They attacked the score through the personality of the heroine, Floria Tosca.
“She is a creature,” DiScelta said, “like all Puccini’s heroines, who lives and dies for love. And she is the center about which the entire action revolves.”
DiScelta pointed out how every one of Tosca’s arias sprang directly from the drama, expressing the character’s fluctuating psychology at any given point in the action. “The prime example, of course, is ‘Vissi d’arte.’” DiScelta emphasized the treacherous simplicity of this aria: the descending scalelike melody in even rhythm, the theme taken up by the orchestra while the voice glided in on a repeated note. “What you are singing is the situation—not the scale, not the repeated note. Without the situation, the aria is nothing. Project the situation, and the aria has all the warmth and radiance of Verdi.”
DiScelta went on to say that she could understand critics who found Puccini’s music questionable. “After all, he is a man of the theater. He is drama using music, not music using drama. Nadia Boulanger once asked me, ‘How can anyone like such awful music?’ I said, ‘It has emotion and energy and it always tells the truth.’ But that is its musical weakness. When there is a choice between musical and emotional priorities, Puccini will always choose the emotional path.”
That was the reason, DiScelta said, that so many of his harmonic progressions sounded like the pop music of a half-century later.
“Which proves not that he was cheap, but that he articulated the real feelings of real people long before they themselves did. Well, enough talk. Let’s get on with your ‘Vissi d’arte.’ Make me cry.”
Mark eased open the door. His first glance told him that, housekeeping-wise, it had not been one of the great days. Breakfast dishes were still piled on the table; pots and plates still poked through the soapy water in the sink and a jetsam of coffee grounds floated on the surface.
He tiptoed through the apartment. Ariana was sitting in the bedroom at the spinet.
It was almost four, and the last rays of winter daylight were slanting down on her. She was wearing her bathrobe. Head back, lips wide apart, she was mouthing the most horrendous scale he’d ever heard, each note like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the slope.
She saw him and started. A book of vocal solfèges slammed onto the keyboard with a terrific dissonance. “Damn—what time is it?”
He made a show of pulling back his cuff and squinting at his watch. “At the tone it will be practically tomorrow. Beep.”
“I meant to clean and shop and…” She tightened her robe. “There’s not a thing in the house for dinner.”
“Sounds great. For appetizers we’ll have fresh not-a-things on the half-shell. They’re in season, you know. For the main course, not-a-thing soufflé. For dessert, not-a-thing compote.”
He was joking, but she sensed mystery behind his half-closed eyelids. “You’ve got a secret,” she said.
“Says who?”
“Says your face. What’s happening?”
“I’m divorcing you. You’re a lousy housekeeper.”
“I’m a lousy housekeeper with a fantastic top extension. DiScelta told me today I have E above the staff easily, maybe even F.”
“Well, how would you like to pack up your top extension and your E and your F and take them to Paris?”
“Paris—France?”
“I’m not talking about Paris, Missouri.”
“When?”
“Spring recess.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then she said, “Why?”
“Because I have been duly elected American Seminarian representative to attend the ecumenical congress at the Pro-Cathedral under the sponsorship of His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury. For your information, that is a very big honor and a chance to meet some of the movers and shakers of the church.”
She looked out the window. The worst of winter was over. The little Pan in the fountain had shed his icicles. “Paris,” she said dreamily.
Her mother had always spoken of Paris as a sort of lost Paradise of lights and champagne, the Seine halo’d in a Toulouse Lautrec glow, echos of bal-musettes and funny auto horns. And food. Pounds and pounds of butter-fat suicide.
“You’re sure it’s—all right for me to go along?”
“Honey, soon I’m going to be mired in some parish in eastern Appalachia. You’re going to be raising our triplets and flying off to give concerts to garden clubs in Houston. This is our chance. Maybe our only chance till we’re retired. We’re free, we love each other, and my airfare is paid and yours will be off-season low-price-special. I say let’s do it.”
