Prima Donna at Large

by Barbara Paul

  “We do the hair now?” her maid asked.

  Wordlessly the soprano sat down at her dressing table and let the maid arrange her hair. For the first time in her life, Emmy Destinn found herself envying Geraldine Farrar. Gerry’s voice was going, but she could still give a performance that left audiences standing and cheering. You could tell just from the way she made her first entrance how much she loved what she was doing; Emmy envied her that. Her own voice had never been better, but more and more Emmy was having to force herself to walk out on the stage and sing.

  An impatient rat-a-tat sounded; the maid opened the door to admit Alessandro Quaglia, who had the profile of a Roman statue and the overmuscled body of a prizefighter. Emmy sniffed irritably. The conductor had an annoying habit of always passing on some new bit of instruction just minutes before the curtain. She dismissed the maid.

  “Since the star will not come to me,” Quaglia said with sarcastic overpoliteness, “you see I come to the star.” He stood like a soldier at attention, stretching out his six-feet-two in an attempt to intimidate her.

  “I had not finished dressing,” Emmy answered indifferently. “I knew you would not want me running up and down stairs and arriving on stage out of breath.”

  Quaglia’s eyes traveled slowly from the top of her head down to her toes, and then slowly all the way back up again. He said nothing, but his meaning couldn’t be clearer: If you’d lose forty pounds, you wouldn’t get out of breath climbing stairs.

  “What is it you want?” she asked sharply.

  Quaglia smiled, knowing he’d scored. “About the Stridono lassù—”

  “You change tempo too quickly,” Emmy snapped. “It should be gradual.” Stridono lassù was her only aria in Pagliacci, and she didn’t want to the orchestra playing tricks with the tempi.

  “Tonight we do it your way. Gradual change.”

  “What?”

  “I think the gradual change is wrong, as you know,” Quaglia said earnestly, “but it is better that we are wrong together rather than you sing one tempo while orchestra plays another. Tonight, I follow you.”

  “Thank you,” Emmy said numbly.

  Quaglia bowed stiffly and left the dressing room. Emmy shook her head. What a strange man! Nasty one minute, understanding and helpful the next. God, how she missed Toscanini! With that hot-tempered man, you always knew where you stood. He made sure of that.

  She finished warming up. It was still a little early, but Emmy made her way down the stairs to the stage level and was surprised to hear herself happily humming her entrance music. Well, well. Maybe some of the old spark was left after all.

  At the bottom of the stairs stood baritone Pasquale Amato, who was singing the role of Tonio that night; he’d been waiting for her. “Quaglia,” he said, “he comes to you with last-minute instruction?”

  “In a way,” Emmy answered. “He says he will follow my tempo in the Stridono lassù.”

  The baritone nodded. “It is same for Rico and me. Always something! Quaglia, he is always tinkering, is he not? Right up until curtain time.”

  Emmy shrugged. “He wants everything to be right.”

  “As do we all, non è vero?” Amato exclaimed. “But this one, he never stops! You will see, he comes backstage during intermission with even more instructions, può credermi. Always the fussing!”

  She stared at him curiously. “Pasquale, you’ve never been a complainer—what’s wrong?”

  Both of Amato’s eyebrows climbed high at this totally unexpected suggestion that something might be wrong with him. “You think I imagine things?”

  “No, Quaglia does fuss a lot. But you don’t usually let things like that bother you. Is something wrong?”

  He scowled as he thought about it. “No, nothing is wrong. But Quaglia, he does … bother me.”

  Emmy smiled. “Just another of life’s burdens, Pasquale.”

  “Eh, you laugh.” Suddenly Amato smiled too. “Perhaps you are right, Emmy. I do not let him bother me anymore.” He walked away, repeating his last sentence under his breath.

  The various members of the chorus were drifting out on to the stage to take their places before the curtain opened. The chorus master was talking to a good-looking man in costume that Emmy had never seen before; Setti seemed to be trying to reassure him. It must be the new chorister, Emmy thought, the dead man’s replacement. Just then the new man looked up and caught Emmy’s eye; she smiled at him. He looked pleased and flustered, the way a minor singer is supposed to look when noticed by a major star.

