by JH Fletcher
About Voice of Destiny
Lucia Visconti is feted in opera houses around the world. But it has been a long and arduous journey to the top and her personal life is a disaster…
Born to an Australian father and Italian mother in the Mallee country in the 1920’s, Lucia is taken to Italy by her mother shortly before World War II. Trained at the word-famous Toscanini Conservatorium, she survives the horrors of war to become the world’s greatest dramatic soprano.
But she quarrels with her domineering mother, and spends years separated from her true love, while accusations of wartime collaboration threaten to destroy her reputation.
It is only when she discovers the love she can truly give to others that Lucia is able to come to terms with her own past.
Inspired by the lives of great singers such as Maria Callas, in a superb piece of storytelling Voice of Destiny lays bare what it means to be a woman and an artist in a world in conflict.
CONTENTS
About Voice of Destiny
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
Part One
THE MOTHER 1917–1936
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
Part Two
THE STUDENT 1936–1946
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Part Three
THE DIVA 1946–1980
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Part Four
BEYOND THE CURTAIN 1980
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
About JH Fletcher
Also by JH Fletcher
Copyright
This one is for Max
Il mio destino è questo: O morte o amor!
(My destiny is either love or death!)
Arrigo Boito (La Gioconda)
PROLOGUE
The ten-minute bell started to ring.
Ten minutes, Lucia thought. Ten minutes to the last curtain of her life.
As she had done so many times, Lucia examined herself carefully in the wall mirror: the make-up of the young courtesan, the scarlet satin dress with the fitted bodice and elaborate floor-length skirt of mid-nineteenth century French fashion.
This, too, was for the last time.
Beyond tonight’s performance of La Traviata, the tempest of Violetta’s ecstasy and despair, beyond the applause and tears, the roses and adulation, lay …
Blackness. Of the unknown; of being unknown. She wondered how she would live with it.
There was a knock on the dressing-room door.
Lucia frowned; her foibles were well known and one of them was that never should she be disturbed before the start of a performance. There had been times when she would simply have ignored the knock, others when she would have yanked open the door and blasted whoever it was for disturbing her concentration. Even after a performance, come to that. A US county sheriff had tried that in Chicago, years before, and the picture of her lambasting him had gone around the world. On the other hand, tonight’s performance was the last she would ever give. From tomorrow there would be no more room for foibles. Perhaps tonight was time to start practising her tolerance and humility. Humility …
She almost laughed. That would be the day. ‘Come!’
Otto, her secretary for many years, a tall, spare, grey-haired man clad in self-effacement and a beautifully tailored dinner jacket to suit the occasion, stuck his head cautiously around the dressing-room door.
Tolerant or not, she still gave him one of her looks. Opera buffs might worship her but she had her hellcat side, too. Over the years Otto had grown used to her ways, and a smile, at this stage of the evening, would have troubled him more than a scowl. ‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Full house! Jammed to the roof!’
It was no surprise. Every ticket had been snatched up weeks before, within minutes of the box office opening; it was not every day, after all, that Sydney farewelled one of opera’s greatest performers. One of their own, what was more, despite everything. Today’s Telegraph had assured its readers that, Italian background or not, Lucia Visconti was as Aussie as meat pie. Controversial at one stage of her career, oh yes, but … WE LOVES YER! the headline had screamed and it seemed they did: all the more, apparently, for having spent the last thirty-two years flying the flag — if that was what she’d been doing — in every major opera house in the world.
No, it was no surprise, but quite a change from how it had been only five years before, when the auditorium had been packed with enemies as well as friends, each as vociferous as the other. There had been punch-ups all over the house that night, a near riot on the steps outside. Afterwards she’d heard the police had come close to using tear gas: all in a country that prided itself, without a hint of irony, on the individual’s right to self-expression.
It was all over now, all forgiven and forgotten. Or so it seemed, but there were times when Lucia found it hard either to forgive or forget. Tonight, in particular, Khieu Pen was very close. So many lives, so much waste and terror and ruin. And for what? Khieu Pen, who had been her friend … She sighed, returning to the present with Otto, who was almost girlish with delight.
‘It’s going to be huge, I tell you. Huge!’
‘That’s good.’
She even managed a smile: razor-edged, it was true, but still a smile. She asked: ‘Television?’
‘The lot. Overseas teams as well. Whole stack of them.’
Which was gratifying, of course, but no real surprise, either. Australia’s commercial channels had never been into art, least of all opera, but from the moment she had first stepped onto the professional stage Lucia Visconti had been big news.