She got out the briki, made Greek coffee, and peered at the sediment in her saucer. “Okay. We’re going to Paris.”
Richard was waiting for her at his office door. She angled her cheek and they exchanged a warm client-agent kiss.
“Richard, there’s been a change of plans. I’m going to Paris in three weeks.”
Richard frowned. A sharp line jagged down between his eyebrows. “Things are just beginning to move for you. It took me months to set up those dates.”
“I’m going to Paris.”
“And I’m supposed to phone New Orleans and L.A. and say my client just had a hankering to see the Eiffel Tower? What do you think I was put in this world for, to eat, sleep, and spend twenty hours a day shifting dates for dizzy clients?”
There was surprise on her face, and he realized he was shouting. The walls were paper-thin and it wouldn’t do to have every secretary in the agency know he couldn’t handle his clients.
“What’s wrong with you, Ariana?”
“I love… someone.”
“And this someone wants you to screw up your career.”
“No, it’s my choice. And I don’t see that two dates with small companies are going to matter one way or the other.”
Richard Schiller closed his eyes and thought of the canceled dates; the long-distance screams; the lost deposits and returned advances and commissions down the drain. He should have been furious; screaming; ripping up her contract. But the truth was, when he allowed himself to face it, he was fond of this dark-haired girl with the too-big eyes and the big, big voice. He wanted to be part of her.
Thirty years from now, he wanted to be able to say, I shaped her. And face it, he told himself, she’s young, she’s at that age when love matters, when Paris matters. Better she should get it out of her system now.
“I suppose I can put something together,” he conceded.
“Thanks, Richard. I know I’m a nuisance. I won’t forget this.”
DiScelta held Ariana in the darkest of dark gazes. “So, you are not only living with this man, you are rearranging your life to suit his.”
Today was one of their occasional lessons without Austin Waters. DiScelta had accompanied. She had done it poorly and with a metallic touch, and now she slammed the lid of the keyboard and sent a ghostly dissonant chord jangling through the music room. She fixed her pupil with the unblinking, unpitying eye of a potato.
Ariana realized suddenly that the next moments were going to be remarkably silent.
“Don’t look so serious, my child,” her teacher said. “Don’t you see, you must laugh. You must laugh because it is laughable, grotesque, that a person of your gifts would squander one instant of her career for this—this lovers’ tryst on the banks of the Seine. It is accordion music. Mandolin concerto. It is comic.”
Ariana kept her eyelids down, hoping DiScelta would not suspect she was holding back tears. But the tears came, unwanted, unbidden; and her teacher’s hand stole about hers.
DiScelta spoke softly, mother to child. She described the heaviness of her own heart. She painted the future in the darkest possible shades. She prayed that Ariana’s own good instincts would come to the rescue.
She harangued till Ariana felt very small and very lonely standing there, lips set tight, chin held firm.
But DiScelta’s efforts were to no avail.
�
�I’m going to Paris,” Ariana said.
“Then I am sorry for you. Sorrier than you will ever know.” DiScelta waved, as though brushing aside a sheet of filthy newspaper that the wind had fluttered at her. “Go.”
She waited for the sound of the door closing, then went to the telephone in the study. She composed the number with a rigid forefinger that hurried the dial along.
“Richard Schiller, please … Ricarda DiScelta, urgent.”
It took a moment for him to come on the line. She sat forward in her chair.
“Richard? Ariana can’t be dissuaded…Yes, a dreadful mistake. On the other hand, it may give us an opportunity.”
Ariana answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Richard.” He sounded too cheerful, too forgiving. A wall of wariness went up in her. “They’re doing three Bohèmes at Covent Garden the week of April 12. That’s just a hop across the Channel from Paris. They need a replacement for Musetta. Interested?”
She sank slowly into the chair. She had to close her eyes a moment. She heard Richard talking and her mind was racing now, her thoughts trying to catch up with the sudden pounding of her heart.