  She was still smiling when she caught sight of Caruso, deep into his usual pre-performance panic. He was surrounded by well-wishers, all trying to soothe and calm him. The tenor had been singing professionally for twenty-five years, but he still went to pieces at the thought of facing an audience. His suffering was real, but it was more comic than pathetic—since everyone knew that the moment he set foot on the stage, his jitters would vanish like magic.

  Caruso spotted her and rushed over. “Emmy! Tonight is disaster! I cannot sing!”

  “Now, Rico—”

  “The voice, it is gone! The hands shake, I have a hurt in the side, the mouth is dry—my spray! Where is my throat spray? Mario!” His valet rushed up with an atomizer bottle. Caruso sprayed his throat and tried a note; it came out thin and wobbly. “I cannot sing!”

  “Of course you can sing,” Emmy murmured automatically. “When the rest of us are dead and buried, you’ll still be here singing. Try to relax, Rico.”

  “Disaster! Tonight is disaster!” He hurried away, not listening.

  Emmy left him to his private terrors while she concentrated on heaving her considerable bulk into the donkey cart in which she made her entrance. Then came the word Quiet, please, and Pasquale Amato was out in front of the curtain singing the prologue.

  The curtain opened; on stage, the chorus was busy setting the scene. Then Emmy was gripping the sides of the donkey cart, holding on for dear life, as Caruso grasped the donkey’s bridle and led on the small troupe of actors they were playing that night. Caruso’s first notes were strong and clear as a bell; no one would have known that only minutes earlier he’d been on the verge of collapse.

  When the time came for Emmy’s aria, Quaglia kept his word and followed her tempo. At the aria’s conclusion, Emmy felt a small glimmer of the old satisfaction that used to follow every job of good singing, but the opera didn’t give her time to enjoy it. She was plunged immediately into a quarrel with Pasquale Amato, followed by a love duet with the other baritone in the piece—which still felt odd to Emmy, as many times as she’d sung it; love duets were supposed to be sung with the tenor. Then followed a scene with Caruso, and at last she was off the stage.

  Caruso was on stage alone, leading into the opera’s big aria, Vesti la giubba. Normally at that point Emmy would be hurrying up the stairs to her dressing room to change into her Columbine costume for the second act. But tonight she lingered, wanting to feel the old Caruso magic working on her, hoping to rekindle the spark. Therefore she was backstage when the unthinkable happened.

  Caruso’s voice broke.

  There was a stunned silence backstage. Singers and stagehands alike exchanged uneasy glances, each of them wondering, Did I really hear what I think I heard? The trouble had come at the climactic moment of Vesti la giubba, when the melodic line soared up to a high A. The A had proved Caruso’s undoing, and the golden voice had cracked. It was a sound no one in the world had ever heard before.

  Caruso finished the aria, and the first-act curtain closed to the sound of applause mixed with murmurs of surprise. “Disaster!” the tenor shouted as he rushed off the stage. “I know tonight is disaster!” He pushed his way up the stairs to his dressing room, muttering to himself.

  Exclamations of dismay bounded back and forth. In any other singer, a break in the voice would be either glossed over or snickered at, depending on one’s personal feelings toward the singer. But Caruso! Quaglia appeared backstage, his whole
body quivering with alarm. “Where is he?” he demanded. A dozen fingers pointed, and the conductor dashed up the stairs to the dressing-room level. Soon Gatti-Casazza appeared, followed by his assistant, Edward Ziegler; Caruso’s dressing room would be crowded.

  Eventually enough order was restored that the second act could be started. In Act II, the troupe of traveling actors put on a little play for an audience of townspeople, enacted by the chorus. Caruso didn’t enter immediately; the others sang away, all the while worrying about their tenor. No one worried about the trap door in the stage floor.

  The trap was located in the exact center of the stage. When it was open, a pneumatic platform could be elevated thirty feet from the substage floor. It was especially effective for raising devils from Hell and the like, but it was not needed at all in I Pagliacci. No one on stage or off was even thinking about the trap door.

