by Paul Adam
Guastafeste gave me a puzzled look.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “Paganini didn’t give Barbaia six thousand eight hundred francs; he gave him the jewelled violin.”
Guastafeste studied the piece of paper again.
“Are you sure?”
“Six thousand eight hundred francs was a huge sum. And Paganini, in 1819, wasn’t the enormously wealthy man he became later. What assets would he have had? His violin—il Cannone—that was probably the only thing of any value he owned. And he was hardly going to part with that. His living depended on it. What else did he have that was worth the equivalent of six thousand eight hundred francs, or more? Viotti’s gold violin, that’s all. There’s another clue in the wording. ‘Isabella will love this.’ ”
“Isabella?” Guastafeste said.
“Let’s have some coffee,” I replied.
I put the espresso pot on the stove. Then I told him about Domenico Barbaia and Isabella Colbran.
Barbaia is one of those characters history has forgotten, but without whom there would be no history to remember. He started his working life as a café waiter in Milan and went on to become the most influential musical showman of his day. He was poorly educated, but shrewd and hardworking and with an eye for the main chance, acquiring the concession to run the gaming tables in the foyer of La Scala and making a fortune on the side with some lucrative contracts to supply the French troops that were stationed in Milan.
At that time, no one went to the opera purely to listen to the music. To many of the patrons, in fact, music was the least of their reasons for going. La Scala was the centre of social life in Milan. For the wealthy with no jobs, it provided relief from the tedium of their days. They would go every night during the season and listen to the same operas over and over again, although listen is perhaps not quite the word, for nobody actually listened to much of the music. They went to talk, drink champagne and play cards in their boxes—their miniature salons—and, as the boxes had curtains that could be drawn, make love to their mistresses or paramours or, if they were desperate, their spouses.
Most of the action on the stage was watched with half an eye, or ignored altogether. The socialising really stopped only for the big numbers or the ballet sequence that every opera was obliged to accommodate and which was little more than titillation for the men in the audience—the cue for them to put down their cards, or their mistresses, and admire the dancers’ legs. There was even a tradition of the aria del sorbetto—the sorbet aria, which was written for one of the supporting singers and gave the audience the chance to leave the auditorium and buy themselves a sorbet. Rossini famously wrote one of these sorbet arias in his opera Ciro in Babilonia; it consisted of just a single note repeated—a middle B flat—because he had discovered in rehearsals that the seconda donna could sing only that one note in tune.
But undoubtedly the greatest attraction of La Scala were the faro and rouge-et-noir tables that were set up in the foyer—the only place in Milan where gambling was permitted. Many people went to the opera and never actually made it to their seats. They got no farther than the foyer, where some would win and some would lose, but the only consistent winner was Domenico Barbaia.
By 1818, when Paganini and Barbaia first met, the impresario had moved from Milan to Naples, where he was running the opera and the gambling at the Teatro San Carlo. He would later go on to be instrumental in the careers of Bellini and Donizetti, but at this stage, if for nothing else, posterity owes him a debt for bringing the young Rossini to Naples and giving him the security that enabled him to develop his genius as a composer.
Barbaia was rough and a little uncouth, but he had a gift for spotting talent and was prepared to take risks to support the musicians he employed at the San Carlo. Rossini’s first opera for him was Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra—Elizabeth, Queen of England—about Elizabeth I’s supposed love for the Earl of Leicester, which is rarely heard in the opera house today. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the overture, which Rossini—adept at cannibalising his own work—had already used for his earlier opera Aureliano in Palmira and liked so much that he would go on to use it a third time as the overture to The Barber of Seville.
The title role in Elisabetta was written for the San Carlo’s prima donna, the formidable Isabella Colbran. Colbran was the Maria Callas of her day, Italy’s most celebrated, and most highly paid, soprano, who had an astounding vocal range and a dramatic ability that audiences found mesmerising. She was to become Rossini’s wife, but at this point—in keeping with the droit du seigneur that impresarios exercised over their leading ladies—she was Barbaia’s mistress.
Given his astute box-office instincts, it was only natural that Barbaia should attempt to lure Paganini to the San Carlo, and in the spring of 1819, the violinist duly arrived in Naples. Rossini was busy overseeing the revival of his opera Mosè in Egitto—Moses in Egypt—which had had its premiere the previous year but had not been an unqualified success because of staging problems. In the scene where Moses parted the Red Sea, the audience—much to its amusement—had been able to see the small urchin boy under the set who was operating the mechanism separating the waves. The mechanism—and the urchin boy—proved difficult to change, so Rossini’s solution was to write a new aria for the scene to distract the audience. In this he was spectacularly successful. On the first night of the revival, the aria, the moving prayer “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” made such an impact that the ladies of the audience went into paroxysms and doctors had to be called to treat them. Many years later, when Rossini’s body was transferred from Paris to a new tomb in Florence, it was this prayer that was sung on the steps of Santa Croce. And it was this prayer that Paganini used as the theme for his “Moses Fantasy,” dedicated to Elisa Baciocchi.
