The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  She demonstrated, the sound much as I’d heard her sing privately the day before.

  Your voice is quite fine, but you have not really been singing, she said to me, after a few of these exercises. Your voice has simply been misused. It is like a horse that was allowed to run wherever and whenever it liked, and then was found by someone who enjoyed it that way, and somehow it has not lamed itself, she said. Though there could, I think, be some secret wound not quite audible to us. For now we will proceed. For our purposes, I want you to begin as if you have never sung before and do all I tell you.

  She handed me a book that looked like a score to an operetta in which one only sang the letter A. This was a lesson book, she explained, a program carefully constructed over the years to train her singers.

  Each day I was to begin at the piano, and to begin with my posture at the piano—I was to sit erect, head slightly lifted. Once the posture was correct, I would begin not by singing but by playing the notes to the lesson on the piano until I knew the music well enough to begin—unfamiliar music, she explained, was a danger to the voice, like running through an unfamiliar landscape. A singer’s voice could trip on too fast a change, especially if untrained.

  As I played the notes without singing, I was to practice breathing through my nose only, practicing for when I began to sing. As I did this, I was also to soften my tongue so that it would not go rigid. When I was ready to sing, I was to use my practice in inhaling through my nose to take a breath this way first, and then hold the breath for a moment, before releasing the note in as natural a way as possible. I was to sing only that letter A and never change the vowel sound during the lesson.

  When I began to sing, I was to sing slowly at first, legato and moderato, and then faster and faster. A mirror sat on the piano so I could watch my mouth’s movements and modulate myself accordingly. Once I knew the lesson comfortably from memory, I would then stand and sing it unaccompanied. There were instructions for standing as well, of course—I was to stand in second position from ballet, one foot in front, the other in back, so there could be no unseemly slouching or swaying or any extra movement whatsoever. The back was arched ever so slightly backward, the head slightly raised, as if I were maintaining my stance in the face of a great wind and I would not ever lose my ground.

  I was to practice fifteen minutes at a time and then rest and do this only when my concentration was greatest. I was never to force, never to slide toward a note, but instead launch it boldly, precisely, never loud when I was to be soft or soft when I was to be loud. If I sensed a mistake or a problem, I was to stop at once and begin again, but only once a natural softness had returned to the throat. The plus marks over or under the notes were warnings as to where the voice was most likely to go sharp (over) or flat (under).

  I cannot play so well, I told her, anxious not to fail at even this.

  She pointed at the keys. So, your playing will improve first, she said, and then your singing. Now begin, and I will return at your first break to speak to you some more. She picked up an hourglass timer, turned it over, and left.

  Hesitantly, my fingers found the notes. I’d had no instruction in the piano previously. I pecked in the manner of all who cannot play, first slowly and then more quickly. I resisted the impulse to hum.

  She returned. My child, you did not tell me you could not play at all.

  And so she became my piano teacher also.

  In several weeks’ time I was ready to sing the lesson. The voice felt made new after the long rest, stronger, surer, as if it were rooted the more deeply somehow. The noise of it was thrilling. Here in the lessons were the ways to attempt the vocal flourishes, the trills and diminuendos and crescendos I had only heard and never understood. Only when I was ready to stand did I realize how I had been raised up very slowly by degrees. Until I was singing in that position in which I would not ever lose my ground.

  I made my way like this through that first winter into the spring in Weimar and Karlsruhe until we returned to Baden-Baden. By the summer, Natalya had moved on, and when the opera was performed, I replaced her onstage as Prince Lelio, singing of love to Maxine, who was still in the role of Stella. This amused the tenor to no end. Especially when I decided, with a flourish, to use that ruby rose gift from the Emperor, the one he had kept for me, as the flower the Queen gives Lelio to pass invisibly through the night.

  §

  At this distance, these lessons with her are, to me, her autobiography written in musical instruction. At the least, as I sat and learned to play beside her, they were a mirror to the story of a girl who had watched her older brother and sister both break very publicly—her sister singing herself to death after a horseback-riding accident, her brother losing his voice very young—and she, all the while, their talented much younger sister, who loved the piano more than she loved singing, picking out the notes before she sang. Doing as her father and mother said.

  And if it was not her autobiography, it was at the least the door by which one could enter a life like hers.

  At Madame Viardot’s school, her many successes were confided to us mostly by either of her two greatest admirers: Louis, who’d once managed an opera house in Paris, or Turgenev, who fell in love with her during her triumphant first season in Saint Petersburg. They spoke of her enormous capacity for memorization and her ability to keep many roles in her repertoire at the same time, even within a single opera, and in several languages. Once, in Berlin, during a performance of Robert le Diable, she replaced another singer as she also continued singing her own role. Later, in London, in Les Huguenots, she found herself tricked by a rival into performing the lead in Norma in Italian—but her tenor that night was going to sing his part in French. She taught herself the French as the opera began, in the wings, and her Norma was also French halfway through the performance. To the audience, Louis said, as he paused with a rare wit in his eye, it was as if the druidess had cast a spell on her own throat.

