Buy the book at Amazon.com
A novel by Michael J. Vaughn
and to Jennifer Der Torossian, for the voice that rises to
heaven
ONE
“Una voce poco fa: Qui nel cor mi risuonò”
(“I heard a
little voice just now; it has marked my heart!”)
–Rosina,
“Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” Rossini
One day she
woke up screaming.
She could
not be sure why she screamed, but the screaming gave her pleasure, small
vibrations gathering force in her tiny frame and throttling out into the
far-too-large world, seizing territories of the air by their very resonance. Soon her mother came to comfort her, and she
quickly made the connection. When her
mother left the room, she began to scream again, and this time her father came. She’d found her occupation.
For years,
the screaming continued. At the slightest
irritation, the little girl would lift up her large walnut-colored eyes, suck
in the air with a great sobbing breath and set the beast free, ringing the room
in ever more blood-curdling tones.
From the
psychologist they received the fashionable comforts – dramatic tendencies, an
elevated need for self-expression – and so they were forced to ignore it. They sent the screaming girl upstairs and
trained themselves not to hear the spearing glissandos shaking the sheetrock. They also learned to negotiate the questions
put to them by friends and relatives, the most common of which was, “What is
that child doing?” which always seemed to carry the converse accusation, “What
are you doing to that child?”
“Oh, don’t
worry about her,” they would say. “She
is our screaming child. Screaming is her
hobby. She’s really quite good, don’t
you think?”
One day the
screaming child realized she was being ignored and opened her window to set the
beast flying into the neighborhood, a gargoyle on the wing. She screamed for five hours. Her neighbors two doors to the south
suspected child abuse, and called the police.
When she saw the flashing lights pulling into the driveway, the little
girl stopped screaming and smiled, proud of the growing reach of her voice.
The next
day, her mother sat with her at the piano and opened up a tattered book of
Italian art songs. She told the little
girl that the dots on the page stood for notes and she could play them on the
piano, or sing them with her voice.
These notes stood for small divisions of time, she was told. And these divisions were called rhythms.
Blessed with a voice strengthened by screaming,
an ear conditioned by the songs her mother played on the stereo or the piano,
or sang over the kitchen sink, the little girl learned quickly. By the end of the morning she had memorized
an entire song complete with bouncing foreign syllables, and that night she
hummed it to herself as she faded off to sleep.
After the
little girl had learned the songs in her mother’s tattered book, her mother
brought home a music teacher, a woman who wore brightly colored scarves and
spoke like a character in a movie. For
her first lesson, the little girl learned a song by a man named Monteverdi. The teacher was impressed by the speed of the
girl’s learning, by the power of her voice, and decided, much to her mother’s
consternation, to teach her a more difficult piece, an aria by Puccini called
“Vissi d’arte.” The title of the aria meant “I gave my life for art,” said the
teacher, and came from something she called an “opera.”
* * *
When I was
six, my mother and I moved north and east to a new state. My father would join us later that
month. After the movers had finished
loading the furniture into our new house, my mother found me playing inside an
empty packing box and said, “Billy! Bundle up.
You’re going to meet your grandmother.”
We drove to
a tall church near the center of town where they were holding a talent
show. My mother and I sat in a pew near
the back while the pastor, Ralph Tompkins, read a poem about his Irish setter,
Mister Bones, and four men from the choir sang “The Old Mill Stream.”
I was
beginning to fall asleep when my mother nudged me in the ribs. I opened my eyes to find my grandmother
standing at the altar in a flowing silk kimono the color of the jade elephant
my father had brought me from San Francisco.
She wore a jet-black wig pulled into a bun, and her face was powdered
white like a clown’s, with cat-like rays of mascara slanting out over her eyes.
The
organist settled her hands on the keys and rang down a storm of chords, falling
by stairsteps into a conversation of two small birds. My grandmother was the sun slanting through
the clouds, and when she held her wide sleeves to the wooden ceilings and
opened her mouth, the sound filled the hollow of my ears, made my nose itch,
ran through my mouth, my head, down the length of my spine and into my legs.
