The Fry play had directly followed the Otway in the card catalogue, and he had looked at it out of curiosity; why should a Twentieth Century playwright be punning on a title from the Eighteenth?
After two pages of the Fry play, the minor puzzle of the pun disappeared entirely from his concern. His luck was running again; he had an opera.
Sindi worked miracles in arranging for the performance.
The date of the premiere was set even before the score was finished, reminding Strauss pleasantly of those heady days when Fuerstner had been snatching the conclusion of Elek-tra off his work table a page at a time, before the ink was even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication dead-line. The situation now, however, was even more complicated, for some of the score had to be scribed, some of it taped, some of it engraved in the old way, to meet the new techniques of performance; there were moments when Sindi seemed to be turning quite gray.
But Venus Observed was, as usual, forthcoming complete from Strauss’s pen in plenty of time. Writing the music in first draft had been hellishly hard work, much more like being reborn than had been that confused awakening in Barkun Kris’s laboratory, with its overtones of being dead instead; but Strauss found that he still retained all of his old ability to score from the draft almost effortlessly, as undis-turbed by Sindi’s half-audible worrying in the room with him as he was by the terrifying supersonic bangs of the rockets that bulleted invisibly over the city.