The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “I believe he’d try if someone gave him the opportunity,” Conrad said absently.

  The remaining infantryman chuckled.

  I know what it is, Conrad thought, the illumination coming to him in a moment as he saw a likeness between the soldier and his prisoner that both would have denied. Roberto’s spent a month and a half in intense companionship with the opera company; they—we—are as much his comrades as would be the case in an army.

  “As for you, Conrad,” Roberto Capiraso said, imperturbably dry. “They tell me Signore Rossini was locked in his rooms by the impresario Barjaba, with only cold macaroni to eat, until he composed Otello. And for Gazza Ladra’s Sinfonia he was locked in a room in the roof of La Scala—and that was on the day of the performance! If a man can write music so quickly, surely you can compose a few new words?”

  “I should have punched you more than once,” Conrad muttered.

  The Conte di Argente choked back a loud laugh. It startled Conrad—and startled him even more to find he was glad of it.

  The second one of the guards entering with writing materials, wine, and food; Conrad took them with thanks. The riflemen took up station across the corridor—the room being so much less crowded without them that Conrad stretched his arms with a sigh of sheer physical relief.

  He set about turning both scores to a matching place. He didn’t sit down afterwards, but paced as much as the small room would allow: three steps either way.

  “As soon as we have a smooth transitions to new materials, we’ll call people up on stage for rehearsals.” Thinking of what JohnJack, Sandrine, Estella and the others would say made Conrad flinch.

  He pictured their faces and sweated at the danger of the next eight hours. The rehearsal, then the performance, and if the Prince’s Men have an attack in hand—

  Conrad came to an abrupt halt on the creaking floorboards, gazing around the dusty room as if it were the first time he saw it. “I’m an idiot!”

  The Count, all il Superbo, murmured, “If I refrain from the obvious remark, will you tell me why?”

  “You’ve written Nora’s role—” He deliberately didn’t avoid her name. Roberto Capiraso showed a flinch in his creased eyelids, but otherwise didn’t react. “—Her role as Isabella of Castile, for a voice that can apparently span the ranges of bass to high soprano—”

  “Not apparently,” the dark man put in.

  “As soon as we have them started on rehearsals—transpose!” Conrad ordered.

  “Transpose? What?” Roberto sounded openly startled.

  “Everything,” Conrad said with grim certainty. “Begin with Act Four’s finale ultimo. Go on to the opening chorus of Act One, and the finale of Act Two. If I remember, that’s between eleven and thirteen minutes of music. Even with what we alter, the time won’t be significantly different… I want all the principal singers, and as many of the chorus as are capable of it, to learn those thirteen minutes. All parts.”

  Conrad thumped a fist on each score.

  “Transpose as much as you can. Male to female roles, and vice versa. Tenor to mezzo, castrato to soprano, bass to tenor—hell, soprano to bass! My point—”

  Conrad interrupted himself before the other man could stutter his outrage:

  “—Is that the Prince’s Men want us stopped. Ferdinand has a division of the army of the Two Sicilies in Naples, ostensibly to greet his Imperial Majesty. Your guards outside aren’t just to keep you from deciding to run, they’re here to keep you alive.”

  “You think we’ll be attacked.”

  “I know we’ll be attacked! We’re not under your protection any more.”

  Roberto inclined his head, acknowledging the hit.

  In the uncomfortable quiet, the distant echoes of voices singing scales and phrases could be heard; and Angelotti’s crew swearing blasphemously; and the noise of violins, cellos, and basses tuning up. The company, all unknowing, at what they think is a last rehearsal…

  “You want me to transpose every principal role, where it’s possible.” Roberto sounded both troubled, and oddly exhilarated.

  “That’s right. If one singer can’t manage Nora’s role—we’ll divide it up between all of ours!”

  Conrad sat, picked up his steel-nib pen, and drew his folder of the libretto towards him.

  “And, besides that… By the time it comes to the finale ultimo—I don’t know how many singers we’ll have.”

  Luigi Esposito came into the San Carlo’s auditorium, possibly attracted by the shrieks of singers given new material—so closely resembling the old material—so close to the rise of the curtain. Conrad caught sight of him leaning against the back wall, and left Il Superbo in the chaos of arguing with chorus and orchestra.

