RICARDA DISCELTA WAVED HER visitor to a high backed chair, keeping the brocade armchair for herself.
Ariana Kavalaris sat down lightly, smoothed her long dark hair, and arranged her hands neatly in her lap. DiScelta knew the girl at a glance. She was young—what girl wanting to sing wasn’t—but her dreams were old, as old as song itself.
“Tell me,” DiScelta said, “do you happen to know the ‘Et Lux Per-petua’ from Verdi’s Requiem?”
Ariana was silent. Her gaze took inventory of the room: the Chinese vase of cut flowers, the marquetry tables, the elaborately framed oil of a cathedral at sunset. So this is what comes with success, she thought. I wonder if I’ll ever have anything like this room.
After a moment she nodded. “Yes. I know the ‘Et Lux Perpetua.’”
“Do you need the B-flat chord?” DiScelta gestured toward the Steinway. The keyboard lid was closed like a coffin’s.
“No, thank you. I know what a B-flat chord is.”
“You enter, of course, on a G,” DiScelta said.
“I know what a G sounds like, too.”
“Do you know by the sound?” DiScelta asked.
“My throat tells me, by the tension. Each note has its own tension, don’t you find?”
DiScelta smiled. “Please. ‘Et Lux.’”
The girl got up from her chair. The strong column of her neck swelled. Her voice rose and began to inscribe in time the spiritual shape of one of Verdi’s most simple, most inspired melodies.
DiScelta listened, her eyes shut.
There were a thousand voice students in New York who were the cream of the best voices in America, in the world. And of the thousand there were at most thirty who would break out into international careers, who would shape for themselves recognizable international identities, who would record, perform, whom people would not only want to hear but would be willing to pay and pay exorbitantly to hear; and then, in every generation, there was the voice.
And Ricarda DiScelta was certain. This was that voice.
The girl had a slight breathing problem at the “Et Domine,” the descending B-flat minor arpeggio.
“It doesn’t matter,” DiScelta said. “I can teach you all about that later. Go on, go on. Just keep singing. Don’t break the line.”
Ariana Kavalaris finished and there was silence.
DiScelta rose. She wore a knitted lace shawl fastened at the collar and beneath it, on a thin gold chain, an antique gold locket set with amethysts and rubies. Her fingers sought the locket and touched it now.
She turned to face the girl. “Singing makes uncompromising demands. There are many hardships, few rewards. It requires a leap of blind faith. Are you capable of leaping into the dark?”
A little drum of nervousness was tapping at the base of Ariana’s throat. “Yes.”
“Then I shall teach you,” DiScelta said. “Much that I ask may strike you as unreasonable. But I shall ask nothing of you that you cannot do. As for the fee, well—”
“I’d give anything to study with you.”
“Anything will not be enough. You must give everything.”
Their first lesson began with DiScelta asking, “What is opera? In one word?”
Ariana hesitated. “Music.”
“No. Opera is theater. Its roots are musical, but its flower is human conflict. And that is why so many great operas are bad music. And why so much good music is dull opera.”
They were discussing Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Ariana worshiped Mozart. DiScelta obviously had her reservations.
“In Mozart,” DiScelta said, “we see too many symphonic elements. Well, he came early in the history of opera. He has to be forgiven.” She called his musical, as opposed to dramatic, forms oppressive, his key relationships “useless”—“As though it mattered to an audience whether an act begins and ends in D!”
With Mozart, she said, the singer was always in danger of putting the audience to sleep. “Arias follow patterned forms, acts are broken into separate numbers, recitatives interrupt the flow and are simply dead. True, there is invention, there is genius, but it is all delicate, tiny, a Dresden figurine. No blood. You have only one ally in Mozart: melody. But it is a treacherous ally.”
DiScelta explained that Mozart’s vocal melodies were based on instrumental models. “The challenge is to make his melody human. You must get into the characters—otherwise the music is boring.”
They analyzed the opening scene. DiScelta pronounced it an unbroken music span. “Symphonic, not operatic.” She praised Donna Elvira’s first aria with its crazed leaps and pauses. “Here the music finally gives us character. There is wit. The serious and the comic come together. Audiences like it.”
