The great singer Hans-Dieter Huis, too, had completely given up hope. The concert he held in occupied Brussels now appeared to him as the last memento of a dying civilization. In the meantime he had seen hunger, retreat and death. They called on him to sing at the deathbed of two German princes who paid with their heads in Holland and France. That was the hardest thing the maestro had ever done. The Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe had already given up the ghost when they called him, so his singing at the catafalque was in fact a requiem, but the Prince of Meiningen still gave signs of life when they rushed the singer to him in an ambulance. The Prince requested hoarsely that he sing Bach’s arias, and he, without knowing why himself, started singing a Bach canon, which was ridiculous and almost impossible for one voice. He’d begin with the higher notes like a tenor and then lower his trembling voice to the deeper notes, while it seemed to him that someone was mutedly intoning the other voice in a cold tenor. No, that wasn’t the prince singing in the hour of his death because he scarcely had the strength to breathe. He heard, yes he clearly heard Death singing the upper register of a canon for two voices with him. And then the prince died. Be-medalled officers who had been waiting for the prince’s death now came in, saying to each other, ‘It’s over now’, and rudely shoved Huis out of the room. As he was leaving, he saw a doctor going in with a metal basin of plaster solution to make the prince’s death mask.
Some other be-medalled officers later sent him down to the cellar with a few polite words. There he sat at a table with two old men who only spoke French. He tried to exchange a few words with them and learnt that they were the owners of the house which had been turned into a German army headquarters, where the prince had breathed his last. The men told him defiantly that the house had been in their family for three hundred years up until 23 September 1914, and then they asked him if it had been him singing on the upper floor. He affirmed that it had, and told them his name, at which they jumped up and started kissing his hand. They had twice heard him in Paris, they said, but for maestro Huis this was so wretched and strange that he didn’t know whether to burst into tears or reprove the old men who were kissing him. Civilization had thus survived, he thought, but it had been driven underground, into cellars, and was so old that it would expire before the end of the Great War.
Such thoughts preoccupied him for the next two weeks as he was carted from venue to venue behind the lines and made to sing like a wind-up doll. But hadn’t he admitted to himself that he no longer felt anything and had no faith in his art any more? Was it not then irrelevant where he sang and who gave the orders? Therefore he reluctantly agreed to these battlefield assignments. They drove him around, introduced him to the superior officers, and he performed. His last scheduled event of 1914 was on Christmas Eve at the supreme command headquarters near Lens, where he was to sing for Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, heir to the German throne and titular commander of the German 5th Army. They told him that the great Theodora von Stade would be performing with him. The Crown prince welcomed the singers as if it was the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. He said he was glad they had come to his estate, and the generals clustered around him exchanged anxious glances. Then the door was closed behind the singers. The prince was their only listener. Theodora began to sing the upper part in a clear and unimpaired voice, but when the second voice was called for, Hans-Dieter Huis cleared his throat with that ‘front-line cough’ of a malnourished man of broken health. The prince raised an eyebrow, looked at them with tear-filled eyes, and the old man at the cembalo played the first chords of the Sanctus from Bach’s Mass in B minor again. Theodora finished the opening, and Huis replied beautifully. The prince gazed at them both with strange, voracious eyes. He smiled happily, but with a hint of desperation, as if he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the end of the short, a cappella concert, he too enthused about them having brought a little civilization into that terrible war, repeating almost word for word what his generals used to say when Huis finished a concert. That embittered the maestro. His thoughts were far from dinner. He took the opportunity of asking His Majesty to allow him to visit some units from Berlin at the front, which was just a few kilometres away. ‘Our soldiers need a song for Christmas too,’ he said, and the Crown prince immediately filled out a permit for him and arranged transport.
In the trenches near Avion, which smelt like graveyard loam, he was met by the members of the 93rd Division, each of whom was an opera buff. He recognized many staff from the Deutsche Oper among them. Now they were tired soldiers with lice in their hair, their cheeks ruddy from the cold and noses red from alcohol. ‘Sing für sie,’ the tenor from the Opera choir encouraged him, who had first called ‘hurrah’ when Huis appeared. But what could he sing when he no longer believed in song? Something German? Bach? In the end, it was the men who decided. ‘Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni!’ they shouted in unison, and he began to the sing the aria ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’. He began in Italian: ‘Fin ch’han dal vino / calda la testa / una gran festa / fa’ preparar’ [‘For a carousal / Where all is madness, / Where all is gladness, / Do thou prepare’], and then continued in German: ‘Triffst du auf dem Platz / Einige Mädchen, / bemüh dich, auch sie / noch mitzubringen.’ [‘Maids that are pretty, / Dames that are witty, / All to my castle / Bid them repair.’] As he sang, he saw that something unusual was happening. The soldiers moved him. This was no longer the threatening audience with opera glasses before their eyes, and his voice began to come from the depths of his breast, where he had kept his artist’s soul locked away for so many years. He remembered Elsa from Mainz and finally let his unhappy soul come out on that Christmas Eve; and he drank in the starry night air and sang as he hadn’t sung in a decade and a half. He grabbed one of the Christmas trees and began to climb the steps in the side of the trench up to the open ground between the German, French and Scottish lines. They cautioned him that just that day it had been impossible to even fetch the wounded, who still lay there with snow-dusted cheeks and eyebrows and cried for help.
But in vain: Huis trod those steps and made it into no man’s land. His song was heard well into the enemy trenches, but one Scottish soldier from the Scottish 92nd Division realized better than the others that only the great Hans-Dieter Huis could sing Don Giovanni like that. It was Edwin McDermott, a bass from Edinburgh and Huis’s constant companion in the role of Leporello whenever Huis performed in Scotland. The Scottish soldier waited for the end of the aria, then he too leapt out of his trench and began to sing Leporello’s aria in reply: ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo / delle belle che amò il padron mio, /un catalogo egli è che fatt’io, / osservate, leggete con me.’ [‘My dear lady, this is a list / Of the beauties my master has loved, / a list which I have compiled. / Observe, read along with me.’]
The two singers now started walking towards one another. At one hundred metres, Huis and McDermott saw and recognized each other. They both smiled and could see the radiance in each others’ eyes. For Huis, it was as if his beloved Elsa from Mainz was striding there hand in hand with him. All at once, everything took on meaning. Leporello sang ever more loudly: ’In Italia sei cento e quaranta, / in Almagna due cento etrent’una, / cento in Francia, in Turchia novant’una.’ [‘In Italy, six hundred and forty, / In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one, / a hundred in France, / In Turkey, ninety-one.’]
No sooner had the two old friends and associates embraced, when a cry resounded. From the French positions, someone started to sing like the Commendatore: ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco / m’invitarsi, e son venuto.’ [‘Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you, / And I have come.’] Immediately afterwards there was a burst of fire. Leporello had only just looked into smiling Don Giovanni’s face, when he began to stagger and fall. His burly body protected Huis from the bullets of the wrathful singer in the French trenches, whose shots had evidently been meant for the great German baritone, not for the Scottish singer.
Instead