That this
extraordinary voice could be contained by the single human frame of my
grandmother did not occur to me. I
considered it a magician’s trick, and waited for doves to fly from the
jade-green sleeves. When she was done,
everybody applauded, and my mother whispered to me that my grandmother was a
butterfly. That seemed a very strange
thing to say.
Later that
year, my mother got a job as a waitress, and during the times when my father
was out of town, I would spend my evenings with my grandmother, listening to
records of women who sang with the butterfly’s voice, of men who shouted like
barking dogs, and other men who rumbled like the legs of the kitchen table when
you scooted it across the floor.
After my
grandmother went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, I would sit on the sofa and
look at the album covers, the big-chested women in gowns that fell like curtains
to the floor, and chunky gold necklaces like the one’s in pirate treasures, and
powdered wigs piled up on their heads like loaves of bread, their hands held
out to the air, their mouths forced apart like they were trying to make funny
faces. And I wondered why my grandmother
was not there, too, with her white face and cat’s eyes and butterfly voice.
But that is
why I am here, desert wind whistling the broken seal of my driver’s side door
as my borrowed Pontiac pours its rusty-mufflered baritone over the Western
landscape. And though I know these
canyons and mesas are supposed to elicit sweeps of Aaron Copland brass, or
rustling copper flamenco, or Irish fiddle music, all I hear are sopranos.
The
poker-deck riffles of grass north of the Big Horn Canyon in Montana bring me
the spun honey of Kiri Te Kanawa, “La Rondine,” Doretta’s Song. The gray stegosaur scales of the Tetons call
up Licia Albanese, the turtle dove deathbed sighs of “Addio del passato” from
“Traviata.” In Logan, Utah, under the longbox tent of Wellsville Mountain, I
hear the cake-frosting mezzo voce of Montserrat Caballé from “Turandot,”
“Signore, ascolta!” And all across the dry shepherd hills of Eastern
Washington, a fold of the map from the hunter green/frost white promise of the
Cascades, I hear Renata Tebaldi’s heart-inflating triple sixteenths from “La
Wally,” “là, fra la neve bianca” (“There, amid the white snow ... “).
I am a
child of the soprano voice.
* * *
At the end
of my quest for the Puget Sound, I crossed the floating bridge over Lake
Washington at sunset, driving square into an orange sun, found the ramp for
Interstate Five and rolled uphill then down into the star-map windows of
downtown Seattle.
I took the
first likely-looking skyscraper exit and wound up on Pike, where I stumbled
onto the Seattle Sheraton and decided to look no further. After check-in and a nice shower, I found
myself strangely restless, and decided to make things worse by seeking out some
good espresso. The kid at the
registration desk suggested I follow Pike back over the freeway to the very hip
Capitol Hill district . When I got to
Broadway, though, I was distracted by a cool old-fashioned neon sign for a
place called Cafe Trademark and decided that this called for inspection.
Slipping
past the Parisian windows and in through the glass door, I found the interior
dangerously clean, but equipped with just enough concert posters, gritty urban
artworks and mismatched garage sale dining tables to seem at least marginally
sleazy (in cafe terms, this is a good combination). A brass plaque next to the cash register
explained the name: the place used to be called Cafe Paradiso, but some big
firm back east wanted to use the name for a retail chain. The big boys threatened to sue, so naturally
the little guys had to back off, but not without at least poking a little
ironical fun with their new moniker.
While
awaiting my caffe brève, I sorted through the stacks of weeklies next to the
window (Seattle statutes apparently require one alternative publication per
ten-block area). In the listings of
something called The Stranger I found a production of The Barber, “Il barbiere
di Siviglia,” just across the sound on Bainbridge Island. The State Ferry Opera Company – just the kind
of obscure little group that makes up my current mission in life.
On the way
out the door I paused to study two metal-faced boys at the counter – some of
these Capitol Hill boohoos sustain enough piercings as to seem almost android –
when my eye drifted to a canary-yellow flyer taped to the window. “The Barber of Seville,” State Ferry Opera
Company. “Just three blocks from the
Winslow Ferry!” The State Ferry publicist
was certainly earning his or her keep.