  By the time Caruso made his entrance, even the Metropolitan’s real audience was as keyed up as the make-believe audience on the stage. A small platform stage had been erected stage left, and it was there Caruso stood with Emmy Destinn and Pasquale Amato and sang. And he sang with an intensity and vigor that showed he was determined to make up for the flaw that had marred Vesti la giubba. The chorus filled up the rest of the stage to the right of the platform stage. Some were sitting, some were standing in various casual postures. None were expecting disaster.

  Then, without even a sound to give warning, the trap door fell open. Three men of the chorus who’d been standing on the trap dropped out of sight through the hole in the stage floor. Shouts of alarm interrupted the music; Amato jumped down from the platform stage and elbowed his way to the open trap. In the orchestra pit, Quaglia made the cut-off sign with his baton. Caruso and Emmy, still on the platform stage, were craning their necks and trying to see what was happening.

  One of the falling men had managed to grab the edge of the stage and there he hung precariously, screaming for help. Amato and three of the chorus men caught hold of his arms and hauled him to safety. Thirty feet below the open trap, on the pneumatic platform that had not been raised because it was not needed, lay the other two choristers. The leg of one was twisted awkwardly under him; the other’s neck was broken.

  The dead man was the new tenor.

  2

  Two baritones sat in Delmonico’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue, nibbling at appetizers while they waited.

  Pasquale Amato gazed around the interior of what was once the most famous restaurant in New York. “Delmonico’s,” he said, “do you think they really tear it down?”

  “Sì,” Antonio Scotti answered without hesitation. “Its day of hay is over. All the good old places, they tear them down. Me, I must find new place to live. Next year the Knickerbocker becomes a place of commerce.” He made a face. “Offices instead of homes.”

  “So much progress,” Amato said wryly.

  Scotti changed the subject. “When Rico gets here, we must not mention last night at all. He is not well and must not excite himself. We do not talk about it. You agree?”

  “I agree. But how do we keep Rico from talking about it?”

  “We interrupt with much rudeness and talk of something else. You know how superstitious he is. He will look back and see the break in the voice as an omen. His voice, it never breaks before, ever. Then when it does, a man dies.”

  The two baritones were silent, thinking of this latest tragedy to befall the Metropolitan Opera chorus. Only a catastrophe as great as that could overshadow the lesser tragedy of the great Caruso voice’s having cracked on a high note.

  Finally Amato stirred. “He sings too often. He should slow down—perhaps stop altogether for a while.”

  Scott threw up both hands. “You tell him that! Perhaps he listens to you. He does not listen to me, he does not listen to Dorothy, he does not listen to the doctors—”

  Just then the object of their concern came bustling in, looking and sounding like the old Caruso they knew so well. “Scusa, scusa … I am late! The time, it goes so fast! You do not start without me? Eh, let us order without delay.”

  With Caruso’s arrival, three waiters quickly materialized around the table. The singers ordered their lunch; Caruso tried to heed his wife’s warnings and eat only a steak, but at the last moment he yielded to temptation and asked for a side dish of pasta.

  When the waiters were gone, Caruso blurted out, “Pasquale, Toto—do you know the chorister who dies last night is new man?”

  Scotti cleared his throat. “Rico, do you think we have snow tomorrow?”

  “It is his first time on the Metropolitan stage,” Caruso rushed on, unheeding. “His first and his last!”

  “I think we go to Belasco Theatre tomorrow night,” Scotti persisted, “if we do not have snow.”

  “Poor man.” Caruso shook his head. “Poor, poor man.”

  “Rico, listen to me,” Scotti insisted. “I have problem you help me with, yes? I do not know what Christmas present to give to Gerry. You suggest something?”

  “Sì, sì—tomorrow. Why does the trap door fall open? It never happens before!”

  Amato tried to help. “I, too, have problems with Christmas presents—”

  “Christmas, Christmas!” the tenor cried. “Christmas is two weeks away! Why all this talk of Christmas? Something terrible happens last night—and you do not talk about it!”

  Amato smiled ruefully at Scotti. “It is hopeless, Toto.” Scotti nodded in resignation. Then Amato asked Caruso, “Do you know the new man, Rico?”

