Where could it possibly all come from?
Your parents, bless their soul, were simple people. Have they everseen, touched, heard a piece of art in their life? Probably not. You were born into an impoverished family with no tradition of music, and yet it was your father who insisted. How did he know?
Was it the region?Up North, where you saw the light of day? Were you always happy todress into those purple clouds when you needed one more layer? In the Middle AgesBergamowas ruled by The House of Malatesta, did you see this as an omen when you decided to compose Don Pasqualeand finished it in eleven days?
When Signor Simone Mayr, not even an Italian at that,put the baton down in awe,were you, standing in the first row of the choir, proud ofyour glitteringlittle-boy-voice?Anamethystif gemscould grow wings, that’s what you sounded like. And so ambition arrived into your life. Enthusiasm. Hunger for more. The clavichord. The cello. The flute. Harmonies. The trigonometry of music. The maze of the fugue. Ancient Masters, most of all God’s Right Ear, Johann Sebastian himself.
Did all of this come back to you in the end? Did you have vivid nightmares in the asylum, onesin which doctors split your abdomenwithout further ado,but, rather thangrabbing liver and kidneys and spleen,they pulled out pages of a manuscriptsplurging with notes, crowded with sopranos, smeared with Belcanto? Who was the last one to leave? Leonora, peak figure of the love triangle? Lucia, the blood-covered Scottish bride? Norina, young widow, desirable and knows things, sassy, smart, kind, your very own sunshine girl? Did they take you where your music took your audience, did you secretly fly away with them?Or did they drag you into the abyss you had been visiting and re-visiting long before your condition became fatal?
When, at thirteen, your voice broke and something had to be done Mayr intervened again, as by then he surely knew. He must have been the first one to see.Do you think he envisioned the almost seventy operas when he picked you as one of the five privileged performers calledIl piccolo compositore di musica?Three months before your fourteenth birthday youcaptured the stage the way Suleiman The Magnificent had bulldozered half Europe in his time.
Did you know La Favorita is a mighty popular name for pizza places now that you have been dead for over seventeen decades? Are you aware that when one types in as much as GAE into any search bar, the first suggestion is your full name?Can you imagine what your reputation has done to once no-name Bergamo?
How did it feel that at not yet twenty you travelled to Bologna to composePygmalion, the one-actthat in all likelihood was never staged during your lifetime? What says you, is it not fortunate thatnow any of uscanYouTube it whenever we wish to?
Talk about luck. After spending a few – not even idle – months at home again, you ran into an old schoolmate, Bartolomeo Merelli, whohad just started totry his hand at librettos. You and him, but most of all you and the muse, you and the goddess, you and the invisible volcano. Break the pattern, break the legacy, break the silent dread to live and die in oblivion.
Much later, already bathing in fame and glory, you employed an amanuensis, a young German boy, introvert, grumpy, constantly in a bad mood.Three years before you died, your heart of volcanoalready a heart of darkness,you heard it through the grapevine that he had achieved stellar success with a certain something called Tannhauser. You were still lucid enough to remember him, how did that feel? Just how heavenly that there overture, fifteen minutes and counting? Did he have it in him when you were dead bent on finding fault with his copies? A German romantic, mind you?
Two weeks before your twenty-first birthday your debutturned out to befrighteningly quiet, the audience gasped at the frescos on the ceiling and the gold ornaments on the walls.Venice, Teatro San Luca, Enrico di Borgogna. Eight singers on stage, three of them tenors. Three! Based on Kotzebue! And all this in Italy! Brotato, brotato. Listeners do be like potato.
Nonetheless the review two days latertakes your exceptional talent for granted and paints you a very bright future.Let the work begin. You arrivedatRome with your ninthto encounter a raging success, and even though just before moving on to Naples you softly asked Mayr to give you a little bump again, he did not need to do anything. Your reputation was already swift and slender enough to precede you.
Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Palermo, Milan, Bologna, Mantua, Naples. The audience was measuring you against Rossini, but then again, in those days Rossini was theabsolute yardstick for every note everyone would ever hear.Banterissimo Gioacchino,born five years before you,died much older than you, quitcomposition at thirty-seven to live exactly thirty-seven years more. Finishing with William Tell right at the peak, a semi-god in his own right. ‘Rossini might have composed the first and the last act but surely God wrote the music in between’ – do you remember saying that about his glorious swan song?A hundred years later one whirlwind-revolution called Maria Callasturnedall three of you into rock stars.Thanks to her, dazzling four-course-dinner Rossini,beautiful and young Bellini, and you became absolute contemporaries on any cool stage in the 20thcentury. Did you know that the first few bars of Alice Cooper’s Poisonare the spitted image ofSweet Child O’ Mine? Just likeyoung Verdi bearing your distinctive features so strongly that people keep mixing his early pieces with yours?Without you the King of the Romantic Italian Opera might never have been able to occupy his throne, how does that feel?