Otto coughed diffidently and pulled a typewritten page from his dinner jacket pocket. ‘They’ll expect you to say something at the end. I thought this might help.’
She took the proffered notes but did not look at them.
‘So long as you’re not expecting me to sing “There’s No Place Like Home”.’
It had become something of a tradition — Nellie Melba had sung it at one of her oh-so-numerous last performances during the 1920’s — but Lucia Visconti made her own traditions and had never seen herself as a ballad singer.
She tossed Otto’s notes on top of the dressing table; they both knew that, if she said anything at all tonight, it would be whatever came to her at the time. As she had lived, so would she go out: her own woman.
Admittedly, there had been times when she had wavered in that resolve. No-one had ever called her promiscuous but there h
ad been one or two men before whom she had stripped emotionally, as well as physically. Harry Lassiter, Jacques Mazetta her first true love and, finally, out of all the dozens who had pursued her in recent years — an old woman, in her late fifties! — Denzil Ryan. Government minister and prize ratbag. She had given him her trust and love and look where it had got her.
‘I wonder if that bastard will be in the house tonight.’
No need to say whom she meant. Otto did not answer, which was wise of him. Not that it mattered now; it was a comfort to know that she, who once had hung on his smile, no longer cared whether Denzil was there or not.
‘I’m going to have a look at the house,’ she said, and saw Otto’s glance of surprise. Another breach of tradition: her own, this time. She had always believed it was unlucky to look at the audience before making her first stage entry but it would make little difference now.
‘They’ll love me to death tonight, whatever I do.’
Which didn’t mean she didn’t want a genuine triumph: anything less would demean the career that from the time she was thirteen years old had been the focus of her every thought. Nevertheless, now might be a good time to start reining in the superstitions that until this moment had played so large a role in her life.
She checked herself once more in the big mirror. Now for the final ritual of touching with her fingertips the good luck painting on the wall of her dressing room. It was a miniature by the Persian painter Bihzad, quite valuable, or so she’d been told. Two robed figures sat beneath a flowering tree; its pigments shone like gems. A friend had given it to her, years ago, and she took it everywhere. It was centuries old but it had picked up its latest legend only ten years before, when she had decided it brought her luck.
All artists were superstitious and, from that moment on, it had been a regular feature of her dressing room. On one occasion she had been performing in Vienna, having flown there from Milan, and somehow, she never knew how, the miniature had been left behind. She’d found out only on the evening before the premiere. Catastrophe! It was out of the question for her to go on without it, so she’d arranged for it to be collected from La Scala and flown over to her. It had cost Lucia a packet but had been worth it. The performance — Anna Bolena — had been one of her best.
There’d be no more performances to worry about after tonight but she would still keep the Bihzad by her, wherever she was. Good luck wasn’t to be sneezed at.
She swept out of the dressing room with Otto at her heels. With so much going on there was an iron rule that the cast, even the stars, should approach the stage only when cued, but tonight Lucia could make her own rules. She went to the peephole at the side of the stage. One of the hands stepped back politely when he saw her. It was one of the privileges of being a diva: the world always stood back for you.
And tomorrow? Lucia thought. What will the world do then?
She looked out at the auditorium. A packed house, indeed, the stalls bright with evening gowns, the sober affluence of dinner suits. Lucia studied the faces carefully. Brendan Hicks, the former PM, was in the second row, surrounded by his usual mob of sycophants; she recognised the blow-dried hair and fleshy face at once. He’d been chucked out at the last election, which showed there was some justice in the world, but she’d known he would turn up. When it came to music, Brendan was as knowledgeable as a chair leg but he loved the cameras and there would be no shortage of those tonight. She only hoped he didn’t snore. Of Denzil she could see nothing.
‘Five minutes to curtain.’
The murmured caution circulated, adding to the tension. In the backstage spaces, the air quivered expectantly. From the front of the house, the orchestra’s zoo-like noises died into silence.
The house lights went down.
Stillness.
The eyes of the chorus showed white in the shadows.
Lucia thought: All this for the last time.
Still she waited, no longer apart in the star’s dressing room but here, with the rest of the cast. I should have done this more often, she thought. It’s something I’ve missed.
Too late now.
A burst of applause from the audience as Sir Georg Solti came to the rostrum. Lucia watched as he raised his baton.
The strings’ soft entrance heralded the beginning of La Traviata, the opera she had chosen to end her career.
She watched the sweeping baton draw glory out of the breath-held silence. Dear Georg. They had been mates for years, since she had performed Mahler’s Eighth with him in Munich. She had asked him to conduct her final performance and he had agreed, rescheduling his commitments and flying all the way from Europe to please her. ‘And myself, too,’ he had assured her earlier that day.
