Vienna Nocturne (28 page)

“She never would. She’s got Wolfgang Mozart in her pocket.”

“I do
not
,” she exclaimed. “Signor Mandini, I’m shocked. You know I haven’t any pockets.”

Mandini laughed. “Then you’re keeping him somewhere else.”

“Don’t you dare,” she cried teasingly, flying at him. He shouted and ducked. It was all in jest—at least it seemed so. Surely Mandini didn’t know. Surely none of them knew. There was always this kind of talk and teasing among musicians. But her heart was racing.

“Come,” said Michael. “Enough. They’re waiting for us.”

Mozart and the stage manager were in the saloon of the Burgtheater, a pleasant open hall with the chairs pushed back. The whole company had assembled. They were to rehearse, for the first time together, the extensive second act finale.

Mozart rose, seeming anxious, and said to them, “I’ve been looking forward to hearing this—all of you together. It’s tremendous. I’ve been dreaming of it.”

The action of
The Marriage of Figaro
took place over the course
of a single day. The Count Almaviva wished to claim his
droit du seigneur
and take his wife’s chambermaid, Susanna, to bed on the night of her wedding with Figaro. Carrying through it all was a subplot involving the page Cherubino, played by Dorotea, who loved the countess. In the section of the opera they were rehearsing now, the jealous count had discovered that Cherubino was locked in his wife’s closet, in a state of undress. After that, various characters rushed in and out until they were all singing together in a frenzy. The finale went on for half an hour without break, and if any element collapsed in its structure the rest would soon follow.

“Well,” Mozart said, after their first attempt. It had gone terribly. He looked at Anna and smiled. In spite of how messy it had been she felt cheerful and pleasantly tired with the feeling that could only come from singing for a half an hour the music of the man she loved. “It could be worse.”

“It’s so fast,” said Bussani. “There’s no time to breathe.”

“Don’t be glum!” said Michael Kelly. “You sound like Zeus himself; you make my bones rattle. If anything it was too slow for you.”

“It must be at
least
that fast,” said Mozart.

“Otherwise we’ll not be home before daybreak,” said Mandini.

“If I may,” said Bussani, “the short duet between my wife and Signora Storace is most delightful.”

“Isn’t it a hoot?” asked Dorotea. She put her hands to her head. “If only I can get my tongue to obey my brain.”

“Maestro,” said Mandini with soft gravity to Mozart. He stood and took some space among them. “We will spend all afternoon on this one finale alone. It’s not even the finale to the
opera
—just the second act. We’ve not begun to master it. I guess the length of your opera will be five hours at the very least—I shouldn’t be surprised if it stretched to five and a half. How are we to be expected to know it by the first of May?”

The room had grown still. “Four and a half hours, I should think,” Mozart said at last. “At most.”

“You’re not accounting for encores.”

Mozart passed his gaze over them, pausing when he reached Anna. “I’m aware of that,” he said. He turned back to Mandini. “My opera is so long because it can’t be any shorter. It’s exactly the length it needs to be. I would offer to cut the count’s aria, but you sing it so magnificently—”

“It’s impossibly difficult,” Mandini interjected.

“And you told me that you like it and it suited you.”

“It
does
, too, by God,” said Michael.

“Can’t deny that,” said Benucci, smiling.

“I’m not suggesting you cut my aria,” said Mandini.

“Perhaps your fair wife’s?” Mozart said. “Yours is perhaps the least important to the plot, madam,” he said to Maria Mandini, “but I would not wish you to leave the opera without an aria of your own.”

“That, too, must remain,” said Mandini. He coughed. “It’s not a question of the arias.”

“Then what?”

Mandini opened his mouth, hesitated, and shut it again. “The whole thing.”

“The whole thing?”

“Some of us”—he hesitated again—“are wondering if perhaps you’ve overreached yourself.”

“Ah,” said Mozart, smiling and leaning back. “Maybe I have. I suppose we’ll find all that out on the first of May.”

Mandini sighed and bowed his head. “I suppose we will.”

“You can’t deny it’s a magnificent finale,” Michael said to Mandini as they were leaving. “I mean, as long as we can pull it off.”

“But we
can’t
. There isn’t time. I see no good in it and very probably harm.”