  Having explained his situation, he raised a brow.

  Luigi looked innocent.

  “You always know what’s going on.” Conrad didn’t mind paying for his information with compliments. “It’s been an hour since I saw the King; what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know much…” The police captain dusted off his white gloves. “Word’s come back from Commendatore Mantenucci. His men and Colonel Alvarez’s troop, they couldn’t find anything on the road out of Posillipo. Last I heard, they were going through the Grotto to scout out the Flavian Amphitheatre.”

  Conrad didn’t bother to ask how Luigi heard things; the police chief’s network of informants rivalled the Commendatore’s.

  Luigi added, “Colonel Alvarez sent orders for another company to join them. If it was me going after the Prince’s Men, I’d have sent for more. But I hear the Commendatore’s expecting ‘a handful of ruffians, conspirators, renegade gentlemen and their servants’…”

  The impersonation was highly accurate. Conrad couldn’t help a grin.

  “Don’t be too concerned,” Luigi finished. “In the police, we’re used to dirty fighting with the people we don’t name. One has to hope that the Prince’s Men won’t be expecting Colonel Alvarez’s troops.”

  Conrad let himself think how badly he wanted to hear that the black opera company was found, captured—was not somewhere out in the countryside of Campania, threatening L’Altezza azteca.

  He thought bitterly that the worry allowed him to avoid the one thing that tore at him with wolf’s teeth. Where’s Leonora?

  A shiver of the earth penetrated the walls of the San Carlo, causing a sudden silence among the stagehands and musicians. After a few moments it ended, and they returned to their work.

  Glancing back at Luigi, Conrad thought—even in the dim lighting—that he looked unusually grim.

  “What?”

  “Oh—nothing about the opera, Corrado.” The reassurance fell from Luigi Esposito’s tone. “I just—don’t like my orders. Naples is not to be evacuated.”

  The sounds of tuning-up echoed from the orchestra. Conrad glimpsed Paolo with their father’s violin, gesturing with the bow. His mouth went dry.

  “I understand, I think. If you did give an order to evacuate, the city would be in chaos. People rioting, roads blocked by coaches… Most people still wouldn’t get far enough away in time.”

  Luigi looked down at his hands, and then up, meeting Conrad’s gaze with a pained look.

  “Corrado, doesn’t it occur to you? If Ferdinand gives the order to evacuate Naples today, the Prince’s Men would instantly know we’re aware of their plans. He won’t give away that advantage.”

  To sacrifice Naples so as to have the black opera fail—

  “I understand.”

  Conrad exchanged a look with Luigi, seeing both how much the other man disliked necessity and bowed to it. There was nothing to say.

  He left the police chief a short time later, and determinedly made his way down into the body of the theatre, where frantic rehearsals proceeded under Paolo’s tyrant hand.

  A voice that is Dead, that has no human restrictions, that can span bass to soprano—

  “I am an idiot!” He said it out loud, just as he came up with the pe
rson he searched for. Taking Sandrine’s arm, and momentarily ignoring her curious look, he escorted her to one of the boxes at the side of the stage. “I need to talk to you about Contessa Leonora’s voice.”

  “Leonora’s voice?”

  It took a surprisingly short time to summarise what Roberto had told him. And would, he considered absently while he spoke, remove the need to make an announcement. Sandrine will have it all around the company in ten minutes.

  She stared at him when he finished, absently adjusting her plumed head-dress.

  Conrad took his copy of Reconquista’s finale ultimo out of his coat pocket. Sandrine studied the staves scribbled on a fresh sheet of paper by the Count.

  “A woman can sing this?”

  “Nora can sing this.” Conrad absently pencilled an alteration to one word of the libretto. “She has no human limitations now. Sandrine, please. You could do this—”

  He found a soft fingertip pressed against his upper lip, and stuttered to a halt.

