La fundación constituida con el legado del mecenas Francis Cornish ha decidido acometer uno de sus primeros proyectos: la representación de Arturo de Britania, una ópera inconclusa de E.T.A. Hoffmann. La encargada de realizar la tarea será Hulda Schnakenburg, una brillante y peculiar estudiante de doctorado, que contará con la ayuda de Simon Darcourt en la redacción del libreto. Desgraciadamente los trabajos se complican de tal manera que los involucrados en el proyecto parecen estar representando el argumento de la ópera y hacen buena la cita de Hoffmann que dice «La lira de Orfeo abre las puertas del otro mundo». En esta novela Davies muestra su extraordinario conocimiento de las artes escénicas plasmando con especial brillantez los entresijos de las producciones teatrales y musicales, a la vez que reflexiona sobre cómo a menudo, y pese a la apariencia de educación y urbanidad que nos envuelve, nuestros más bajos instintos se imponen y nos conducen a actuar insospechadamente. Una brillante conclusión de la Trilogía de Cornish en la que el talento narrativo del autor volverá a asombrar tanto a sus fieles lectores como a quien se acerque a su obra por primera vez.

I reached this by way of Hoffmann, of course, he being a minor but constant obsession of mine, with additional interest-weight added by way of Orpheus and Davies. I meant to read it back in my first or second year of undergrad and even took it out of the library. In fact I think I got pretty far into it because I remembered the "pastiche/pistache" conversation before exams hit or school ended and I had to return the book to the library. Despite that, I talked about this book a lot. Really, it was very disproportional for a book that I hadn't read and that no one else was talking about, meaning I deliberately brought it up in the conversation. Given that I read [b:The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr|594852|The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr|E.T.A. Hoffmann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1375745289s/594852.jpg|581567] earlier this year and only heightened my Hoffmania it really seemed high time to take it out again. Another university library, but the exact same edition, conveniently.

I've got to note, before I go on though, that I once had a professor of Arthurian literature who was also a Canadian Lit prof (which, I mean, perfect marriage for this book, right?). He's since been awarded both the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada. And someone in my class, I don't think it was me, asked him during a break about Roberston Davies, and I just clearly remember him saying that he didn't find Davies that interesting. He asked, why would he care to read about upper-middle class white people?

That got me, and that haunted me, and especially when I started reading this book again I couldn't stop thinking of his remark. It made me dislike everybody to start with, and given that I haven't read [b:The Rebel Angels|74405|The Rebel Angels (Cornish Trilogy, #1)|Robertson Davies|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387741372s/74405.jpg|1336027] or [b:What's Bred in the Bone|265767|What's Bred in the Bone (Cornish Trilogy, #2)|Robertson Davies|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328019283s/265767.jpg|2994820] (Davies trilogies aren't hard-sequential trilogies) I didn't have much in the way of back-story that might've potentially made me fonder. For the first half I was thinking mostly about how I wasn't in love with the voice of Hoffmann's ghost the way I wanted to be (not nearly frenetic enough for the Hoff, but I suppose limbo will do that) and how these characters were, in actuality, not that interesting. And yes, in quite a lot of way they're really not. But then by the second half of the book I was craving more, and luxuriating in the book, really sinking in and looking forward to whatever time I could find to keep reading, and there's a part of me that's really sad that I won't have more of it to look forward to reading before bed tonight. (I bought a copy of The Rebel Angels at a bookstore just the other day though I've got a few library books to read before I can get to it, and part of me thinks I should savour.) I don't know how that happened. I don't know what Davies did. All I know is that suddenly even though Al Crane's appearance is in the style of this very-Canadian American caricature, it hollowed me out inside when he talked about Mabel, "a twenty-two year old woman," wanting her mother. Christ, Davies, hold nothing back. ( )

Summary: The project of a gifted but difficult graduate student to realize an unfinished opera of E. T. A. Hoffman uncovers darker and hidden aspects in a number of the central characters who join in undertaking the project.

"The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld." -E. T. A. Hoffmann

E. T. A. Hoffmann was one of the major authors in the 19th century Romantic movement. He was something of a polymath who also wrote libretti to a number of operas, and composed Undine and other musical pieces. His greatest claim to musical fame probably was that three of his stories inspired Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. He died in 1822 at the age of 46, a victim of alcoholism and syphillis.

