Vienna Nocturne
Page 13
He told Anna she mustn’t tire herself with this luncheon business, but she said with the brightest look that there was nothing wearisome about bringing together two of the best gentlemen she knew. Stephen hoped to take composition lessons from Mozart, and Mozart wanted English lessons, so that he could someday return to London. He had been there once as a little boy, before Anna and Stephen were born, and it would be just the thing for him, he said. But Anna did not have the patience to teach him English; she said she wouldn’t know where to begin.
Mozart embraced Stephen like a brother and greeted Mrs. Storace cordially. He was a pale, slightly built man in his natural hair. His big eyes, Stephen thought, like agate stones, overset by soft reddish brows, seemed to seize and stare into one’s very soul, such was the intensity of his attention and concentration. Yet he was also fidgety and shy. He had his neck wrapped in a checkered scarf because he had been ill. He ate with a ravenous appetite and avowed pleasure, two plates full; he had been up since six, composing, he said, and had taken no breakfast, only a single piece of cheese three hours in. He’d given up his opera. Nobody wanted an opera from him anyway. Now he was just composing piano concertos and symphonies, chamber music for sweet ladies, to pay the bills. How grand it was that Stephen had gotten an opera at the Burg—Mozart looked forward to hearing it. Stephen blushed and said he’d rather it was one of Mozart’s operas and Mozart said that was nonsense. For Stephen to be only twenty-two and having his first opera premiered at the Burgtheater—that was something to be proud of.
Mozart wanted to know everything about London and the English way of being. There was a craze for all things English these days. They talked of politics and freedom and America. Mozart had just joined the Freemasons, though he couldn’t tell them anything about it, only that it was marvelous and new. He had a friend there, a lodge brother, who was a black man, an actual African, working for his freedom from a nobleman. And by God he had nearly gotten it. He was a great fellow, married to a Viennese lady. Freemasonry, Mozart said, was about freedom and humanity, how to live, how to regulate one’s mind to the highest capacity and discipline. It was a bastion of science, medicine, and all the arts.
“We used to see blacks in London,” Mrs. Storace said. “Poor creatures. And of course one finds all kinds of Turks and Egyptians in this city. I never heard of one living so kingly as your man. I suppose he can’t believe his luck.”
Mozart looked at her. “Well, madam,” he said at last. “I do not know if that is true. Perhaps someday you might ask him.”
She blanched. “I do not go out often, Herr Mozart.”
“She reminds me of my father,” Mozart said to the Storace siblings later, when they retired to the music room.
“You, too?” said Stephen with a laugh. They had been talking of their childhoods, how all of them had been paraded for their musical skills—though Mozart’s parade, of course, had covered all of Europe.
“Put her in trousers,” Mozart said, “and I’d call her my own.”
“She married very young,” Anna said. “It was practically an elopement. But she was educated, you see. She really should have been a man.”
“Our father was a bumbler,” Stephen declared. “She’s the one who taught us to read.”
Stephen felt nervous and young beside Mozart. Mozart was an open, jovial fellow, but filled with such intensity—those fishlike eyes, that flushed pallor, behind which thrummed arteries of life and thought—that one almost wished to escape for air.
But composition lessons had already been proposed, and Mozart suggested looking over some of Stephen’s pieces now, why not this instant? Perhaps a selection from the new opera? Stephen could not refuse. Anna asked if she might sit and watch. Her brother, though he had not been expecting a lesson today and would rather have been taught in private, said that of course she might.
He and Mozart sat at the keyboard with one of Stephen’s favorite arias from his opera and the orchestration to which he’d been setting it. Mozart proceeded to reduce it to rubble.
He was not harsh, but neither did he coddle, and for that, at least, Stephen was grateful. Mozart spoke in a low, mild voice, so that only they two could hear, and made small markings on the paper or played examples and ideas to explain his reasoning. When he praised, it seemed praise truly felt: he would stop to explore some surprise or beauty in Stephen’s line or harmony, and wonder at how it worked, and speculate how it might be still improved, so it left one feeling oddly cheered, even in the wreckage of everything that was drab and hackneyed and ugly and wrong. Mozart’s powers of concentration were all-consuming. The walls might have collapsed in flames around them and he would have kept murmuring and analyzing. He must do the same with his own work, one felt, only perhaps with still more strictness and rigor, and for this, too, one was wholly grateful even as one was stripped raw to the bone. Stephen hardly knew whether to laugh at himself or weep. It seemed impossible folly that his opera would go up in two months.
“We must do this again,” he said to Mozart rather weakly after they’d gone through everything. “I’ll pay you, of course. I’m going to have to think for days but I’d like to see you again—there are so many things I’ve got to learn.”
“I like it very much,” said Mozart, nodding at the page. He was silent a moment and then asked, “I wonder if you might indulge me in letting me play this aria with your sister? Would you mind singing, mademoiselle? It’s been too long since I played with you. If we run through this aria I could show your brother what I mean about the accompaniment.” His face as he said this had a dreamy quality; his eyes seemed the color of a briny sea. Flushed and smiling, Anna rose and went to the piano. Stephen with some reluctance took her place on the sofa. Her maid, Lidia, stood just inside the doorway. She’d come so quietly he hadn’t noticed her. She had a chin, he thought, like an arrow’s point.
