After a while she appeared at the door, in the corner of his vision, and it was all he could do not to go to her. He had not seen her in ages. But he must not startle her nor imply that there was anything strange. So he smiled a little and pretended to be slightly bored. She wore a shimmering robe, blue and green and gold. Her hair was down. Sweat dampened his brow. She stood in the doorway and he played as if she were not there and yet every nerve was tuned to hers.
At last she closed the door and came in. Her gown like water around her, her face thin and pale, unadorned, her eyes dark pools of yearning and regret. Until that day he had been safe.
Orangery
“The winner is Salieri,” the judge declared, and the hall broke into polite applause. They were in the orangery of the emperor’s pleasure palace at Schönbrunn, transformed for the occasion into a double theater and banquet hall. It was bleakest February, almost a year after Anna’s crisis, and the emperor’s brother was visiting from the Netherlands. The emperor had decided to welcome him with summer. The humid air smelled heavily of hothouse flowers; the guests had left their hats and furs piled in the hall. They were seated at a long table overflowing with a royal feast. The vaulted glass ceiling seemed to touch the stars. The orange trees rose about them and made them feel in a fairy grove. Here could be no thought of snow.
On each end of the hall was set a miniature stage, ringed with lights, and on each of these stages this night had been fought a mock battle between German singspiel and Italian opera buffa; between Mozart and Salieri. Each had written a one-act opera satirizing his respective genre. And Salieri had won.
“It isn’t fair!” cried Aloysia Lange. She had sung in Mozart’s contribution, The Impresario, along with the rest of the new German company from the Kärtnertortheater. The Italian company, from the Burgtheater, with Anna and Benucci and the rest, had put on Salieri’s First the Music, Then the Words. Both offerings were comedies about the backstage politics of the opera theater. Mozart’s music was superior, anyone could tell, but Salieri outranked him, Salieri was Italian, and Salieri had better singers.
“Well,” Mozart said in a low voice, smiling quickly at Aloysia and applauding with the rest, “we couldn’t expect otherwise.”
Aloysia watched the Italian company rejoice. They didn’t even have the courtesy to act surprised. She had sung well. She was not as good an actress as Anna Storace, but she had sung well and been unafraid of making fun of herself. But she was not Anna. Anna with her perfect breasts and beguiling eyes and velvety low notes. Anna with her unshakeable legato, her naturalness, her charm.
“Pig,” said Mozart genially to Salieri. “What’s the prize, another watch?”
“Mozart, my boy!” laughed Salieri, striking him roundly on the back. “My child! You actually had me worried for a moment.”
Mozart winced and rubbed his shoulder. “A dainty opera,” he said. “It reminded me of all your others.”
“And yours,” chortled Salieri, “had so many notes it reminded me of none.” He patted Mozart’s cheek. “And the words! God bless you, my boy, for thinking anyone can sing German without foaming at the mouth.”
Mozart smiled tightly. He had long been a proponent of German opera for German-speaking people, and his greatest success on the stage to date had been another singspiel, The Abduction from the Seraglio. But Italian opera still had its hold. The aristocracy, perhaps, did not wish to hear its own language.
He went to Anna. He could not help himself. But there was no harm in going to her, surely. He had every reason.
Months had passed since the Ophelia concert to mark her return to the Burgtheater. They had seen each other since then on many occasions, dinners and salons and such, and each time it seemed to Mozart he was more nervous, could speak to her even less, yet also that he was more filled with joy. He was composing an opera for her with Da Ponte, based on the second Beaumarchais play, The Marriage of Figaro, even though it was banned for being politically subversive. But Da Ponte would take out the politics and leave the comedy, and then there could be no objection. Mozart and Da Ponte wished for the new soprano, Luisa Laschi, to play the Countess Rosina. Luisa had more stateliness. But Anna was famous for her Rosina in The Barber of Seville—she might be displeased, think that Susanna was the second to Rosina. But the opera was Susanna’s. They would make her see that. It should have been called The Marriage of Susanna.
