The maid came and announced a John Abraham Fisher. Anna’s dogs, rousing themselves for the stranger, paced over to sniff at his dusty shoes. “Good afternoon,” he announced in a mild Irish accent. “This is an honor beyond my deserts, a sight for sore eyes, to be in the presence of good English ladies who are also lovers of music.” He looked in a lively way between them.
“Good sir,” Mrs. Storace interposed. “You are most welcome. Please let me introduce you to my daughter.”
“Charmed, Miss Storace.”
He was a tall man, heavyset, with a mass of wavy blondish hair that collected in side-whiskers on his wide, blunt cheeks and gave his face the broad, formidable aspect of a lion. The impression was not of elegance but of power. Anna felt acutely the pressure of his gaze and glanced nervously at the fireplace.
“Ah,” he said with a smile, “forgive me if I am staring—I never have been justified in calling myself a gentleman—but the last I saw you, Miss Storace, you were a little girl. You won’t remember me. I only sat in the audience that night, though I knew your mother and your father from my days with the orchestra at Marylebone.”
“You have a prodigiously clear memory, sir,” Mrs. Storace said primly. “When I read your line about my old plum cakes I thought, ‘Now here is a true friend from those long-ago days.’ ”
Fisher, who had continued to let his eyes linger on Anna, suddenly turned all his forcefulness upon Mrs. Storace to say in his bright, lilting voice, “Remember your plum cakes, Mistress Storace? How could I forget them? I swear to you I never tasted better in all my worldly travels.”
“Mr. Fisher. You are too kind. So many memories you bring back to me.”
“Madam,” he said gravely, “would it not be now so evidently beneath your station and did I not suspect this good city of having a shortage of plums, I should ask you to bake me some of those cakes this instant, that I might experience once more that peerless, plummy, buttery-sweet rapture.”
“Thank you, sir. You are poetical.”
“It really is quite extraordinary,” Fisher murmured, turning to Anna, “how quickly the girl has become a lady. When I saw you sing all those years ago, I said to myself I should never forget it, and forget it have I not. I said to myself here was a young girl who was yet a kindred spirit—I felt it, I knew it, because of the way you made music. We have an affinity, I thought. We are kindred in song.”
His eyes were an arrestingly pale blue; one felt caught in them as if held by a knife’s point. His cheeks were reddened as if by wind or frost. His dress was fine, his age perhaps forty or forty-five. “You don’t believe me,” he continued with a rueful smile. He looked down at his interlacing hands. They didn’t look like violinist’s hands. They were broad and thick. “And I’m afraid I’m being too forward. But it is the truth, and I must speak it when I see you so grown, Miss Storace, so beyond what I remember, and become so fulfilled in your music, as I knew you would be!”
It was the baby, perhaps, that made her feel sick. But she could never tell Benucci about the baby. She would rather die. If she told him, he might want to marry her, and then for the rest of his life he would hate and resent her, as her mother had hated and resented her father. But if he did not want to marry her, if he scorned her, her shame would reach to the very depths. So she could not tell him. That way was closed. She was too afraid, and too proud. The secret was like a rotten quail’s egg, webbed with cracks, which she must carry inside her mouth. Her tongue pressed it against the back of her throat and saliva collected around it, and at every motion the shell threatened to burst all its putrefying liquids. She must paste her lips in bandages.
“I was going to congratulate you that night,” continued Fisher, “after you sang Cupid, but you were surrounded with friends and my late wife was tired and wished us to go directly home. So it’s her fault, you see, that you’ve now no memory of me and must take only my word that I have recalled and admired you ever since that day. Such a felicity, to find the Storace ladies here in a city where I expected to find nobody!”
“Why did you come, then?” asked Anna.
He sipped his tea. “I’ve been seeking something.”
“And you think you’ll find it here in Vienna?”
“Perhaps I already have.”
