Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  Ariana sensed that this was not just the handing over of a lucky charm, some rabbit’s foot or laminated four-leaf clover: something was at stake.

  Her glance traveled across the little piano where she had warmed up. In the full-length mirror she saw a scene that had the stillness of an old engraving. Two figures, one in sixteenth-century Scottish costume, one in twentieth-century evening clothes, sat on a sofa. A locket on a chain hung between them.

  Ariana heard herself answer, “I want to wear it.”

  “Then it is yours.” DiScelta paused. “But there is a promise you must make.”

  A curtain had been drawn over the open door to the hallway. The two costume ladies who sat outside with needle and thread, ready for any summoning, could be heard discreetly chatting as they sewed.

  “The promise is the most important part of all,” DiScelta said, “for it ensures the continuity of the line. You must take a student—the most gifted student you can find. Note by note, role by role, you must train her in your repertory. Once you have taught her a role, that role is hers—and you must never perform so much as a note of it again. Within twenty-five years of tonight, you must promise to have turned your entire repertory over to your successor.”

  The locket hung unmoving in the space between them.

  “At some point—you may choose the moment—before you renounce your last role,” DiScelta went on, “you will give this locket to your pupil—as I give it to you—and you will bind her to the promise I now bind you. Once she has sung that last role, you will never sing on any stage again—just as I shall never sing on any stage again.”

  The air in the room seemed suddenly hot and humming.

  “Do you accept?”

  The locket drew Ariana’s eyes, held them. She thought of the ordeal ahead of her, the most demanding audience in the world, a role with one of the highest tessituras in opera, the cruelest critics in Europe. Every childhood terror, every superstition she had ever known rose up in her. She whispered, “I do.”

  “You swear by Almighty God and on your soul?”

  Ariana nodded mutely.

  DiScelta slipped the chain around her pupil’s neck.

  “Then—for twenty-five years—the locket and the voice are yours.”

  Ariana did not appear in the first scene of Act One. She watched from the wings as Lord Enrico Ashton, in a grove outside his castle, received a disturbing report: his guardsmen had seen his sister Lucia meeting in the woods with Sir Edgardo di Ravenswood, Enrico’s sworn enemy. Enrico, hoping to restore his family’s fortune by marrying his sister to the wealthy Lord Arturo Bucklaw, vowed to let nothing obstruct his plan.

  Scene Two took place that night at a moonlit fountain in the castle gardens. The cue came for Lucia to enter with her companion, Alisa.

  Ariana crossed the narrow walkway that led onto a set misty with sixteenth-century Scottish gloom. At the instant she stepped onto the stage where Grisi and Patti, Callas and Melba and Ponselle had sung the greatest Lucias in operatic history, a nameless fear clutched at her heart. She took one blinding glance into the spotlight and opened her mouth. Something came out. She had no idea what.

  There was silence, darkness just beyond the light. She felt the darkness judging her.

  Paralysis swept over her. Her hand went to the locket beneath her blouse.

  As her fingertips secretly touched the metal, a warm current seemed suddenly to pour from it into her whole being. Strength came flooding through her. Suddenly the stagelights were a blinding boundless sun beaming its power upon her.

  After her first aria, “Regnava nel Silenzio,” she heard clapping. Someone was applauding.

  She realized it was they. The Milanese public was applauding her, applauding the little girl from East 103rd Street in Manhattan.

  And then it came to her that they were applauding Lucia, not Ariana: Lucia who stood resolutely by the fountain as Alisa pleaded with her to break off her friendship with Edgardo.

  Lucia refused.

  Edgardo entered, handsome and in an overweight way dashing in his doublet and boots and sword, saying he must seek safety in France but would return for Lucia. Their duet, “Verrano a te,” brought a storm of bravos. The lovers exchanged rings as token of their marriage before God.

  Act Two opened in Lucia’s apartments. Enrico showed her a forged love letter purportedly from Edgardo to another woman. Believing herself betrayed, Lucia agreed to sign the wedding contract binding her to Arturo Bucklaw.