“That’s wonderful, Richard. Thank you.”
When Mark came into the room he saw a shocked little girl crouched in the chair, gazing at him with enormous, wide-open eyes.
“They want me to sing in Covent Garden.”
“Great.” He kissed her and she clung to him. “When?”
“That’s the unbelievable part—it fits in with our trip.”
“Hey, no crying now.”
“I just feel so damned lucky.”
“If you ask me, Covent Garden’s lucky.”
“No, Mark, I’m lucky. I have you.”
8
FOR THREE WEEKS DISCELTA subjected Ariana to a cram course in La Bohème, which amounted to a continuing seminar in Puccini.
“The opera is pure emotion. The melodies no longer follow a musical logic. They follow the emotional line of the words themselves.”
She pointed out that Puccini’s use of the orchestra, for all its “lapses into lavishness,” was masterful, and economical as well. “Note in Bohème how the harp is used. Often it cannot be heard, but it can always be felt. It plays the role of italics in a page of prose. It emphasizes without adding fresh material.”
And she pointed out how the typical Puccini aria was made up of different melodic kernels, each succinctly expressing an emotional state—and that these were linked together to form a melody which was not so much a “tune” in the Verdian sense as the working out of the character’s state of mind. “His melody sweeps us with its feeling rather than with its exact notes. What counts here is the passion.”
Ariana nodded, trying very hard to absorb.
“Now Musetta,” DiScelta said, “is not a typical Puccini role, but it is one of his most effective. You have one show-stopping number: the waltz. Don’t be afraid of it. It is a popular tune—sing it like one. Opera audiences are always grateful for a popular tune. This is your chance to be loved more than the heroine. Take advantage of it.”
Ariana stood in the gallery of the Racquet and Health Club and watched the squash match.
Nikos Stratiotis played savagely, with a street-ball overkill, sending the ball on unpredictable trajectories that caught his opponent time after time in just the wrong place. The match ended with Nikos slamming a hard shot high onto the rear wall. It ricocheted past his opponent’s lunging racket and took three bounces and died. Nikos’s opponent came up and shook his hand.
The door to the court opened and an attendant went over to Nikos and pointed to the glass window. Nikos looked up at Ariana.
Two minutes later he was standing beside her, swinging the head of his racket against his bare leg with a hard slapping sound.
She handed him the check.
“What’s this?” he said.
“My Covent Garden guarantee.”
He smiled. “That’s terrific. I knew you’d be a great investment.”
He tried to hand the check back. She didn’t take it.
“You loaned me money,” she said, “remember?”
“Did you certify it?” he asked.
“No.”
He ripped the check into neat quarters and let them sprinkle down among the cigar butts in a standing brass ashtray. “That was no loan. That was a scholarship.” He was smiling, bending down to massage the muscle in his thigh. “Which means you don’t pay it back. What’s more, the scholarship wasn’t from me, it was from the Stratiotis Foundation for the Fine Arts.”
She heard herself murmur, “All right. You’re very kind.”
“The hell I’m kind. And let’s get something else straight. You’ve got no responsibility to me. You’ve got no responsibility to some cockamamy foundation my lawyers drew up. Your responsibility is to excellence alone.”
She stared at this muscular man in sweaty squash clothes, dark curls plastered to his skull as though he’d just been diving in the Aegean, and she had the confused sensation of not quite seeing him. “That doesn’t sound like you,” she said.
“It’s not meant to. I’m taking lessons. An actor’s teaching me how to sound like him. Minus the British. British would be too much on me, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you something. I don’t care what you say or how you sound. You are kind.”
She kissed him quickly, a light brush of lips against cheek. As she hurried away she caught her reflection in the squash court windows. It gave her an idea what he was seeing, a tall girl with a determined stride and long jet-black hair that whiplashed her shoulders. When she glanced back from the elevator he was staring at her. A funny man, she thought, a kind thug.
