Symphony of Seduction

by Christopher Lawrence

  For heaven’s sake, they had even spoken of late about the idea of adopting to compensate for their childless marriage. And now – this?

  She took his hand and covered it with kisses.

  ‘My dear Richard, if we were to separate it would only lend credence to the silly rumours that will make their way around town. Neither of us could possibly stay if the other disappeared. You talk about the stability that Asyl has brought to us, that it is a haven for your work. How would you continue with your Tristan if we again become homeless?’

  Minna went on like this, her voice eventually giving way to gentle sobs. Wagner paid no attention as he looked at the lake through the window behind her. The proximity of water was such a balm, so primal, so womblike. And the harmonies of the songs he had composed for Mathilde came back to him with a deeper intensity, showing him in a flash the tone of the love dialogue in Act Two of what he knew would be his masterpiece. All he needed was a new space in which to work – space, silence, water – where Tristan and Isolde could be led to their inevitable, sublime fates.

  Mathilde must now join Minna on the fringes of his emotional life. He would permit some correspondence, certainly; the Wesendonck money might still be useful to him in the future.

  He decided to leave Asyl behind and travel south, following the water. Venice perhaps, a big room overlooking the Grand Canal. Some large red drapes on the walls. He would have to find someone for some cash. Liszt had been good for a touch or three in the past.

  Once he was installed to his satisfaction, Richard could return to his score and kill someone.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Wagner left Minna behind in August 1858, travelling first to Venice and then Lucerne, where he completed Tristan and Isolde the following year. Minna disposed of their household effects in a public garage sale and ended up in Dresden, where she died from a heart attack in 1866. She and Wagner never lived together again.

  Wagner began an affair with Cosima von Bülow and the couple had three children before her divorce was granted in 1870. In the meantime, her publicly cuckolded husband Hans von Bülow conducted the premiere of Tristan in Munich in 1865. The Wesendoncks did not attend.

  Tristan and Isolde is widely considered to be the most influential work of Western art music ever written.

  SCANDAL GOES WEST

  Being the soprano in an opera by married playboy Giacomo Puccini was a dangerous business. All of them come to an unhappy end in his most successful works – excepting one, whose creation on the page overlapped a scandal of alleged adultery and suicide that grabbed the world’s attention and virtually destroyed a marriage.

  ‘I am a mighty hunter of wild fowl, operatic librettos and attractive women.’

  Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)

  OCTOBER 1907

  The knock at the door was unexpected.

  Seated at the piano, Giacomo Puccini had been watching the trail of smoke from the end of his cigarette, waiting for its ascent to give him a sign. If it passed the top of his head, the soprano would sing a G natural. Any further – perhaps to the bottom of the chandelier – and she would rise to a B flat.

  Now his concentration was broken. Dammit, he thought, clicking the fingers of his right hand. This is a Viennese luxury hotel, for God’s sake! Don’t they respect the privacy of the creative process?

  ‘Si?’ he said aloud, trusting that his Italian mixed with the note of annoyance on a gruff E natural would discourage the usual chambermaid from entering.

  The voice at the door was not a woman’s.

  ‘Maestro? Permesso?’ It was young, with a local accent.

  Probably a hotel valet, the famous composer thought. He might have a letter. Perhaps another baleful one from Elvira. Then again, it might be from someone else; a message that would be far more exciting to read.

  He pressed his thick dark hair close to the sides of his head and checked his tie before opening the door, right hand already outstretched for details of an assignation.

  There was no letter, and no valet.

  Instead, two people he guessed to be brother and sister stood before him. The young man looked up at him expectantly, while the young woman stared at her brother with a look of distaste on her face, as if she had just stepped in something. She’s a feisty one, the older man deduced. He would have appraised her even more carefully had not the pair’s anointed spokesperson piped up.

  ‘Signor Puccini, forgive this intrusion. We told the reception downstairs that you had invited us for an audition.’

  ‘That was my first question,’ said Puccini. ‘Here’s the next. How did you know I was here in Vienna?’