She pointed out the amazing ball scene that ended Act One, where three orchestras on stage simultaneously played a peasant dance, a contredanse, and a minuet. “A dramatic idea. Unfortunately, too harmonious. He is writing music, not theater.”
She praised the supper scene in Act Two where a stage band played numbers by three different composers. “But again, too harmonious.”
She criticized the finales of both acts. “Long movements held together by tonal relationships. The idea of ending a tragic opera with a cheerful sextet is straight out of the symphony, with its bright rondo finales.”
She made a face. “Nonetheless, the opera can work—and does—provided the voice supplies the emotions which Mozart, in his perfection, did not. So, let us start with your character, Donna Anna. She is a woman in love with the murderer of her father. A neurotic. A woman torn. Put that into these pretty melodies and you will be giving us opera, not concert music. Which, after all, is the only reason audiences are paying today’s criminally high ticket prices.”
Ricarda DiScelta made a point of visiting her old teacher, Hilde Ganz-Tucci, once a week. Today her teacher greeted her at the door, frail as old parchment, but neat and clean and tidily dressed.
“Ricarda, what a pleasant surprise.”
“It’s not a surprise at all. You know I always come Tuesdays.”
The table had not yet been cleared.
“I see you’ve had lunch,” DiScelta said.
“Alone,” Ganz-Tucci sighed.
And no wonder, Ricarda thought. Hilde Ganz-Tucci was a boring old woman. She was always complaining. She was doing it now. Her joints, servants, the Metropolitan Opera, back pains, inflation.
DiScelta interrupted. “Hilde, I believe I have found the one.”
Hilde Ganz-Tucci suddenly looked very alert. “You’re sure?”
“I do have a modicum of judgment. I can recognize talent.”
“But can she be the voice?”
“I believe she can be. But time alone will tell.”
“Sometimes,” Ganz-Tucci grumbled, “you are a paragon of inertia.”
“And of caution.”
“Ricarda, we do not have forever. You risk a few hours a week. But I risk eternity.”
“It’s a risk,” DiScelta remarked coolly—she had, after all, survived decades of her teacher’s manipulations—“that we’ll both have to take.”
After two months Mark hadn’t phoned Nita.
After four months she told herself to accept the fact that he was a childhood friend, period; she had plenty of work to keep her busy and she had beaux who were interested in her and it was silly to keep daydreaming of a guy who obviously wasn’t daydreaming about her.
After six months she picked up the phone in her room in the Barbizon and gave the operator his number.
“Mark? Nita.”
“Oh. Hi.” He sounded like a very distant echo of a voice she had once known.
“Haven’t seen you in a few light-years,” she said. “I’m sorry, Nita. I’ve been swamped with exams.”
Exams all year, she thought. Why am I phoning him? It’s not as though I were eighteen going on fifty-six. It’s not as though I didn’t have other friends. “Are you busy tonight?” she said.
“Tonight? I can’t. Not tonight.” And then, “Not for a while.”
She couldn’t help smiling at herself. I couldn’t take a hint. I had to phone. I wish to hell I didn’t love him. “Well, maybe some other time.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely some other time.”
“Goodbye, Mark. And good luck with all those exams.”
She replaced the phone firmly and sat for a moment thinking.
Say goodbye to him, Nita. It was fun wrestling him when you were six and fun necking with him on sofas when you were sixteen but that was long ago. Now he’s got a friend with dark eyes and dark hair and a beautiful voice and a strange last name and that kind of lets you out.
For a month Mark had kept his evenings free on the off chance that Ariana would be free. It didn’t happen very often. Usually she called at the last moment, breathlessly apologizing that a waitress hadn’t showed or a soprano had strep, and would he forgive her if …
He always forgave her.
But two days after Nita’s call he was able to nail Ariana down to dinner.
“Nothing fancy,” she said, and they went to a Chinese restaurant. They sat on a glassed-in terrace on Bleecker Street and stared at each other in silence.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t spoken much.”
