by Mary Gentle
“Tell me where we stand for the end of Act Two.”
Conrad searched his heaps of paper, and found his notes on the back of a sheet. “Here we are. Act One, the first love triangle: Cortez and General Chimalli both love the Aztec Princess. Act Two, we introduce the second love triangle: Hippolyta the Amazon slave-girl and Aztec Princess Tayanna both love Cortez. The surprise reveal for the end of the act—the slave-girl has had a child by Cortez. Cat among pigeons, shock and horror from the chorus, Fernando Cortez astonished, the Jaguar General triumphant, L’Altezza herself furious, exits the stage; all ends in confusion!”
The Conte di Argente sipped at his wine, looking as if he concealed amusement.
Conrad added, “We may have to placate the censor and make the slave-girl Hippolyta into Cortez’s native wife. Is there any problem with that?”
“Not with the staging.” Roberto gazed off in absently the direction of the chorus rehearsal. “An older child, though, not a baby! Any child is bad enough—although a member of the chorus or orchestra will likely have a six or seven year old we can train to be led around stage by his Amazon mother—but can you imagine Signore Velluti holding a baby while wearing any of his usual white costumes?”
Conrad couldn’t help laughing. “I can imagine the disaster if he does!”
“Quite…” The Conte di Argente looked at his glass, as if surprised to find it empty. “We do have some difficulties with the prima donna and seconda donna. Madame Sandrine feels the ‘slave-girl secondary plot’ in Act Two is in danger of swamping the true romantic heart of the opera—by which she means Cortez, Chimalli, and Tayanna—and Madame Estella doesn’t appear to think her role falls into the category of ‘secondary plot.’”
“Che stronzo!” Conrad divided the last of the bottle between their two glasses. “All right, I’ll talk to them—or Paolo will.”
“And may I point out, I have yet to compose anything for our contract singer from the San Carlo? I hear Donna Lorenzani is due back from South Africa shortly.”
Roberto Capiraso’s expression held considerable schadenfreude, but also a degree of unmalicious amusement.
“If all else fails, she can have a role as a junior Priestess—” Conrad glanced up, aware that the chorus’s voices had ceased at some point while they were debating. Paolo and Lorenzo Bonfigli came to the table.
“Signore Conte!” The diminutive tenor thumped a set of much-annotated music in front of Roberto Capiraso, and launched into a diatribe. Conrad found it amusing that, within forty-eight hours of his presence, the company had taken to badgering their composer quite as much as they did their librettist.
Paolo hitched a hip onto the stout wooden table. “Need you and il Superbo to listen to Velluti’s run-through.”
Roberto’s brusque “Of course!” cut across whatever answer Conrad would have given. The Count swept up Bonfigli’s score and pushed it back into his hands, with what might have passed for an apologetic look.
Paolo winked—and was gone back to the musicians before Conrad could react.
I think il Superbo may actually enjoy composing on the spot, Conrad reflected. Even if he has no patience at all…
The tenor was not so easily disposed of, drawing il Conte aside and putting his point, with the tenacity of a small dog.
“Cortez’s big aria on the step-pyramid.” Paolo patted Velluti’s shoulder. “Time to wrench everybody’s heart, so we have to keep rehearsing!”
Surprisingly obedient, Velluti waited for the piano’s introduction.
“‘Mio figlio! Mio patria! Mio amore!’” The castrato voice thrilled up into the spaces of the great cavern. My child! My country! My love!
Roberto dumped himself down in his chair, four bars after the beginning of the aria, seemingly at the end of wits and patience. He cast a look at Velluti. “Gran Dio! Thank God that man can sing!”
“I can’t lie.” Conrad muttered. “He wasn’t hired for his thespian talents…”
Roberto unmistakably stifled a laugh.
Giambattista Velluti was not in any meaning of the term a “singing actor.” He stood on his mark on stage and sang. If necessary, he moved to his next mark and sang again. He showed his better side to the audience. If severely nagged to act, he would place his right foot carefully forward, and extend his right arm towards the audience—usually towards the general region where the boxes owned by the local nobility were situated. Four bars later, he would bring his arm back and place his hand flat on his breast, over where he fondly imagined his heart to be. He struck these two attitudes no matter what role he might be playing. It was the context of the opera that made him seem tragic or comic.