* * *
The
following evening I paid a visit to the Pontiac in its clean garage spot,
offered reassurances that I would be giving it a few days off, and opened up
the trunk to slip the red leather checkbook from its bank-box niche. It occurred to me that I should give a name
to this car – Escamillo, perhaps, after the toreador in “Carmen,” or maybe
Mistress Quickly from “Falstaff.” I put the idea in my pocket next to three
Susan B. Anthony dollars and headed for
the street.
Seattle
hardly seemed like the Seattle of myth without rain and cold, but it was
August, after all. Under eighty degrees
of humid sunshine I sought out the shady side of the street and tried to
breathe slowly, feeling the sweat gathering in my shirt sleeves and looking
forward to the breezes over the waterfront.
The natives all around me seemed to have the exact opposite idea,
burbling and rattling their skyscraper canyons with a fierce, joyous energy,
agendaless and sun-charged, knowing it could rain tomorrow, and the day after
that, and so on ad naseum.
I am a born
mariner, though never an actualized one, and once on board the ferry I was
drawn inexorably to one of the twin prows overlooking the car deck. I started out aft so I could watch the
tangerine flame of the sun as it charmed each spire of the gray and brown
skyline, the waterfront shrinking to postcard size as the Walla Walla’s big
engines churned the waters of Elliott Bay to an evergreen milkshake.
I gradually
turned my eyes to the Duwamish Head of West Seattle, feeling the pulse of envy
as I sighted its clifftop dwellings, imagining the view from each window. Circling the deck to the bow, I found the
Olympics throwing jagged outlines over the unassuming green loaf of
Bainbridge. The ferry turned to port and
slowed, sliding past the mainsail forest of Eagle Harbor and into the dock,
where the captain churned the reverse engines until the bow settled into its
cushioned pilings.
One of the
crew asked me to stand back as she lowered the passageway and locked it to the
prow. Once set loose, my fellow footmen
and I paced up the long, cattle-chute corridors, passing a gaggle of weary
Seattle-bounders before we broke out into the parking lot and chose our
separate electron paths up the broad sidewalks into Winslow.
I ventured
from the throughway of the ferry road and jogged left into town, where I found
a sleepy strip of restaurants, antique shops and bookstores, refreshingly
patchwork in style (no civic master plans at work here). I stuck the Streamliner Diner into my mental
Rolodex – if only for the silly rhyme and the laminated menus Scotch-taped to
the front window – then took another left, downhill toward the waterfront. On Bjune, a block away from the harbor, I
spotted the Bainbridge Theater, a vaguely suburban assemblage of organic curves
and archways all lit up for the big night, and split the wide front doors,
handing over my cash to two smiling elderly ladies at the ticket window and
settling into my seat a mere two minutes ahead of the overture.
I have
become a student of tiny regional opera companies, and have learned to revel in
their often predictable faults. The
State Ferry Company afforded several.
The
orchestra, a cut-down assemblage of fourteen, attacked the famed overture as
though they were regulars at La Scala, but would fail to be half as good or
aggressive for the rest of the evening.
The reasons were simple enough: that overture had rung through their
heads since the age of three, pounded into place by college recitals and
symphony pops concerts, whereas the rest of the score was a strange, dark
neighborhood haunted by the unruly presence of singers.
Another
unruly presence was their conductor, a thin, stately septuagenarian sporting an
antique white tuxedo and an extraordinarily stilted manner. He began with his baton pointed skyward some
three feet over his head, as though he were pointing out Corona Borealis at the
meridian, then delivered his downbeat with all the subtlety of a spiked
football. He followed with thrashing
sweeps to the left and right, broad calisthenic strokes worthy of Jack LaLanne,
then geared back skyward for another go-round, passing out silent reprimands
all the while over tempo differentials – none of which, apparently, were his
fault.
