by John Gardner
The girl from London fared better. She had drawn the long straw, so was the one who sang “Un bel dì vedremo.” She had a sweet, clear voice and a definite grasp of character. Passau sat up and took notice. Listened. Asked her to do some scales. Took her through her paces. Gave her notes and passages to sing again. Then, for almost an hour, he gave what amounted to a breathtaking master class, coaxing her through “Un bel dì vedremo,” line by line, almost note by note, teaching her tricks here and there. Finally getting her to sing the aria again, from the beginning.
The others sat, silent and enthralled. Later Kerry Arlow maintained it was the greatest piece of direction he had ever seen. Thereafter, when he told the story of that morning—and there was certainly a story to tell—he always referred to it as the Day of the Singing Lesson which, in view of what was to occur, had a double edge to it. The girl’s name was oddly foreign for a young woman from Surrey, England. Miranda Candelaria. Passau engaged her immediately for the chorus. Later she was to become one of the backbone leading sopranos of the Passau Center.
“So, we haven’t completely wasted the entire morning.” He beamed at his companions and, at that moment, Freddie Edwards appeared on the stage again, walking down the ramp, and into the orchestra.
Passau was aware of his presence, but chose to ignore him as he discussed a fine point about the aria which he had just gone through with such care and devotion. At last he turned, giving Edwards a curt nod, indicating that if he had something to say, he should say it now or forget about it.
“Miss Traccia, Maestro …”
“Who in hell is Miss Traccia?”
“The girl from Cincinnati, Maestro. The one who didn’t turn up.”
“Well, that’s her loss, not ours.”
“Maestro, she has telephoned. Her train was delayed. Two and a half hours. She called from the train station. It wasn’t her fault, and she’s coming now. By taxi.”
Passau gave an enormous sigh. “Well, she’s too late for us. If some half-trained soprano can’t get here on time.”
Edwards did the unthinkable and interrupted. “Maestro, she is coming with very high credentials. Already, at twenty-two, she’s a B.M. and a M.M. Her teacher is Maestro …”
“Oh, yes.” As though he had suddenly remembered, Passau spoke the name of the music teacher who had recommended her. He was a man held in great awe by many leading figures in music. He looked at his watch. “How long?”
“She should be here any minute, Maestro.”
“Then we can wait for five, maybe ten, minutes. No longer.”
“Thank you, Maestro. I’m sorry I’m late.” The voice was clear, confident, and even in speech contained a quality and strength which made Passau quickly turn his head.
She stood near the top of the ramp, shrugging herself out of her street coat. Slender, heartbreakingly young, with shoulder-length dark hair that brushed her shoulders. Her face oval, a clear complexion, slightly flared nostrils, a thickness in the lips of what novelists, who should know better, would call “a generous mouth.” Her eyes seemed huge, glittering, a deep brown under long lashes and, as she moved, so everyone’s eyes were drawn to her.
In spite of her height—she was around five-eight—Miss Traccia carried herself with a composure and grace which was remarkable. She wore a dark maxidress, belted and with large pockets slanted forward on either side of her hips. As she walked, so the skirt swung enticingly. Dior had brought out the style during the previous year: the “New Look” as it was then called, a reaction to the former shortage of cloth, and as sexually inviting as the knee-length skirts of wartime utilitarian design.
She spoke to Helen Comfort, leaning over, talking rapidly to the pianist, throwing her coat over a chair, and coming forward again. “Thank you, Maestro—gentlemen. My name is Constance Traccia.” A pause, then she quickly corrected herself. “Constanza Traccia. Traviata, ‘Sempre libera.’”
This was a good choice for a soprano’s audition: Violetta’s aria, “Ever free shall I hasten madly on from pleasure to pleasure.” It requires range and certainly shows if the voice can sustain the top notes.
She began to sing, and Passau suddenly went very still. “She was so true, Herb. So complete and controlled. So clear. You ever been in a dry cold climate, where there’s a lot of static? You ever tried to kiss another person in that kind of climate?”