  These were not lectures but they acted as such: We were to be as ruthless in the pursuit of a performance and as able. I soon inquired about learning other languages, and learning my parts, when I was allowed to, each in several languages, all of which pleased Pauline—and all of which she could teach. I began the practice of learning the other major roles of opera. I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover.

  I was consumed by my apprenticeship and paid little attention to the tenor’s affairs. At first, on our return to Baden-Baden, he enjoyed himself at the casinos and baths as if he were on some extended vacation, and he was a hit at Pauline’s many dinners and events, sometimes even singing at the Haustheater, much as she’d suggested. Soon he was excusing himself to go on trips, at first for a few days and nights and then increasingly for longer—a week, a fortnight. But he would always return for the Haustheater events, as if they were to him a regular engagement at any other theater. The proximity of Baden-Baden to the major capitals and its strange role as both a sanitarium and a casino to the rich meant a variety of notables passed through, and all of them sought a place either in her audience or on her stage.

  Each time the tenor returned from his trips, he found me further along in my education and praised me. He brought gifts, always. He kept an apartment in the town I rarely saw; it was impractical for me to live so far from the house. Each time he returned, some part of me was surprised to think I had not fled, but that part became smaller and smaller as time went on. I was content with my situation, happy to see him, happy to be with him.

  This last, in some ways, was the most confusing for me, the part that would be the hardest to forgive.

  §

  It’s for the best they rejected you, Pauline said of the Conservatoire after she had heard me sing a little. Pauline then launched into a critique of their system. Too many teachers confuses, she said. The tenor tells me you studied with Delsarte, yes?

  Yes, I said.

  Dels
arte will tell anyone he lost his voice to the Conservatoire’s methods, she said. It may even be true.

  She let this stay in the air a moment before continuing.

  There are two voices for an opera singer, Pauline said. Your speaking voice, which can be as ordinary as a wren’s. And then the singing voice, which can sound as strange as something the wren found and holds in its beak, as if it comes from some other place entirely. For most singers, that voice is something made from the first, carefully, with both passion and patience. A patience born of that passion. For a few, their voice is a gift and can improve with training, but it has qualities that cannot be taught. And because the singer did not make this voice herself with careful training, she does not know what those qualities are except that she finds them by singing.

  She paused and then said, She also does not know when the gift will break.

  She smiled at me as she said that. Be careful of your roles, she said. I sang everything out of youthful pride in my three-octave voice, and I should not have. Yours is much like my own. It will not last forever, this voice. I know this seems very cruel, as you must give everything to become a singer and then it may be taken from you all at once. The voice can go quite suddenly or slowly, but even with a slow departure, once it is underway, it will sound as if the original voice has already left you.

  I said nothing, alternately warm from her compliment—she believed my voice was like hers!—and chilled entirely by this warning, which was, of course, meant to chill me.

  She then began to play a slow scale and then went faster, the movement between high C to high E flat and back down again.

  There, she said. Did you hear it? That’s one place you may fall.

  She played it again, the notes sounding this time almost like a trap.

  Don’t be afraid, she said. It’s not just the melodies we should know. We must know also where we could fail. Learn them and you will never fall, not, at least, before your time.

  §

  After my lesson was done, I passed by Pauline’s library, where her autographed manuscript score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni stood on a music stand. I went in, as was now my custom. The Mozart manuscript lay open, turned to a new page every day, as if each day Pauline came in and looked over the handiwork of her hero now that she was also a composer.

  Le Dernier Sorcier had been a success in Weimar and Karlsruhe, and this had filled her with some new courage and happiness. She was now busy with her commission from the Queen of Prussia. Turgenev also had brightened in the reflected glory, though he sometimes seemed still pained by the regrettable controversy he made when he published praise of the production, for which he was intensely criticized—he was, after all, the author of the libretto, beyond all other personal relations to the opera, the singers, and the production. The scandal had wounded him and Pauline both; in the Haustheater we understood it as an excess of enthusiasm, the madness of love, and forgave it. But out in the world, it was egotism, nepotism, and, given the way they lived here, a disgrace.

  This scandal would subside, but after I left there, in the years that followed, I would often have a chance to reflect on the doubled irony, the twin fictions of Pauline as “ugly” and the temptress who brutally controlled Turgenev. Whenever it came up in conversations, I would recoil and sometimes want to assure them as Natalya assured me, that Turgenev was the one who’d urged Pauline to take her composing more seriously as her voice began to fade—he did what he did out of his faith in her talents as a composer, as well as out of love. We all knew Pauline’s mother had forced her to sing—Pauline had wanted to stay at her piano, out of sight. I thought of this often when we sat down to our lessons there—how, as her singing voice left her, this voice, the piano, remained—the one she’d preferred all along.