The set
designer, meanwhile, had assembled a quite reasonable plywood-and-stucco
facsimile of Dr. Bartolo’s Spanish
villa, but had perhaps gone a step too far by installing a small, fully
operational three-pronged fountain in the courtyard. He had failed to anticipate the theater’s
fluctuating water pressure, which caused the trident spray to grow or shrink
depending on how many of the crew were flushing the johns backstage.
The theater
itself turned out to be a converted film house, and though its vaulted ceiling
afforded some amazingly crisp acoustics, the low concrete walls at left and
right were a mite too enthusiastic. I
discovered this when the company’s Figaro, a slim, stern-looking baritone who
seemed to be singing through his chin, turned stage left at the climactic point
of “Largo factotum” (the passage that I remember singing to my little brother
as “ci-ga-rette, cigarette, cigarette!”) and suddenly appeared to be singing
three inches from my right ear. At first
I suspected body mikes – unheard of in legitimate opera – but figured it out a
few minutes later when Count Almaviva pulled the exact same trick stage right
to ear left.
Fifteen or
twenty minutes into the first act, Count Almaviva and Figaro hover at Bartolo’s
front door, waiting to discover the effect of Almaviva’s serenades on Bartolo’s
beautiful young ward, Rosina. (The Count
has assumed the identity of a poor student, Lindoro, as operatic noblemen are
wont to do.) A womanly silhouette appears at the balcony, parts the gauze white
curtains with slim, red-nailed fingers, and muses to herself in a voice I
cannot quite believe. So, in truth, I
met Gabriella’s voice before I met Gabriella.
“Non è
venuto, an cora?” (“Has he not come yet?”) Then, interrupted by someone inside
the house, she offers a plaintive aside: “Oh, che ver gogna! vorrei dargli il
biglietto.” (“Oh, how provoking! I wished to give him this note.”)
This was no
more than a recitative, and, after a few more lines, an exclamation of surprise
- “Ah, che vita da crepare!” (“Oh, what a scolding life I lead!”) - and she was
gone, never having ventured past the white drapes. I could not quite take in what I’d just
heard, so I set it down to another acoustical trick, perhaps a steel beam set
into the ceiling above Rosina’s apartment.
No Bainbridge Island soprano could possibly be this good.
Rosina
turned out to be Gabriella Compton, a tall, almost willowy young woman
somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years of age, possessed of a thick
stream of burnt umber hair descending halfway down her back. Her face was sharp, almost cat-like, with a
slightly upturned nose, a smattering of freckles across high cheeks, and
marquis-cut eyes the color of walnut shells.
She rolled them upward in the universal expression of teenage girldom as
her guardian (who had designs on being her husband) scolded her for her
scandalous behavior.
Though certainly
pleasing, the exterior paled in comparison to the instrument, a living object
for which I already lacked superlatives.
I rummaged the world of nature for similes. Lighter than a slice of beeswax. Sharp as any number of spices: nutmeg,
cinnamon, oregano, bay leaves and cayenne pepper. Tangy as molasses, or lemon drops. (On a cold day. In New York City.) It was getting ridiculous,
so I dropped the process entirely and made myself dumb, a hollow vessel,
recording device, acoustic tile, as Gabriella punctured Bartolo with snappy
Italian phrases.
And, of
course, I knew what was coming. My
grandmother’s schooling had included innumerable interpretations of “Una voce
poco fà,” Rosina’s cavatina (or introductory aria) – even a scratchy old 78 of
Lily Pons with the Paris Opera. I knew
each phrase, every nuance, and several of its traditional cadenzas. I could likely sing it myself, but to apply
my sickly baritone to notes such as these would smack of sacrilege.
And this is
how the scene is set. Bartolo leaves
Rosina to consider her several sins, locking the door on his way out to make
sure she doesn’t commit any more. At the
very turn of the key the girl rushes to Bartolo’s desk and writes her new
beloved a secret letter, musing out loud as she composes. “I heard a little voice just now; it has
marked my heart!” All during the long, stately introduction, and even these
first perfunctory phrases, I am here in my seat making simple calculations. I take this concrete object, Rossini’s
elegant, immortal aria, and this smooth sheet of terra cotta paper, which is
all that I know of Gabriella Compton’s gorgeous, barely describable voice, and
I wrap the one in the other. I balance
the package in my hands, measure its weight, roll my finger under the yellow
ribbon, read the calligraphed card, and am about to take one Scotch-taped seam
and tear when I open my ears to find I am wrong. Utterly wrong.
