Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle

by Blechta, Rick

  The only fresh meat I bought was two lamb chops that had called to me as I’d walked past the meat counter. Broiled up with a decent tomato and some sautéed spinach, it made quite a nice meal to sit down to less than half an hour later. Opening a bottle of Pinot Noir someone had given me, and with some candles on the table, I felt quite festive if rather blue. It’s never fun to dine alone, and the nicer the meal, the deeper the funk.

  I dug out one of the copies of the Nabucco recording Tony had been playing the previous evening on the way to our aborted dinner date.

  Listening as if I were an outsider judging the recording, I felt I’d given a good, solid performance but one that, admittedly, fell a bit short. The baritone singing the title role was just terrific, the whole cast was — except for me. The performance by Careful Marta as Anna, every note placed perfectly, resonant, in tune, quite simply lacked the emotion the rest of the cast captured in their performances.

  As I sat glumly on my sofa, listening to the last act with a third glass of wine in my hand, the phone rang. I hit pause on the remote and picked up the receiver, glad for the distraction.

  “Marta? It’s Tony. I was just calling up to see if everything was okay. You were quite upset when I dropped you off last night”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I answered. “I’m afraid I behaved rather badly last night and I’d like to apologize.”

  “Not necessary at all. Could I ask, though, what upset you so much?”

  I wasn’t about to go into things with a veritable stranger, but I felt I owed him some sort of explanation.

  “The journalist from Montreal who was murdered. I’d met him. He was dating one of my close friends. She’s a complete mess, as you can imagine.”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of journalists in Montreal who cover biker gangs. How did you know it was him from what I told you? ”

  “I can’t tell you that. I just knew.”

  “Listen, I’d still like to take you to dinner if you’re willing.”

  I detected a hint of apprehension in this otherwise confident man’s voice, and marvelled at the fact that not only had he phoned, but he’d asked me out a second time. After my behavior, I thought I’d never hear from him again.

  “I’d like that, Tony.”

  “Would tomorrow be good? Or Wednesday? I’m free on Wednesday.”

  “You wouldn’t be skipping an opera performance on Wednesday to take me out to dinner, would you?” I laughed. “I couldn’t live with myself if that were the case.”

  “No. They’re doing Bluebeard’s Castle and Pagliacci on Tuesday and Wednesday is dark. Thursday is Der Freishütz. You sang Agatha the last time the COC mounted it.”

  I felt quite flattered that he remembered.

  “So it’s tomorrow or Wednesday,” I said. “Hmm ... All right, I choose Wednesday. Could we go to the same restaurant? It sounded awfully good, especially since it has your nonna’s blessing.”

  He finally laughed. “I’ll make the reservation as soon as I hang up. Pick you up at six o’clock?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Great!”

  “And Tony, thank you for being so understanding. I wouldn’t have blamed you one bit for tearing my phone number to shreds after last night.”

  “Don’t even think about it. You had a right to be upset. A death of a friend is a horrible thing.”

  There was another awkward silence as he probably realized that I also lost my husband not all that long ago.

  “Until Wednesday, then.” I said.

  “Unless something goes wrong with your computer and you need to speak to me sooner.”

  I was laughing again as I hung up. What a delightfully unassuming man. Why hadn’t some intelligent woman snatched him up?

  Monday was another coaching with Lili, and even though she seemed to be waiting for me to say something about my current problems, I decided I wanted to spend more time thinking things over before talking to her again.

  Pamina’s arias were once more becoming comfortable to sing, and there were several points where Lili just let me go through whole passages without stopping to correct things. She was smiling a lot, too, while she played, always a good sign.