  When I saw them working together, their heads bent over the score, making adjustments and speaking intensely over this or that part of the new drama, I saw a kind of love I’d not seen before, a devotion unlike any other. To the extent he’d disgraced her and himself, it was born of an excess of his fear that the world—that world that had judged her voice by her face—would not accept this from her, either. And yet I also understood that he should never have published that essay. There were too many of his readers who believed our strange little paradise, these two houses side by side, were a disgrace.

  My own devotion brought me to Pauline’s Mozart shrine, though I did not come for Mozart. A portrait of Pauline’s sister, Maria, looked down from over the mantel in that room. I went in and stood before it.

  This was my talisman. I had memorized her long white neck, her large dark eyes as familiar to me as those of anyone else’s in the house. The lesson Pauline wanted us, her students, to take from her stories of her sister was that she had died too young, a victim of her own reckless ambition. But I, increasingly certain I lacked Pauline’s genius, had become enchanted with the portrait and had, more and more, taken another lesson. While Pauline was not the same kind of beauty as she and had suffered for it, at least Maria would not know the ignominy of being a voiceless singer with no other talents.

  I understood Maria’s recklessness differently. Nothing waited for her if she could not sing, much as I suspected nothing would wait for me. But I still believed that fame could save me, somehow, even from this, and I would for some time.

  This movement—between my room, her music room, this library, this is how I spent my time in Baden-Baden until the war began.

  Three

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1870, when French society declined their usual visits to the spas and casinos in Baden-Baden, it was clear to Europe there would finally be war between Prussia and France.

  For nearly a year Pauline had hoped to at least have her good friend, George Sand, come to see Le Dernier Sorcier performed and then, when that failed, had begun to plan a trip to her—we would perform for her there, in Nohant in her theater instead. We were to go in July, around the time of their birthdays, and the performance would be in her honor.

  It was a great compliment to be asked, and as the tenor had been gone for a month at least, with no sign of returning, I said yes, excited at the thought of a trip without him.

  The news of the possibility of war cheered me at first, as the talk in Germany was of how quickly it would be over; the French, we were assured again and again, could not hope to prevail. Surely it would be the end of the regime, Pauline said one night, when this sentiment was expressed at her dinner table.

  The end of the regime meant, to me at least, if not my outright freedom, the beginning of it. Inside France, the idea of a France without the Emperor and Empress had seemed impossible for me to imagine. But from inside Germany, it seemed certain. When this was done, I would be able to leave the tenor then, I was sure. This trip could be the first of many without him, I hoped.

  We must go to her sooner than July, it would seem, Pauline then said to the table and us, her assembled troupe. She did not need to say Sand’s name.

  Several weeks later, as we packed to depart, Pauline appeared at my door, stricken, a letter from the tenor in her hand. He’s gone mad, she said, holding it out to me.

  Thank you for informing me of your plans, and I’m so sorry I won’t be able to join you there except very briefly; for you see I must return to Paris, and Lilliet should come with me—I think she has learned all she can from you for now. I will collect her from Nohant then, as I will already be in Paris when you arrive, so be sure to tell her to pack all and make her good-byes and send what she will not need in Nohant to the avenue de l’Opéra address. I will be making arrangements for her debut there for the spring season, where I know she will be the talk of Paris.

  The letter read as if it were from a stranger, almost a forgery, except I knew his hand by now. Pauline had been carefully training me for a year to debut in Weimar, in Bellini’s La Sonnambula, performing the role of Amina. This was an effort she and the tenor had both undertaken, and so I knew she felt variously betrayed, as did I. Pauline was famou
s for her Amina, and as I could have no better teacher for it, wouldn’t my debut and my safety be assured if we continued as we were? Why this change? He’d discussed with us how, even after the debut, I should remain a student of Pauline’s for at least another year, perhaps two.

  How could he do this to us? And to you most of all, Pauline asked, though I knew she knew I did not know the answers. This is just so disappointing. Well, I will send my maid to help you pack everything, then.

  None of the agreements we’d made from before this letter were visible except in his insistence I return to Paris, the one only I knew of, the one that required me to be with him. Something had happened out of my sight, a cord pulled tightly where I’d expected it to go slack. I understood then that I knew nothing of what would happen next.

  §

  My fortnight’s introduction to Madame Sand, then, was also to be the end to my life as a member of my adopted family. We left Baden-Baden first by train back into France in a grim procession—Pauline, her children, Turgenev, and I—while Louis stayed behind. All that we said to one another sounded as if we were calling to one another from very far away, not from the next seat. It had been one thing to mock the Second Empire around Pauline’s table in Baden-Baden, quite another to enter it on the verge of war. But whatever we feared from the French did not appear as we crossed the border; the conductors, the passport officers, the police, all were as cordial and formal as ever. The peculiar spell broke only when we were met by a carriage waiting for us in Châteauroux, sent by Sand and driven by her servant Sylvain. Only after he had greeted us warmly and made sure we were all packed in, only then did Pauline seem to relax, and the desolate worry that accompanied her until then left; her normally confident and bemused expression returned, and it was as if we had passed through enemy territory between her house and Sand’s, and she were somehow home again.