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Rudolf Peterson (formerly Rudi Petrescu) enjoys fame as an operetta star, but it is an ambivalent enjoyment (the fame itself being as solid as that state can ever be). His tenor voice, later to be captured for eternity on the Golden Age label, is matched by good looks, and brings romance to thousands. His rewards include good money, offers from Hollywood, and knickers in the post from love-struck female fans. He has an Elizabethan house in the country as well as a ‘sumptuous’ London flat. Yet is Magyar Maytime, with its preposterous plot, all mistaken identities and phoney reconciliations, a satisfying medium for his undoubted gifts? He was trained for serious opera, and his fellow-countryman, the influential composer, conductor and violinist Georges Enesco, thought his surrender to operetta prostitution, and told him so. Yet success when it is within reach is hard to resist, and especially for someone like Rudolf who has fled his own country, having read the terrible writing on its walls. Andrew’s Uncle Rudolf is a dedicated enemy of the fascism Romania has chosen to embrace.
Paul Bailey’s insights are nowhere, throughout his distinguished oeuvre, more brilliantly or more subtly shown than in his treatment of Rudolf’s musical compromise. No getting away from it – he uses his fine voice to serve drivel. And further, it’s drivel that falsifies the very part of the world – Central Europe and the Balkans – whose tragic predicament (epitomised by what’s befallen Andrew’s mother and father) Rudolf has faced up to with an exemplary moral courage. His sister-in-law, for example, was called the Debt-Collector’s daughter because her father was Jewish, a crime for which her country makes her pay the requisite wicked price. Later Rudolf will turn against operetta, though popular taste will always link him to it, even posthumously.
This is a beautifully worked cultural fable, elliptically presented after the manner Bailey has made uniquely his own. But it’s more than this; the teller of the tale and his subject love one another deeply, and their love transfigures both the world they find themselves in and the artefact which so deftly presents it.
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