GRAND HOTEL
opera in four acts
David Hertzberg
—
Persons of the Drama
Upstairs:
Dauphin van Veen (variously “Veen”, “Van”, “van Veen”) - mezzo soprano (Mélisande, Cherubino, Urbain, Komponist)
faded, fallen divo, swashbuckler of yore, mercurial socialite and hotel regular, blue-blooded hemophiliac,
jewel thief, navigates and cavorts with the worlds of the upper and the lower, bequeaths sizzling plums of
star-studded hotel gossip to staff in exchange for kleptomaniacal impunity (Norman Maine, Fredric March,
John Bowers, John Barrymore, Tammuz, Adonis)
Norma Veen (always “Norma”, no relation, probably) - soprano
withering, reclusive divina of yesteryear, scion of meticulous beatification and vanity, checks in to hotel
to orchestrate her ritual comeback/adieu (lilting legacies of Desmond, Talmadge, Shearer [and Bellini,
Romani, Soumet, Callas], Garbo, [Gwili A., L. Vélez] Psyche, Ishtar, Pearls)
Dolores Cornelia Flower (“Dolly”) - high soprano (Olympia, Zerbinetta, Königin der Nacht)
young, loud, glamorous society lady and fabled scarlet starlet, recently widowed shortly before the
dotting of the i’s of her high profile divorce, grieving her recently deceased poodle (Harlow-Astor-Bow-
West-Thomas-smear, P. Hopkins Joyce, M. Montez, Agrippina, DeMille’s Delilah)
Mr. Walter Mann (“Wally”) - bass (with lithe, disincarnate falsetto)
hungry hotel patriarch who clave the stone and brought the water to the thirsty land, speaks through
appetite and soppingly prurient descriptions of foods, Man of the Pipes (Wallace Beery, various Walts, W.
Mulholland, F. Eaton, Leontius, lost Laestrygonian)
Lester Luria Gall - tenor (Spieltenor)
jaundiced, febrile, suppurating, logorrheic, incurably ill lover of clocks and time, subject of medical
experiments (Pliny, Tacitus, Josephus)
Ms. Eva Lamarre - mezzo soprano (or Zwischenfach with honk)
glitzy, lusty, laconic vaudevillian, saving la voix for the big show, liminal, shadowy figure who travels
between upstairs and downstairs (Dietrich [later years], Messalina, Piaf, Pythia, Pasiphaë)
—
Downstairs:
Cook & Friend (The Cooks):
mezzo soprano and baritone, respectively,
locked up in the sweltering kitchen, alternating turns cooling
off in the meat freezer, for which Friend maintains a strange affection
Rudy & Gus:
Rudy - tenor, front desk, guileless sentinel
Gus - countertenor, maintenance, amateur mortician
Bessie & Cordula:
Bessie - bass-baritone, lord of laundry (Proserpina, Enki)
Cordula - contralto, maid and manicurist of the Gilded Lily (Erichto)
Bunny & Flo:
soprano and tenor, respectively,
old sycophants who gawk and stargaze in the public
spaces of the hotel
Baldassare (“Baldi”) - silent,
waiter, bartender (Sisyphus, Charon, Pilot’s Doorman, Galla, von Stroheim)
Charlie (“Chuckles”, “Fat Chuck”) in HVAC - silent,
mostly in the boiler room, spoken of with awe, dread,
and unquenchable fascination (Arbuckle, S. Bowers, Minotaur, Moloch)
Ada - silent consort and plaything
of Eva in their everted Eden (Dietrich [Lola, Morocco])
Batteries of Yellow Journalists & Construction Workers, rendered in musical sounds
—
Banda - six staged musicians,
hired to distract from the noises of pervasive plumbing problems and resultant repair work on the pipes -
they perform in the lobby, the trattoria/lounge, the theater, and, throughout the course of the drama, scatter
and dislocate about the public and private spaces of the hotel:
Violin (doubling Ukulele)
Accordion
Cornet (doubling Piccolo Trumpet, Bass Trumpet, and Shofar)
Sousaphone (doubling Tuba, Piccolo Trombone, and Shofar)
Baritone Saxophone (doubling Alto Saxophone and Shofar)
Contrabassoon (doubling Bassoon and Shofar)
—
Setting:
A fabulous hotel, a space at once outside of time and suspended in a murky Golden Age snow globe.
An place of palace intrigue and hot decay, where everyone is thirsty and time is getting faster.
A photographic negative, a tangled, technicolor mosaic, a sculpture in relief.
—
Contents:
Act I.