  Today, I felt ready to work on the exquisite aria, “Ach, ich fühl’s, es ist verschwunden,” from the second act — in the minds of many, the most beautiful moment in the opera. Pamina believes that Tamino, who has taken a vow of silence, loves her no longer, since he will not speak to her. Mozart wrote this incredibly sad and melodically ravishing aria with an astonishing simplicity that makes it something treacherous to negotiate successfully. One false step and the music is either lacking in humanity or completely unbelievable. Pamina is girl on the cusp of womanhood. There is no subterfuge or complex emotions behind the way she behaves, and that’s what makes it so very difficult to sing. Those four and a half minutes are some of the most sublime moments in music. An operatic career can be made if a soprano can truly make her audience believe what she’s singing.

  When I told Lili what I wanted to rehearse, she looked at me from the piano, one eyebrow raised, as if to indicate, “Oh really?” Once in the past, I’d tried to work on this aria with her, but Lili gave up in frustration after only a few minutes. She loves Mozart more than any other composer, and try as hard as she might, that day she couldn’t hide her disappointment in the way I was interpreting the music.

  “Let us put this away for now,” she said and rose to busily shuffle through some of the piano parts that normally littered the top of her grand piano.

  Her rejection stung me and I quickly left, staying away for several weeks. I even contemplated switching coaches during that time. Eventually, we met and patched it up, but she never apologized and never mentioned the incident again, nor did I.

  Having studied and worked on the aria for over two hours the previous evening, I felt hopeful we might actually make it all the way through this time. Now that the role was mine in Salzburg, this moment had to be faced.

  A calm seemed to envelope me as I shut my eyes and sang the first notes, trying to grow them in my chest before exhaling them into the air. In the past, I would have been conscious of every small movement of my body as I worked to produce each note perfectly, not too loud, not too soft, all of them threaded together into the patterns dictated by the music. This day, I just shut off all of that and sang. The treachery of my husband and all his lies seemed to well up in me and I transferred those emotions to the music, understanding in the very fibre of my being how Pamina’s heart must be aching, to reach out to Lili and try to make her understand what those feelings really meant.

  The aria ends with a slowly descending passage in the strings with three solo woodwinds, a series of notes of such aching sadness that it always brings tears to my eyes. On this day, Lili’s hands on the piano made those notes live in such a way that I began weeping. Opening my eyes, I saw that she, too, was overcome by emotion as her tears rained down on the keyboard.

  The sound of the piano died away, leaving us in silence until the spell was broken by the clicking of someone’s heels on the sidewalk as they hurried by the house.

  Lili got up from the piano, walked over and wrapped me in tight hug, and I hugged back just as fiercely. We stood that way for nearly a minute before she pulled away.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Again!” Lili barked, drying her eyes and the keyboard with her sleeve as she sat down at the piano. “I have not cried enough yet today.”

  I smiled through my tears and poured a glass of water from the jug that always stood ready on a nearby table, then dried my own eyes, blew my nose, and took a drink. “I’m ready now,” I said.

  Lili’s hands hovered over the keyboard for a second, then slowly dropped, giving the first notes a special weight as she set up the dum-daaaa-dum of Mozart’s accompaniment.

  I shut my eyes and again sank into Pamina’s world, where she believes utterly tha
t love has abandoned her and life is no longer worth living. I became that person, because now I understood and could use Mozart’s sublime music purely to sing what had become my own emotions.

  Midway through, the phone started ringing in the hallway. Lili, with a deep scowl, ignored it as she always does. When the same thing happened two more times in rapid succession, she apologized and left the room.

  Reappearing almost immediately, she told me, “The call is for you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Tallevi from the COC. He is absolutely desperate to speak to you.”

  I walked into the front hall and picked up the receiver. “Leonardo, how wonderful to hear from you!”

  Two years ago, Leonardo Tallevi had taken over the reins at Canada’s premiere opera company. An excitable man, he nonetheless seemed quite competent, and the COC hadn’t slipped a bit under his leadership, as many had feared would be the case.

  “Marta, thank heavens I’ve found you! Our Bluebeard ... We have a very grave problem. Our Judith has been taken ill, and her understudy is also suffering from a very bad cold. Please, please, can you sing it tomorrow night?”

