Detail from a November 16, 1992, New Yorker cover by Arnold Roth
In the middle of a performance of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre at the Metropolitan Opera the prompter dies of strychnine poisoning under the horrified eyes of the leads. Rudolf Salz, a former Wagnerian tenor himself, was filling in for the regular prompter when he took a swig of whiskey from a bottle he had snaffled from the dressing room of Elsa Vaughn, soprano and one of the singers who witnessed his death.
Opera singers are a notoriously strange breed, tempestuous, temperamental, erratic. When a group of them assemble on stage for a performance anything is likely to happen—and frequently does.
Detective-Lieutenant Sam Quentin is given the information about the whiskey by Elsa's business manager, Howard Stark, who tells him of other attacks on the soprano, and Quentin's investigation has to include the possibility of the wrong person being poisoned. There's also the unsolved death of Ivy Ecker, which happened the previous year and may have a link to the death of Salz; she had frustrated ambitions to be a singer, but was cursed with a terrible voice. Her husband, Karl Ecker, is an up-and-coming Wagnerian tenor who was singing in Die Walküre opposite Elsa. At least three of the singers who were on stage when Salz was poisoned, Elsa, Karl, and Hilda Semple, another soprano who understudies Elsa and is impatiently waiting to take over major roles herself, were coached by the victim.
Salz was once a famous tenor and idolized for his performances of Wagner, but was put into a concentration camp by the Nazis and came out a broken and bitter man. Because of his intimate knowledge of these particular operas, he worked with many singers taking on the highly demanding roles, but ended up on bad terms with most of them. Even his protégé, Hilda Semple, was unhappy because she was under contract to him to hand over fifty percent of her performance earnings for ten years. Suspects are not thin on the ground for his death, but Quentin is having a more difficult time coming up with reasons for the attacks on Elsa that also tie in with the deaths of Ivy and Salz. When a second murder happens, again there is a question of who the intended victim was.
It's a frustrating investigation for Quentin, every time he thinks he's ruled out a suspect it turns out not to be the case and he still has a wide open field. The number of suspects isn't large but the connections among them are more tangled than the story in a Wagner opera. The DeBrett family is smack in the middle of it all - Stanley is a very successful financier and major supporter of the Met Opera, his sister was Ivy Ecker and a piece from the collection of antique family jewels that disappeared at the time of her death shows up in this case. Stanley's second wife, Edwina, wields a lot of social power because of the DeBrett money, and Jane, Stanley's daughter from his first marriage, desperately wants to become an opera singer and is a pupil of Elsa's.
"Patron of the arts. The wife of one of the largest contributors to the Metropolitan Opera Company who is also a member of the board. Power behind the throne."
Quentin grows more concerned over Elsa's safety and keeps probing into the lives of the suspects as further incidents occur. His boss is getting heat from the city's bigwigs and the press, and isn't happy.
This is one of the Library of Congress Classic Crime re-issues and has absolutely nothing to do with the holidays, but was a lovely December mystery read anyway. The puzzle part of the book isn't its strength, what makes it stand out is the intimate knowledge of the opera world, specifically the Met Opera and all the people who are part of that milieu from the superstars to the lowly hangers-on.
The author, Helen Traubel, was a major star at the Met in the 1940s and 50s, specializing in the Wagnerian repertoire, and even rated a page one New York Times obituary at her death in the 1970s. She apparently had some help with this book from Harold Q. Masur, who wrote hard-boiled crime fiction, which is slightly ironic as this story has some fun at the expense of the noir style so popular at the time. Traubel must have done much of the writing herself, descriptions of the characters and their relationships; and descriptions of what it takes to make an opera singer and the work that goes into learning a role, how an organization such as the Met runs, what is expected of those connected with the opera company, and the humor are hers.
Here's a description of what happens when one of the singers stumbles into a shocking scene:
Powered by twenty years spent in developing her lungs, larynx, and diaphragm, fortified by countless Valkyrie war cries, it was an awe-inspiring sound that must have agitated seismographs across half the continent. For the first time in operatic history a dramatic soprano hit an F above high C.
Traubel also shows a lot of sympathy and respect for her characters, she knows better than anyone the kind of expectations and strains they are under. A thoroughly enjoyable mystery in an unusual setting, and it's wonderful to have it back in print.
(The Metropolitan Opera Murders was first published in 1951 and re-issued this year by Library of Congress Crime Classics with a foreword by the Librarian of Congress, Carla D. Hayden, and an introduction by Leslie S. Klinger.)
No comments:
Post a Comment