He smiled to show it was all right, and the smile was a complete lie. It wasn’t all right at all.
Dessert came and they showed one another the messages in their fortune cookies. His said Now is the time to work and hers said You would be wise not to overextend your commitments.
Afterward they strolled along MacDougal Street.
“Would you mind awfully, Mark,” she said, “if we cut it short?”
Dear sweet Jesus, he thought, cut what short? Here it comes, she’s met a tenor.
“Ricarda DiScelta has taken me as a pupil. She’s hearing my ‘Una voce poco fa’ tomorrow.” Excitement was radiating from her. She said it was the first time that the music world had given her a clear and unambiguous sign that she was part of it. “I want to be my best.”
“What’s ‘Una voce poco fa?’” he asked.
“Rosina’s aria from Barber.” She saw his blank look. “Of Seville.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t mind, Mark, do you?”
“I mind like hell but I hope you have a great lesson.”
“Will you help me celebrate—afterward?”
“You’d better believe it.”
Ariana sang “Una voce poco fa.”
DiScelta listened. After an endless silence she folded her hands in her lap.
“With Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti,” she said patiently, “we come to the flowering of melody. What is artificial in these works is what is artificial in song itself. No one makes love or commits suicide in verse, refrain. Except in this school of opera. But it doesn’t matter. These melodies touch the heart. Or, rather, they must touch the heart if anything is to be believable. Harmonically and orchestrally they are laughable—Wagner called them guitar music—but, properly sung, their emotional pull endures.”
She had moderately kind words for Ariana’s performance. “But you must let more spirit and wit shine through. The aria is rhythmically alive and melodically inventive and the cabaletta never fails to delight. And there are even dramatic orchestral touches.”
She pointed out the famous “Rossini crescendo” that occurred throughout the score—the orchestral phrase that appeared unobtrusively in the strings, then throughout the orchestra, moving upward in register, gaining in volume and power, till the voices joined in and all musical hell broke loose.
“Say what you like, naïve it may be, obvious it may be, but it is a device that always works in the theater. Rossini knew how to get applause. And therefore he is every singer’s friend.”
Moving on to Bellini, DiScelta became less enthusiastic. “A throwback, but he wrote extremely long melodic lines such as no one else before him or since.” That the melodies were all cut to the same pattern of two-bar units, that his rhythms rarely varied, that he dwelt endlessly on the third degree of the scale—none of this mattered.
“His melody has power. It seems simple, but it is not. Enormous breath control and mental control are required. The phrase must never be broken. Even when you are silent in this music, you must be singing. The silences are part of the melody.”
DiScelta pointed out that later composers had made Bellini’s handling of emotions seem pallid. “But his emotions are never pallid in their own context. Look at the aria ‘Casta Diva’ from Norma. The climax—very unusual for this period—is postponed till the end of the aria, and when it finally arrives it is pure ecstasy. Chopin based his piano writing on this climax. It is anything but pallid. But because the melody is exposed, because there are no harmonic or orchestral supports, the delivery must be perfect. Straightforward music is always more treacherous than complex music. The voice has nowhere to hide.”
Which led to three hours of drilling in staccato runs, roulades, and trills. Which led to Donizetti.
“Again,” DiScelta said, “melody is all. Donizetti is nothing in the way of harmony or orchestra. He uses the same devices over and over, and no other composer dared to wring so much sadness from plain major chords.”
She pointed out other deficiencies: arias that climaxed too early, overuse of repetition, expanded cadential formulas that invariably ended in the major. “But he is brilliant, he is expressive, he achieves drama by shaping the vocal line—and he always lets the audience know exactly when to applaud. In opera this matters. Donizetti can still build careers.”
As Ariana rode down in the elevator her thoughts were spinning. She had prepared one tiny aria and her teacher had rewarded her with a three-hour seminar of which she could remember not one word.
Am I studying with a madwoman? she wondered. Or am I a simpleton?
And yet that night, in her dream, she heard a voice singing “Una voce poco fa”—singing it with wit and spirit and proper style.
When she awoke, she recognized the voice.
Her own.