It was a good time to travel abroad. The dollar was strong, and Europe had almost recovered from the devastation of the war. Though there were still ruins in the heart of London and Rome, they were clean ruins, not the smoking rubble Mark had left three years ago.
He and Ariana made the reassuring discovery that they could not only sleep together eight hours a night, they could be happily conscious together the other sixteen, traipsing through Vatican City, standing in awe before the doors of the Cathedral of Chartres, losing their way in the Scottish Highlands, settling any and all disputes as to where-next or what-next by consulting appropriate passages in Baedeker and Michelin.
They saw four countries, attended three international conventions of Anglican and Protestant-Episcopal youth, and stuffed themselves on fettuccine al pesto in Venice and on bangers and mash at a pub in London’s Portobello Road, and one night—just to be able to tell their grandchildren they’d done it—glutted themselves on tournedos Rossini at the Savoy.
Mark picked up his glass and before bringing it to his lips raised it toward Ariana. She mirrored the gesture. It was their nine-hundredth wordless toast to love, to each other, to happiness, to now; and they were beginning to get a little bit tipsy. He washed down the remnants of his poire belle Hélène with the last of the wine and settled back in his chair.
“What?” she said.
One thing he’d noticed in the last week was that she was quick to pick up on his moods and even on his fleeting thoughts. “What, what?”
“You’re wondering something.”
“No, I’m not.” He grinned.
But she was right. Beneath the grin he was wondering if life would ever be this good again.
They paid the tab with a wad of travelers checks, which hurt, and then they went and sat on a terrace with a view of the Thames and the floodlit houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. An orchestra was playing and between Grand Marniers they danced.
Ariana was wearing an evening dress that her agent had bought her two weeks ago, when he’d finally reconciled himself to her going. It was silvery gray silk, very simply cut, and only a very beautiful or striking woman could have worn it. The silk picked up all the colors around her and blended them into a soft shimmering i
ridescence.
“Tomorrow I have to rehearse Musetta,” she sighed.
“Tomorrow’s a long way away.”
As they danced he pulled her tight against him and they kissed.
He whispered in her ear, “Let’s go to bed. I want to make love.”
She smiled. “Now?”
He nodded. “Now.”
They could afford to eat at the Savoy—barely—but not to sleep there. They rode to their hotel in S.W.3. in a London cab whose back seat seemed larger than their entire living room.
The next day was her first piano rehearsal at Covent Garden; the day after was her first stage rehearsal; and the day after that her first and only rehearsal with full company and orchestra.
Wearing her red gown and ermine stole from Act Two, she watched the first act of the dress from the third row of the house.
Puccini’s opening measures, catching all the eager high spirits of youth, rang out from the orchestra. The curtain rose on a delicately shabby set that had the flavor of a hand-tinted nineteenth-century engraving.
It was a Christmas Eve in the 1830s.
The poet Rodolfo and the painter Marcello were freezing in their bleak Paris garret. Rodolfo—sung by Lucco Patemio, a three-hundred-pound former wrestler with a rough and friendly face—lit the stove with a draft of his play. Two friends arrived: Schaunard, a musician, bringing wine and food, and Colline, a philosopher. The four began to feast. (Patemio, saving his voice for the performance, sang mezza voce—half-strength—the others sang full-out.)
The landlord entered, demanding his back rent. In a broadly comic scene the young men plied him with wine until, drunk, he began telling them of his extramarital loves. Pretending to be outraged, they threw him out.
While the others left to celebrate Christmas Eve, Rodolfo stayed behind to work on a newspaper article. Mimi—a beautiful young neighbor sung by a two-hundred-pound Bolivian—knocked at the door. Her candle had gone out—could Rodolfo light it? Suddenly she had a fit of coughing and, almost fainting, dropped her key. Rodolfo helped her to a chair. A draft blew out both their candles.
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