  Caruso said he’d never spoken to the dead man. The other man who had fallen through the trap had suffered a hip injury as well as multiple fractures of the leg. “He is gone the rest of the season,” the tenor said mournfully. “That is still two more chorus singers that must be found!”

  “How do you know this?” Scotti asked.

  “Mr. Gatti tells me. You understand what all this means?” Caruso laid one finger alongside his nose. “Una maledizione!”

  “Oh, Rico!” Amato exclaimed in amused exasperation. “There is no curse! Do not say such things.”

  Caruso nodded wisely. “The chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—it is cursed! How else do you explain what happens? First the young soprano in Samson and Delilah. Then the poor man who hangs himself. Then last night … eh, I feel disaster in the air, even before we start! And I say so—ask Emmy! Then the voice breaks, and I think that is the disaster! But no, it is merely sign of worse things to come. A trap door that never mal-, mal … never misbehaves before—wide open it drops! One more death, and another man seriously hurt. That makes one injury, two fatal accidents, and a suicide, all within a week. Do you ever know so much misfortune to come so close together before? There is only one explanation. Una maledizione.”

  All the time Caruso was talking, the waiters had been putting food on the table while listening openly to what the tenor was saying. Both Scotti and Amato had made shushing gestures to Caruso, who either did not or would not see. When the waiters had gone, Scotti burst out, “Now all of New York will be saying the Metropolitan chorus is under a curse! You should have waited until they are gone, Rico.”

  “Who?”

  “The waiters,” Amato said. “They drink in every word you say.”

  Caruso waved a fork in dismissal. “Is not important! La maledizione, that is important! Think, my friends—what starts in the chorus, can it not spread to us as well? Pasquale, you are there last night, you hear! Do you not understand?” He put down his fork and grasped his throat dramatically. “The voice, it is the next to go!”

  “Rico, you are foolish man,” Amato remonstrated. “Your voice, it breaks because you sing too often. You need to rest it more.”

  “He is right,” Scotti added. “I tell you many times, not so much singing! You do not listen, and see what happens? Right in most important part of Vesti la giubba—”

  “It is not too much singing,” Caruso insisted stubbornly. “It is a curse. Only on the chorus right now, bu
t—”

  “And who places this curse on the chorus?” Amato asked patiently. “Who has the power? Who hates the chorus so much?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps we find out?”

  “Perhaps we forget this nonsense and finish our lunch. Your pasta grows cold.”

  “It is not nonsense!” the tenor protested. “Tell me true—are you comfortable when you go in opera house now?”

  He had them there; the two baritones acknowledged the point. “Always, backstage there are accidents,” Scotti said, “but so many? And so close together? No, I am not comfortable.”

  “And it does not end,” Caruso said in a whisper, beginning to take a perverse enjoyment in his role of forecaster of doom. “There will be more accidents, more suicides. You will see! The curse has not yet run its course. Something else happens—perhaps tonight!”

  Amato frowned; Geraldine Farrar was singing Carmen that evening. “Rico, you do not say this to Gerry, do you?”

  The tenor was indignant. “What you think? You think I want to frighten her? No, I say nothing.”

  “Good,” Amato smiled. “She is perhaps already nervous—no need to make it worse. Do you think she is nervous?”

  Scotti sighed. “I call her on the telephone this morning. She screams at me to leave her alone and slams down the receiver, crash!”

  “She is nervous,” Amato nodded.

  “We go tonight,” Caruso decided. “We keep close watch, yes?”

  The others agreed. Although all three men had sung in Carmen in the past, none of them was scheduled to sing that evening. Scotti had only recently added the role of the toreador to his repertoire; he’d sat down to learn the part the minute he heard Geraldine Farrar was divorcing her husband. Now that she was free again …

  “Per dio!” Caruso cried, jumping up from the table.

  Scotti slowly became aware of something hot and wet on his chest. Amato was angrily wiping at one sleeve with a napkin. The frightened-looking waiter stood paralyzed, the coffee pot he’d just dropped still lying in the middle of the table.