Paganini's Ghost (28 page)

An evening of jovial revelling is one thing. Marriage, however, is quite another—as Isabella discovered, to her sorrow. In 1822, on their
way from Naples to Vienna, she and Rossini stopped off to be married at Castenaso, outside Bologna, where Isabella had inherited a large estate from her father. The marriage, far from cementing their love for each other, seems to have been the beginning of the end for their relationship. Isabella was thirty-seven, Rossini thirty. Her stellar career was starting to falter. Her voice was slipping and she could no longer be relied on to sing in tune. Rossini, though, was at the height of his powers, the most famous composer in Italy, with a staggering thirty operas under his belt.

Two years later, after a poorly received performance in the title role of Rossini's
Zelmira
in London, Isabella retired from the stage and retreated to her villa at Castenaso. Her husband, meanwhile, had relocated to Paris, where he was intent on furthering his already-illustrious international career. Physically separated from each other, and probably temperamentally incompatible, the two of them drifted apart.

No one at the time was very sure why Rossini married Isabella. Wags said it could only have been sheer masochism on his part—condemning himself to a lifetime of listening to Isabella's increasingly wayward voice. Others implied that he did it for the money. Isabella was a wealthy woman, her earnings from the stage supplemented by the income from the Castenaso estate, and she gave Rossini a generous dowry when they tied the knot.

Interestingly, no one seemed to consider the possibility that Rossini might have married for love—and maybe he didn't. He was a successful composer, but perhaps he was aware that sooner or later the well would run dry and he would need a nest egg for his retirement. No one could shine as intensely as he had been doing without burning out eventually. Is creativity in a person finite? Would Mozart and Schubert, dead at thirty-five and thirty-one, respectively—or Mendelssohn and Chopin, gone at thirty-eight and thirty-nine—have continued composing so feverishly if they had lived to ninety? Or did they somehow sense their own mortality and so crammed all the outpourings of their genius into a short span of years?

Perhaps Rossini knew that his composing days were numbered—as
indeed they were, though it was choice, not death, that terminated his career. Seven years after his marriage, following his last opera,
William Tell
, he stopped composing operas altogether. Just gave up. Never wrote another opera, though he lived for a further thirty-nine years. Why did he stop? No one knows. There have been suggestions that he was lazy, but his record of thirty-six operas in nineteen years must surely refute that. More likely, he'd simply had enough. He had run out of things to say and he was honest enough to admit it. I like him all the more for that. We tend to put the great composers of the past on pedestals, perhaps because we've stopped producing any new ones ourselves, but Rossini had no exalted ideas of his own status. He looked on composition as a job, not an art, and he was always im mensely practical about it—hence his habit of moving overtures, and arias, about from one opera to another. If a work was wanted quickly—
The Barber of Seville
, for example, was composed, rehearsed, and staged in just twenty-four days—and no one was going to listen to half of it anyway because they were too busy drinking and chatting, why bother to bust a gut producing something new?

Changing fashion also played its part. Romanticism was bursting forth all over Europe. Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann were the new rising stars of the concert hall, and in the opera houses Meyerbeer and Donizetti were edging out the old guard, of which Rossini—though he was still only thirty-seven—was the standard-bearer. His ill health, too, was a factor. Like Paganini, Rossini had venereal disease. In Rossini's case, it was not syphilis but the less serious, though still incurable, gonorrhea that troubled him.

It was while he was convalescing at Aix-les-Bains after a bout of illness related to this disease that he met Olympe Pélissier, a well-known courtesan who had been the mistress of Balzac and the painter Horace Vernet. They fell for each other, and when Rossini went back to Paris, Olympe came to live with him. Isabella Colbran was out in the cold.