Paganini’s stay in Naples was clearly not all work and no play. The IOU we’d found in the gold box was unequivocal evidence that he had succumbed to the weakness for gambling that had afflicted him since his youth, when he had had to pawn his violin to pay his debts. There could have been no question of his pawning his violin this time. The Cannon was far too important to his career. He would no more have parted with it than he would have cut off one of his fingers. But the jewelled violin Elisa had given him was a different matter. Precious though it was, it was expendable.
Throughout his life, Paganini was careless in his relationships with women. He did not have the temperament or the inclination for monogamy, and his lifestyle, in any case, was not conducive to it. He was constantly on the move, travelling from one city to another, playing concerts, then moving on. In modern times, that would be tiring enough—as many an international concert soloist could vouch. In Paganini’s day, with journeys made by horse-drawn coach over unmetalled roads, it was exhausting. Few women would have been prepared to put up with such hardships. They would have wanted stability and a settled life, which Paganini was not able to give them. Even when he was in his forties and he fathered a son, Achille, he did not change his ways. A doting, besotted parent, he simply jettisoned Achille’s mother—paid her off with a financial settlement she was only too happy to accept—and took the boy with him on his travels.
If he was so indifferent to the feelings of the women in his life, why should Paganini have had any greater attachment to the gifts they gave him? Elisa’s present of the jewelled violin was not as generous as it seemed, given that it had been looted from a convent by one of her soldiers, but she must have made it in a spirit of love. Whether Paganini received it with the same sentiment may be open to question, but he hung on to it for many years after their split. If the gaming tables of the San Carlo had not come in his way, maybe he would have hung on to the violin even longer. Was that why he had dedicated the “Moses Fantasy” to Elisa? I wondered. As a kind of recompense for using her gift to pay off his gambling debt, as a way of alleviating the guilt he must surely have felt? Six thousand eight hundred francs was a considerable sum. Dom
enico Barbaia would have happily taken the jewelled violin in lieu of the money, and then . . .
“And then what?” Guastafeste said.
“It’s there in the IOU,” I replied. “ ‘Isabella will love this.’ Barbaia gave the violin to Isabella Colbran.”
Fifteen
What happened after that? I wondered. What did Isabella do with the jewelled violin? Most jewellery is made to be worn, but she could hardly have pinned a twenty-centimetre-long gold violin to her gown. Did she have it broken up and the jewels reset into more practical forms? I couldn’t see it. Only a vandal with no aesthetic taste would have taken apart such a fine work of art, and Isabella Colbran was no vandal. She was an educated, discerning artiste. She would certainly have kept the violin intact, perhaps displayed it on her dressing table, where she could admire it when she was doing her hair and makeup.
Isabella was one of the greatest singers of her day, a beautiful, supremely talented woman, yet her life was fated to end unhappily. When Barbaia gave her the jewelled violin in 1819, her relationship with the impresario was already coming to a close. She had almost certainly started an affair with Rossini, and who could blame her? Rossini was young and good-looking—the baldness and corpulence that was to afflict him later was still just a shadow on the horizon. He was a phenomenally gifted composer with a love for the good things in life and a wit that any woman would find attractive.
Occasionally, I have been known to speculate about which great composer would have made the most convivial companion for a night on the town. Mozart? He was, by all accounts, a warm, gregarious individual, but his childish, scatological sense of humour would, I fear, have quickly become tiresome. Beethoven? Well, his deafness—not to mention his irascibility—wouldn’t have made things easy. There might have been some cruel amusement to be had out of scribbling a provocative comment in his “conversation book” and then retiring to a safe distance to watch the explosion. But that’s not something I could ever do to another person, let alone someone as great as Beethoven. Brahms? Too serious and austere. He played the piano in the brothels of Hamburg when he was a young man, but—perhaps understandably—that seems to have put him off sex and drink for life.
No, Rossini would be my number-one choice. A bon viveur with a fondness for food, wine, and music—what better companion could you hope for? They say that Rossini wept only three times in his life: once when he heard a singer murdering one of his arias, once after the premiere of The Barber of Seville—which was a notorious disaster—and a third time, at a picnic, when the truffled chicken fell in the river. That’s the kind of man he was. Leaving aside The Barber—the most joyous comic opera in the entire repertoire—how could you not like a man who went out in drag with Paganini during carnival season, the two friends singing and accompanying themselves on guitars? Or who coined the immortal words about Wagner: “Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.” Or who, when his friend the composer Meyerbeer died and Meyerbeer’s nephew showed him a funeral march he’d written in honour of his uncle, remarked, “Excellent. But wouldn’t it have been better if you had died and your uncle had written the march?”
An evening of jovial revelling is one thing. Marriage, however, is quite another—as Isabella discovered, to her sorrow. In 1822, on their way from Naples to Vienna, she and Rossini stopped off to be married at Castenaso, outside Bologna, where Isabella had inherited a large estate from her father. The marriage, far from cementing their love for each other, seems to have been the beginning of the end for their relationship. Isabella was thirty-seven, Rossini thirty. Her stellar career was starting to falter. Her voice was slipping and she could no longer be relied on to sing in tune. Rossini, though, was at the height of his powers, the most famous composer in Italy, with a staggering thirty operas under his belt.
