Vienna Nocturne

by Vivien Shotwell

  But then she saw Rauzzini in the wings, dressed all in red with his face brightly painted. He played the hero. He met her eyes and his face told her that he trusted her, and that because he trusted her she had no choice but to see it through. She looked at the bow and arrow in her hands, and lifted them in the air. Though she could not hear, she watched the concert master and found her entrance. Into the wall of faces she launched her unwilling voice, launched it with the imaginary arrows, while Rauzzini watched from the wings, while the silk singed and peeled but did not dissolve. She did not know why he had trusted her. For a moment her mind was a blank and she could not remember anything. Then the music and the stage drew her back. The opera house became a circle of dim light in which she sang and danced as if she were alone. At a certain point she knew it must be good, because she was aware that the murmur of the hall had quieted, but she did not allow herself to dwell on it. The aria finished, the applause was ready and resounding, and she stood for a moment feeling the confused and muddy-minded release of a condemned thief who has been spared at the foot of the gallows. “Bow!” Rauzzini shouted from the wings. “Bow!” He was laughing. The applause went on. Anna gave a start, flourished her arm, called up a radiant smile, and bowed like a boy, one leg extended before her. Then she ran off the stage and into her teacher’s arms.

  Naples

  Rauzzini said there was no steadiness in music. One could not hold music in one’s hands. One could not taste it, nor see it in the air. It vanished almost as soon as it was made. Music for them was an offering. That was what it meant to sing. It meant being in love with the audience, having that ardent munificence, withholding nothing. Only then would the voice truly be beautiful.

  Anna did not quite understand. She was only fifteen. But she said she did.

  He had taught her to sing a line, to sing as though she were speaking, to sing softly and loudly. He had taught her how to move, how to gesture, how to pronounce the language, and how to have appropriate musical style and inflection. Everything that was necessary. Now it was time, he said, for her to sing in Italy. Italian opera was all, and Anna could not sing as she wished—as a prima donna—without first establishing herself there.

  So she was leaving. Anna’s mother and father would go with her and in Naples they would be reunited with her brother, Stephen, who was studying at the conservatory.

  “You must promise to care for yourself,” Rauzzini said to Anna a few days before her departure. She had come to his studio, as familiar to her now as her own home, for a last lesson. He kept blowing into a handkerchief. “You must promise to stay safe and well and never cross through danger, nor associate with bad people.”

  “I won’t,” she said. There had come over her face a kind of ashen sobriety unsuited to a girl of fifteen. She had not taken off her hat. It was askew. Her face was blotched and distressed with tears. “I hate saying good-bye. I can’t bear it. We have to go on a ship, and nothing is packed and everyone is in fits and it’s all because of me.” She smiled weakly. “Make me sing, maestro. I’m afraid I’ll forget on the voyage how to sing.”

  Without difficulty they slipped into their usual routine, and one would not have known it was the last lesson except that he did not correct her as assiduously as usual. He was helplessly sad. She sang beautifully, with dear honesty and true instinct. Her cheeks brightened and her loveliness was restored. She had grown up. Her figure was womanly, her waist neat. Her darkly lashed eyes could entrance every soul, her brows articulate any subtlety of comedy and wit. Her lips were clever and full, and her smile—her father’s smile—almost devilish in its charm. But it was her voice, now, that Rauzzini cared for; the voice he had helped shape, the voice that had become as dear to him as his own child’s. He lapsed in correcting her because he was trying to burn the sound of it into his brain. It was impossible, and yet he must try.

  The voyage to Naples brought out the worst in everyone. The air was bad, the sailors unsavory, and the quarters more like a sick house than a ship. They were trapped. Nothing happened. A nothing to end all nothings. Theirs was the weariness of bodies not allowed to move as they should and unable, after enough time, to recall how such movement felt. Everything was monotony, stomach cramps, bad breath. They dreamed of vegetables.

  But Anna had her guitar, and where there was a guitar, there could be music and good cheer. Even Mrs. Storace remarked how soothing it was to have Anna’s guitar on the ship. An hour spent listening to Anna idling upon the instrument was an hour free from pain. That was a blessing, Mrs. Storace said. She was very glad Anna had brought the guitar.