Mozart smiled at Anna. There was a scarcely perceptible pause. Then he looked down and began to play.
Anna already knew the aria. She sang it easily and well. One forgot, watching her, that she was heavy with child. She seemed all girlish grace. Her color was high and her smile infectious. She got this look often when she sang, as though her life had become whole, as though she wished to do nothing ever but this. Now, however, the feeling seemed deepened. Had she not looked so happy one might have thought she was about to cry. Perhaps she was so affected because her brother had returned, or perhaps it was love and expectation for her child. Stephen had forgotten how beautiful her voice was and how unhampered by artifice. She sounded only like herself.
Mozart, however, was changing the entire accompaniment. Stephen, listening to his music in the hands of another—only altered, at times dramatically altered, by what this far more skilled composer suggested with harmony and texture and dynamic—felt riveted and strange. He was almost queasy. Was he so conservative as all that—so conventional? This particular aria had been his favorite. It had been, to him, one of the best things he’d ever done in his life. But it turned out to have been rubbish.
His sister was happy, singing with Mozart. He had come here expecting her to be troubled or wounded and it turned out she was happy and well. Watching them was like watching swallows in the air. He could not touch them. He was wholly barred. Though it was his music, the best parts of it were what they did with it, the phrasing, the tempo, the embellishments, such as would never have occurred to Stephen by himself. He could have gone on his knees.
“There,” Mozart said. “You see? Of course it was only a little improvisation. You’re a treasure, mademoiselle, to follow me.”
Stephen groaned. “You’re giving me headaches, Mozart.”
“As my father always told me,” Mozart said, putting on a long face, “Learn or die! Learn or die, my son!”
“I thought it was better before,” Lidia said softly to Stephen as they were parting. “I liked yours better.”
“Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “You’re the only one, then.”
He looked forward to seeing Mozart again, though, and vowed to himself that the next time he would hold his own. “He’s absolutely brilliant,” he said to his sister. “I knew he would be—I daresay I’ve been his admirer long before he had many admirers—but I never would have guessed the extent of it. Why, if I had only the skill in his little finger! But I’m more practical than he is, I’m not afraid to bend to the wind of populism. Music should be agreeable above all else. Mozart knows this but he gets in his own way. My God, and I thought my orchestrations were complex! I wondered if I had gone too far! I would never dare go further than that, than what I myself have done, and yet look at Mozart going to the ends of the earth. If I didn’t admire him so much, I’d have thought he had no care for his future or his family. And then you hear the bloody thing and can’t help but be taken in, even as half of you is begging him to cut it down a little, for pity’s sake, and let us enjoy the beauty underneath. Would that be so hard?”
The Discontented Spouses
The Storace siblings were often remarking, as the premiere of Stephen’s opera drew nearer, how amazed their father should have been at their change of circumstances. To have seen Anna sing in a royal house the music of her brother—to have known that Stephen had written it—well! At the time of the premiere Anna was almost nine months pregnant, although only her mother and Lidia knew that. Even her brother did not know. He had a vague impression that there were still one or two months remaining. Anna was calm, however. She knew the baby would wait.
In Stephen’s face on the night of the premiere was a sort of patient excitement Anna had felt herself so often before—the feeling that everything that could be done had been done, that it was done extremely well, and could not help coming off like a perfect dream. The patience came from fullness of preparation and purpose, and the excitement, from the inconstancy of the theater, which was like the natural world in that events must occur that the actors could neither foresee nor control.
The Duke of York was in the audience, a guest of the emperor in the royal box. Laughter and applause greeted the first act. Stephen’s music was charming, the libretto no worse than any other. Anna’s costume disguised her condition tolerably well, although it was difficult for her to get a proper breath with the baby taking so much room. The other singers, because they loved Anna, were at their best. The orchestra did not indistinguish itself, and compensated, in its placid collective way, for Stephen’s eager and somewhat impulsive behavior at the keyboard. So consumed was he by this moment, by the unbelievable felicity of his art made manifest—audience, stage, word, music—that he might have been forgiven for forgetting his own name.
What happened during Anna’s bravura aria at the end of the first act could have been predicted by no one, least of all by herself. She felt no warning. All was as it had ever been. She was always at her best on stage—she felt it clearly—a better, more beloved Anna, an Anna of mystery and fortune and power.
What she would remember afterward was the time between ignorance and understanding, those few seconds or perhaps even minutes when none knew the extent of her misfortune but herself; when many indeed had not yet realized there had been any misfortune at all. There was a pain or spasm in her throat—a knife in her windpipe—then a blossoming of broken glass. She choked on the A-flat, on the word dolce—sweet. When she coughed and cleared her throat, and tried to continue, unknowing at first, there was no voice she recognized as hers, just rags and smarting air and pathetic wheezing. The orchestra kept playing. Stephen, almost deaf with excitement now that the moment of greatness was upon him, did not notice his sister stop singing, and was indeed one of the very last to look up. But Anna saw him. His forehead was knitted in happy concentration. It will break his heart, she thought.