  “This is opera,” Sandrine said softly. “If there was anywhere I wouldn’t object to doing this… But it isn’t possible. Corrado, it’s true I used to sing tenor with a baritone lower range. Now I sing mezzo, with a contralto base—like Colbran, but without her soprano tessitura. It took a long time to train myself to use my upper range for speaking and singing. More to the point—”

  She fixed him with a glare, as he tried to interrupt.

  “—I’ve never trained for transitioning between the two voices! I have no idea how I’d go about finding my way through the passaggio between a baritone-shaded tenor and a high mezzo!—And I’m not going to learn before two o’clock this afternoon!”

  “Merda!” Conrad relieved his feelings. “No, not you, Sandrine.”

  He rubbed at his eyes, watching the Conte di Argente down in the orchestra pit.

  “Il Superbo’s never believed anyone could sing this but Leonora. He’s rescoring the last finale as a stretta, transposing it for all the principal singers, so everybody is singing part of it. I suddenly had the thought that you’d be the one who could sing it all.”

  Sandrine Furino touched him gently on the arm, but didn’t vocalise her sympathy. “You may want to talk to Estella and Signore Velluti about anything above high B. You’re thinking in terms of range, Corrado; not whether someone has the resonance, tessitura, flexibility… It takes a long time to train a voice, and a long time to re-train one.”

  “I thought I’d solved our problems.” Conrad sighed.

  Sandrine nodded absently. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the scribbled page of score. “Corrado, better get il Superbo to make more copies of this Reconquista—look at them over there, they’re turning into a mob!”

  “No one will have time to do more than learn their own part. The way we’re going,” Conrad muttered, staring up at the rows of unoccupied boxes, “we’ll still be rehearsing Act Four while you’re singing Act One!”

  “They’ll hang il Superbo, and you too.” Sandrine snickered. She tucked the folded paper into the bodice of her costume. “Oh, Corrado, don’t look so worried! Our singers are very forgiving!—Well, more than the Prince’s Men would be, I think—Conrad?”

  Conrad jolted out of his momentary daze.

  “I’ve got it!”

  Dropping Sandrine from his attention as if she were part of Angelotti’s scenery, he tucked himself into a corner by the proscenium arch, with a silver-point pencil and a sheet of paper, and engaged himself in six minutes of rapid-fire, utterly-certain, scribbling.

  Emerging, he found himself in the middle of singers on the stage, most of them waving either a short copy, or—in the case of Estella Belluci—Roberto’s full score of Il Reconquista d’amore.

  “I can’t sing this!” Estella protested, waving her free hand at both Paolo-Isaura and the Conte di Argente. “No woman could sing this! If I sing Isabella as it demands to be done, I’ll burst a blood-vessel and drop dead on the stage. If I sang even part of it, my voice would be wrecked forever!”

  “Who says you’ll be singing Isabella di Castiglia’s part?” Velluti glanced up from unbuckling his stage breastplate, and ran his hand through his dark hair—which gave him the look of a rather large Naples street-brat. The great chandelier cast bright enough candle-light that Conrad saw the acquisitive glint in the man’s eye.

  “No woman can sing that,” the castrato said. “Not a mortal woman, anyway. But the soprano part of it is within my tessitura, and—I may lose my voice permanently, but all the same. Let me try.”

  Velluti gave a sudden grin. “If I succeed and I lose my voice, people will travel miles just to see the castrato who did it, so I’ll still have fame and fortune! If I fail… If we fail, I don’t think it matters whether I’ve got my voice or not.”

  Roberto Capiraso looked up from where he sat at the upright forte-piano. “I’m sorry to remove your chance of fame and fortune, Signore Velluti. Our finale ultimo is not to be one singer, nor the prima donna with an accompanying comprimaro singer, or accompanying chorus. Conrad once said to me, ‘put the effort in that you would to the end of Act Two’—so I’m scoring this the way an Act would work when it needs to drag the audience back into the theatre after the interval. I’m scoring Leonora’s finale ultimo as a sextet.”

  A thunder of protest broke. Conrad put his hands up, gesturing for silence.

  It fell only when Roberto Capiraso stood, by the forte-piano, his dark gaze picking them out one by one. “Yes, I know it isn’t done. The heroine or the hero sings at the final curtain. We’ll be the first to do it differently.”

