The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  “You have to trust the opera.”

  He began pacing again, not able to contain his energy.

  “Not The Aztec Princess, in particular. I mean: trust opera. Trust bel canto. There must be no jealousy, no aggression and back-biting, no upstaging; nothing that make them call us la feccia teatrale. Unselfish singing.”

  One hand went over his eye to prevent the light falling in it, he was aware he must look a fool, but he went on without regard for that.

  “No singer ever made a success of an aria on their own! Not even a solo. If there’s no chorus involved, there’s still the orchestra. I know what tricks people have in duets and trios and choruses, singing over top of one another, showing off coloratura where the score doesn’t call for it—the list is endless.”

  A low rumble rolled up from the west, shivering through the earth—originating, not from Vesuvius, but from the Campi Flegrei.

  “I’ve sat in the Pit and listened to singers support each other. You’ve read the score: you know that if you sing to make your partner look good, they’ll return the favour further on. You become part of something stronger—” Conrad fought for words, and gave Ferdinand a nod of acknowledgement. “—Something more intense… You trust bel canto itself—”

  A long-drawn chord launched on the air.

  Conrad halted, swinging round and staring down the long axis of the amphitheatre. The singers of il Principe clustered in a ruck, on the edge of the stage farthest from the Returned Dead. A low chorus began.

  A few yards off, on the lowest tier, Conrad saw Luigi Esposito lean forward, one elbow on his knee, hand cupped to his ear to better hear the distant singing.

  “That’s it, right there. We have to get Luigi’s attention. And everyone else.”

  Conrad couldn’t bring himself to look up the tiers at the lazzaroni and corn-sellers and butchers and laundry-women who make up a proportion of Neapolitans present.

  “And we need to do it soon. Or the Prince’s Men will have won.”

  Conrad turned away. Roberto gathered their attention with the lift of a hand. Conrad glimpsed the King’s face.

  I suppose I need not ask if he regrets, now, not giving orders to evacuate Naples before the eruption.

  “You should sing.” Conrad put out a hand to stop Ferdinand rejoining his scant group of officers. “Any of us who aren’t professional, but can read music, will make an adjunct to the chorus.”

  Ferdinand’s bland face took on a smile.

  “I admit to singing while Maria played the piano; I’m not hopeless. Very well. Some of these gentlemen may have done more than sing in the Mess. I’ll call them over.”

  “Yes, sir—”

  In the centre of the Anfiteatro, not far from the cleft in the earth, Leonora stepped forward, lifted her head, and—a capella—reprised the first two bars that began her final part in Il Reconquista d’amore.

  “Six minutes remaining!” Conrad snapped, ushering Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily into the row of chorus singers, beside him. He pitched his voice to carry to all of the remaining company of the Teatro San Carlo. “And it’s the finale ultimo, which we’ve practised enough to sing asleep! We don’t have—”

  Estella and Lorenzo.

  “—Soprano and tenor, but you know the roles transposed to your own voices. The Prince’s Men haven’t even had it all their own way so far! But it isn’t decided until it’s finished. You’re used to improvising. Remember what we know—you can trust bel canto, and we can trust who we sing with!”

  Conrad took a space this time between a church-choir mezzo, and a captain of the King’s Rifles; the latter moving over to make room for Ferdinand.

  A few yards around the shallow curve, Paolo sat with the oboe player and other musicians. At her feet, she had the case she had been clutching aboard ship; in her hands, Alfredo Scalese’s violin.

  JohnJack, Brigida, Velluti and Sandrine clustered on the arena floor, and Roberto Capiraso, Conte di Argente, some yards in front where all could see him.

  Six minutes before… before we stop what the Prince’s Men have planned for so long? Or before what they plan to do—is done?

  He barely noticed his audience. If he had been told that he would, one day, ignore the better part of ten thousand Returned Dead men and women, he would have laughed. Only a minor part of him kept any track of the Neapolitans, sprawled on the tiers as their ancient pagan ancestors would have, desperate for blood shed for entertainment. Only the absence of wine and bread and olives made it clear this was no usual crowd.