Every morning when he sat at his desk to compose, it was as if he were engaged in a private dance with Anna. But whenever he saw her in the flesh, she was not as he had remembered her, at once plainer and more beautiful, because she was real.
Impulsively she gave him a hug, and touching his shoulder exclaimed, “Oh, I wish you’d won! It isn’t fair.”
“That’s what my sister-in-law said,” he replied, smiling into her eyes. “I am happy you won. You sang beautifully.”
She shook her head. “I meant to sing awfully, so that you’d win. But then I couldn’t do it.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. It was rigged from the start.”
She looked back at him. In her eyes there was still a shadow of that sorrow that had made him love her, veiled in that bright good humor that had made him love her more. Then she kissed his cheek and moved on to talk to some patrons. He laughed and watched her go.
“What were you talking of with Frau Storace?” Aloysia asked Mozart, coming to his elbow. “I fear we’ll lose you to our enemies.”
He smiled, still looking after Anna. “Oh, this and that.”
“I was just having a tête-à-tête with Benucci,” said Aloysia in a disinterested tone. “He’s madly in love with her.”
There was a short pause. Mozart cleared his throat and said, “Is he really?”
“Oh, yes, quite desperately. And she loves him. They do make a beautiful pair, don’t they? They’re both so handsome, are they not? I daresay Benucci is the tallest gentleman in the room. He was asking me what he should do, poor man. He really wants to marry her, but of course she’s already wed. And she, poor lady, begs him to disregard her honor and live with her in sin. She says she’s had too much unhappiness. All she wants is peace and love. She cares nothing for honor.”
Anna and Benucci were talking to the emperor now, laughing and bantering. Mozart watched them. A high color was in his face. “What did you tell him?” he asked Aloysia.
She gave a sad, compassionate sigh. “I said to do it. I said she was free in the eyes of everyone but the law—even in the eyes of God. I said that a great love must be cherished—that this life of ours goes all too fast.”
He turned to face her. It was curious to think he’d once been in love with Aloysia Lange. She could not act to save her life. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he said. He looked back at Anna. “Mademoiselle Storace has too much dignity.”
“I assure you it’s true,” Aloysia exclaimed.
He shook his head. “Benucci might love her,” he said, “but she, my beloved sister, does not love Benucci.”
As they were departing the orangery, Anna and Aloysia arrived at the exit at the same time. Their skirts bobbed together and they held their fans on opposite sides in the air. Mozart and Salieri were coming up just behind them.
“After you, my dear,” said Aloysia, smiling and bowing formally.
“Oh no,” Anna said, with her own sweet curtsy. “After you.”
“You are the victor,” quoted Aloysia through her teeth, and graciously inclined her head.
Anna laughed and gestured kindly to the door with her fan. “But you are my senior.”
Aloysia’s mouth fell open. “Ah!” she exclaimed. She gathered her skirts. “There, my dear, you have trumped me.” With a fixed look of lightness she glided through the doorway. Anna followed behind.
“I’m using that,” said Mozart into Salieri’s ear, roughly linking arms with him. “You are not allowed to use that, you bastard.”
Salieri laughed, delighted. “Oh, please,” he declared, “be my guest.
I wouldn’t touch those girls for all the money in the world. I leave the difficult ones to you, Mozart. I like my women like I like my music, obedient and mild.”
Mozart shoved him away. “That’s not what I meant. The scene. Their tone—their smiles.”
“I know what you meant,” said Salieri, smiling easily. “You can have it, my man, with pleasure. I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.”
Mozart gave him a blank stare and then laughed. “That’s right. You wouldn’t. Forgive me, Salieri. Sometimes I forget you’re not as clever as I am.”
“Do you really?” asked Salieri dryly. “That’s the most flattering thing I’ve heard all day, Mozart, my boy. I’m sure I never forget it for a moment.”