  ‘When the world’s most famous living opera composer comes to the world’s most musical city to oversee a production of Madama Butterfly, everyone knows.’

  The composer stroked his carefully cropped moustache. The young man had a point, but Puccini would not be flattered. He decided to harden his voice with more diaphragm support and a switch to the same high baritonal range his Baron Scarpia used when being sardonic in Tosca.

  ‘Nevertheless, this is an intrusion. What is it you both want?’

  ‘Just as we said. We’d like to audition. At least, I ask you to hear my sister.’

  ‘Young man, this is pointless. I don’t need to audition aspiring singers now. The production of Butterfly is underway.’

  ‘We know that trying to see you under normal circumstances would have been impossible. We’ve travelled far for this. If you could give us just a few minutes, I hope you’ll agree your time hasn’t been wasted.’

  The young woman muttered something to her brother in a dialect Puccini would never understand, glancing at the composer as she did so. It sounded like an angry instruction to drop the whole idea. No docility there, he observed. Perhaps she was a singer after all; much more a Tosca than a Mimi. What a little Austrian garden she would be.

  ‘I’m trying to start my new opera,’ he said, remembering the vapour trails from his cigarette, the notes from Minnie’s aria now dispersed across the ceiling. ‘Come in for a moment, and I’ll take some details about your sister. We can arrange an audition for another time.’

  ‘Thank you, maestro – thank you,’ said the young man, motioning to his sister to enter. Puccini spun on his heels and walked elegantly towards the adjoining bedroom to find pen, paper and another cigarette, unaware of the exchange of whispers behind him.

  Once inside, opening and closing the drawers of his bureau, he did not hear the discreet click of a closing door, or the rustle of cotton.

  When Puccini returned to the spacious living area graced with the grand piano brought in specifically to suit the purposes of a famous musician, the young man had gone.

  His sister remained behind, standing in front of a gilt mirror above the unused fireplace.

  All her clothing was bunched on the floor next to her feet.

  Ever the gentleman, Puccini looked at the mirror. The plaits at the back of her head were almost certainly an authentic rural decoration, he thought.

  ‘Herr Puccini,’ she said in a tone of voice that at last drew his attention to her face. ‘I hope I can convince you that I’m deserving of any part you are able to offer me.’

  The line was obviously rehearsed, and Puccini hoped the singing would be too – if that was what she did.

  He reflected that the lovers in La bohème went from first meeting to proposition in little more than fifteen minutes in Act One. Rodolfo tells Mimi he is a poor poet with the soul of a millionaire, and she replies that she makes artificial flowers. Soon, he hints at what might happen afterwards if they go to the local bar that night. Puccini thought such a seduction was faster than anything humanly possible, but here was a naked young woman to prove him wrong. Opera was implausible; life even more so.

  ‘We’ll discuss parts shortly,’ he said, sitting at the piano. ‘First, though, I must know what you can do. Vieni qui – stand next to me. Sing an arpeggio on this note.’ He placed his hand on her bare a
bdomen, stroking with outstretched fingers. ‘I want to feel you support the voice.’

  Afterwards, when the aspiring diva had returned to her waiting brother with a vow of secrecy given in return for vague assurances of a possible understudy role sometime in the future, Puccini buttoned his trousers, the sound of her coital cries still reverberating in his mind. He had expected something more operatic at the peak of their encounter, something that would really bring down the house. Instead, the young lady had barely ventured above a pianissimo, her top note only just an A flat. His initial impression had been wrong: she was more a Mimi than a Tosca.

  While every opera composer tried to express character by choosing a certain sequence of notes for the voice, in Puccini’s considerable experience nothing was more revealing of a woman’s true nature than the sounds she made when all inhibitions had been abandoned, singing at its purest and most primal. Once the notes were learned, the effect would always ring true, even if the emotion was faked. Many onstage careers were built on such artifice. In that respect, sex was opera.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  In the five years she had been working at Villa Puccini, ever since Signor Puccini’s terrible car accident, Doria Manfredi had never heard anything like it. The maestro’s stepdaughter was either in pain, or was asking a question over and over without receiving an answer.