And his voice, which conveyed every nuance that his acting did not.
“When he sings, he’s a genius,” Conrad added, in an undertone, “and we have JohnJack to act.”
Roberto Capiraso took a folded page from an inner pocket and weighed the paper in his hand. “I’ve taken a rather unusual step, with that in mind. The traditional ‘Heroine’s Mad Scene’… there really isn’t any place for it with Donna Sandrine’s Princess Tayanna. If I give it to Estella Belucci’s Amazon, the prima donna will shoot me.”
He said this with sufficient gravity that Conrad had to choke off a guffaw.
“Giambattista has the best voice,” Roberto continued, “but the acting ability of a sheep. With your co-operation, therefore, I propose to give the Mad Scene to a man—to the bass. To Signore Spinelli.”
Conrad spread the synopsis out on his knee, reading while he spared an ear for Velluti.
“That is… ideal.” He dug in his pocket for a pencil, marking the paper. “We’d need a repeat verse, here—JohnJack sings brilliant coloratura bass; let him show it off!”
“I suggest it for Act Four, scene two.”
The suggested melodic line sounded so powerfully in his mind, Conrad lost track of what the musicians were actually playing.
“So… we have our complex villain being driven mad by the loyalties pulling him apart… On the one hand, he’s promoting rebellion with the aid of the Priests of the Sun—” Conrad made another pencil note. “Have them on-stage with him here. He must get rid of his rival, the false Quetzalcoatl, Fernando Cortez—the Feathered Serpent must die! But this means fighting against his love, Princess Tayanna… You’ll want to bring his warriors on somewhere…”
As if there had never been a rift between composer and librettist, Conrad looked over at Roberto, Conte di Argente, without any constraint.
“We might have to choose between a hymn and something military—with what you’ve got here, a march would suit better. Let’s see: JohnJack tells the priests he’ll marry Tayanna afterwards, to legitimise his reign as King Chimalli. But he’s torn—and suddenly he’s tormented by the image of the old King, who was his shield-brother, and whose beloved daughter Tayanna he promised to support! He hallucinates the old warrior-king, and begs his pardon—embarrassing himself in front of his own warriors—then recovers himself,” Conrad scribbled cabaletta! in the margin of the score. “Because he knows that, if the white men aren’t driven off, they’ll take over the whole Aztec kingdom. His motives for wishing Cortez dead are mixed—but his aim is right. He gathers his followers, exits to martial music, close scene, and we don’t need to see him again before the climax of Act Four! Bravissimo!”
Roberto leaned back in his chair, apparently observing Velluti, but in reality attempting to see the pencilled notes. “A true martial march, or town banda martial?”
Conrad tapped his fingernail on the paper, not so much debating the question but wondering that il Conte di Argente should think to ask it.
“Start off with a park bandstand march,” Conrad suggested. “Segue into the true melancholic march of men going off knowing they’re going to die.”
Roberto Capiraso nodded. “I’ll write you the cabaletta to lead into it.”
Before Conrad had even been old enough to name the parts of opera, he had always preferred those f
aster, change-of-gear sections at the end of long arias—’cabaletta’ for one or two singers, ‘stretta’ for the whole cast on-stage. To his ear they are the apotheosis of opera.
Conrad folded the already-creased paper and slipped it into his coat pocket, while he applauded Velluti. He leaned over to Argente.
“You know what? Since you’ve given JohnJack the Mad Scene, and Estella’s got her nose out of joint—give her the bravura aria of the slave protesting against the loss of his freedom with a call-to-arms for Libertà! The one that usually goes to the tenor. I’d pay money to see Estella singing the amazon warrior-made-slave who yearns to be free, to fight to liberate her homeland from the Aztec invaders…”
Roberto’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline. “You mean an aria of the kind that caused a riot in Signore Donizetti’s Gemma? And set up a republic in the Netherlands when Monsieur Auber’s Muette de Portici began a revolution?”
