Festival

CONTENTS

Dustjacket

Title Page

Start Reading Festival

Composition: Sowing

Performance: Reaping

Encore: Monday

Critique: Truth

Dedication & Copyright

More books by André Jute & friends

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Festival

André Jute

When the formidable Iron Curtain conductor Vlaklos decides to defect to the West at the Adelaide Festival of Arts, consequent events electrify an elite group related through their loves, their hatreds, their secrets and their ambitions. Lovers and enemies alike have their price.

The rising impresario Ransome is torn between his fear for the life of the great conductor and his duty to his friend O’Neal, whose re-election as Premier depends on the smooth running of the Festival. A complication is Ransome’s long friendship with Kerensky, the KGB’s cultural watchdog over Vlaklos: if the conductor defects, Kerensky will be shot. Ransome also has to cope with the shifting political pressures applied to him from every side. All this while trying to run the largest arts festival in the world, with nobody to turn to except Mellie, his fiancée. And even she, with the benefit of having the great plots of the world explained to me over breakfast by her communications-tycoon father, cannot detect all the currents before the last night of the Festival, when they converge explosively.

The New York Times hailed André Jute’s literary début, Reverse Negative, as wild but exciting and the London Evening News thought it so bizarre, it’s probably all true. In FESTIVAL he brings together his intimate experience of the high-powered performing arts world, his inside knowledge of the security apparats of the world and his abiding love of Adelaide with the terse narrative, pointed dialogue and sharp-focus characterization that elicited such high praise around the world for his writing. The resulting novel lifts the lid off the world’s premier arts festival to show the deals that sustain it, the careers it makes and breaks, the men and women of the city itself and from all over the world whose lives are changed by it. FESTIVAL displays all the suspense mounting to a shattering crescendo — and the astounding twist-in-the-tail — that is the hallmark of this highly original writer of elegant, credible and truly memorable fiction.

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Festival

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André Jute

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CoolMain Press

www.coolmainpress.com

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COMPOSITION: SOWING

Remember, in any event,

I was a haphazard amorist

Caught on the unlikely angles

Of an awkward arrangement. Weren’t you?

Ern Malley: PALINODE

from The Darkening Ecliptic

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The winged white building soared on the sound of Beethoven’s Eroica. It was easy to imagine, even from the red-plush and indigenous-wood interior of its largest auditorium, Festival Hall itself. Vlaklos brought the baton down to within ten centimeters of the low rail around the podium, not a millimeter more, not a millimeter less; genius has no need of sloppy craftsmanship to prove its creativity. It was the last beat. A triumph. He let the point of the baton rest on the rail and nodded unsmilingly to this member and that of the orchestra who had pleased him, six in all. At one who displeased him he glared and the man dropped his eyes: two such glares in any one year could get a man dismissed to the outer darkness where lesser conductors snapped up Vlaklos’s rejects. Vlaklos, and the orchestra, ignored the applause behind him for two full minutes. Then Vlaklos turned and looked out over the audience as if aware of them for the first time. He had not bowed when he had come on, simply started conducting. Now he allowed the applause to wash over him for another moment. They stood, were standing when he turned around. Vlaklos made one brief bow. He did not wave to the orchestra or bring the leader forward for a bow; he never did. The distinguished audience shouted themselves hoarse. Vlaklos walked into the wings with dignity, looking neither left nor right, giving the audience no further recognition. He heard the calls for an encore but paid them no heed.

In the wings a man grasped him by the arm and swung him around so that some of the drops of sweat on Vlaklos’s forehead flew onto the other man’s shirtfront.

Vlaklos, they’re begging for you.

Vlaklos hated Kerensky for being tall, blond and impossibly beautiful. But he hated him more for being Russian. You mangle my mother tongue. Let us speak Russian instead, Vlaklos said in Russian. With Kerensky, as a calculated insult, Vlaklos always managed to speak Russian at least twice as badly as Kerensky spoke Vlaklos’s obscure mother tongue. Vlaklos took the cultural commissar’s hand from his sleeve, looked at it like some suspect fish and dropped it distastefully.