The Execution of Franz Zahlheim
Their first day back in rehearsal, two months after her concert, Anna and Benucci could at first say nothing serious, not with everyone there, but they smiled, tentatively at first, and there was relief in those smiles. He had had time, perhaps, to recover from his shock. At last she found a chance to take him aside and say how sorry she was, and he grasped her shoulders and said, “No, no, it’s my fault, it’s I who ask pardon of you,” and he hugged her tightly, and the humanity of that embrace washed over them both. Though nothing could be as before, yet they could go on. For the first time in weeks she had no nightmares.
But John Fisher sent her letters. She balked to read them, felt the old shadows slamming around her. He was in France. He said she was still his wife. And she was. He claimed he had no wish to see her again. He only wanted money. Even the penmanship made her ill. She gave the letters to Lidia to file away. Then she decided she must witness the execution of Franz Zahlheim.
Franz Zahlheim had murdered his young wife with such brutality that he had been sentenced to the kind of torturous public death not seen in Vienna in forty years. His wife had been so beautiful and the murder so gruesome, so entirely without cause, that the public clamored for suffering. His execution was scheduled for March 10, 1786, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s thirty-seventh birthday.
Da Ponte, disgusted, declined to celebrate.
Michael Kelly did not want to go, but Anna insisted. She had loaned Michael money for a gambling debt; he was in no position to deny her anything, however perilous to his ease of heart and stomach. Michael was a gentle, pleasure-loving fellow; he had no affinity for blood sport and screaming, for being squeezed and pummeled by the rapt and heaving crowd. But Anna said that she had an interest in men who murdered their wives.
“Have you ever seen a man executed?” Michael asked, exasperated. “Stuck with hot coals and broken on the wheel?”
Anna gave him a soft look. “Now and then I thought that John was going to kill me. I’d set him off, somehow, and I’d be absolutely certain it was going to happen. Wouldn’t that have been a scandal? If he’d killed me?”
“Not a scandal,” Michael said. He rubbed his forehead. “A goddamned tragedy.”
“Of course I didn’t want to die. Lidia will tell you, I still have nightmares. It was as though I was only made of fear—I couldn’t think—I was suffocating in it. But, you see, sometimes I wanted him to do it. I did, Michael. I wanted it so that he could never take it back. I wanted him tormented. I wanted it to be in the newspapers. Everyone would have been so shocked and sad.… But then he didn’t kill me, and no one knew a thing, and it wasn’t in any newspapers, and we all went along.”
“Some of us knew.”
“Not really,” she said.
Michael said, feelingly, “You should resist pain, Anna. You shouldn’t invite it in. You know that story already.”
“I want to see if he looks like John.”
“Of course he won’t.”
“In the eyes.”
“You won’t be able to see his eyes!”
“If we get close enough I will.”
“We will not get close enough. I won’t have you swooning on me with blood spattered upon us. I’d lose my breakfast.”
“I deserve it,” Anna said, feeling a kind of stillness fall across her.
“What? His pain?” She shrugged and would not answer. Michael took her by the shoulders, his eyes wide, his face red with emotion. “You don’t deserve that. You don’t.”
“It’s not my pain, Michael—it’s my pleasure.”
“Do you hear yourself?” he cried, looking around him as if to seek more sympathetic ears.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Ireland and become a seminarian?”
“Don’t mock me,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “As my friend—my dearest friend.”
He gave an indignant snort. “Fine. But only because I owe you money. And we’re not getting close.”
“Close enough to see his eyes,” she said, and kissed him.
She wore her black veil, in the hopes that no one would recognize her, and leaned on Michael’s elbow. He was wordless, thin-lipped.
Lidia and a big manservant pushed a way through the rolling crowd. The smell was bad. One could not help bumping against men—most of them were men—of every rank. On the streets and lanes, from shop fronts and carriages, all eyes turned toward the square, where stood the scaffolding and all its flags and barbaric accoutrements, soldiers ranging before it. Anna was surprised at the number of children. Sometime later the soldiers brought out Franz Zahlheim—a thin man in soiled clothing, with a shaved head—and bound him to the wheel while he wept and struggled hoarsely and feebly. He was twenty or thirty yards away. The noise of the crowd seemed to blot out all thought, all freshness, all peace. But there was a great hush when the bludgeon was raised to break Zahlheim’s first flailing foot. The hammer swept through the sky and there was a crack and thump and then the rending scream, and the cheers and shouts of the crowd. Anna, in all her career, had never heard a crowd like this, so huge, so rapt. In spite of her veil she was flayed by her senses.