“To be fair, I think it was the signal for revolution, rather than the cause of it.” Conrad smirked. “I did hear rumours of his Majesty King Ferdinand belting out an aria of young Signore Verdi’s on the palace balcony, the day the Two Sicilies became free of the North’s power—despite the fact that he can’t sing.”
“Write me some verses,” Roberto, Conte di Argente, said, with a somewhat put-upon air that didn’t disguise his enthusiasm.
Thirteen days.
With the curtain drawn back, there was no door as such to his chamber. Interruptions came frequently. He was not surprised, as he walked back in from a rehearsal, reading the score he carried in both hands, to realise someone was waiting. Glancing up from the pages, Conrad caught a glimpse of brown kid boots and embroidered white muslin skirts, and saw Leonora putting her fur muff down on his desk.
His heart stuttered and jumped. He came to an undignified sudden halt.
“Leonora!—Contessa—!”
She wore a short green pelisse over the morning dress, buttoned to the throat, and her hat was a velvet fantasia based on a horseman’s steel helm, also sea-green.
His mind gibbered. The first time I’ve seen her close enough to speak with—
An odd calm came over him. Conrad put his score down on his desk. He was near enough to touch her, if that had not been absolute stupidity, and he was not afraid.
She’s not the monster my imaginings have made of her. She’s just Nora.
Her voice was quiet and direct. She did not quite look him in the eye. “I want to apologise to you. I know Roberto never will. I apologise for the prison. This is my fault. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t have any trouble working with you—and he was enjoying it.”
She did meet his gaze, then. Her eyes were dark.
“At first, he didn’t tell me the name of the ‘damned commercial librettist’ he was working with, but he quoted me parts of your discussions, and arguments… It isn’t always easy for Roberto to make real friends, being on the opera board—”
“—Being a stiff-rumped son of a bitch!” The callow, school-boy insult fell out of his mouth without consideration.
“Roberto is always sure of his opinions.” Leonora’s chin came up. “And always ready to change them. It’s just that he’s very—thorough—in his arguments, and he rarely meets anyone who can stand up to him.”
By her expression, she did not like being put in a position of defending her husband to him. Conrad let it pass. Because this is Nora, finally speaking to me…
“In any case,” Leonora said, determined, “you and he wouldn’t have quarrelled if it wasn’t for me. Therefore I apologise. I am sorry. Truly.”
Conrad found himself unable to concentrate on anything but her face. “Thank you.”
“It seemed ridiculous for both of us to be part of L’Altezza azteca, and for me not to speak to you…”
Her gaze fell. Conrad realised that, before he came in, she had been reading Paolo’s daily report where it lay on his desk, deciphering the smudged inky handwriting of their progress.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to pry, Corrado; I was… I’m hearing the verses now, as a recitateur, and Roberto talks about his composing just enough that I want to know more. It’s as if he forgets I was a singer!”
Conrad pushed the report towards her. “Look at it all you like. One of us will need to add your progress with the singers to it.”
He watched her closely, seeing her expression change as her gaze flicked across the notes. Concern, amusement—at Paolo’s terse nagging of his “cousin,” perhaps—and then worry—and finally her intense Delft-blue gaze rising to meet his eyes, full of whatever he dared not hope for or name.
“What I need to say to you,” Conrad murmured, “can wait until after the fourteenth of the month. Do you understand?”
She bit at her full lower lip—which so automatically made him want to kiss it that he had moved forward before he stopped himself.
“Yes, Corrado, I do understand.”
In his more cynical moments, these past few years, Conrad had thought love is only pain. He understood viscerally, now, why poets speak of love being felt in the heart. It felt as if something physically pierced him through the ribcage. It might have been unselfish empathy for Leonora, going through her life so misunderstood—or an entirely selfish satisfaction that Roberto Capiraso should so prove it: he doesn’t understand or deserve her.
“Well then.” He spoke with a forced brightness, that—as she looked up, curiously—became oddly genuine. “I have a copy of the score; you can give me your expert option. If you’ve forgotten how an opera’s put together in the last five years, I’ll be very surprised!”