Anna set down her teacup abruptly and called to the two dogs, who lifted their heads and came to her. “There,” she said to them, “aren’t you my only darlings?” The dogs, their faces rubbed this way and that in her hands, wagged their tails and looked at her with vague curiosity. “Are you fond of dogs, Mr. Fisher? I love them.” She dragged one of the poor creatures into her lap. “My singing teacher had wonderful puppies like these. Sometimes I do think they are better than people. They’re simpler than we are. They give their love wholeheartedly. They are never inconstant or changeable.”
“Admirable qualities in beast or man,” said Fisher.
“They’re just like babies—they are wholly dependent on their master. As are we poor females, some might say!”
“Oh, no, indeed,” laughed Fisher. “You will not draw me there, Miss Storace, comparing dogs to ladies.”
“I had a cat once in Naples,” Anna said. “Do you remember, Mama? It was a stray. One day it ran away. It never cared for me—I knew it then. So I didn’t grieve for it—didn’t even look for where it had gone.”
“It must have been crushed to death under some carriage wheels,” said Mrs. Storace. “Or been eaten by a wild beast.”
“I hope it was,” said Anna. “The wretched creature.”
“But you’re mistaken, my dear, that you didn’t grieve,” said her mother. “I don’t know why you say such things. You were brokenhearted. You wouldn’t eat, you wouldn’t sing.”
“Well,” said Anna softly and sternly, “it is a hard thing when an object of tender affection does not come back to you.”
Fisher cleared his throat and leaned forward. “I hope to have the honor of playing for you, Miss Storace, so that you may see my real strengths. I’m not a man of words. Do you like the violin?”
She forced herself to meet his eyes, and saw him smile. “It’s my favorite instrument.”
He nodded. “I knew it would be.”
“Did you? And how? From seeing me when I was a child? Did you hear me sing and see clear into my soul?”
He raised his brows and nodded evenly. “I believed I did. You were just a girl. But I felt I knew you, almost as I knew myself.”
“Nonsense,” Anna said briskly. “You never did anything of the kind. You’re making it all up.”
But he would not relent. “I thought you were like me, yes. In your musical soul.”
She sighed. “Then you were mistaken. I do sometimes think my soul the most tuneless in all the universe. Please don’t offend yours with comparisons to mine.”
“I think the opposite is true,” said Fisher. “You are too modest.”
Anna pushed her dog away. “You haven’t heard me sing yet, Mr. Fisher. For all either of us knows I may have reached my height when last you saw me.”
“I’ve heard marvelous accounts of your singing,” Fisher said. “I don’t doubt them. I can hear your singing even now, behind your most musical speech.”
“I’m not that child,” she said severely. She brushed at her skirts. “You shall make me angry in a moment.”
“Anna,” said her mother.
“But you are,” said Fisher.
“Sir, I am not.”
She stood and he rose with her. He was tall.
“Good-bye, Mr. Fisher. We wish you joy of Vienna.”
He seemed surprised. “I see. You’re angry.” He glanced at Mrs. Storace and gave her a reassuring smile. “Well, we shall meet again, I hope, when you are more agreeable. Farewell, for now, Miss Storace.”
“If you lose him,” her mother remarked bitterly, later, “there will be no help for you.”
Anna stared into the middle distance. She felt so ill she wanted to lie down. �
�Oh, Mama. He has no wish to be lost.”
Rosina
The next day, John Fisher invited Anna to see Hamlet with him that evening at the Burgtheater. She accepted. The performance was in German. Joseph Lange, Aloysia’s husband, played the title role. Fisher sat next to Anna and the heat of him and the smell of his breath made her want to put herself away, but she remained calm and cordial.
“May I see you again?” he asked. “Tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “Tomorrow I’m singing for the Thun und Hohensteins.”
“Then I’ll join you.”
She flushed. Mozart would be at the Thun-Hohensteins’, and she had never heard him play. “It’s a private salon, Mr. Fisher.”
“I’ll be your guest. I can play my fiddle. I’ve played for the empress of Russia, I’m good enough for Thun-Hohenstein, whoever he is.”