  “You’re asking me to jump into Bluebeard on a day’s notice? It’s been over four years since I last did the role.”

  “Could you? Would you? We have a sold-out house,” he wailed. “I am just beside myself. A cancellation now would be truly abominable!”

  I took a deep breath. Tallevi was asking a hell of a lot — and he knew it.

  “There’s no one else available?” I asked.

  “Do you think sopranos are just falling off the trees who know this role? Our performance is in your hands. It is you or no one!”

  I could hear my manager, Alex, saying, “You should do it, Marta. It would put him greatly into your debt.”

  What he wouldn’t say is that I would be up on the operatic equivalent of a high wire with no safety net. Bartok is not easy music, and while I have a very good memory, there is a lot of singing in that one-act opera with only two performers in the cast — and it was in Hungarian.

  “I don’t know, Leonardo.”

  “Please say you will do it. I have read the reviews you received in Paris and I know your voice is in excellent form. You are at Lili’s right now. I will bring over the music personally if it will help!”

  Lili was standing in the doorway to her studio, arms folded in front of her and a quizzical expression on her face. Tallevi has a very piercing phone voice, so I had no doubt she could hear every word.

  I put my hand over the receiver. “Should I?”

  Lili said, “I can clear my schedule for the rest of the day and tomorrow, as well.”

  Jeez! What a position to be in. I wanted to do it, but I also didn’t want to commit musical hara-kiri.

  “Please, Marta!” Tallevi’s miniature voice pleaded from the phone. “Save us!”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, Leonardo. I will do it. Call me tonight at home and we’ll discuss details. I’m assuming the blocking is the same. And you’ll need to bring in the costume from last time. I weigh twenty-five pounds less.”

  “I will do it myself, if need be!” he declared grandly, and I tried hard not to laugh as I imagined this very proper Italian gentleman hunched over with a needle and thread.

  “Oh, and call Alex to explain what’s going on. He’ll talk money with you.” And I’ll call him next, I thought as I hung up the phone.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Lili said cheerily. “I will help get you through this. And you will be fantastic.”

  “If I don’t kill myself doing it,” I muttered as I dialled New York.

  Tuesday evening at seven o’clock found me sitting in a dressing room backstage at the Four Seasons Centre, feeling as if I’d gotten hit by a train as the makeup artist fussed over me.

  I was always one of those students who would wait until the last minute to study for exams and then would spend two days cramming everything in until my brain felt as if it would explode. Either that, or I’d reach for those answers and they just weren’t there. I was praying that tonight wasn’t one of those nights. Opera singers have nightmares about being onstage and either not remembering anything about the opera they’re supposed to be singing, or they don’t even know what opera they’re supposed to be singing. We wake up with cold sweats from those, believe me.

  Tallevi had pulled out all the stops and even had the offstage brass play a fanfare when I took to the stage mid-afternoon for a quick blocking rehearsal. My dressing room was so crammed with flowers that I had to ask the stage hands to clear them out, because the mingled perfume from them was absolutely overwhelming.

  At 7:20, there was a soft tap at the door, and the stagehand on the other side of it said in a low voice, “Time, Miss Hendriks.”

  It sounded to me like the sort of thing they say to the condemned person just before that long walk to the gallows.

  I made my way to the darkened stage. Crossing myself, I found my mark and prayed that I wouldn’t make a total mess of it over the course of the next fifty-four minutes.

  On the other side of the curtain, the orchestra began to play those potently ominous chords that begin the darkest of dark operas, one whose plot line concerns a serial wife murderer. I felt the evening’s Bluebeard, a thoroughly nice Serbian bass-baritone named Slavos, fidget next to me as he slipped into the persona of a person so unimaginably sick and demented. I hadn’t heard the man sing more than a few notes at our blocking rehearsal, but everyone told me he was marvellous. I tried not to feel intimidated. This was his fifth performance, and by now he’d be thoroughly comfortable in the role.