A slow smile grew on her face.
It changed her, he thought. The polite facade that she or any other gentlewoman must keep up in society vanished. The smile was a lot closer to the orphanage brat’s grin that Nora had been used to have, shortly before she suggested some plan or other that would get them in trouble.
She unbuttoned her pelisse, and unpinned her hat, removing both, and gave him a grandiose gesture. “Show me your verses, poet! Let’s see if I can give you any inspiration.”
Conrad couldn’t help a smile.
“I’m not a complete fool. If you won’t look after your good name—” For the next two weeks. “—I will. Tullio will make us tea, and… Angelotti’s wife Maria can act as chaperone, while she’s sewing costumes.”
Leonora looked wistful. “I’ve never understood why a woman can’t have friends who are men. But yes, it will silence rumour.”
Conrad studied her for a long moment. “You can have friends who are men. Just… not me. If we have no chaperone, I’m going to find this place as familiar as our lodgings in the Accademia. And that means I’ll kiss you, and touch you, and… Forgive me: I don’t want to find out whether you will stop me—or you won’t.”
Leonora Capiraso said nothing. She gave a small nod.
He turned away to call Tullio.
The large man brought wine, and bread, and olives. He put the cups down with a speaking look at Conrad. If vocalised, Conrad thought, it would have mentioned something along the lines of playing with fucking fire when you’re sitting on top of an ammunition wagon!
He’s not wrong, Conrad thought, as he helped Angelotti’s seamstress wife set up her sewing in a corner of the stone cell. But it’s Nora.
Paolo joined them, during a break in orchestral rehearsal, helping herself to Conrad’s olives and reading the new verses over his shoulder. She greeted Leonora with a charming smile (that Conrad thought it would be entirely too confusing to be jealous of).
“I appreciate you taking the chorus through their roles,” Paolo said. “We still can’t get understudies for threats nor money, so groom any one of them you find talented. Just in case. Contessa, we need all the help we can get! And I’m sure my cousin will agree that he needs it…”
Conrad gave her a stern look.
He was met by the stubborn set of her lip that meant any protest was useless.
&
nbsp; Nora, with demure mischief, said, “Signore Pironti is correct, obviously.”
“‘Paolo,’” the disguised girl said cheerfully.
“Please call me Leonora, then.”
Conrad made a mental note to ask—when the next twelve—eleven?—days were over—why a sister and a sweetheart will invariably combine their forces to persecute the relevant male?
Roberto Capiraso took the orchestra through the revised Act III, which echoed through the tunnels. Conrad glanced up from his scribbling as Leonora entered his stone cell again with two of the women who sang mezzo in the chorus, currently on their break, and the carpenter’s wife—apparently today’s chaperone. Since Tullio appeared to be elsewhere, Conrad went over to the cupboard for wine, and served all. Leonora left the other women chatting, and took the other chair beside Conrad’s desk.
“Well?” Conrad indicated the sheets of paper she had brought, rolled up inside her fur hand-warmer, “suggestions?”
“Oh, certainly… I’d make the same suggestions if it were to Roberto,” Leonora murmured aloud, musing over a sheet of paper over-written with so many crossing lines of script as to be indecipherable. “I did try, when he first started this opera. He told me it ‘wasn’t women’s business.’”
Conrad snorted. Leonora’s head came up, eyes fixing him with a glare that failed to be effectively icy.
“Corrado, if you tell me that you agree…”
Conrad glanced across the tunnel at a stone cistern, now dry, that formed a smaller rehearsal room. Paolo sat playing at the cribbage board with a scene-painter’s wife, theoretically overseeing Sandrine and Estella in their duet. “…I wouldn’t dare. We have some remarkable women here. And I know you. You’re remarkable, Nora.”
She tossed her head, ash-brown hair flying, in imitation of a fashionable young lady in a pout. “I know that!”
“Well, then.” Conrad pushed the pen-stand across the green-topped desk. “Feel free to be extraordinary and help me out!”