Comrade Conductor, must I again point out to you your duty? Kerensky at his silkiest, ignoring the most gross insult.

Vlaklos stared at the younger man but said nothing. One day, when he was ready to die, he would clench both hands and hit this blond abomination squarely in the testicles.

And, Comrade Conductor, the choice of a symphony dedicated to a warmongering imperialist like Napoleon is, even here, not suitable.

Vlaklos nodded and waited a moment so that his rage would not make his voice thin and angry. I am Vlaklos, Kerensky. You and your kind live on my back like fleas. If I allow you to make my choices for me, I shall no longer be Vlaklos and you will be out of a soft living.

I request you courteously, Comrade, to take a second bow.

If I milked applause to the last dregs, then, too, I would no longer be Vlaklos and soon the applause would no longer come.

Kerensky’s face colored. You have lived on adoration for so many decades you’re glutted with it! What do you know of the people? Listen to them, even these people, listen! He took Vlaklos’s elbow again and swung the conductor around violently. They want you. They paid. They shall have you. I, your superior, I order you to take another bow!

Vlaklos tore his arm free. Kerensky, he said, in English now, you are more stupid even than I thought. What will you do if I refuse: take me out of the stage door and shoot me among the dustbins?

Vlaklos walked away quickly. Behind him the Russian stood thoughtfully, then smiled slightly, listening to the applause still echoing for Vlaklos.

What was that all about? a stagehand asked.

Kerensky smiled mysteriously, the smile his wife thought he practiced in secret in front of the mirror.

Fiery little guy, the stagehand added. But he sure knows his music.

Yes, Kerensky agreed. And if he would only stick to being the world’s greatest conductor, we’d all have a great deal less trouble. Kerensky had a perfect command of English idiom, as of several languages, including Vlaklos’s — when he cared to display it.

With the orchestra travelled a man whose sole function was to wait in the wings to offer Vlaklos a towel and a glass of plum brandy at intervals and after performances. Tonight, despite the apparent control of his exchange with Kerensky, the conductor was so disturbed that he walked straight past the outstretched towel and glass, not seeing them.

Kerensky had never before dared order him to do anything.

In his dressing room Vlaklos picked up a towel from a stack on the corner of his dressing table and wiped his face and the back of his neck. He poured a thimble of plum brandy and swallowed the fiery spirit. And another.

Never!

He was Vlaklos. Flunkeys did not order him around. Not even high-level flunkeys like Kerensky.

Remember your predecessor, Comrade Kerensky, Vlaklos said to the mirror. He was recalled between one night and the next dawn. Siberia? An unmarked grave? Does even your exalted seniority, your bolshoi cheroy status, tell you his fate?

Then it struck him that quite possibly Kerensky had ordered the fate of the previous cultural commissar. Vlaklos sat down, deflated, feeling his age. Yet, even Kerensky, definitely a bolshoi cheroy, a big boil in the Moscow euphemism, had never before dared order Vlaklos to do something. And in public at that.

Was Kerensky right? Petty vanity? No! All his life, even before the war, when he was unknown, he bowed but once and then left the stage; even then he gave no encores.

No. There was a change in the air. They thought Vlaklos old, at the end of his usefulness. Soon they would retire him and take their vengeance for three and a half decades of taunts subtle and brazen. Even under the philistine Stalin, Vlaklos had never been able to keep his mouth closed about the iniquities of the non-kulturny and pseudo-kulturny swine, even then his enormous talent protected him.

Vlakos considered dying. He did not fear death. During the war, for a long time after the Germans killed Katarina he wished he too would die and had actively courted death by always being the first of his partisan band out into the open.

But they would also take the music from him. In another three, perhaps four years, he would have a perfect Eroica. It would not be too much to ask for a year to enjoy it. Five years more of music, then they could kill him.

Kerensky was the signal that he would not have those five years. Melbourne, Canberra, the Opera House at Sydney, then home and the end. He poured more plum brandy and called ‘Herein’ to the knock on the door.