Rossini's desertion devastated Isabella. Shut away in provincial obscurity at Castenaso, bored and depressed, she started gambling to excess and lost a lot of money—although no more than she could afford.
It must have been a traumatic time for her. She had been an operatic star for twenty years, fêted by audiences all over Europe. Now she was a middle-aged recluse who had lost her looks, her voice, and her husband. Alone in her villa, with no lover, no children to comfort her, just memories of her glorious career and a husband who had abandoned her, she must have been unutterably miserable. Did she still have the jewelled violin with her? Was it on her dressing table or beside her bed? Or had she buried it away in a drawer, or even got rid of it, because she could no longer bear to have it around—this gift from a former lover that served only to remind her of happier times?

Rossini never came back to her. In 1837, he obtained a legal separation, and eight years later, in 1845, Isabella died at Castenaso, sad, lonely, and neglected. Ten months after that, Rossini married Olympe.

Guastafeste was silent for a long time after I'd finished.

Then he said, “I've never heard of any of them. Isabella Colbran, Domenico Barbaia, Olympe Pélissier.”

“I know,” I said. “The peripheral figures in great men's lives are always forgotten.”

“Who inherited Isabella's estate after she died?”

“Surprisingly, I believe it was Rossini.”

“But they were legally separated.”

“Isabella never changed her will. She still loved him, despite what he had done to her. When she died, they say she was murmuring his name.”

“And the violin?”

I shrugged.

“Who knows?”

“Did Rossini inherit that, too?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

“If he did, what would he have done with it?”

“Taken it back to Paris with him, I suppose. That's where he lived for the remainder of his life.”

“And where Villeneuve and Robillet lived. Do you think they found something in Paris, something to put them on the trail of the violin?”

“Maybe,” I said.

Guastafeste cut another slice of cheese and ate it with a cracker.

“One thing I'd like to know,” I said. “Paganini's gold box. How did Nicoletta Ferrara acquire it?”

Guastafeste nodded, chewing on his cracker and cheese.

“I'd like to know that, too,” he said. “Why don't we go up there tomorrow and see if we can find out?”

 

 

The journey took us less than two hours. First the A1 to Milan, then the A8—one of the many motorways that radiate out from Milan with the sole purpose of getting its citizens out of town as swiftly as possible. Milan is a wonderful place—or so the Milanese are always telling us—it's just that no one actually wants to live there, particularly at weekends. On a Friday evening, the A8 is choked with fleeing families heading north to the lakes and mountains, like refugees from a war zone.

This morning, however, the roads were relatively quiet. There were the usual convoys of lorries, of course, but Guastafeste soon left them far behind in his 150-kilometres-an-hour slipstream. At the Sesto intersection, we turned off the autostrada, crossed over the River Ticino, and took the road along the western shore of Lake Maggiore, the carriageway hugging the edge of the shimmering water, twisting and turning past inlets where yachts and rowing boats were moored in the shallows. In the distance, beyond the northern tip of the lake, I could see the mountains stretching away into Switzerland, the highest peaks glazed with snow.

Stresa was once the favourite summer retreat of the rich and fashionable, of royalty and artists and idle playboys. Dickens and Flaubert passed through the town and Hemingway set part of
A Farewell to Arms
there. It is long past its heyday, but it is still a stylish, attractive resort, the public gardens along the lakeside luxuriant and well maintained, the hotels elegant and smart, their trade no longer sustained by dukes and counts, but by coach parties of Swiss and Austrian tourists.

It was awhile since I had been there. I first went with my parents when I was a child, just after the Second World War, and later I returned with my own children, visiting the zoo in the grounds of the Villa Pallavicino and taking day trips out to the Borromean Islands to see the grottoes and white peacocks of the Isola Bella and the tropical gardens of the Isola Madre. We went swimming in the lake, the kids screaming at the cold water, and hiked up Mottarone, the mountain behind Stresa, from whose summit you can ostensibly see both Switzerland and the Duomo in Milan, though on the day we went, there was a low mist and you were lucky to see beyond the end of your nose.

I remembered it as a bustling, vibrant place, the waterfront crowded with visitors and boat skippers touting for trade, the balconies of every hotel garlanded with red geraniums. In summer, it is no doubt still like that, but now, as winter approached, it was quiet, with that sad, closed-up feel of a holiday resort out of season.