[Cut to. Autopsía (seeing for oneself). Morning.]
i. A dark closet or attic-like space between the walls. Bessie and Cordula are covered in dust and bird
feathers, digging through a trunk for costumes. They discuss the night’s upcoming “movie” and strange
noises coming from HVAC. Bessie’s gut gurgles. Cordula reveals a discovered curiosity.
ii. In the kitchen the cooks take turns cooling off in the meat freezer, as they prepare various
delicacies for guests in the trattoria. They are locked up in the kitchen, soldered behind molten brass.
They have stolen a reel of something smutty from the theater. Baldi takes meals through a slit in the wall
serves them to the diners in the trattoria - a bell enunciates the rhythm of digestion.
iii. Rudy at the front desk. Gus, an amateur mortician of the hotel’s august
maintenance staff, is sleuthing the stomach of Dolly’s poodle out of view, who died after ingesting
something the night before. A band plays in the adjoining trattoria, hired to mask strange plumbing noises
and construction on the faulty pipes. The water is out and everyone is thirsty. Norma asks about a delivery
of hyacinths, anemones, before ascending to her suite. Rudy discusses Veen and the “movie”.
vii. A rigor mortis-induced splat
of gall from Gus’ amateur tinkering introduces ———————————————————————
iv. In her eponymous Flower Suite, Dolly, beside herself, receives
reporters during a massage session. They are badgering her with questions about her late husband and
recent high profile divorce, though she only talks about her poodle.
v. Wally watches the cooks butcher a chicken through a
peephole, and describes it with excitement. His thoughts peppered with various food-stuffs, he wanders to
the trattoria to watch guests eat.
vi. Baldi serves ortolan to Lester and Veen,
who are dining in the trattoria, where the band is playing. As he eats (with his head draped in linen),
Lester reads prognosis papers discussing his maladies and experimental medical procedures he is
undergoing. Veen suggests he relax in the adjoining theater called ———————————————
viii. La Maria Oscura, where Bunny and Flo are gagged and gogged by a series of fabulous new(ish) flicks.
A melange of reels and reactions becomes ————————————————————————
ix. The Gilded Lily, a salon where Dolly and Norma are beatifying themselves for the pool, among other
things. Cordula does their nails. They discuss horoscopes.
x. Triptych dissolves into a tutti pool scene:
a tableau vivant of Olympian posturing. Bunny and Flo ogle the real life matinée idols. Mannerism and
midday martinis: desert air, Levantine palms, idyll. Until Lester’s acrid reckoning of overmeating.
Act II.
[Dissolve. Evening.]
i. The downstairs clientele are scavenging remains of meals in the shuttered trattoria, which they access
through an oubliette. Chuck is absent, Eva is aloof. Aftershocks of the afternoon’s accident animate the
scene. They discuss the vents, ventricles (channels through which they observe the guests), the draining
of the now pestiferous pool, the clotting boiler, and the ubiquitous smell tar and bitumen, used excessively
in construction. They are awaiting a cue from Veen which will signal the arrival of his promised “movie”.
ii. Lester, drunk, alone and ashamed in his room, attempts to console himself by reading the
Gideon Bible on his nightstand. After two futile attempts, he becomes distracted by the ticking of a clock,
which he finds delicious. Muttering in a febrile malaise, he begins to talk to it.
iii. Wally descends to HVAC to inspect the boiler. In the laundry room he
discovers Cordula alone eating a book. He wrests the remains and reads to himself, panting, slavering —
iv. Veen taps on a trattoria window signaling the beginning of the
“movie”. He scales balconies from the outside, ascending to Norma’s tower and entering through the
window, disclosing a panorama of private scenes:
a) Dolly inters her poodle in a lamé-gilt shrine, delivers last rites.
b) Wally devours her filthy diary in the laundry room.
c) Lester romances the clock.
d) Chuck, alone and unseen, watches his suppertime something silently
in the theatre below. Eva joins in ——
————— The downstairs personae, having traced Veen’s path
through the vents, gather around Norma’s room in a crawl space. They watch the following scene unfold
upside down through a camera obscura created by a hole in the wall:
v. Norma ascends the steps to her suite, and begins to perform her ritualized farewell, which she has
choreographed to arrive with shushing, undreamable glamour on A1. Flower petals and fragrances, silks
and satins, every unraveled reel and every unsavory notice: a nitrate pyre to swaddle our
odalisque in grisaille…
And yet - before she extinguishes the final cigarette…
A crepitating gramophone whispers in concentric obligato...
b) torn pages hang from his mouth...
a) she strokes a diamond-gilt revolver...
Hot kliegs. Fade to white.
< Interval >
[Entr’acte in concentric circles: the muckrake and mire of process and production.]
III.
[The Mad Rush]
[…]
[attacca]
III.a
[Revue:
Ms. Eva Lamarre’s Garden of Earthly Delights]
[…]
[a long, stark caesura]
IV.
[Morning. Stretto. Close up.]
[…]
———————
[to I.]