He was annoyed. She pressed a hand to his arm and gave him a tender, beseeching look. “Another day, Mr. Fisher. The day after next. I shall be all yours, the day after next.”
He narrowed his eyes. “But not tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow.”
“You’re ashamed to be seen with me.”
She swallowed and said, “My dear Mr. Fisher, nothing could be further from the truth.”
The next evening, at the salon hosted by the Countess Thun, a woman whose beauty, taste, and elegance would have inspired poets of any age, Anna arrived alone. She had been invited there to sing, but it was as much a social occasion as a professional engagement, and she had been looking forward to it for a long time, even amid her personal turmoil. Mozart was already there when she arrived. He greeted her and then was pulled to another corner of the room. Anna was glad. She would not have known what to say to him. She looked forward to seeing him play because then she would be able to stare frankly. She had forgotten about his eyes and his paleness and slightness, forgotten the variety of his expressions, how they crossed so easily from cheerfulness to concentration. And then it was time for her to sing.
Aglow in her daffodil gown, the countess, an expert player, accompanied Anna in arias from Paisiello’s wildly popular adaptation of Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville. Anna, somewhat to her chagrin, was conscious of trying to please and impress Mozart above all the rest. She thought he was attentive. She thought he must be pleased. And in these idle musings she forgot, for a moment, John Fisher’s breath. The room was large and had a pleasant acoustic. The countess played as well as any concert artist and the piano was a beautiful Stein.
After she sang, Anna returned to her seat in the gathering and with a shaking hand accepted a glass of sherry. Count Thun, the countess’s lucky mate, beamed at his wife, who moved so gracefully among her guests, every gesture simplicity, no more than it should be and no less, her face open and kind, accepting the compliments of her listeners and remarking in low, lilting French (she spoke in French almost as well as German) how blessed they were to have a singer like Mademoiselle Storace among them. One could not help but recollect, seeing Anna and this gracious lady together, how the pert Rosina of The Barber of Seville became the melancholy, neglected Countess Almaviva of the second Beaumarchais play, The Marriage of Figaro. The Countess Thun, however, had no such impediments. There was not a better heart in all of Vienna, nor one more beloved, and thank God for her love of music.
Mozart arranged himself before the pianoforte and waited while the guests settled and seated themselves. He wore a red frock coat trimmed with gold thread. A froth of lace cascaded from his throat. He had brought no music. He would play a sonata from memory and then improvise for a time on any theme given to him.
The room seemed to grow smaller around him, the light in all corners to flicker and dim. He played almost without appearing to move, sitting at the piano with a quality of straightness born more from attention and relaxation than from any excitement or anxiety.
Anna had seen many virtuosi play. Wolfgang Mozart surpassed them all. He exhaled, and so many breathing notes unfurled from his unhesitating hands. He played as she had always wished to sing—how she imagined she might sing if she were not so excitable and striving, but selfless and assured, bound to music alone. His expression hardly altered. He looked as if he were listening to a soothing prophecy about the felicity of his children. His eyes, relaxed and open, took in the room and yet looked at nothing. The smile on his lips was scarcely there—a smile for himself, alone, because he felt no need to parade his emotions for their benefit. He would not distract them from his music, nor undermine the balance of its perfection with aping or sighs. He looked as noble and quiet as a physician tending a miraculously reviving child, and no one seemed to take more pleasure in his art, for all his equanimity of expression, than he himself.
When the sonata was over he turned to them all with lively good humor and asked for a tune on which to improvise. Count Thun, winking at Anna, proposed the theme from her most famous Barber aria.
“Too obvious!” cried Mozart. “Everyone will think I’ve planned it out beforehand.” But no superior alternative being found, he at last consented to the Barber theme.