  We’re losing them.

  He breathed, in respite from his role as the tenor shadowing what Lorenzo Bonfigli would have sung, and gazed down the amphitheatre. Sunlight still blazed beyond the western edge of the eruption cloud. The edge of shadow caught Sandrine and Velluti, singing hand in hand as if lovers were trusting children.

  Across the arena, where the sun was full, Isabella of Castile stood as her pages removed her bright armour, and gowned her in blue and gold. Her low contralto floated across the ancient, shattered stone:

  “Di Dio più santo, io giuro!”

  By God most holy, I swear!

  The Returned Dead of Naples shifted in their seats, heads turning first towards Conrad, where Velluti spiralled a delicate harmony up beside Sandrine’s mezzo, and then to the Prince’s Men, and the inhuman perfection of Isabella at the height of her conquest. Conrad cast a quick glance round. What do we have here—hundreds? Dozens?

  One of Alvarez’s sergeants held out Isaura’s scribbled-over score for Conrad to share. About to shake his head, Conrad caught Roberto’s eye on him.

  A stern jerk of the conductor’s hand, and Conrad bent over the score—startled what authority the man carried when he was not being il Conte—and found his place.

  He straightened to sing, this time shadowing Sandrine.

  Conrad waited until his rest came before he looked again. He climbed onto the lowest tier, shading his eyes against the brighter end of the amphitheatre.

  “Oh, I think I see…”

  He stepped down, threading his way between singers to where Roberto Capiraso conducted. The Count stood with his body twisted, attempting to both conduct from the score a rifleman held out for him to see, and listen to Brigida Lorenzani whispering urgently.

  Conrad overheard her frustrated cry: “They’re trying to listen to both of us!”

  Without wasting time, Conrad gave a sharp nod of agreement. “The two operas share music.”

  He kept all accusation from his voice.

  “There are differences,” Conrad pressed on. “Particularly in the finale ultimo, but I think we ought to have realised before now—as far as our audience is concerned, there aren’t two operas. There’s one.”

  Roberto Capiraso scowled, went to speak, halted, and began again. “If we’re the ‘black opera’ too—”

  “—Just as much as Nora’s singers are the counter-opera.” Conrad faced the bearded man and his dark, haunted eyes. “You told me you thought the end of Aztec Princess was better than Reconquista. So it comes down to singing it to interpret it that way—”

  JohnJack shook his robe, a few more sewn peacock’s feathers abandoning it with the dust. “But if we’re all singing the same thing—!”

  “You’re not; not quite. And it wouldn’t matter if you were. What matters—”

  With time running out, Conrad found the words.

  “What matters is whether those people sitting down there feel that you’re singing in support of Nora’s principals, or whether Nora and il Principe are singing comprimario roles to you!”

  A moment succeeded, silent despite every note and every voice in the arena.

  Sandrine patted at her hair, re-fixing a hairpin. “People’s attention has to—shift. We have to sing well enough to make it apparent her voice is in service to ours.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this from the man who wanted none of the dirty tricks of bel canto!”

  Conrad silently m
arvelled at what he was about to say. “Trust your composer.”

  The startled-deer look that il Superbo shot him was almost worth it.

  “Trust him,” Conrad repeated, “because L’Altezza azteca is the most recently composed and revised of the two. Reconquista was written over the space of years. L’Altezza was composed over weeks in a white heat in il mondo teatrale. Which do you think is going to be better?”

  It got a knowing chuckle from all of them, even Velluti.

  “Places!” Paolo-Isaura called, not interrupting her playing.

  Roberto Capiraso hung back a moment as the singers walked forward across the nominal “stage.”

  “Do you believe that to be true?”

  “I do.” Conrad smiled crookedly. “Under any other circumstances, of course, I wouldn’t admit it.”

  “No.” Roberto’s lips twitched, in a smile darker and more self-knowing than Conrad had seen before. “I don’t suppose you would. Get into line, tenor. This is the finale.”