  Mrs. Storace was a woman whose position in life did not reflect her sense of her own refinement. She was always reading books and poetry, and the more moral they were, laughed her husband, and the more tedious, the better. Though her husband was some twenty-five years older, all the youthfulness and playfulness were his, which she took for folly. He had no head on his shoulders, she said. He was a great grinning salesman, a seducer, a philanderer. He had left three mistresses in London, she was sure. Had it not been for her daughter, Mrs. Storace said, and her absent son, she would have committed herself to a convent.

  She was always wincing at some thing or other. When readying to volley a criticism she would first sniff through her nose and stare into the middle distance. Her husband was all vagueness. He threw himself into the air and expected to be caught. When Mrs. Storace was angry with Anna she would say that she was just like her father. But her mother loved music and was softened by it. She could never know how pleasant she looked when she listened to her daughter, how her forehead relaxed and her breathing slowed. But Anna could see it, and it made her play more sweetly. She did not mind the conditions on the ship. She wouldn’t have minded if the journey had been twice as long, or if there had been no food at all. The tedium, the discomfort, the sailors who stank of rum—the rats and fleas, the dirtiness of her clothes and of her own person—could not overcome the bigness of the sky at sea at night. If ever she felt sick or upset she need only remind herself, “I am going to Italy. I am going to see Stephen,” and that would cure her. She would have been ashamed to feel ungrateful. She missed Rauzzini’s advice, his wit and his laughter, but it was for this he had trained her. She must sing in Italy. It had been fine to sing in London as a child, when her youth had made her something of a wonder, but all anyone wanted now were Italian divas; they would not pay good money to hear one of their own, not unless she had sung abroad, in all the great houses. Anna should stay away just long enough, Rauzzini had said, for her countrymen to forget she was English.

  She hoped Stephen would love her as much as she intended to love him. He had left when she was ten. She remembered playing games with him, and how patient and jolly he had been, and she remembered how he had practiced his violin and harpsichord all day behind a closed door, but when she tried to recall his face she could not. All they had was a small portrait of him that Mrs. Storace had drawn before he departed. She said it was not a bad likeness, but neither was it a good one.

  They arrived in the Naples harbor. The long illness of the journey lifted. Anna’s father could not stop smiling—he remembered, he said, everything, even after twenty years. Mrs. Storace stretched and felt the life returning to her limbs. And Anna could not believe it. They were there. They were nowhere else. It was another world from England and they were in it.

  They stayed with Mr. Storace’s elder brother, a merchant. Stephen lived at the conservatory. After they’d washed and eaten they sent for him. Everyone was nervous. At the least sound from outside, Mr. Storace would jump up and go to the window. Mrs. Storace’s face was pale and her eyes bright. “I’m afraid I won’t recognize my own son,” she said to her brother-in-law, through her husband. Mrs. Storace had some Italian but refused to use it, because she was embarrassed by her errors. “I’m afraid he shall not know me.” Her brother-in-law murmured his sympathy. Mr. Storace jumped again to the window.

  Anna could not sit at all. She ha
d barely eaten. She wanted to run to the conservatory. And suddenly he was there, Stephen, her brother.

  There was a moment of hesitation. He stood in the doorway, in the uniform of the Conservatory of Sant’Onofrio, the white tunic and the black sash, his hair curling to his shoulders and his eyes shining with suspense, this boy of seventeen whom they had not seen for five years. Then they were falling upon him, laughing and crying, squeezing him to death and saying they would never have known him and would have known him anywhere, for he had the same dear look, inflection, and manner, a light-boned, thoughtful young man with pleasant features, his sister’s eyes, and his father’s middling height.

  They said his name a hundred times, “Stephen, Stephen,” smiling and looking into his face, touching him to make sure he was there. He seemed like a dream to them, and they to him; it was as if there had been some sorcery.

  “Anna,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

  She could not let go of him. She was weeping loudly and laughing. She had given herself hiccups. “Stephen!” she said. “Stephen!” and he kissed her cheeks and said he would have known her in any country.