Maestro. Magnificent. What can I say?

Vlaklos liked Bruce Ransome. If he were asked, if he considered such things, Vlaklos may have concluded that the younger man, less than half his own age, was now his only friend. Fourteen years ago Vlaklos, producing Wagner’s Ring for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, entered so spiritedly into argument with Sir Rudolf Bing (then at his most chillingly polite peak as supremo of the institution he had rebuilt virtually from ashes to greatness) that he had lost his command of both English and German. Bing, of course, never lost command of anything. Ransome, a Harvard sophomore doing vacation work, was called in to translate — his maternal grandmother who came from Vlaklos’s obscure corner of the Balkans had taught him the language at her knee. From translation Ransome proceeded unobtrusively to mediation between the titans. It was the start of his career in the arts. In later years both Vlaklos and Bing, long since reconciled, claimed to have discovered him and given him his first leg up.

You could say the second violins were half a beat slow at least once. Another conductor might have said it drily, as a put-down. Not Vlaklos. He did not joke about music and especially not about Beethoven’s music.

Ransome was not abashed. In the midst of so much perfection, who would notice but you, Maestro? He waved it away.

No, Vlaklos said, giving him a glass of plum brandy. Perfection is not so much or so little. A thing is perfect or it is not. There is no in-between. Tonight’s Eroica was very good — I do not think anybody alive has ever heard better. But it was not perfect.

Ransome nodded, sipping the spirit. Let Vlaklos split the very last half-beat as often as the great man wished. Ransome, in the audience, observed not only his guests in his box but the rest of them, all enraptured. He too knew something about the quality of music — say one per cent as much as Vlaklos — but that was enough to know a superb performance when he heard it.

Vlaklos reached up to push Ransome gently in the chest. Ransome stepped back and found the chair behind his knees. He sat down, now level with Vlaklos. While he was conducting Vlaklos seemed nine feet tall, a shining, vital youth. When he stepped from the podium the pumpkin coach waited: he turned into an elderly man, still vital but completely bald and only five feet tall. Away from the podium only Vlaklos’s black eyes seemed eternally youthful — or old as all age and all sin, Bing once told Ransome in a rare mood of expansiveness. Ransome held out his glass when Vlaklos gestured with the bottle; he did not object to Vlaklos’s imperious gestures. If shrines were ever built to conductors, Ransome would make annual pilgrimage to that built for Vlaklos. Of all the others, so many of them, only Karajan was in the same class as Vlaklos.

Maestro, you opened my Festival gloriously. A quarter-beat in the second violins, once…

Half a beat, Vlaklos said implacably. I shall deal with the man.

Christ, Ransome thought, one violin out of all the second violins. No wonder I didn’t hear a bloody thing. He was not surprised that Vlaklos had heard.

I was thinking just now, Vlaklos continued, how long it would take me to perfect the Eroica. He poured again.

Ransome held his hand over his glass. He long since learned that two glasses of the fiery high-proof spirit was his limit.

Remember New York and Budapest, Maestro? I don’t have your head. Why don’t you return on the last night of my Festival and close it as gloriously as you opened it but with a perfect Eroica? It was a shot in the dark. He would have to reschedule the best-selling author speaking to a sell-out crowd in Festival Hall on the last night, three weeks away, to another auditorium and, if there was no other auditorium (there would not be, not with over six hundred events in three weeks in a city of only a million souls), put up a marquee across the road on the army parade ground next to Government House. The only acoustic milieu good enough for Vlaklos was Festival Hall. But he would do it somehow. It would be a triumph for him and his Festival.

Nein Jünge, Vlaklos switched to German which, with English, is the language of international music. You know Vlaklos does not die in the same place twice. The conductor watched as the younger man made an exaggerated grimace of disappointment and drained his glass with a high elbow, mimicking solace from the bottle. Ransome spoilt the effect somewhat by spluttering on the plum brandy. But, on the other hand, how would you like to have me permanently?

How do you mean, permanently?

Always. So you don’t have to go beg Sovietexport and the Culture Ministry every time you want me to appear, even after I myself have agreed.