  Doria stood outside the room as the sounds of distress grew louder. ‘Signora?’ she ventured.

  There was no response, and with both of her employers out of the house, she had to investigate. She opened the door as quietly as she could.

  There was Fosca, looking for all the world like a wheelbarrow with her haunches raised at the edge of the bed, her arms extended backwards like a pair of handles. Standing behind her crouched form, grasping those handles and pushing the wheelbarrow more with his hips than his elbows, causing all the commotion as he did so, was the Puccinis’ houseguest, Signor Civinini, who was supposed to be working on the libretto for the maestro’s next opera, set in America’s Wild West.

  Doria doubted that Fosca’s husband, Signor Leonardi, would approve. She brought a hand to her throat.

  ‘Scusi, scusi,’ she stammered, backing out of the room.

  The couple only became aware of the intrusion as the door clicked shut. Fosca lifted her face from the pillow.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  ‘What do we do?’ said Civinini. ‘If the maid says something, you’re in disgrace and I lose a great job writing about cowboys.’

  ‘We’re going to have to discredit her before she discredits us,’ said Fosca, who was bored with her husband anyway. ‘I’ll have a word with Mamma. She tends to suspect every woman within a ten-mile radius of the house. With good reason, I should add.’

  ‘You’d better go right away.’

  ‘There’s nobody at home until dinnertime. And we haven’t finished yet,’ she said, reaching back.

  ‘I need to talk to you about Papa,’ Fosca said after dinner. Puccini wasn’t her biological father, but she had known him since she was five, when the handsome young musician used to come around to give her mother piano lessons while her actual father was travelling away for work.

  Elvira sighed, her mouth assuming its customary grimace.

  ‘Don’t expect me to be surprised, Fosca,’ she said. ‘I presume that once again, somewhere on his travels, he has found himself another little garden?’

  ‘Little garden’ was her husband’s euphemism for whichever lover happened to be waiting back at the hotel while he supervised foreign productions of his works.

  Not that she was supposed to know, of course. He would always insist that the work gave him no time for such things. In any case, didn’t he love her enough to endure the scandal of their elopement more than twenty years earlier, when he whisked her away from her husband and family in Lucca to a life of notoriety, indignant landladies and backstage whispers? Hadn’t he waited nearly twenty years for her first husband to die so that the way was clear for them to at last assume the respectability of their own marriage? And didn’t she now enjoy the trappings of wealth and celebrity: devoted domestics like young Doria, one of the first cars in Italy, and the beautiful Villa Puccini, built on a spectacular lakeside plot in the country and decorated to their taste?

  Torre del Lago. A village in the sticks. A place where her husband could go and shoot whichever unfortunate animal crawled into or flew over the estate and Lake Massaciuccoli. She hated it. It was all very well for Giacomo to sit in silence all day waiting for a passing bird to annihilate, or a passing tune to capture. What was she supposed to do in the meantime?

  Milan beckoned, with restaurants, soirées, and endless compliments to Signora Puccini. They had money from performance royalties pouring in like rain. Why not live there, or in some other glamorous city?

  Giacomo would not hear of it. ‘I hate pavements,’ he said.

  Then there were the damned cars. Theirs was the first car in the village, followed by the first car accident, skidding through a bend in the road on a foggy night when the chauffeur lost control, landing upside down at the bottom of a ditch. She and their son Tonio were lucky, suffering only from shock. Giacomo broke his leg. All of Italy was riveted by the news. The King sent a get-well card.

  At least the setback kept Giacomo at home for several months. Hobbling around on two walking sticks, wincing with the pain, he couldn’t get back to work on the almost illegible manuscript of Madama Butterfly lying open at the piano. He also couldn’t rush off to continue his affair with that Corinna girl he’d picked up in Turin three years before.