  The action moved to the castle hall. Just as Lucia put her signature to the fatal contract, Edgardo pushed wildly through the celebrating guests to hurl an accusation of faithlessness at her.

  The main characters poured out their conflicting emotions in a sextet, the Lucia sextet, the most famous vocal ensemble in all opera. Lucia’s despairing voice rose to a high E-flat that soared effortlessly over the others.

  When the applause finally died down, Enrico seized the signed contract and brandished it in Edgardo’s face. Cursing the Ashtons, Edgardo drew his sword and threw himself at Enrico and Arturo. The chaplain separated them, and Edgardo fled.

  The next act opened in a raging storm at the tower of Wolf’s Crag, the Ravenswood castle. Entering on the back of a not very well-behaved horse, borrowed, a stagehand told Ariana, from the police, Enrico challenged Edgardo to a duel. The two men agreed to meet at dawn in the cemetery.

  The next scene returned to the wedding celebration in the great hall of the Ashton castle. The chaplain interrupted with horrifying news: Lucia had gone mad and stabbed her bridegroom.

  The audience gasped as Lucia appeared at the head of the stairs in a blood-splattered wedding gown. This was the Mad Scene, the great solo moment of the opera. The crazed heroine passed among the stunned guests and—in an aria that alternated heartbreaking pathos with explosions of coloratura fireworks—she imagined herself being married to her true love, Edgardo.

  The applause lasted four and a half minutes.

  Ariana watched the final scene from the wings. Edgardo waited in the graveyard, resolved to let himself be killed in the duel. A death knell sounded. A procession passed, and one of the hooded figures told him of Lucia’s madness and death. Edgardo flung himself onto his sword.

  Ariana had twelve curtain calls after the opera—a record, someone said, for a debut, or for an American, or for a Lucia. She was too confused to follow all the Italian babbling, but the next day, the Milanese critics praised her ineffable sense of character, her innate musicality, the splendor of her technique.

  That rarity of rarities, they called her, a young voice that is also a perfected voice.

  “It’s strange to think they’re praising me.” Ariana closed the newspapers and laid them down on the breakfast table.

  DiScelta looked up from the roll she had been smearing with apricot preserves. “Why is it strange?”

  “I didn’t feel it was me singing last night.”

  “It seemed to be someone else singing through you, didn’t it?”

  Ariana stared at her teacher. “How did you know that?”

  DiScelta smiled. “When a singer is healthy, rested, prepared, and calm; when everything is going absolutely right and all conditions are optimum; when the voice is working technically correctly, then there is sometimes the sensation of another voice singing through you without your having anything at all to do with it. All singers know the sensation. Or think they do.”

  “You experience it too?”

  DiScelta buttered another roll. “I used to.”

  “How often does it happen?”

  “For most singers—twice in a career, if they’re lucky.”

  “And for me?”

  DiScelta’s gaze met hers. “So long as you keep your promise, that voice will be yours till you give the locket to the next.”

  Ariana Kavalaris’s second Scala Lucia was carried to North and South America by shortwave. Huddled under three shawls in her bed in her apartment on West Fifty-ninth Street, Hi
lde Ganz-Tucci followed the performance with her score.

  Twice she muttered “Excellent,” and after an act and a half she closed the score.

  “Ecco,” she whispered, “ecco l’artista.”

  And she was satisfied.

  She closed her eyes. The score slid softly to the floor.

  When the cleaning woman let herself into the apartment the next morning, the radio was blasting static and Hilde Ganz-Tucci was sitting up in bed, smiling like a bride on her wedding day.

  Her hands were ice-cold. Her heart had stopped.

  The funeral in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was sparsely attended. The young priest who, Ricarda DiScelta thought, could not possibly have heard Ganz-Tucci perform, said that the dead woman had been opera itself, with all its ancient traditions and glories, all its beauty and wisdom.

  The burial was in the graveyard of Our Lady of the Sorrows in Queens. Fresh snow blanketed the cemetery in thin cleanliness.