The beautiful tan Ransome acquired in the sunny climate turned ashen. Say it right out, Maestro! He almost strangled on the words.

I should like to come over to the West, Vlaklos said.

Defect. Flatly.

An ugly word. Music knows no borders. I will come to the West with my music— here Vlaklos tapped the side of his head —and I will come to you, here, after appearing at the last night of your Festival. I will say, ‘Here I am. I have made the most momentous step of my life with my friend Bruce Ransome.’ Then I shall start work on the perfect Eroica.

Jesus Christ! Ransome said, aghast but aware that Vlaklos mistook his horror for awe at the daring of the deed and for gratitude for the intended (but oh so misplaced!) sign of friendship.

The goddamn Soviets and all their satellites and allies, Ransome knew, would blackball him for the rest of his natural life if he helped Vlaklos defect and, what was worse, crowed about it. How the hell was an impresario of international festivals to function if he was cut off from half the performing arts world?

Not that Vlaklos was likely to understand…

Nor his other problem, the personal one. Oh damn! When, two years ago, he applied for the job of General Manager to the Trust and the biennial Festival, he did so more in the hope of getting a free trip to Australia if by some miracle he made the short list than under any delusion that a thirty-two-year-old assistant at the Edinburgh Festival would suddenly be elevated to the leadership of the largest and richest performing arts festival in the world. The management of festivals has a fuhrerprinzip, a drinking buddy told him in Edinburgh. It’s called seniority. Badger’s turn. Dead man’s shoes. You’re too young by twenty years. Nonetheless, Ransome was chosen. He had impressed with his Master’s in Business Administration from Harvard and with letters of commendation from important employers in the arts world starting with Bing and ending with the man in charge at Edinburgh. It was however made quite clear to him that he was on trial: one festival to make the grade or out. This was his one festival and it was a humdinger. He sweated blood for it. And now…

If Vlaklos cast a shadow over his festival by defecting on the last night, not even Ransome’s friendship with Rod O’Neal would save him. Ah yes, Rod... What did Mellie report her father as saying? Ransome had only been half-listening. Oh yes. J B Masters told his daughter that Premier O’Neal would be facing an Opposition much strengthened by the recent bad economic times while Party Leader O’Neal was already troubled by dissension in his own ranks that could quite easily become an open split before the election he was required, by law, to call before the end of the year. Ransome was not surprised that O’Neal had not told him any of this: Rod never discussed politics with him unless it affected the arts grants Ransome was directly interested in. But, if J B Masters said it was so, it was so. But why was it not been in JB’s newspapers? Never mind that! O’Neal, harried by the left wing of his party for surrounding himself with intellectuals and spending fortunes of the State’s money on the arts, would not take kindly to the kind of embarrassment Vlaklos’s defection would cause. The left wing of the party...

My friend Rod O’Neal will be the first to kick my ass right out, Ransome thought. And he’ll be right. I will have betrayed his trust and friendship.

Now to tell Vlaklos, who was looking at him, waiting for him to express his gratitude. It would not do to explain everything else, all the other factors, to the conductor.

You go to Melbourne, Canberra and then Sydney, don’t you?

Yes.

The West will welcome you, Maestro, and reward you richly. I will welcome you. But I think you should do it in Canberra, the national capital. They know how to deal with those things there, you understand. I have no official status here.

Vlaklos shook his head. My Bruce, I do not know them. I know you. You will find a way to do it.

In Canberra, Maestro, they have experts in—

Experts, pah! Kerensky is an expert. Your Canberra experts are carbon copies. What do they know of music? Nothing! To them I’m so much meat. Just another job they do without commitment or passion. If they make a mistake, they still have a job. But I have to go back and be shot! Vlaklos tossed his brandy down.

Ransome was startled by the old man’s vehemence. Then why take the risk at all? What— He was about to ask what the West could offer Vlaklos that he did not already receive from the Soviets but Vlaklos interrupted him with an explosion.

"Because I’ll be shot anyway! Damned if I do and damned if I don’t,