As you turned thirty your life turned a corner. Gilardoni came into your life and stayed your librettist for six years and eleven operas, your impresario contracted you to produce twelve pieces in three years, you inherited the position of the director of the Royal Theatre in Naples from Rossini, you remained free to compose for other houses and you got engaged with Virginia, the baby sister of your friendTotó.
The one that almost became a doctor.
You lived to see internationalfame as soon asAnne Boleynwas staged in Milan. Thirty-three years of age.Up and down The Boot, the continent, one capital after the other, ten years of solid interest in this one piece only, and then we haven’t even begun to talk aboutLucia, L’Elisir, Pasquale.Sweet gods of pure honey, how many more to be composed in weeks, sometimes days, on several occasions still lacking a recitativo or two at the time of the dress rehearsal but what of it. You were the comet who shot higher every time you touched paper, ink and pen. Nothing else mattered.
Of course you visited Paris, of course you were established all over. And when you sat down to seal the deal about the blood-ridden Scottish bride, the pinnacle of the oracle, the plethora of the opera, thecrème de le crème ofyour chef-d’oeuvre, somehow even the timing was flawless. Rossini had retired, poor sweet innocent beautiful but surprisingly tough Bellini had just died, yes, died, at thirty-four. Hisgorgeous, mellow, slightly boring tunes still secure a place for him in the platinum-clad triangle, titans of The Belcanto: Gioacchino, Vicenzo, you.
The madness,the look-at-that, the wow-this-just-freezes-my-blood: when Lucia entered your life,did sheknock over your invisible chessboard at once? The glass harmonica, the superhuman key, the cadenzas, the runs, the trills, the mordents, the speed, the additions, the interpolations – were they meant as a warning? Was it the first feeble attempt to mend the bend? Lucia’seerie string of notesbursting with intimidating beauty, whendid it snapin your head? Was itwhen the first child closed her eyes? Virginia and you saw the baby was poorly as soon as it was out, and you who had never buried anyone before now had to lay the first moment of your fatherhood in the grave. Was it the second baby with the same condition, same predicament, same span of a lifetime, three days, maybe four? Was it knowing that no one on this Earth can be asked, expected, doomed to survive thisblow for the third time in a row and yet the two? Of you? Were? Allotted? The same? Out-of-this-world? Agony? Again?
Was it that whilst Virginia was whimpering next doors, having only hours, no matter minutes,to spend with the third and last baby, you were feverishly working on your signature opera buffa? The amusing musical drama whose tunes every barber would soon whistle in the streets of sunny Naples? Did you try to stifle your wife’s moaning with chimes and jingles? Her screaming and her prayers as she was clutching onto thetiny, wrinkled, premature body?
Virginia died, too, shortly after.
That bump, barely the size of a bean, awee lump, nothing more. Back and forth, Paris, Vienna, Italian cities, capitals of Europe. The slightly protruding red push right above your right elbow. Signore, signore, what divine talent you have! Your future brother-in-law didn’t notice. How you have an instinct to tell what works wonders on stage! Totóscanned your bodyfor the signs of syphilis a few days before the wedding, being the scientist in the family, assuminga couple of semesters at medical school would do.
Totó. Your friend. The one who almost became a doctor.
God bless your eye for a stage plot, signore, God bless your ear for those honey-gold melodies that go straight to the heart! Totólooked and scanned. You worked like a madmanday and night. He investigatedhe explored he scrutinized he studied he hunted he pried. Not only were you given the honour to conduct Rossini’s Stabat Mater at forty-four, you finally had the chance to meet him in person at long last. Two artists beset with longing the way only an Italian knows how to, both heavily hung with sorrow behindhissweet smile, both infected, none of them knowing yet. Becauseyour particular syphilis was a subtype Totó had never heard of, the mission was dead before he even asked you to take your shirt off. He missed the lump, and even if he hadn’t. When it happened, you were fifteen. A boy. Your very first time. Who could even find out the name of that hooker in the road inn where you had lost your virginity and your Virginia in advance,unprotected by the purple Bergamo sky just when you needed another layer the most.
Maybe that is the answer. The honey-goldpoison in your composition. Maybe yourdivine musicality became so powerful that it needed a vessel, so it took everyone’s body around you. It wasyou who infected your wife, you whopassed it on to foetus one, two, three so that they all came to this world early, unprepared, withered, pressed to arrive, pressed to leave. You destroyed the healthy organs and the sane mind of the love of your life, she never knew any other man.