Two years later, after a poorly received performance in the title role of Rossini’s Zelmira in London, Isabella retired from the stage and retreated to her villa at Castenaso. Her husband, meanwhile, had relocated to Paris, where he was intent on furthering his already-illustrious international career. Physically separated from each other, and probably temperamentally incompatible, the two of them drifted apart.
No one at the time was very sure why Rossini married Isabella. Wags said it could only have been sheer masochism on his part—condemning himself to a lifetime of listening to Isabella’s increasingly wayward voice. Others implied that he did it for the money. Isabella was a wealthy woman, her earnings from the stage supplemented by the income from the Castenaso estate, and she gave Rossini a generous dowry when they tied the knot.
Interestingly, no one seemed to consider the possibility that Rossini might have married for love—and maybe he didn’t. He was a successful composer, but perhaps he was aware that sooner or later the well would run dry and he would need a nest egg for his retirement. No one could shine as intensely as he had been doing without burning out eventually. Is creativity in a person finite? Would Mozart and Schubert, dead at thirty-five and thirty-one, respectively—or Mendelssohn and Chopin, gone at thirty-eight and thirty-nine—have continued composing so feverishly if they had lived to ninety? Or did they somehow sense their own mortality and so crammed all the outpourings of their genius into a short span of years?
Perhaps Rossini knew that his composing days were numbered—as indeed they were, though it was choice, not death, that terminated his career. Seven years after his marriage, following his last opera, William Tell, he stopped composing operas altogether. Just gave up. Never wrote another opera, though he lived for a further thirty-nine years. Why did he stop? No one knows. There have been suggestions that he was lazy, but his record of thirty-six operas in nineteen years must surely refute that. More likely, he’d simply had enough. He had run out of things to say and he was honest enough to admit it. I like him all the more for that. We tend to put the great composers of the past on pedestals, perhaps because we’ve stopped producing any new ones ourselves, but Rossini had no exalted ideas of his own status. He looked on composition as a job, not an art, and he was always im mensely practical about it—hence his habit of moving overtures, and arias, about from one opera to another. If a work was wanted quickly—The Barber of Seville, for example, was composed, rehearsed, and staged in just twenty-four days—and no one was going to listen to half of it anyway because they were too busy drinking and chatting, why bother to bust a gut producing something new?
Changing fashion also played its part. Romanticism was bursting forth all over Europe. Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann were the new rising stars of the concert hall, and in the opera houses Meyerbeer and Donizetti were edging out the old guard, of which Rossini—though he was still only thirty-seven—was the standard-bearer. His ill health, too, was a factor. Like Paganini, Rossini had venereal disease. In Rossini’s case, it was not syphilis but the less serious, though still incurable, gonorrhea that troubled him.
It was while he was convalescing at Aix-les-Bains after a bout of illness related to this disease that he met Olympe Pélissier, a well-known courtesan who had been the mistress of Balzac and the painter Horace Vernet. They fell for each other, and when Rossini went back to Paris, Olympe came to live with him. Isabella Colbran was out in the cold.
Rossini’s desertion devastated Isabella. Shut away in provincial obscurity at Castenaso, bored and depressed, she started gambling to excess and lost a lot of money—although no more than she could afford. It must have been a traumatic time for her. She had been an operatic star for twenty years, fêted by audiences all over Europe. Now she was a middle-aged recluse who had lost her looks, her voice, and her husband. Alone in her villa, with no lover, no children to comfort her, just memories of her glorious career and a husband who had abandoned her, she must have been unutterably miserable. Did she still have the jewelled violin with her? Was it on her dressing table or beside her bed? Or had she buried it away in a drawer, or even got rid of it, because she could no longer bear to have it around—this gift from a forme
r lover that served only to remind her of happier times?
Rossini never came back to her. In 1837, he obtained a legal separation, and eight years later, in 1845, Isabella died at Castenaso, sad, lonely, and neglected. Ten months after that, Rossini married Olympe.
Guastafeste was silent for a long time after I’d finished.
Then he said, “I’ve never heard of any of them. Isabella Colbran, Domenico Barbaia, Olympe Pélissier.”
“I know,” I said. “The peripheral figures in great men’s lives are always forgotten.”
“Who inherited Isabella’s estate after she died?”
“Surprisingly, I believe it was Rossini.”
“But they were legally separated.”
“Isabella never changed her will. She still loved him, despite what he had done to her. When she died, they say she was murmuring his name.”
“And the violin?”
I shrugged.
“Who knows?”
“Did Rossini inherit that, too?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.
“If he did, what would he have done with it?”
“Taken it back to Paris with him, I suppose. That’s where he lived for the remainder of his life.”
“And where Villeneuve and Robillet lived. Do you think they found something in Paris, something to put them on the trail of the violin?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Guastafeste cut another slice of cheese and ate it with a cracker.
“One thing I’d like to know,” I said. “Paganini’s gold box. How did Nicoletta Ferrara acquire it?”
Guastafeste nodded, chewing on his cracker and cheese.
“I’d like to know that, too,” he said. “Why don’t we go up there tomorrow and see if we can find out?”