  The silence deepened. Every singer and musician watched their composer. Conrad could see that all of them, by now, were aware that he had been one of the Prince’s Men, and their enemy.

  Roberto sounded both acid and grim. “Leonora has the advantage of being able to sing this part—but one voice is one voice. It can’t be six different voices, in unison, in harmony, in counterpoint… If you can’t do what she can do, do what she can’t. If her range and colouring are more than human—then we’ll see what polyphony can do.”

  Slowly, the singers began to nod agreement.

  Conrad smoothed out the paper he had crushed in his fist and walked forward, his boots loud on the stage boards.

  “Now you’re all here, I want to confirm that there’ll be libretto changes as well. No—”

  He lifted a hand, quieting them.

  “Nothing major except the finale ultimo, and there I’ve written a handful of new lines, and added one piece of stage business.”

  Paolo groaned under her breath, evidently trying to figure out how she could adapt anything new into the tightly-woven dance that was the staging and blocking.

  Conrad held out the paper to her. “If we can have copies for everybody? They don’t have to be calligraphy, just quick!”

  Her mouth curved into a reluctant smile, and she nodded, already reading over the slanting lines, crossed-out scribble, with its boxes and arrows that directed errant words and directions into their proper places.

  “Reconquista…” Conrad widened his attention to take in the rest of the principal singers and musicians, and raised his voice slightly. “We originally thought the Prince’s Men would end with tragedy, being an easy emotion to evoke. Instead, the soprano Queen of Castile, Isabella, ends with her song of triumph over her enemies. And I realised—that doesn’t matter. Only a few changes to our script, and we have an exact opposite to that vindictive triumph.”

  Velluti looked unusually disgruntled. Conrad thought that would be because he had been denied his rondo finale.

  “Meaning?” the castrato demanded.

  Conrad voiced it softly:

  “Forgiveness for all.”

  JohnJack reached over Paolo’s shoulder, as she followed the altered score, and made play of turning the page the other way up, and reading it that way. “Porca giuda, Corrado! How long did this masterpiece take you?”

  “Less than ten minutes.”
Conrad glimpsed words on Estella Belucci’s lip and fixed her with a glare. “I’ve had my head full of this opera for six weeks, night and day! I’ve had more opera than I’ve had food and sleep! Now, each of you tell me what you think I’ve written, and I’ll tell you if you’re right!”

  The blonde woman covered her mouth with her fingertips, stifling a giggle. She leaned over Paolo-Isaura’s other shoulder.

  “All right,” she said cheerfully. “All as before for Princess Hippolyta; I still leave the country… Ah, but the Aztec Princess Tayanna calls me “sister queen”! And we embrace: that’s touching. And she requests that I bring the Amazon boy-Prince to meet his father now and again.”

  Conrad turned from her shining gaze to the tenor. “Lorenzo?”

  “I, ah, as King Carlo, I forgive Signore Cortez for his rebellion against the crown—” The diminutive tenor interrupted himself to add, “—Although I really don’t know why I should—”

  “Natural forgiving nature,” Conrad said blandly.

  Lorenzo Bonfigli gave him a look of disbelief. “Says here, I understand the power of love, which even earthly rulers cannot conquer. And then Cortez and I, we embrace as brothers. Whether we want to or not.”

  “Bonfigli!”

  “We embrace as brothers, in a spirit of universal forgiveness.”

  JohnJack looked up from his revised score with a snicker, subsumed into an enthusiastic beam. “‘Universal’ forgiveness is right. I don’t get killed, I get captured! Then I defend the Princess against il Re Carlo here when he tries to annex her kingdom—oh, and look: in the space of a couple of lines, Princess Tayanna forgives me for my rebellion, because love was at the bottom of it all, and sends Chimalli off in exile to the frontiers to guard the Aztec lands—but I shall be able to come home when I’ve expiated my crimes.”

  Conrad subdued sardonic reactions with a narrow glare.

  “This lieto fine is earned,” he emphasised. “For each of them, there’s as much happy ending as they deserve—after the punishment for their own stupidity has finished falling onto their heads!”