Herbie nodded, a memory filling his mind for a second. Years ago. Finland. A hotel in some small town right up in the Arctic Circle. They had run a complex operation: brought someone in from the old U.S.S.R., and it had gone well. Standing by a bank of elevators, with one of the girls who had worked on the op, he leaned forward to kiss her in a moment of happiness. A spark had crackled through the air between their lips, stinging the soft flesh with a sharp shock.
“If you know,” Passau said, “then you know what it was like in that theater. She had such range, such color to her voice. True, unforced, no strain. It was glorious to hear, and we all knew we had found something rare. When she finished, I could hardly speak.”
But he had spoken. One word only. “More,” he said in the past.
“Of course, Maestro Passau.” A moment’s thought, then a word to the pianist. “Carmen,” she said. “The ‘Habanera.’” A pace back, followed by a subtle movement of her body inside her dress.
“And this was amazing.” Passau was looking through Herbie, not at him. “Carmen is for a mezzo. She was showing off an incredible range. Rare, moving, like being inside a crystal.”
Again, there was absolute silence from those sitting around the director’s table, as though they sensed something unusual. In the one movement of her body, Miss Traccia had performed the first part of that magical spell unique to great actors. In street clothes she had suddenly become the Flamenco cigarette girl of Bizet’s opera. Helen Comfort began, and, for the first time, Louis Passau heard the sweep, fall, control and power of the extraordinary voice that was to become internationally famous within a few months.
To everyone there, in the early afternoon of September 24, 1948, Constanza Traccia became Carmen, a seductress displaying her sensuality for the doomed Don José. On that day, many of those present could have sworn she was reaching and touching Louis Passau as he sat, immobile, entranced at voice and assumed personality.
The AMD, Adrian Helpenmann, would later say that he could hear a full orchestra. “She had bewitched us, like some composers enchant by sheer genius: Rachmaninov’s Vespers, for instance. You could swear it has an accompaniment, yet it is all a capella. This was almost unbelievable.”
Of that moment, Michael Dresden was to write, “She seemed to do nothing, yet everything. Later I could not make up my mind whether it was all voice or a combination of great vocal and dramatic power.”
Don Birch, the Chorus Master, said he could not take his eyes off her eyes. “My head was full of the music, but her eyes seemed to flash and glow, just as the part demands. She had me quite hypnotized.”
It was not Passau’s favorite opera. In the present, on that morning so many decades later, sitting in the apartment with Kruger, he admitted that his heart sank when she announced the “Habanera.”
“Yet, when she began, Herb, you should have heard it, and seen it. Her voice seemed to glow with sexuality. She hardly moved, yet her body was alive to the rhythms. At one moment, I believe she tapped the three middle fingers of her right hand against the palm of the left, like a Flamenco. Her feet also rapped the stage, and that wonderful, clear, powerful voice had an undertow of smoke and sweat. When she finished, there was just a tiny pause, the fraction of a second, and we were all on our feet. I knew there was little I could ever teach her. She was one of those strange, incomprehensible artistes who are born. …”
“Like yourself, Lou?”
“Maybe. Yes, maybe. But she was there, she had arrived at her true birth, on that bare stage, in September 1948.” Tears were close to the surface. He opened his mouth, then, as if he had thought better of i
t, he closed up again. His body gave one huge shudder, as though he was trying to hold back some flood of emotion, and his voice cracked as he said, “She … she was … my epiphany. …”
He raised his head, and Herbie found himself looking into a ruin, a face that had collapsed in almost mortal pain and agony. “God help me, Herb.” He reached out and gripped his inquisitor’s knee as though Herbie had the priestly right to shrive him. “She was my beginning and my end; my epiphany and my destruction. Constanza Traccia laid waste my soul, and when it was over—God help me—it was like the melodrama of Don José’s last words in that small opera—‘Carmen, my beloved Carmen.’ In her I was razed to the ground.”
“I been there, Lou. I know. I been there.” Big Herbie Kruger, being the person he was, wanted to weep with the old man, for the passion, horror and depth of despair.