  Later they had a concert for each other. First Stephen played on his violin, with the easy pride of mastery, that they all might admire him. Such tones and notes! The instrument became in his hands like a human voice. They watched him greedily, his serious brow, his slender, steady limbs. There was no flaunting about Stephen. He had always been quiet. It was astonishing that he had ever been sent away, and that he had managed. But he had mastery and grace. Anna’s intentions were fulfilled. She loved her brother completely.

  “Now you must sing,” he said to her, and she readily complied. Her uncle had tuned his harpsichord, though he said it was little better than kindling, and she sang to her own accompaniment. Stephen, delighted, said there was not a better soprano in Naples. Everything refreshed. Mr. and Mrs. Storace smiled and did not hate each other. Mr. Storace’s brother felt he now knew what it might have been like to have had children. Stephen seemed to grow taller. And Anna, with everyone she loved all around her, tried to make her gaze wider, her ears more true, to fix in her memory this moment of her family together and happy. She loved her father with his pattering speech and his bad puns and clumsy feet. She loved her unfamiliar uncle. She loved her mother in all her nerves and severity. She loved her brother, who shared her face but not her affect, who lived in certain of her memories and was absent from others. He had never met Rauzzini. All that part of her life, and so much more, he could not know, just as she could not know of his. But he was her own brother and no one else’s.

  The next day, they visited Stephen’s conservatory. He had already completed his studies, and now he taught some of the smallest boys and played concerts here and there. He took Anna to see Giovanni Paisiello, a famous opera composer who taught singing and counterpoint at the conservatory. Anna sang for him and he was pleasantly surprised. He said he would recommend her to his friends, and would offer small parts to her in his operas. But as the months went on, nothing to speak of came of Paisiello. She sang a few solo cantatas for him at the cathedral, but they paid very little. Finally he said he could not gamble on a little English girl. “She must sing more in Italy,” he told Mr. Storace. “She must spend some years here.”

  “How is she to sing in Italy if no one in Italy will hear her?” asked Mr. Storace.

  Paisiello shrugged. “How does one do anything?”

  Her father wanted her to sing for Jommelli, who had taught Farinelli, but he would not hear her. He said he was too old to give time to the English.

  Cimarosa was in France, and would not return until the new year. Mr. Storace had translated several of Cimarosa’s operas and corresponded with him. He’d set his hopes on Cimarosa. Cimarosa had promised on his honor to help Anna. He had said nothing about France.

  All of the family but Stephen got sick with feverish indigestion. For two weeks Anna did not leave her bed. And they had to eat, and be kept in good clothes, if they were to mingle as they must with the aristocracy. Yet the aristocracy did not invite Anna to their concerts and salons because they did not know who she was. And even if they had known, they would have assumed that she could not sing, because she was English.

  In the spring her father determined to go back to England and raise capital. He would be gone most of the summer. While he was there he wished his family to leave Naples and try their fortunes elsewhere. Naples had no use for them. There were too many singers in Naples. He was not a superstitious man but he believed they would have better luck elsewhere; that this whole year, nearly, had been cursed by some fog of confusion or disorder. But while he was in London he died of an infection. Mrs. Storace and her children were left alone with very little money, and debts now in Naples and London both.

  L’inglesina

  For months they did nothing. As the weather cooled, Stephen, who had been giving music lessons for too little pay, began to talk of pawning his violin, while Mrs. Storace volunteered her modest jewels. Then a letter arrived from Paisiello. He had found a position for Anna at the Pergola theater in Florence. The miracle was arranged: she would sing seconda donna to the primo musico of the famous castrato Ludovico Marchesi. Stephen would play second harpsichord in the orchestra there, and that would provide enough funds to send him back to England, where he would settle whatever affairs Mr. Storace had left unfinished.

  “This is a great honor,” Mrs. Storace admonished her daughter. She had been shocked by the death of her husband. She took hardly any food and seemed to shrink into the earth. “You must do everything to perfection, and offend no one.”

  Anna was too pert, said her mother, and lacked deference.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” said Anna with a smile. “I’ll be an angel.”