  It’s not up to me—to Roberto—even to Paolo. It’s up to the singers. And chiefly, to those four men and woman—

  Conrad didn’t move from where he stood on the arena floor, transfixed as they sang.

  —Sang the wrong parts, but the right voices. Lines transposed—because every singer knew all the words of the scene. And it was not Velluti, but JohnJack, who sang, “Mi perdono, perdonata!” in his resonant, precise, passionate bass, holding Sandrine’s hand as he sang, the General begging pardon of his Princess rather than the hero of his King.

  Every word and note fell into place.

  Velluti put his arm around Brigida’s plump shoulders and sang with her the duet that should have been hers and her daughter’s, “We are strangers, you and I, in this land of stone and serpent,” and the emotion fitted both of them, Hernan Cortez so far from any familiar road or hill to walk down, and Thalestris utterly at sea in a country that values no woman unless she fights for power like a man, and Conrad couldn’t keep his eyes off Leonora.

  He broke off his singing and whispered to Paolo. “Move, go with them, she’s doing it!”

  He pointed down the arena, where Leonora walked up the centre of the arena, or as close as she could come while avoiding the sunken corridor, and her voice was sufficient without accompanying instruments—which was just as well, Conrad thought, watching her bewildered musicians already frightened by the Returned Dead, and the bemused other singers of the Prince’s Men who stared after her from the stage.

  Leonora walked on, fists clenched, and sang, and turned all the heads of the audience to her.

  Roberto bowed his head to one side to hear Paolo and sharply nodded assent, and without ceasing to mark the time, said, “We’ll go down towards her.”

  The instruments they had with them were of necessity portable, but he signalled the musicians to stay with their scores.

  He knows he can depend on the Prince’s Men for music, Conrad realised, walking down the arena behind the composer.

  “Bring my music,” Paolo directed without ceasing to play.

  She walked off, and the other musicians followed her anyway. Conrad picked her score up, holding it open so that she could see it; silently cursing at having a buffoon’s part. He just managed not to fall over the rock-bombs that scattered the arena now, hot and spitting where they sat in craters in the chill earth and brickwork.

  Leonora launched into improvised coloratura melody.

  It was not in il Superbo’s score. For a moment the counter-opera clashed horribly to a stop.

  Roberto bit out a sharp oath. “Cazzo! You sons of whores, keep playing!”

  The handful of musicians began to play from the score.

  First Velluti and Sandrine, then Brigida, and at last JohnJack, abandoned the known notes—and the rehearsed score—to soar with Nora’s incredible voice; winding a coloratura quartet around her because they can improvise like this, they know the shape of music.

  Conrad stopped, his serviceable tenor nowhere capable, and his mind leaped to catch the new melody.

  This! Yes—this—

  This is what I heard when I dreamed, weeks ago.

  When I had hemicrania after Il Terrore di Parigi. What I was dreaming as I woke.

  It can’t be.

  It isn’t in either score, and it’s not something I heard Roberto play, but I dreamed it, and only now remember.

  Objections followed on the tail of that; thick, fast—

  I only imagine I dreamed it; I had hemicrania then and now, it’s a false similarity, or even a product of the illness. It must be like a part of the score that I’ve forgotten. Or something Roberto did once play. Or she stole it from another opera and I’ll remember in what house I heard it.

  He violently forced himself to believe the reasons of Reason. It did no good. All of him, heart, mind, and soul—If there’s any such thing!—insisted that it was true.

  I dreamed this melody of Leonora’s when I had no idea whether she was alive or dead. Certainly no idea that she had Returned. I dreamed what she is singing now.

  Is there some link between us, since Venice, that I heard in my own mind what must have been in hers, rehearsing it for the black opera?

  Conrad’s eye throbbed in time to his heartbeat. He stared at Nora. A faint unseeable disturbance in his vision warned him.

  As it had in times past, a flickering defect appeared in the centre of his vision, expanding outwards until the whole world was fractured in planes of light. He stood blind, nausea rising in his throat, and the music and her voice seizing on him.