(14)
“THERE IS A STORY, LOU.” Herbie tried to sound casual. “A story that you signed her straight off and then put her in the chorus. This story goes that she had a massive tantrum. There and then. Almost on the spot. That she expected to sing the leading roles immediately. Instant diva. True or false?”
The Maestro gave a sad little smile, fond and foolish at the same time. “Mostly true.” He nodded.
It had taken almost an hour before Passau was able to talk again, and Kruger wanted to seize the moment: drag him back to that day in 1948 when something magical had happened on the half-empty stage in the Passau Center. This, he thought, is the great turning point. There is catastrophe here, and I shall be the first to hear of it. Also, this drama—whatever it was—impinges on his life as a Soviet agent, if that is what he truly was. Herbie was certain of it. Certain sure, as he would have said. He went to the kitchen and made coffee, taking some through to Pucky, then back to collect his, and Passau’s, cups.
He stood looking at the percolator for several minutes, thinking of dates and times, and of the great eternal question mark that hung over the whole business. Why? Why bother with a ninety-year-old genius who just might have betrayed his country—twice?
The Nazi thing had obviously been low-key. Kruger had thought that from the start. Passau’s confession, which had all the hallmarks of truth, bore that out. Blackmail which did not result in any serious intelligence calamity. Was Passau—had he ever been—a threat to national security, both here, in America, and across the ocean in Europe? Could be, he supposed. “Yet, what kind of ratings we got here?” he asked himself, almost aloud, part of it whispered.
Louis Passau’s long-standing affair with Constanza Traccia had lasted from 1949 until the mid-fifties, when its abrupt end led to his disappearance, his five years in the wilderness, and the writing of his one symphony. Yet there was more. Herbie thought of the days before he had traveled to New York, at the start of it all. Art Railton, Young Worboys and others briefing him on what they knew and did not know. Words floated back into his head.
“Erik the Red, ‘Brightwater,’ maintains the Sovs bought Passau—‘bought him and paid for him,’ were the words—in fifty-nine or sixty.” Art Railton speaking.
“1960 would be about right,” Worboys said. “It more or less coincides with his reappearance after the self-imposed exile. Get to the heart of that as fast as you can.” At the time, Art had no idea of the restrictions that would be placed on Passau’s interrogation.
Standing in the kitchen, Herb clenched both of his big fists and shook them in the air, whispering, “Push! Push! Push!” Then he went back to the Maestro, let him take a sip of coffee, and fired the question at him, its trajectory aimed exactly at putting the old man into his time machine, sending him back to 1948.
“Tell me about it, Lou. Tell me about the tantrum.”
Louis had been all over her. Indeed, his colleagues had followed him up onto the stage congratulating her, as she stood there, smiling but unsurprised. They all told her she had a wonderful and bright career ahead. In turn, she seemed to acknowledge the fact with a smile and a short nod. With a voice, presence and dramatic talent like that, Constanza Traccia could not fail. Passau took her up to his office. On the way, he told Peter de Souza to draw up a contract.
Michael Dresden, the Chorus Master, walked ahead with the girl, talking earnestly. He was an intense man, who moved with arms locked behind his back, his head bent, looking at the ground so that he had no distractions, like some Oxford don. Dresden always appeared much older than his forty-six years. She was obviously incredibly knowledgeable about the voice as an instrument. The conversation floated back as they climbed the stairs to the executive offices. She talked technique, like a woman who had been at the heart of operatic life for twenty years or more, and that was just not possible, even though she had secured her bachelor’s and master’s degrees with stratospheric marks.
Passau was impressed. (“Impressed is not the real word for it, Herb. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t take it in.”)
Quietly he whispered to de Souza that he wanted a standard exclusive contract. Ten years. Complete control. “Get hold of Martin Spinebrucker,” he said. “No loopholes. Make it set in stone. No, make it set in steel.”