“Harm? It’s opera, Mandini. We are not going to war.”

“Your part is nothing. If we fail, it’s I who’ll get egg on my face, I and Benucci and the prima donnas.”

“The opera is superb,” Benucci declared. He touched Anna on the back and she looked at him with surprise and gratitude. “Best
thing I’ve ever sung. I won’t soon forget it. Wait until you hear my aria in the second act, Mandini. The man makes me sound like a god.”

“You always sound like a god,” said Michael happily.

Mandini snorted. “Where’s your loyalty, Benucci?”

“With the music, ass. I don’t mind anything if the music’s good.”

“Barnacle,” drawled Mandini. He gave Benucci a push. “It won’t be any good if we can’t sing it.”

“We can sing it.”

May 1, the day of the premiere, came too soon. As they assembled in the familiar round of the Burgtheater there was within the cast of
The Marriage of Figaro
a degree of nervous tension not usual for them. There were obstacles of vocalization and memorization. The instrumentalists were out of their depth. Mozart had used his opera orchestra as he used it in his symphonies and concertos, but the orchestra of the Burgtheater had never played such symphonies. He’d meant for the instruments to be in dialogue with the singers, nearly their equal, commenting on their action, but too many of them had not sufficiently learned their parts. They were not yet moving in the same breath, with the same mind. Everyone felt uneasy and unmoored.

Anna stood backstage holding hands with Benucci in the dark. She had taken his hand because she was frightened, and he’d accepted her touch without a word. Of them all he was the most composed. But Anna perceived him taking measured breaths to calm himself. It was always like this with a premiere. One didn’t know it well enough. One could not anticipate how it would go over.

After a moment she transferred her hand to the crook of his arm and let him take a portion of her weight. On her head was Susanna’s wedding cap. Her shoes were pink. They could hear the chatter of the audience and the fiddling of the orchestra. It was not yet dark outside—there must be an hour or two left of daylight.

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” she asked Benucci in a low voice. “I’m ready to faint, if you weren’t here holding me up.”

“We do it,” he murmured, “because we haven’t found anything we like better.”

She seemed to have lost the use of her right ear. Her vision was blurring at the peripheries. But it was too late. The overture had begun. She and Benucci went to their places in the darkness behind the curtain, he to measure out the space for their marriage bed, and she to admire her pretty cap. Then the curtain was drawn and warm light poured on her and she saw from the corner of her eye the shifting audience and the heads of the players and Mozart in the center, at his piano, as tranquil and focused as he had been in rehearsals, and she loved him, and could be frightened no more, for it was of utmost importance that Figaro be drawn from his work to admire the little cap she had made for their wedding day.

Running through the evening she had the sensation of balancing a ball on her nose like a bear at a circus. When it stayed balanced, even with all her dips and dodges, it seemed a miracle. Every now and then she would have the sensation of watching herself. But if she observed too long, everything would threaten to come crashing down and she’d have to scramble. She was ever having to loosen her awareness—and become, in that way,
more
aware—in order to steady her brain, which wanted to comment upon her actions rather than sinking into them as deeply and resolutely as it must. This evening she failed, she feared, more than she succeeded. The audience was restless and vocal. A knot of rowdies in the balcony—hired, no doubt, by Mozart’s detractors—had set themselves to booing, and this distressed and distracted her. Da Ponte had done the best he could in adapting the libretto from the French play, but the plot could not be jarred, or it lost its sense; yet jarring, it seemed, was all they did. The singers missed their cues and confused the audience. When Anna played her guitar to accompany Cherubino’s second aria—a song within the opera, which Cherubino had written for the countess—it seemed the first time in the evening that the restlessness
stilled. The impartial members of the audience gave many bravos but it seemed not enough. The finale at the end of the second act nearly fell apart. Everyone came off stage in a black humor. They had not rehearsed enough. Mozart had overestimated their abilities.

“Cheer up, my ducks!” shouted Dorotea Bussani, breathless from jumping out the window to escape the wrath of Count Almaviva. She mopped her brow and blew out her lips and stretched her mouth like a lion. She enjoyed strutting around in her tall boots and snugly fitting trousers. She had told Anna the garments made her want to gallop on a horse. Her husband sliced an apple for her. “The worst is over now. Nobody remembers the middle of things. They can read the libretto during the interval. Only two acts to go, my chickens! The easiest acts yet!”