  Ricarda DiScelta stood shivering with the half-dozen other mourners at the grave. Now I know more dead people than living, she thought.

  Trudging back to her limousine, she was haunted by her last glimpse of Ganz-Tucci’s face in the open casket at the viewing. It had been more the face of a peaceful young woman than of a hypochondriacal old nag, a face peaceful and unlined as though all care and fear had, at the end, been lifted from her.

  And now it is up to me, DiScelta thought. A sigh went out of her, hanging in the air before her like a ghost. God help me.

  It was time, DiScelta told Ariana, to face up to Wagner. “You will need endurance, and—when you sing Isolde—comfortable shoes.”

  She called Wagner the longest symphony in all opera. “And the voice is but one melody among many.”

  She showed Ariana how the musical texture was built on motifs: tiny memorable kernels of sound, each intended to arouse a specific idea in the listener’s mind. “The Wagnerian ‘aria,’ which scarcely exists as a type, is like human thought itself, with a thousand associations flowing together.”

  She explained that Wagner had undermined the most basic assumptions of opera and of music: the division into set pieces, tonality, the traditional sequence of harmonies and keys. “He exploited sound for its own sake. He used harmonies that had no relation to one another except their psychological effect. He invented new instruments to achieve the sonorities he wanted. He called for unprecedented virtuosity from his players and his singers. And what is the result?”

  DiScelta sighed. “Flux. Endless flux. The music never comes to rest. For many it is hell to listen to. For all of us, it is hell to memorize. You ask what key it’s in, and the answer is—all keys. There are no boundaries. His music is infinity—too much infinity. Yet he was serious, and though he was a horrid little man, the operas have dignity. Sooner or later a singer with your gifts must face up to the challenge.”

  Ariana faced the challenge. Though she was not comfortable with the role, she sang four Isoldes in Vienna and three at La Scala.

  Boyd Kinsolving sent two dozen roses to each performance: To my luscious Lucia, my sole Isolde—from your own loving boy, Boyd.

  The critics called her remarkable, a lyrical Titan. One would like to hear this artist’s Brünnhilde.

  Which, DiScelta explained, was acclamation.

  “And now you must marry.”

  The sun was shining with unseasonable brilliance, and long lines of Lincolns and Rolls-Royces were double-parked in front of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue and along Fiftieth Street. The sidewalks were thronged with men and women of the press, autograph hunters, celebrity watchers, and innocent strollers-by caught in the riptide of celebrity.

  Inside, the pews swelled with hundreds of beautifully dressed members of the musical world and the international set, as well as the aristocracy of Philadelphia, the more important hosts and hostesses of New York, and an impressive sprinkling of British and French titles.

  At 12:15, in a Protestant-Episcopal ceremony performed by the Reverend Mr. Charles Grissom, Ariana Kavalaris and Boyd Kinsolving exchanged vows to love, to cherish, to honor, to keep one another, and so were joined in holy matrimony.

  The reception was held a half-hour later at the Colony Club. Ricarda DiScelta had to fight her way through the crowd to congratulate the bride. “This is yours now,” she said, handing Ariana a thick package wrapped in silver paper.

  Ariana experienced a queasy feeling in her breast. “What is it?”

  “My score of Gioconda. With Ponchielli’s own corrections. Ganz-Tucci gave it to me, and Nordica gave it to her.”

  “But I can’t accept—”

  “My dear, I’ll never sing Gioconda again. I’ll never sing anything again. It’s your turn now.” Turning to the groom, DiScelta added, “I wish you all the happiness in the world. It was a lovely ceremony.”

  Part Two

  GLORY: 1966–1969

  14

  THEY HAD A GOOD relationship. They shared interests; they knew how not to get on each other’s nerves. It wasn’t the glorious insane sort of love Ariana had once known; but she had companionship. She had warmth. She had predictability. Things that counted.

  She supposed she was happy. After all, she and Boyd were rich; they were famous. Their performances sold out. Their agents were able to book them two years in advance.