There could be no question that he was making up the variations on the spot, finding novel and ever wilder ways of exploring and distorting the theme, every turn unexpected and yet wholly right-seeming, without pause or misstep. His resources of creation were as if bottomless. The theme was always there and always changing. Just when it seemed he had ventured too far, beyond recovery, there was the original melody again, Anna’s melody, waiting for him patiently at the end of the next corner, nearly the same as he had left it—nearly exactly the same—and yet deepened, made somehow more complex and reassuring, by the twists and convolutions, the permutations of key and rhythm and mode, to which he subjected it. Anna was wholly rapt. When he had finished she felt almost hollow with the transformation. Here was an intelligence, a perception, quite beyond her scope. It humbled and inspired, and made her want to sing her aria again, right now, so that she might show him what he had taught her—or else to never sing it again, because she could never be as good as he had suggested.
“Isn’t he marvelous?” asked the Countess Thun. She offered Anna a few savory pastries. “I told him he would have to go last, or my fingers would be paralyzed when I went to play with you.” She gazed around the room with benevolent approval. “He outdid himself tonight. Did you ever hear such an extensive improvisation in your life? At every change I felt my eyes gape wider and my heart rise still farther with I don’t know what—nervous excitement, joy, gratitude—sincere astonished gratitude.”
“I’m quite speechless,” Anna confided to the good lady. She smiled, feeling restored and happy. It really was easy in this moment to imagine there was no baby and no John Fisher. They were all quite removed. Everything was whole again, restored, as it should be. Mozart’s playing had soothed her hot brain like sweet water. Where once there had been panic and confusion, there was now clarity, a peculiar, tingling calm. All would be well. She was almost sure it would be well. “I’d never heard him before.”
“What, my dear? Not in all these weeks? I’m surprised. I suppose you are prohibitively engaged. Well, you’re lucky you saw him tonight, because he’s leaving Vienna the day after next.”
“Leaving?” Anna looked around quickly and saw him by the whist table, conversing patiently with a dowager.
“Tragically so,” said the countess, following Anna’s gaze, “and the more loss for the rest of us. He and his wife will visit his family in Salzburg.”
“For how long?”
“Oh, some weeks, I’d think.” The countess’s smile deepened. “I see you’re disappointed. I felt quite the same when he told me. I am one of Herr Mozart’s greatest admirers and because of that, I get foolish notions that I can claim him for my own. But he is a free man and may do as he likes. You’re lucky to have heard him tonight, at his best!”
A little later Mozart came nearer and Anna could speak to him at last. She congratulated him
and saw how happy and proud he was, how well he spoke of his wife. She tried to explain how moved she had been by his playing, and how he had changed her perception of an aria she knew so well. She felt suddenly shy, yet also as though he understood her. Last night she’d seen Hamlet with John Fisher’s breath upon her. Now that was forgotten. She was herself again, at peace.
“Do you,” she asked hesitantly, “did you hear it all at once? I mean, when you heard me sing, were all the other variants already in your mind?”
He laughed and shook his head. “I make it up as I go. That’s the fun. Can I do this thing? Is it too far? Oh, now it’s too far and I’ll have to scramble to find my way back. And now is anyone bored, anyone nodding off? Yes? Better speed up, better get louder, range round the highs and lows, modulate, go backward and upside down and stick the ass on its head, and then isn’t this a sad little thing now, let’s do that again, and then add it to this one, like so, and softly softly softly, and here we are back to the theme again in minor and the tune is like a thread through all of it, guiding me through it like a maze, you know. If I lose it I’m finished! It must be at the heart, my heart. Everything spins around it. You see? But there’s no plan. If there were a plan it’d be a travesty. I’d have to call it something else.”
His face was rosy with pleasure and his hands, as he tried to let her see into his mind, drew vague excited pictures in the air. He looked into her eyes with such brightness and unreserve it was like watching a breaking sun along the sea. Anna nodded and nodded again and told him she did the same sort of thing when she was singing, or at least tried to. They were comrades, then. It relieved her that he had not been thinking of her directly when he played—it had been vain of her to hope for that, his thinking of her. No, it was all much simpler than that. He had been at play. He had allowed the rest of them to see into his amusement. And it was this play, this risk, that made him so extraordinary.
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