“The orchestra is out of time and out of tune,” said her husband.

“Well, I thought our duet went splendidly,” said Dorotea to Anna. The duet between Susanna and Cherubino, with the two young servants singing over each other in panicked whispers, was a comic masterpiece, over in the blink of an eye.

“Yes,” Anna said absently. She had hoped Mozart would come backstage during the interval, but there was no sign of him. Somehow it seemed that if the opera failed tonight it would be her fault.

“Mandini’s aria will set us right,” said Benucci, clapping the other basso on the head. “Nobody does it better. Elegance, farce, it’s all there.”

“Ah,” said Mandini. He adjusted his wig. “We’ll see.” But he added, “I’m rather fond of the third act.”

Luisa Laschi, who played the countess, gave Anna a hug. She was a sweet girl about Anna’s height and they had become friends. In the third act they sang a duet in which the countess dictated a letter, while Susanna repeated the lines back to her. Although the text was ironical, Anna and Luisa’s voices mixed and slipped across each other like silk in a breeze. It was one of the most exquisite moments in the opera and showed, Benucci had remarked, Wolfgang Mozart’s
profound and uncanny understanding of womenfolk. Mozart had laughed and said it was because he had a sister.

“You sounded beautiful,” Anna said to Luisa. “I listened to your aria.”

Luisa shook her head. “I was sure I’d run out of air.” She gave Anna a kind look. “I’m sorry I doubted the opera, Anna. You were right. It is a marvel. But I’m afraid we’re not showing it to its best.”

“We will,” said Anna.

“Of course,” said Luisa. She bowed her head and moved away, murmuring her lines. She’d had some memory slips in the first half.

“How are you holding up?” asked Michael. He was in his judge’s costume. He took Anna’s arm.

She leaned on him with theatrical weakness. “I’m so tired,” she exclaimed. “I’ve sung enough for one evening, thank you. I think I’d better go home.”

“You can do it,” Michael said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“How like a judge you are,” she said, admiring his costume. Then Benucci swung her away from Michael and lifted her into the air, and she let herself become excited again, because the opera was still wonderful, and for all her fears there was still nowhere she would rather be, just as it had been when she was thirteen, than inside an opera house.

The third act was the best they’d ever done it. When it was over and time to commence the last, although she had already sung more than she was used to, she somehow felt she had new energy, as if nearing the end of a long fast.

The fourth act was the act of mistaken identities, of lovers’ assignations in summer evenings. The stage was in semidarkness. The little girl playing Barbarina went out alone to look for the lost pin and sang a melody as melancholy as anyone had ever heard. The child reminded Anna of herself, when she had been young. Then came Maria Mandini’s aria, then Benucci’s, and finally it was time for “
Deh, vieni,
” Susanna’s last aria, the one in F.

She went out, disguised as the countess, more alone than she had
been all evening. Figaro hid behind a tree. Anna lifted her veil, to breathe the sweet evening air, and saw Mozart in the orchestra, dressed in white and gold with a gold insignia at his breast. And she understood then that she had not failed. She saw it in his face. He did not care if it was imperfect.

She flitted about the stage for the recitative and then settled, kneeling, on an imagined bed of moss, among fragrant nighttime flowers, for the aria.

She could never sing it without blushing.

Here, this evening, for the first time in nearly four hours of stage play, she paused in her disguise to reveal her heart. The aria was gentle and lulling, delicately exposed, achingly sensual. The range was as narrow as any popular song. More low notes than high. A serenade. Yet amateur young ladies after dinner could not have sung it as Anna did now. As with much of Mozart’s music, its greatest difficulty lay in its seeming ease. An amateur would not have had the breath for it, would have wobbled and staggered, run sharp or flat. To make it sound as it must—simple, guileless, a breath of desire—Anna had to draw on all her reserves, that the line not fail, the silver ball not waver in its balance. And this time she did not falter.

Now came the ending, the part that transcended nature, the part where she begged her beloved to come to her, to this dark copse of trees, where the flowers were all smiling—to come, come, “
Vieni
,
vieni
,” that she might crown his brow with roses. Mozart watched her from the piano, remembering their sacrilege. She sang it to him.