  “You’re not the prima donna yet,” said Mrs. Storace. “And you’ll never be if you carry on as you do. They think of you as an English child with bad Italian.”

  “My Italian is perfect.”

  “Then something else is wrong. How you move. You must take smaller steps and be careful not to knit your brow.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Anna thought of her father every day, of his hopefulness and his daring. He had wished for his children to have the sort of musical career that had been denied him, and somehow it seemed her fault that he had died, because he had gone back to England for her sake. But she could not allow herself to think like that for long, because then she would not have been able to sing.

  They arrived in Florence and began to rehearse, and almost immediately she knew that she could not keep her promise to her mother to be an angel. She did try.

  Had it been anyone else she would not have objected to kneeling. Ludovico Marchesi had done it simply to abase her. She knew he had. In the few days she’d been in Florence he had done everything to cross her. He had stepped on her toes, deliberately stepped on them, when he passed her in the wings. He had given her wrong directions and wrong cues and doubted her abilities openly and at every turn. Anna had done him no wrong. But Stephen said she was a threat. Although Marchesi was one of the most famous singers in the world, and all of Tuscany was coming to hear him, the castrati were dying out. The profit was going to be in comic opera now, in opera buffa. Castrati were rubbish for buffa, Stephen said. They sang only serious opera. They played gods and heroes, not ordinary people. Ordinary people did not sound like castrati. Besides, the French found the castration of boys abhorrent, and the sentiment was spreading.

  “You must be lower down when I’m singing this,” Marchesi said to Anna. “You must kneel.”

  “Signor,” she said with a soft smile. “I do not see how you could appear any taller.”

  A ripple of laughter went through the orchestra. The stage manager looked uneasy. Marchesi narrowed his eyes. “I am supposed to be standing on a mountain,” he said, as though with infinite patience. “You must appear lower.”

  Anna regarded him demurely. She thought of her father.
She was now sixteen. They lived on bread and water. At last, with a graceful inclination of her head and a supple billowing around her of skirts and ribbons, she knelt.

  “Ah,” Marchesi exclaimed. He spread his arm to the orchestra. “Now we may begin.”

  Anna, swallowing bitterly, kept her eyes down. His voice was not as beautiful as Rauzzini’s, nor as elegant—not nearly—but the sound was loud and brilliant. Still, he had no taste. He was all embellishment and show. There was no naturalness, no honesty, no simplicity. His diction was lazy and incomprehensible. He was all vowels—vague, lazy vowels—with no consonants to mark the sense. One could hardly make out the line of melody for the frills and leaps and runs of adornment he heaped upon it. It was ornamentation in the old style. To Anna it sounded pompous and ridiculous.

  She lifted her eyes to watch him sing the end, the part for which he was most acclaimed, a cadenza so dramatic and daring it had been named for him, La bomba di Marchesi, the bomb of Marchesi, a dazzling voletta of octaves ascending by semitones all the way to a high C. A miracle of a cadenza, a feat of humanity, which none on earth could match or mimic. And in that moment she got her idea.

  “But you can’t,” whispered Stephen. “You haven’t practiced. We’ll be run out of town.”

  It was the first interlude. A ballet was playing on stage, and after the ballet would come a short comic intermezzo. The whole evening’s entertainment would go on for some five hours. All of Tuscany was in the audience, and perhaps beyond Tuscany, including, Anna had heard, an impresario from La Scala theater in Milan.

  Marchesi had sung his bomba in the first act, and had received a twenty-minute ovation. The rest of the act he’d strolled around the stage with as much boredom and nonchalance as if he’d been in his own home. He’d taken pinches of snuff and talked to his friends in the audience. He had talked, on stage, through the entirety of Anna’s first aria, as though she were not singing—as though she were not there. The whole audience, in fact, had talked through her aria. She could hardly blame them. Her character did nothing, said nothing, knew nothing, and the aria was repetitive and simpering and thus sounded like nothing. Her only purpose was to let Marchesi rest his throat. Nor could she do anything to redeem her part—not with a text like that, music like that, and everyone talking.