her purple slacks and purple woolly top) was at least a hundred hours—i.e., two weeks—of rehearsal time in the new theater.

      Well, when the new opera was booked in, there simply wasn’t a 100 hours of rehearsal time available.

      The