The orchestra went on—oh, for many painful measures. Michael Kelly, on stage with her, leapt out of his part in an instant to be at her elbow.
“Is it the child?” he whispered.
Anna looked at him without a word.
“Is it the child, Anna?”
The hall had gone deathly quiet. The orchestra, divided between those who had noticed her distress and those who yet had not, limped to a halt. Stephen looked up and met his sister’s eye, the enraptured smile fading on his lips. He would think she was joking, or that she hated him and was doing it on purpose. And in some selfish part of her heart she wished that were true, because this helplessness, this loss so sudden and unimaginable, was not anything she could remedy or bear. There was the emperor in his private box. There was the Duke of York with his medals and his disappointment. There was her mother with her hand over her mouth, and Mozart leaning forward in his chair as if he wanted to spring to the stage and finish the aria himself. Salieri, across the aisle, whispered something to his mistress. All of them were whispering now. The members of the orchestra looked up at her in alarm. Anna shook her head, once, “No,” for all their benefit, and someone had the sense to draw the curtain.
There was an uproar. They kept asking what had happened and if it was the baby and whether she could still finish the opera. She tried to sing, but it was no good. The voice had left her. She had done something terribly wrong, abused her heavenly gift, upset the balance. Now the work of years was reduced to nothing. Any girl might lose her voice, just as she might lose her hearing, her sight, or her life. But not so young—not, surely, at the flourishing of her powers.
She was made to recline on the floor; a physician was sent for. Stephen came running and was told everything.
“What will we do?” he asked wildly. “Who will sing it in her place?”
He had knelt beside her and seized her hand but looked away, all distraction and agitation. The desperation of his sister’s case was not yet evident to him. She seemed distraught and mortified but otherwise in robust health, while his infant opera, his fragile, miraculous construction of thought and air, was in the throes of death. There were two more acts to be gotten through. Some other soprano could sing from the orchestra, while Anna put on a dumb show. He proposed this repeatedly to the crowd surrounding them. He helped Anna sit up in order to demonstrate that she was fit and well. He was urging her to stand—she was weeping and could hardly draw air from her panic—when the emperor’s own physician came in and made her lie down again. Stephen hovered above them, muttering for a new singer and looking around frantically, but it would not do, this plan of his to save his opera from the brink. In the first place, there was no one else capable of singing Anna’s part. In the second, the physician, who thrived on situations of public urgency, positively forbade Madame Storace from exerting herself in any way. She must be bled, she must drink bitter powders, she must have poultices applied to her throat and chest. In the third place, a new opera by an unknown English composer, without Anna Storace, was no opera that any Viennese wished to see. The Discontented Spouses died in Vienna that evening, at half past nine, and was ever after known only and infamously as the opera that muted a lark.
Black Bile
The doctor said she was not in danger of miscarrying; that had not caused Anna’s distress. Rather the problem was black bile, in her chest and throat, which must find its way out. Black bile was the worst kind of bile, thick and noxious, seeping through all the vital organs. The black bile had filled her neck and burst out during the bravura aria, whereupon it had spilled into her bowels and lungs. If they did not release it, it would choke her heart. The doctor gave her ice baths. He made her drink bitter powders so that she would vomit, which only hurt her throat more. He bled her twice daily, u
ntil she was weak and delirious. Lidia became so distressed she threatened to take her own life. Finally Mrs. Storace, seeing her daughter white and parched as death, declared the doctor a murderer and sent him away.
Mrs. Storace found an old midwife, a sturdy woman from the country, who swept in and gave Anna good food and cooling drink and bathed her and aired and cleansed everything. And though Anna still had no voice, at least there was no one talking anymore about the black bile and how she must vomit it out. The midwife did not believe in black bile. She said she’d never seen the stuff in her life. She gave Anna herbal drinks that were sweetened with honey and not bitter. She said Anna was a strong girl, and that there was nothing wrong with her. Anna was grateful for her kindness, and tried to believe her, but could not. Her throat hurt with every breath. She could barely speak. She was afraid for the baby and afraid, too, terribly afraid, that giving birth to it would kill her. She prayed it would not come out at all, so she would not have to feel any pain.
But she delivered the baby as well as the midwife had predicted. She was brave and strong. She hardly made a sound, to spare the rags of her voice. The midwife said she’d never known such a quiet young mother. But after the birth Anna became terribly ill.
The baby girl had Benucci’s eyes. They sent it to a wet nurse. The wet nurse, though they did not know at the time, was sick, as well, and gave the illness to the baby, and it died a week old. They did not tell Anna for two weeks more that the infant had died, and when they did—for she had been begging to see her baby—her wails were like a banshee’s, and after that she would not eat, nor speak, nor sign to anyone, and for a long time they feared she would not recover.
Mesmer
The emperor came often to the Countess Thun’s salons. He was as in love with her as everyone else. She treated him exactly as he most wished: as an ordinary man.