Rosina
rises from Bartolo’s desk, hits upon the name of her beloved student (“Si
Lindoro mio sarra,” “And it was Lindoro who hurled the dart”) and takes flight,
climbing the scales of her initial cadenza like turbine escalators to the top
of a department store, then turns like an overcharged child and leaps the steps
three at a time back down, each brief landing a bell-like staccato chime that
would not normally be attributed to a human voice.
A dozen
measures later she lands on a rare Rossini sustain and pulls a trick I have
only heard from Tebaldi, on a recording of “L’altra notte” from Boito’s
“Mefistofele.” She sets herself into a slow trill, then speeds it up like a
racing motor, simultaneously gearing back on the dynamic, mezzo forte to piano,
three times, then drops it down to nothing and directly into the following
phrase, more rapid Rossini patter - and all of this without a breath, not till
the end of the phrase! Any other singer would have passed out.
And it goes
on like that, cadenzas raining down like a pyrotechnic display in a wealthy
city, sprouting from phrases where I’ve never heard them before, each as
individual and inspired as a snowflake.
This Gabriella Compton is singing out of her century, reading from the
great tapestry of 18th and 19th century virtuosi sopranos who took the score
into their heads and etched signature embellishments all over its margins, each
of them striving to create ornaments that no other could duplicate. (Adelina Patti once gave an inordinately
florid reading of “Una voce poco fa” at one of Rossini’s salons, and was
afterward met with the composer’s polite inquiry, “Very nice, my dear, and who
wrote the piece you have just performed?”)
The treble
meter of “Una voce” gives way to the rolling four-four of “Io sono docile”
(“With a mild and docile air”), but not before the inexperienced audience
breaks matters up with a burst of applause.
Gabriella smiles and calmly sings them back down, pulling her distracted
conductor along with her, and soon commences to further vocal displays.
The phrase
“mi fo guidar” (“If none provoke or chide”) traditionally rides an exaggerated rolled
“r” to the conjunction “ma” (“But...”), serving to introduce the business side
of Rosina’s sweet personality (the
lioness inside the angel). Gabriella
turns this transition into a showpiece, riding that “r” like a frisky Palomino
and piercing her “ma” with a bright staccato no heavier than a paper clip.
The device
draws unexpected laughter - but perhaps not unexpected by Gabriella, who
repeats the phrase a minute later in a spot where it has not previously
existed, and throws in a practiced pout of her fluid red lips for extra
measure.
I cannot
tell you any more. It would bankrupt all
that I know of singing and opera, and I would have no bread to live on
tomorrow. Let me just say this: the
remainder of this Barber was mere transport, a ferryboat cruise along
watermarks of plot and music, that brought whoops of “Brava!” at the closing of
the final curtain. I followed the
murmuring crowd into the lobby, simultaneously exhausted and reborn, the panels
of my skin worn smooth as beachward glass by the tides of glorious sound.
My glory
turned quickly to anxiety, however, as I realized that a few more minutes might
bring Gabriella Compton in the flesh, and words not sung but spoken from those
lips. I was not prepared, this soon, to
pierce the sacred separation provided by the proscenium arch. Besides, I felt like a high school freshman
at his first dance, a mental state that could not possibly make a worthy
impression.
Thus fixed
on my plan, I drifted to the edge of the waiting mass, a tossed salad of
perfumes and musty suits, and discovered a fishbowl holding entries for a
raffle. I took the red leather checkbook
from my shirt pocket, scrawled out a check to the State Ferry Opera Company,
and folded it into the slot.
Satisfied,
I escaped out a side exit into the water-crossed night, slipping through the
pockets of a tree-shadowed park to the lights of the ferry station and the
dark, noiseless water of Puget Sound.
Photo by MJV
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