He did not really know what he had got in Constanza Traccia. The family name seemed vaguely familiar, and the Carmen Habanera’ was obviously a very well rehearsed party piece. Something she did effortlessly, like a conjuring trick or some routine learned in childhood. Experience told him she would need a great deal of work. There were few real divas who did not come directly from the Italian tradition and, while her name showed obvious Italian origins, she spoke clearly with an American accent. No hint of being a first-generation American: no Italian, or any other European, inflection. This girl had grown up in the United States and, though she had trained in Cincinnati, there had to be much for her to learn. Already, Passau was ticking off a mental list of teachers. His first thought would be to get the very best, put the teacher under an exclusive and make Traccia work night and day.
Once alone with the young woman, Louis Passau discovered it was not that simple.
“I want to put you under contract to my organization,” he began.
She smiled, giving a little nod, part thanks, part triumph.
“There will be much to do,” he continued. “I feel that, like most gifted sopranos who come to us, you should work for two years or so in the chorus. …”
The first explosion was minor. Her eyes glittered with irritation more than anger. “The chorus?” she asked, and her tone of voice should have alerted Passau. She repeated it, “The chorus?” as though she had not heard him correctly.
“I can give you extensive training. You’re obviously a very gifted lady. If things go well, you’ll progress quickly to understudying the leading soprano roles. After that, there’s …”
“Understudying?” This time it was anger. Her mouth curled, the eyes flashed danger. “Maestro, I didn’t come to you in order to understudy. I think I’d better go to the Met. I have friends there. …”
“But, Miss Traccia, nobody can expect to walk straight into the leading roles. You’ve graduated with spectacular success. Now, we must build on that. It takes years to learn the repertoire. …”
The softness of her voice, as she cut in on him, signaled a huge and consuming ego. “Maestro. I already know the repertoire. I’ve studied the repertoire since age ten.” The way she said it, revealed something more than simple youthful assurance. It was as though she truly believed she had achieved, in her early twenties, a pinnacle which demanded instantaneous recognition.
“Since … ?”
“Since the age of ten. My father was Alberto Traccia. …”
Passau suddenly grasped why her name had seemed familiar. Alberto Traccia had been one of the great voice coaches at the Met. A man who had died suddenly, and young, some five years before. Alberto had come from the long apostolic succession of Italian opera. He opened his mouth, but only said, “Ah!” Then—“I knew your father. Once he came to dinner at my place near Rhineb
eck. Your mother was ill and he came alone. But I knew him. A fine man. A kind of genius.”
She stood glaring at him, and he again said, “Ah!”
“Ah, indeed, Maestro! My father was not a man who accepted second best. He began my training at age ten. Even before that I was exposed to music. From the cradle almost. Maybe before that. In the womb. I’ve worked for the day when I could put to use all those grueling hours of labor. I knew the bulk of the repertoire by heart, exact, before I reached my sixteenth birthday.” Her voice had risen to the level of a cold and bitter storm. “If you’re not going to give me my birthright, then there are others who will, and to hell with you, Maestro Passau. To hell with your organization!” She was on her feet, heading towards the door. With one hand on the knob, she turned her head and spat out one of the worst Italian oaths. “Porco bastardo!!”
In the present, Passau gave an enormous shrug. “You see, Herb, it was impossible. Impossible for any young woman of her age to have learned the repertoire. In America the great operatic tradition had been handed to us from Europe, but there were few opera companies to sustain it. Visiting companies came from Europe, and great operatic singers, but they were mainly transients in our country. A season here, a season there. Sure, they left their mark, but opera did not fully take root until after the war. It was there, but … well, you must know …”
“’Course I know, Lou. But this is a good story. What next, Lou?”
“I called her back.”
She was spitting fire. Oaths in Italian that shocked Passau. She was out of control, shouting, shrieking at him like a toddler deprived of some treat.
“Miss Traccia, please. Please come back. Sit down. We’ll work out something.”
She stood in the doorway, enveloped in this storm of abuse. Passau could see Dresden and Adrian Helpenmann outside, their faces white with shock, for Constanza Traccia turned this kind of anger into an art form.