The Villa Nettuno was on the outskirts of Stresa, on the hillside overlooking the lake. We turned off the main road through an open pair of steel gates and went up a steep drive to a small parking area at the side of the house. The villa was a stately nineteenth-century gentleman's residence, rendered with a white stucco that had faded to a dirty grey. It had two storeys, the ground-floor windows arched, the ones on the first floor rectangular, with wrought-iron balconies outside them and green wooden shutters. The shutters, like the render, were faded and rather shabby. Some of the wooden slats were missing; others were broken and hanging loose.

Ruggiero Monteveglio was waiting for us by the side door. He was a slender man in his late thirties. He had a squat nose with very open nostrils, which gave him a porcine appearance, and hair shaved close to the scalp to disguise his premature baldness. He was wearing a creased pair of cotton trousers, a frayed jacket, and scuffed suede shoes. In some countries—England, for example—it is fashionable for the very rich to dress down, to disguise their wealth under the trappings of the common man. But this is not the case in Italy. In Italy, that kind of dissimulation would be regarded as ludicrous, possibly
even evidence of insanity. If you had it, why on earth would you not flaunt it? Ruggiero Monteveglio didn't look like a man whose aunt owned a villa that, at a conservative guess, was worth two or three million euros.

We introduced ourselves and shook hands; then Monteveglio unlocked the door and turned off the alarm at a keypad on the wall of the hall.

“You've had the alarm fixed?” Guastafeste said.

“Yes, of course. The insurance company insisted on it.”

“You've made a claim for what was stolen?”

“For what I
know
was stolen,” Monteveglio said. “There may have been other things that were taken that I don't know about. My aunt had a lot of stuff, some of it valuable, some of it junk, and she wasn't good at keeping records. I can't be sure exactly what was taken.”

He opened an internal door and we walked through into a large sitting room at the front of the house. The shutters were closed, but there was enough light filtering in through the slats to show that the room was crammed from wall to wall with furniture.

“I see what you mean,” Guastafeste said.

There were dark wooden antique sideboards and cabinets round the perimeter of the room, and the centre was taken up with armchairs, sofas, and low tables. Every surface was cluttered with objects—framed photographs, vases, ornaments, all manner of bric-a-brac and knickknacks.

Ruggiero Monteveglio picked his way round the furniture and pulled open the windows to throw back the wooden shutters. Light flooded into the room.

“You don't have metal shutters?” Guastafeste asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” Monteveglio replied. “I kept trying to persuade my aunt to instal them, but she wouldn't hear of it. She said they were ugly and would ruin the look of the house. I suppose she had a point, but . . .” He shrugged. “It would have made the place more secure.”

“I've seen the Stresa police report,” Guastafeste said. “The burglars broke in through the kitchen window, didn't they?”

“That's right. After they'd cut the power to the alarm.”

“And the items stolen, they were in which rooms?”

“This one, the music room, and my aunt's bedroom upstairs. The bedroom is where they found the jewellery. My aunt, as you may gather, was careless about security. She had the alarm—the insurance company wouldn't insure the house without one—but I don't think she ever switched it on. She was the same with her jewellery. She used to leave it lying around on her dressing table or in a box in a drawer. Nothing was locked away.”

I walked over to the windows and looked out. There was a terrace flanked by a stone balustrade running the width of the house. From either end of the terrace, diagonal flights of stone steps descended through the garden, which was a lush jungle of temperate and semitropical vegetation—banana plants, eucalyptus, camellias, azaleas, hydrangeas. Palm trees poked their heads up from the dense undergrowth, some of them short and stubby, some tall and thin, with umbrellas of fronds, like propellers, at the top that looked as if they might take off into the air in a high wind. Out across the water, I could see the ornate terraces of the Isola Bella. One of the steamers that crisscross the lake was heading towards the island, sunlight glinting off its white hull and the rippling waves it was leaving in its wake.

“This is a magnificent setting,” I said. “Your aunt was very lucky.”