Years later, after taking the Kapellmeister position in Vienna, the one that used to be held by Mozart, you upped sticks to run home and see Mayr for the last time. He was ancient, he was unwell, buteventually the journey turned into your wake-up call. How sick you alreadywere, how rapidly your condition was deteriorating, that lump was no longer a tiny push hiding from the curious eyes of Totó, almost a doctor, and when you tried to sell the family house in Naples, that is whereyou crushed for the first time, nowhere to run from the razor avalanche ofmemories, Virginiahad died in that very bed, though her inarticulate farewell to life could not keep you from composing some of the most mirthfulmelodies in the world.
How did you conceive all that joy? How did yousqueeze the Mediterranean vivacity of a shit hotwidow into three cascades and an optional cadence? Where did you find the heavy rhythm and the featherweight melody that shot her aria to fame at once? Virginia and you never became parents and yet both of you had three, can such things be? How did you stay alive? Compose twenty-four more operas? Keep travelling abroad? Go to work, think about money, eat dinner, keep up affairs?
At least you had the chance to say goodbye to Mayr. As you hugged his shrunken little body, as you waved at him with your already shaking hand one last time, did it cross your mind that perhaps you’d never see Bergamo again? Or were you certain you’d return to die?
Before they drugged you and lied to you, you had been inconsolable, incurable, still showered with success and bursting with plans, reviving half-completion, receiving rejection, writing for the French, breaking a contract or two, overseeing Nabucco, being pleased with it, preoccupied with orchestration, bathing in a sea of applause, finding it harder and harder to stand on your feet, fretting concentration, looking forward to the visit of your brother, roaming in Italy, postponing, staging, receiving news of failure. At times you admitted you were half-destroyed.
After the doctors’ verdict your brother sent his son to get you. This nephew, Andrea, bamboozled you to believe the two of you were travelling to Vienna. With the good doctor Ricord following in a second coach one evening you stopped just outside of Paris. They called the building an inn. It took you days to see what had happened. You poured your rage into desperate letters. They were never delivered.
Left on your own in the semi-dark, like an old broom,were you inundated by your melodies? Were you gripped by the tornados of your sextets? Were you nailed to your seat by the brass section? Or was it the contrary? Cacophony, cavalcade, chaos echoing inthe empty halls? Did you have prophetic hearing nearing Bartók, Messiaen, Cage?Are they your friends?Did they play you? Was it instrumental? The entirety of Italian pop of the so-called sixties, Pappa Pomodoro and what not, sprung from carbon copies of carbon copies of your legacy, did you know?
Was Lucia’s madnessyour only company?
Still, miracles exist,in about eight months everyone leans in: your nephew, your brother, your other brother, the memories of Mayr, the Austrian ambassador, six more French doctors. There were no signs that the two-and-a-half-week-long trip back to Bergamo hadantagonised you in any way.You have six more months. Days. Large chair, occasionally muttered monosyllabic words, famous sopranos and tenors visiting, shreds of arias sung, none of them recognised.Your face is covered by heartless chancres, your eyes rarely look. You suffer a stroke on April Fool’s day, you die a week later.
You certainly remember one night right until the end: you are twenty-four, you arrive in Rome to present Zoraida di Granata, your blood is on fire, you are unstoppable, and then the lightning strikes: the star tenor of the house dies three days before the premiere. Hit on the head and stabbed in the chest and pushed from a cliff you must be – for two seconds?You are twenty-four, you pull three all-nighters ‘till lo and behold you are done with the new version. True, you changedthe tenor part to mezzo.First man down, secunda donna in. Problem? As if this was uncommon in the Belcanto, oh, please.
And yet this is not how the world remembers you. The world sees and hears Lucia, Pasquale, Nemorino, no matter what. The world is dreaming in the language ofUna furtiva lagrima.
How the bassoon pushes the door opento the melancholy of the B flat minor, the melody that flows and spreads like guava syrup, thick, soft and sombre. Youremblematic legato floatsunlike a breeze, unlike a butterfly, it has poise and volume, a torn piece of velvet soaked in sour wine.
She is the one who bends over your cradle in 1797 and over your bed in 1848, your mistress and owner and torturer and feeder and dictator and sex witch and domme, it is your divine talent who puts her arms gently under your knees and over your shoulders. Your chaser and your saviour. Your despot and your revolution. Devoted to you even when your sane mind crumbles to dust, keeping you in theBelcanto flair forever. She is the one to cast the dream resonating in a single furtive tear as we swoon and cede again and again, thanks be to you, dearest Gaetano, carissimo signor Donizetti, thanks for the gateway and thanks for the path. Thank you for the music.