  He felt himself listening so acutely that it was as if he joined with the music. He barely noticed the defects of light in his field of vision—did not note when they dwindled and shrank, as they so far always had, and freed him from the icy terror of remaining blind.

  The conviction remained. I’ve dreamed this; these are the notes I couldn’t retain in my mind. For all the reasons why it might be an illusion, a trick of memory, a wished-for thing; he could not divest himself of the absolute knowledge of the inexplicable.

  Nora looked as intent and silly as most singers do, founding the sounds within their body and giving them voice, and she leaned forward very slightly, as if she leaned into a gale that opposed her.

  Something broke warm and fragile within him; he loved her with something that was not pity—No one can offer such a force of nature pity!—but might have included an empathy for another outsider who remained out of the pale of ordinary men’s social lives, not from some romantic rejection of it, but simply because what she is—what Leonora Sposito is—precludes it.

  And yet she’s improvising.

  Voice mounting by leaps, with no need for breath control, no weakness in the passaggio—though indeed she must be controlling the breathing she didn’t need, to produce the sound.

  Conrad’s head throbbed, less for the pain in his skull than the painful puzzlement of knowing in his heart that he first heard this sound in sleep on a morning in February, on a day when he had no idea whether Nora was alive or dead, and no conception of what her voice has become now it’s been through fire and ice.

  Her voice lifted up, bringing half the Returned audience of Naples to their feet with her, stamping, whistling, cheering, crying bravo! bella! bellissima!

  At that moment, the four voices of Sandrine, Brigida, JohnJack and Velluti—and the musicians—the orchestra of the Prince’s Men, too—dived into unison, and lifted up, and missed four bars seamlessly together, all of them, without any sign to each other or from the Count. Missed those bars and came in together on the next phrase, their playing and singing all of a piece.

  The principal singers of the San Carlo walked forward, their music lifting hearts; stood all in a line with hands joined, and began to sing the finale as Roberto had rewritten it.

  JohnJack first, noble and immoral, loved once, corrupted by ambition but raised up now by remorse—swearing to go into exile as Sandrine bade him, but first to lay down
his life for her against the white man’s king.

  And at this, the Aztec Princess gave him a wonderful smile as Sandrine came in, at lowest contralto, jumping two octaves and dropping down, swearing she would walk through a sea of blood to keep her throne—but she would not put her General Chimalli or her Consort Cortez in danger of their lives. Love is so easily frangible and comes so seldom that it is never to be wasted when it comes—

  Brigida’s voice broke for a second as she joined the bass and contralto, lamenting her daughter whose love she has lost to a man who no longer cares for her. Now I will take Hippolyta home and soothe her hurts. Brigida sang with the desperate knowledge that no hurt of Estella’s can ever be soothed: she lies dead on the stage of the broken Teatro San Carlo.

  To his utter amazement Conrad saw a tear slide down in the dust on Velluti’s cheek.

  The castrato added his voice to what should have been a sextet—were not Lorenzo Bonfigli laying with Estella, as dead as she—and Velluti brought his presence into the choir of voices, not ponderous, but young and energetic as his clear, dark face.

  He sang first to JohnJack: that if they have been enemies and competitors before, they now meet equal on the floor of desiring what is the most best for the Princess, for that Tayanna whom they both love.

  And then, to Brigida, the castrato sang that whatever happens to him, her family will always find succour among those who have loved the name of Hernan Cortez.

  “Non sia spaventato!” Velluti’s voice soars up, swelling, unencumbered by the thunderhead eruption-cloud overhead. “Don’t be afraid!—Proud defender of your nation, you will always find a friend in me.”

  They ought to look comic, Conrad thought. The over-tall castrato singer in dirty robes and armour, his hands resting on the much lower shoulders of the round Brigida Lorenzani… but it only makes the words come with more sincerity.

  They faced the singers of il Principe with utter defiance. Brigida held a prop sword—Conrad couldn’t begin to imagine how she might have clung to it through the San Carlo’s destruction and the flight on board the Apollon; but there it is, wiped clean of dust—and it gleamed as she raised it.