Wherever my travels take me, brother, I will never return to Terrafirma in autumn. Perhaps in the spring, when the trees are bursting with feathery green leaves and young buds. Or summer in its flower-strewn glory. Or even winter, with its Alpine blasts and bare tree branches. But never in autumn when the dying earth is shrouded in red and gold. That season now belongs exclusively to Grisella, and I would not for the world intrude on her solitude.
Ever your loving,
Tito
Author’s Note
As a young reader, I cut my teeth on English country house mysteries. From The Moonstone of Wilkie Collins to the later versions penned by Agatha Christie and her fellow Golden Age authors, the archetypes of the genre enchanted me. An isolated manor, a body in the library, and a cast of suspicious characters could provide hours of entertainment. The taste never really left me. I think I was curled up on my sofa watching a rented copy of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park when it occurred to me that Tito could have his own country house adventure, with a Venetian twist.
Venetian Villas
At its height, the Venetian Empire took in a vast arc of mainland territory that swept from the Po River in the south to the mountains that form a natural barrier between Italy and Slovenia in the northeast. Its people would not have been Venetian if they hadn’t transferred their comfortable way of living to this fertile land, which they called Terrafirma. Villas designed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio and his disciples sprang up all over Terrafirma. Serving as both peaceful retreats and working farms, the villas featured classical motifs adapted to residential and agricultural use. Many of the most beautiful still exist and are dotted along the Brenta, a river which was made into a canal between the Venetian lagoon and the city of Padua in the sixteenth century.
While the Villa Dolfini is a fictional structure, it owes parts of its layout to the Villa Rotunda at Vicenza and to the Villa Cornaro. This last is lovingly described by Sally Gable in Palladian Days, her account of restoring this sixteenth century home. For an American take on the theme, think of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Our third president was a keen student of architecture whose own house was built according to Palladio’s pleasing, symmetrical designs.
The Opera and Its Backer
Of course, I had to populate my villa and find a reason for Tito and Gussie to visit. An ambitious patroness gathering an opera company fit the bill. In mid-eighteenth-century Venice, the noble class was confined to a few hundred ancient and distinguished families from the so-called Golden Book. Music provided one of the few entrées into their rarified society. Octavia’s character contains undertones of Georgina Weldon, an eccentric, Victorian-era Englishwoman famous for taking up Charles Gounod when the composer of Faust was down on his luck. Her biography is entertainingly chronicled in The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon by Brian Thompson.
Tamerlano, the Italian name for Timur the Lame who sought to establish a fourteenth-century Mongol empire, had become a popular literary character by Tito’s time. The English playwright Christopher Marlowe used the tyrant as a subject, and a play by Nicolas Pradon served as a basis for several opera libretti. Many composers put Timur’s story to music, the most famous being George Frederick Handel. In the eighteenth century, the borrowing of storyline and characters was not regarded with the same disfavor as it is today. A lovely DVD of the Halle Festival’s production of Handel’s Tamerlano directly inspired the descriptions of the musical passages in The Iron Tongue of Midnight.
Tourette Syndrome
Since the publication of Interrupted Aria, the first novel in the Baroque Mystery series, readers often inquire about Grisella’s condition. Today she would be diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics that first manifest during childhood. The most dramatic feature of the disease is the compulsion to voice disturbing words and phrases, not only swear words, but also racial epithets and other socially inappropriate material. A broad range of impulse control difficulties may also be present. The course of the disease waxes and wanes over time, with adults often learning to control their symptoms to a great degree.
The current treatment involves medication and psychotherapy. Grisella’s elixir was compounded of substances available at the time, primarily opiates dissolved in alcohol, to which Grisella became addicted. In its analgesic value, it would have been similar to the more familiar laudanum, an opiate tincture sometimes sweetened with sugar.
Further Reading
I’d also like to direct the interested reader to several excellent histories of Constantinople. I enjoyed getting up to speed on Alessandro’s world, sometimes having to force myself to put the books aside and get back to writing. His Constantinople was a complex society, all the more so for a new convert to Islam. These volumes helped me envision what Alessandro experienced: Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel and Constantinople, City of the World’s Desire by Philip Mansel.
Readers’ Guides
For the use of teachers, librarians, and book clubs, a Readers’ Guide is available for each of the novels in the Baroque Mystery series. These may be obtained by contacting the author through her website at www.beverlegravesmyers.com.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Joanne Dobson, Kit Ehrman, and my husband, Lawrence, for reading The Iron Tongue of Midnight in manuscript and offering wise suggestions. And to everyone who provided technical details about early opera, painting, architecture, or other specific matters: Flavio Ferri Benedetti, Kit Ehrman, Benjamin Hufbauer, Ann Lee, Megan McKinney, Janine Volkmar, Mark Windisch, and Luci Hansson Zahray. As always, the efforts of the staff at the Louisville Free Public Library were invaluable in gathering the materials necessary for the extensive research that made this book possible. Thanks are also due to my agent, Ashley Grayson, for his encouragement and support, and to my editor at Poisoned Pen Press, Barbara Peters, for her patience and attention to detail.
More from this Author
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