The overture was timed for just under four minutes; when it ended, the curtain would rise to discover the revellers, herself among them, at the ball where Violetta meets Alfredo Germont and takes her first gay and uncaring steps towards catastrophe.
Behind the curtain all was soft movement as the cast took up position on stage.
A minute’s wait. Time for nervousness to claw. Lucia permitted herself to show nothing of the stage fright that had gripped her, too. The last time … The overture ended. Amid applause, full-bodied but still decorous, the curtain rose.
Images, inextricably mixed:
Violetta, no longer Lucia, tremulous between doubt and joy, fearing the commitment that she makes in full measure.
Oh gioia ch’io non conobbi, esser amata amando …
To love and be loved …
Time and again the applause came crashing, breaking the action, mutilating the music; the awareness of virtue draining from herself Violetta, from herself the messenger; her stage clothes drenched with sweat; changing costumes and make-up, she had always been noted for the stark realism of her Violetta’s darkly shadowed and haggard face, the tubercular woman doomed in health, doomed in happiness, doomed in love, the woman betrayed by love, lover, herself; the applause coming in like the tide, bursting higher, higher still, the sense of adoration flowing out of the darkness to surround her; she, alone, in a wilderness of yearning and sublimation and despair: Violetta and Lucia and the music, love denied, love fulfilled, and addio del passato. Violetta’s last words. Farewell to all that is gone.
And it was indeed gone, over, finished amid the tears and acclamations, Solti holding her hand aloft to the audience that loved her, that worshipped her, and herself alone on the stage accepting their adoration with modestly inclined head and practised humility.
Silence, expectant and still adoring. Lucia Visconti, the great artist, even perhaps the woman, one with the audience and the music’s sonorous aftermath.
She looked out at the faces in a blurring of tears. She could not speak, knew that the throat that had contained such beauty would close if she attempted a word. Instead she raised her hands to the audience as though to draw them close to her in acknowledgement and acceptance of their love, while her smile mimed helplessness. A man’s voice shouted from the auditorium.
‘You are opera!’
A crash of cheering, of approval, and Lucia found that she could speak after all. ‘No!’
Silence returned, as deafening as the applause.
‘I am not opera. No-one is. Opera is art, and beyond any of us. We do not own it; we are its servants. It is a hard master, sometimes very hard. It demands of us all we have to give, more than we believe is possible. It drives us, crushes us, at the last uplifts us. It is pain and despair and glory. And it is you, the audience but so much more than that, the participants in the greatest of all rituals, the creation and sharing that is art’s essence, who uplift and sustain us. Because without you, without the opportunity that you give us to share it with you, there would be no art. So it is I who should acknowledge you, pay homage to you.’ The words came instinctively. And instinct it was that caused her to kneel before them now, arms outstretched in obeisance, amid the tribute of flowers covering the stage, while the audience rose stamping an
d shouting and weeping. And at last, truly …
It was finished.
Lucia could scarcely gather the strength to make her way through the mob of smiling, loving faces to her dressing room. The door was open. The room was packed with more flowers, more adoring faces, more voices and cheers battering and battering until she wished that she could have driven all — well-wishers, opera house, herself — into oblivion.
Brendan Hicks was centre-stage, the politician predictable in his publicity grabbing antics and self-regard. He grabbed her, embracing her, and she caught a whiff — more than a whiff — of stale cologne and fresh whisky.
‘The empress of all divas!’
She smiled at him as the flash bulbs exploded around them.
‘And I always thought you were a republican,’ she said, feeling the lingering imprint of his damp palms on her shoulders. And managed to get away: one of the less-vaunted skills of the prima donna.
It was at best a temporary escape. At once others were after her, the voracious slavering of media men and self-proclaimed personalities, hangers-on in merciless battalions.
Juliet Jones, host of a current affairs chat show, sharp in red and black, cocked an eyebrow at her.
‘Your choice of tonight’s opera. La Traviata: the woman betrayed. Is that how you see yourself?’ Bitch. No shortage of brain, there. Give Juliet a heart and she might have been a whole woman.
‘Nothing to do with myself. I chose it in tribute to my mother, because without her I might not have had a career at all.’
Determined to stifle any reference to Denzil Ryan, Lucia spoke more sharply than she’d intended. Juliet’s ears were fine-tuned to nuance; she honed her eyes and tongue.
‘Yet your mother isn’t here tonight.’
‘She couldn’t make it. She’s not a young woman.’
‘She’s saying she wasn’t invited.’
Lucia laughed: not for nothing was she known as much for her acting as her voice.