In this novel, the third in Davies' Cornish Trilogy (but can be read on its own), a difficult but talented graduate student, Hulda Schnakenburg ("Schnak") has proposed as her doctoral project to complete an unfinished opera by Hoffmann, Arthur of Britain or The Magnanimous Cuckold. The Cornish Foundation, established by a bequest of Francis Cornish have been approached with a request to fund what sounds like a long shot. But Arthur Cornish, perhaps already showing symptoms of the mumps which will render him sterile, forcefully persuades his fellow trustees, Maria (his gypsy wife), Simon Darcourt, a priest turned scholar and friend and biographer of Francis, Clem Hollier, an owlish scholar, and Geraint Powell, a charming actor friend, to proceed.

In deciding to make this music, the characters embark on a course that opens the door to "the underworld" of their own lives, facing them with choices of how they will proceed. For "Schnak" this comes in the form of the woman who becomes her advisor, Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot. Through both her musical mentoring, and a love affair between these women, "Schnak" comes out of the protective shell she developed to cope with a rigid religious upbringing and some abusive encounters with boyish men, to come into her own as a composer and a woman.

Others in the Cornish Foundation face underworlds of their own. When life imitates art and Maria conceives a child through a strange one night fling with actor-friend Powell, Arthur must decide how he will respond to his own cuckolding. Will he be "magnanimous" as well. Maria, the daughter of gypsies must decide between simply keeping up appearances as the wealthy wife of author, or assert the "Rabelasian" within her, to also be the daughter of her mother who lives in the basement "underworld" of her building.

Simon, the priest friend and "fixer" is perhaps the most interesting character. He is writing a biography of Francis Cornish, one with a big blank space in the middle of it. Along the way, he must decide whether the opportunity to gain this information (and as it turns out, the critical insight into his friend and a major art find) warrants theft and some devious maneuvering.

He is also the main librettist for the opera and here as well, he somewhat deviously "borrows" much of his work from a nineteenth century author. He must decide whether he will be the relatively colorless, competent and understanding friend, or at times act "the fool." Simon is disillusioned as a priest, but his keen sense of the human condition makes him the ideal narrator of this tale, seeing as he does, both his own, and other characters' "underworlds," and sometimes helping them see those "underworlds" for themselves.

There are several "breaks" in Simon's narrative when "ETAH in Limbo" speaks. This is the ghost of Hoffmann from the underworld, reflecting on his life, and the progress of the realization of his unfinished project. It is a curious device, that Davies uses, I think, to give us insight into Hoffmann, into private lives of the characters, including the love-making between Dahl-Soot and Schnak, and as well as what Hoffman thinks of the work he never finished.

All this happens as the project moves forward from composition to staging of the actual opera. Along the way, we get an inside glimpse of an opera production--staging, singers, director, costumers, the composer and librettists, and the most overlooked of all, the benefactors, who discover the painful realities of having lots of money to give away. Davies' experience as a scholar at the University of Toronto also comes through in the scenes where "Schnak" comes up for her doctoral defense and he portrays a truly believable episode of the kind of academic hazing these rites of academic passage involve.

Robertson Davies was one of Canada's best know novelists of the 20th century, passing away in 1995. Reading this work takes us into the Canadian artistic circles of Toronto and Stratford with which he was obviously well acquainted. There is a combination of humor and deep psychological insight in his writing. His plot moves forward as much in the development of his characters and their relations as in the action of the story, leaving us alternately to delight and to muse as Davies plays with a lyre of words to open doors into the underworlds of our lives. ( )

As is only right and proper, this third part of the trilogy ties up the threads from the previous two parts, bringing us back to the foreground narrative in late-20th century Ottawa and to the heirs of Francis Cornish. The artistic focus this time is a project to realise an opera on the subject of King Arthur which E.T.A. Hoffmann left unfinished at his death. This of course provides the trilogy with a suitably spectacular grand finale, but it also gives Davies the opportunity to play around with a lot of interesting corners of the philosophy of art. We are made to think about what it means to realise an unfinished work, the relationship between music and libretto, artistic integrity versus effective theatre, artist versus patron, and much more. At the same time, of course, there is a plot, and the relationships between the people sponsoring the opera production are seen to be mirrored by the plot of the opera in ways that they find mortifyingly absurd. E.T.A. Hoffmann pops up to comment on the action from the limbo to which unrealised artists are consigned, Kater Murr becomes an allegory of bourgeois Canadian taste, we get some loving caricatures of the PhD examiner from hell and other academic absurdities...

Probably more than a little over the top - but that's as it should be when we're dealing with opera - a very clever and entertaining conclusion to the trilogy. ( )

Not my favorite Davies but still a pleasure. The books are about a world of academia, arts and ideals that seems in decline, if not dead. I would have enjoyed living that life and settle for visiting it. ( )