  Musicians can sometimes get to a place where a performance becomes so balanced it’s almost as if you don’t have to expend any effort. I’ve heard it referred to as The Zone. All those hours of practice, all the thought, technique, and knowledge fuse together at the critical moment in such a way that you feel you can do anything. No matter how high, how fast, how difficult a passage is, you can suddenly just do it.

  Whatever you want to call it, that night on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto I was on fire, I was there, I was in The Zone, and my God, I did not want that performance to ever end. I felt as if I had just stepped onstage and then the curtain began descending as the audience was leaping to their feet. I had done it!

  I knew that Tallevi had come out to make a little speech before the opera began, but I hadn’t been able to spare the concentration to listen to what he was saying as he explained the last-minute substitution for the expected soprano. Lili, for whom I’d basically demanded a ticket, told me later that the general director had put things in such a way that the audience would have been on my side no matter what.

  For that performance, though, I hadn’t needed anyone’s help.

  I was blessed with six raucous curtain calls with the audience yelling, “Brava!” at the tops of their lungs in a show of excitement thoroughly uncharacteristic for staid old Toronto. What really touched me, though, was Tallevi himself bringing out the hugest bouquet of red roses anyone had ever seen this side of the Kentucky Derby.

  Back in the dressing room crowded with well-wishers, I pulled Lili to me, trying to find the words to express the gratitude I felt for all her hard work, not just over the past day and a half, but for the seven years we’d been working together professionally.

  The second opera of the evening was a pretty dark one also, Pagliacci, but less dark than Bluebeard. It’s very hard to be completely black when you’re singing in Italian. I guess the idea had been to stage two short operas about men who kill their wives, but at least in the latter work, they do it more tunefully, otherwise some enterprising soul out on the street might make their fortune selling razor blades after the evening ended.

  Tony, in his peasant’s costume for Pagliacci, stuck his head in the door to tell me how great he’d thought my performance had been.

  “Why didn’t you stop by before the opera to wish me luck?” I te
ased. “Or were you waiting to see if I’d make a complete fool of myself?” I immediately regretted being so flip with him because he quite noticeably flinched.

  “Ah, no, it was nothing like that. I figured you were under enough pressure without some member of the chorus bothering you.”

  I was sitting on the chair in front of the dressing room mirror at that point as my dresser was removing the wig I’d worn, so I was actually speaking to Tony’s reflection in front of me. Turning to look directly at him, I smiled and said, “Relax. I was just joshing with you. If Bartok himself had stopped by to wish me luck before the performance, I wouldn’t have opened the door.” I shot a glance over to the clock. “Now don’t you think you’d better get going? You’ve got about three minutes to get to the stage.”

  “Will you be around afterwards?”

  “Probably not. I’m completely done in.” Noticing a slight slump in Tony’s shoulders, I added, “We’re still on for tomorrow, though, aren’t we?”

  “Absolutely. See you at six.”

  “Break a leg, Tony,” I laughed, and felt that I was finally all the way back — and then some.

  I had been great tonight and even I could acknowledge that.

  In high spirits, Lili and I made our way uptown to the Park Hyatt Hotel, taking the elevator straight up to the roof lounge. It’s my favourite place for a drink in the entire city. Tonight, I wanted Toronto at my feet, visually as well as operatically.

  The waiter came over and I ordered a rather expensive bottle of champagne. I also told him to surprise us with some nice little snack, because I couldn’t be bothered making any more decisions.

  Toronto on a clear autumn night from the roof of the Park Hyatt looks as good as any city anywhere. We had a perfect view of downtown with Lake Ontario as an infinite backdrop.

  “Here’s to our success once again,” I said as I held out my glass for clinking.

  Lili held her glass back, looking at me curiously. “So you finally believe, really believe?”

  “What do you mean?”