She had wanted to place John Fisher’s face over Zahlheim’s. To see him hurt—to see him, in agony, die—this would release her, she had thought; would bring a feeling of vengeance, an end. But there was no end. She did not wish to see this man suffer. She did not wish to see him tortured and killed. She had been tortured herself once. The wife of Zahlheim remained murdered. And these crowds were wild with excitement, they were laughing, vivid, exultant, to see the murderer wracked and killed. She suffocated among them. It was they, as much as the spectacle, that stunned her, and made her wonder who she was. It was as if they had never known pain themselves, even though this, what they were doing, was nothing else. She plugged her ears but the sound only seemed greater. Stumbling against Michael, who pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and against his tearing eyes, she begged him to take her home, but their progress was so slow, and the executioner’s so swift, that Zahlheim’s body had been broken and branded long before they could struggle free.
Her mother was at home doing some needlework. The dogs lay sleeping around her.
“How was the execution?” Mrs. Storace asked. Anna put her face down to Bonbon and didn’t answer. “I saw a few hangings when I was a girl. Thieves and such. Poor creatures.”
They were quiet for a while. Then Anna asked, “Mama? Were you afraid of my husband? Of John?” Her throat was dry. She petted the soft, dreaming dog.
Mrs. Storace continued stitching so steadily that for a moment it seemed that she had not heard. But at length she sniffed and said, “I curse myself every day for letting that man into my house.”
Then Anna, her heart full of sadness which was also a terrible warmth, rested her cheek on the arm of her mother’s chair and watched the needle pinch and thread as if for all eternity. While she watched she did not have to think of the broken man and the wrongs. She had only to think of the needle, pinching and threading forever in her mother’s elegant hands.
In Heaven’s Name
Mozart was home, waiting for Anna. She’d said she would sing Susanna only if her last aria, “Deh, vieni, non tardar,” w
as a showpiece rondo. He was good at writing rondos. He liked to put them in his piano concertos. They were long and vivacious, in the form of verse and refrain, and demanded a skilled technique. Anna’s aria would have decorations and roulades, low notes and high, show off everything she could do. It would stall the action, but leave no doubt which soprano was the prima buffa of the Burgtheater.
She was coming over now to try it out. His rondo. He had cleared his afternoon appointments. What time Anna did not need he would reserve for Figaro. Figaro must be everything now, as nearly everything as he could make it.
At lunch Constanze had remarked that he was fidgeting. That was what he did when he was nervous. He had not been alone with Anna since that time when she was ill.
He tried to play but it was shit, his hands were shaking all over. She was late. Perhaps she would not come. Perhaps that would be better.
Then there she was, cheerful and smiling, with her bright, dark eyes, and it seemed that both of them were nervous, remembering the last time they had been together alone. So long ago that was now. He had tired himself out, finishing his opera. It consumed his thoughts. He wanted little to eat and little sleep—only to finish it, to see it whole and perfect as he had it in his head. He forgot to wash, forgot household matters and social engagements and his appearance. Nothing like that could hold in his mind. Only Figaro—only Susanna.
His wife was out for the afternoon with Karl, visiting her mother. They went every Wednesday. Mozart disliked his mother-in-law. She was always wanting money and smacking her lips. She was superstitious. But she was good to Karl and devoted to her daughter.
It was now late March. Soon it would be full spring. Since last he’d seen Anna, Mozart had come to believe that Aloysia must have been right about Anna and Benucci. After all, their characters in his opera possessed an ideal love. And it was better that way. Benucci was tall and free. Mozart was small, and bound to Constanze. He had no time for infatuation. It would be much better if Anna loved Benucci. He would encourage it. He desired nothing but her happiness and she could not find happiness with him.
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