Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read Online Free

Time has not changed it. Ralph settled the issue, for all time, with his authoritative transliteration: MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ.)
    They played that first tape at parties for months and got letters off to every management on Fifty-seventh Street, to the Metropolitan, to the festivals, begging for more (in fraught yet tempered phrases after the fashion of the forties). That same first morning they had composed the first Czgowchwz fan letter, in every language they knew, and had sent it off to Prague.
    It happened slowly, but it happened. She sang in the Soviet Union, at Omsk in September, at Minsk and Vitebsk in October and November, and in December at Nizhni Novgorod in what had once been a smallish winter palace. The seven had their reply for the New Year, a letter which hangs framed on Ralph’s wall, written in Czech and signed

    January on the wane, despair threatened. There had been no Czgowchwz news for weeks. Her seven American friends languished in a cold and uninspired late-forties New York season. No other person in Gotham seemed to have heard the predawn August broadcast.
    Then history took over for a time, cruelly, efficiently, with few stylish flourishes. On the tenth of March, a person of eminence was thrown or fell from a window in Prague. Prague itself fell directly thereafter. Czgowchwz reacted. The flawless gesture of her crash landing on the Champs-Elysées at dawn on Bastille Day, after a precarious solo flight in a single-engine prewar flying machine, was no more to be believed, nor less great art, than her first appearance at the Opéra, singing Amneris in French. It took the rest of the summer to fetch her to America. The Secret Seven met her at the pier at Hoboken, together with the managers, many and various; they took control at the start, teaching her English. (Ignorant as she was at the time of her true origin, she seemed to be remembering , although in almost anguished reluctance. She spoke English in just three weeks, albeit persisting in her Eastern European intonation. It was thought uncanny, but no more.)
    The career blazed. The Carnegie Hall recital, where she sang the Erwartung in fully open chest, tore the lid off. She debuted at the Metropolitan the next week as Amneris, singing it in Czech, on a whim. Luigi Francobolli, in one of the now defunct dailies, proclaimed the next day, with characteristic gush, that “a voice of the size, sweep, impact, and delineation of a flaming angel, projected with the pathos, premonition, and despair of a dying swan, was encountered by your correspondent last evening in a debut to sear the mind, obliviating comparisons.” Tompkins proclaimed himself speechless, and went on gorgeously for three columns. Certain hags in the late afternoon had reservations. On Saturday, Kölnischwasser said: “One could hardly object to her singing it in Czech with capework of such pointed brilliance; a contralto with every difference.” (K.’s summation was, of course, absolutely sibylline in its prescience...)
    Those first years began: the Czgowchwz Era. Neri commenced to frazzle; lines were drawn. It was given out that a frantic contralto could never presume to dethrone Neri, “La Serena” (an idle prediction). Czgowchwz went to London, Rome, Bayreuth, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Chicago, Stockholm, Naples, Venice, Paris, Boston, and returned. Ralph went along; everything she did is on Ralph’s tapes. They wept who did, to realize they belonged to someone like Czgowchwz. They saw her in New York on Sundays for tea, sherry, and the rest.
    The forties ended, and they did not. The Czgowchwz moment endured in centripetal dream time, its zithery sonority reverberating through the corridors of the hastily tumbling twentieth century, somehow counteracting “time’s relentless melt.” In history, meanwhile, at some thrall-time-frame’s least auspicious point, the opera house came under new