  They had three homes: a co-op in Manhattan, a chalet in Gstaad for Christmases, and what the French called a chateau on the Mediterranean shore three miles from Cap d’Antibes, a twelve-room house with red tile roofing where they spent their summer vacations.

  She liked her husband. She did most things in her life thinking, This will be fun to tell Boyd. And when her mother died in 1957, he was supportive and understanding, a great comfort to her.

  Years came and went like waves. Dukes invited them; they received barons; the Queen of England had them to a Buckingham Palace garden party. Everything was the best: hotels, clothes, Steinways, stereos, Bracques, food, friends. Reviews were always good, ovations the rule. And there were honors. Many, many of those.

  In the tenth year of their marriage, after five performances of Pélleas and Mélisande at the Paris Opéra, they were awarded the Légion d’Honneur for service to the glory of France.

  In the bedroom of their suite at the Georges Cinq, Ariana’s eye went to the mirror, to the locket hanging on its gold chain around her neck.

  The promise she had made so long ago stirred like a faint dissonance in her mind. “Panagia mou,” she sighed.

  “Something wrong, sweetums?” Boyd came in from the sitting room with two highballs.

  “I should take a pupil,” she said.

  “Why? You’re in your prime. You’ll have plenty of time to teach when you’re an old wreck.”

  “I only have fifteen years,” she said. “I promised DiScelta…”

  “That old nuisance. Whatever you promised her, it’s nothing you have to do this year, is it?”

  She decided Boyd was right. She didn’t have to take a pupil that year.

  She didn’t take a pupil the next year either.

  Or the year after.

  In April 1966, at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Lyndon Baines Johnson awarded Ariana and Boyd Congressional Medals of Freedom for their services to music.

  It had been sixteen years since they had married; sixteen years since she had put on the locket and made her promise to DiScelta. She still had not taken a pupil.

  “In this hour of uncertainty,” the President intoned in his Texas drawl, “music is needed to lift this nation to courage, to strength, to faith. For over two decades, Ariana Kavalaris and Boyd Kinsolving have given us that music.”

  That fall, after two Normas at the Teatro La Fenice, they were awarded the Order of St. Mark’s of the City of Venice.

  “A voice is needed,” the Mayor of Venice declaimed in sonorous Italian, holding out the little gold lion as hundreds of reporters and citizens of Venice looked o
n, “a voice to lift mankind to courage, to strength, to faith. And that voice is—Ariana Kavalaris.”

  She let him pin the lion to her pale blue Chanel. It was not good for the cloth. She thanked the mayor, thanked Venice, thanked Italy.

  By the time the ceremony ended it was dusk and Ariana and Boyd were tired of being the world’s most famous musical couple, tired of dodging photographers and interviewers and musical hopefuls.

  “Let’s be tourists,” she said.

  “Let’s,” he agreed.

  She put on a black kerchief and dark glasses. For a half-hour they avoided the main malls and waterways and walked down narrow streets and along back canals. No one bothered them.

  Suddenly Ariana exclaimed and caught Boyd’s hand and pulled him back to look in a shop window.

  “Look!” she cried. She was pointing at a framed photograph. “Hilde Ganz-Tucci.”

  All Boyd could see in the garish frame was a fat woman dressed like a grande dame out of a Marx Brothers movie.

  And then something in the window moved. It took him a moment to realize that a reflection in the glass had shifted.

  He turned around and looked behind him.

  A man stood by the awning of a cafe, half in shadow, tall and grave but disturbingly coarse in his striped red shirt and dark trousers. A cigarette smoking in the corner of his mouth drew his lips down to one side.

  The man was staring at Boyd with extraordinary concentration. Not at Ariana Kavalaris, not at the most famous soprano in the world, but unmistakably at her husband. At first it occurred to Boyd, He knows me…and then he realized, No, we’ve never met. He simply knows who I am, what I am. Italians are quick to pick up on these things.

  “Damn,” Ariana said. “The store’s not open for another half-hour. They take such strange siestas in this city. We’ll have to kill a little time and come back.”