  Elvira had got wind of that one when the pair was spotted in the café at the Pisa train station. She found out about most of his ‘little gardens’ by being vigilant; finding a stray letter, receiving an eyewitness report from a family friend. Sometimes he would slip off for an assignation even when Elvira was travelling with him. She even tried to medicate her husband into a state of morality with bromides in his coffee and camphor in his trouser pockets – anything to keep his pecker down.

  It was a fruitless struggle against Nature; at least, Puccini’s nature.

  Thank heavens for the loyalty of servants like Doria, Elvira thought. Little Doria, who had been at the Villa Puccini ever since the accident in 1903, when she came to them as a callow teenager. She had been so sweet to Giacomo during his convalescence, bringing him his five meals a day, and remained a fixture in the running of the household while so many others had come and gone. To the Puccinis, Doria was a treasure; they called her so. They had watched her grow up.

  ‘It’s about Doria,’ Fosca said.

  The news was shattering. If Puccini had been setting Fosca’s revelation to music in an opera, there would have been a stark line played in unison by the whole orchestra, or a chord sequence on a tritone like that at the beginning of Tosca.

  The gestures of real life could never compare to the drama of theatre. The best he could do was to slam the butt of his unloaded gun into the floor with a loud cracking sound.

  His next spluttered word emerged in an unfortunate head voice.

  ‘What?’ Not effective, he thought. If this was a libretto, I’d send it back to Civinini.

  ‘I have thrown Doria out of this house and our service, Giacomo,’ said Elvira, her grimace now a sneer. ‘She is lucky I did not do worse.’

  ‘Why?’ (Monosyllables don’t convey sufficient outrage. Use cymbals.)

  ‘You know why!’ she yelled. He didn’t know why, yet had to admit that the accusation was impressive in its delivery.

  There was a pause. (String tremolo here. Crescendo leading to …)

  ‘Gardens!’ she spat out.

  Giacomo was confused. Why didn’t Elvira fire the gardener? She had fired the gardener just a few days before, in fact. And the cook.

  ‘Little gardens,’ she said more softly. ‘You have brought your little garden under this roof.’

  Puccini continued to unwind his scarf, trying to make sen
se of this. He had just returned from shooting; it was a cold morning.

  ‘You and Doria are having an affair,’ Elvira continued.

  ‘Me – and Doria?’ He realised instantly that mere incredulity was never an effective retort.

  ‘There is no point in denying it, Giacomo. You have been seen together.’

  ‘Elvira, when someone has worked in one’s house for six years, being seen together is somewhat inevitable.’

  ‘I mean – together. You have been observed in flagrante.’

  Even the imaginary orchestra fell quiet. Puccini’s mouth fell open. The intake of fresh air reminded him that he needed a cigarette. Probably his fifteenth for the day.

  Elvira’s jealousy, while not unwarranted, had long since grown from an irritant to a matter of bemused discussion between Puccini and his friends. ‘She gets on my nerves, Giacomo!’ his former librettist Illica had said one day as they worked on the previous hits La bohème, Tosca and Butterfly. Everyone noticed that the composer occasionally smelled as if he had been embalmed, thanks to the bizarre aroma wafting from his pants. More than once, Puccini had been aware of a figure dressed in his own clothes observing him in the street; the distinctive waistcoats of his taste not quite concealing the familiar bustline that had piqued his interest twenty years before during piano lessons with his friend’s wife.

  At least these actions had a point; Elvira was following a real trail. Puccini was a naughty boy, and he knew it. He bragged about it.

  This time was different. This time Elvira was being delusional, even psychotic. It was impossible that Elvira, or anyone, had seen anything at all. There was nothing to see.

  Doria? He was writing an opera with his most complex female central character yet. How would Doria ever show up in any opera of his, except as some meek and simple servant, bless her?

  He knew that the meek were blessed, of course, just as the Good Book said. That was how Mimi and Butterfly started out in his works; Mimi, the shy, sickly seamstress living in poverty, and Cio-Cio-san, the fifteen-year-old offered as a bride of convenience to a visiting American lieutenant.