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SIX
A week
later, I walked into the Bainbridge Theater to spy on the auditions for “The
Marriage of Figaro.” Gabriella had reassured me that no one would notice a
strange body in the place on auditions day, and would probably just take me for
some new tenor in from Spokane. I had
just slithered my way through the big front doors when a man in black jeans and
a navy blue sweater burst in from the other side of the lobby.
“Shit!
Shit! Shit! Son-of-a-bitch!”
He looked
like a young Placido Domingo, only with a bodybuilder’s chest, Sylvester
Stallone’s eyes, and remarkably short legs.
After storming down the entrance ramp, he crossed to the concessions
counter, head lowered like a charging bull, and threw down a fist, rattling the
top of a coffeemaker. Only then did he
notice me – fifteen feet away in blue jeans, white shirt and a stunned
expression – but didn’t seem at all embarrassed. He gave the counter one final slam for
punctuation (he had to be a tenor, I thought), then continued out the front
doors and into the street, throwing out curse words like bags of peanuts.
I enjoyed
perhaps ten seconds of silence before I heard a blood-curdling scream from
somewhere inside the theater – then another, and another, and then realized
that these screams had something of a pattern to them, a purposeful tack, and
found Gabriella strolling through the doors.
She saw me – twenty feet away in blue jeans, white shirt and a relieved
expression – but waited two more scales before she smiled and greeted me with a
hug.
“Hi. Just taming the monster.”
“Some
monster.”
She lifted
her long arms skyward and gave herself a full-body stretch. “Ooomf! Sometimes I think I’m demonically
possessed. That thing seems to be too
big to be coming out of li’l ol’ me.”
“Sure. So who was that stormin’ Spaniard I just
saw?”
Gabriella’s
eyes widened at the mention. “That was
Rodrigo, our new tenor. Huge voice,
Billy. What a find! Thirty eight years
old; he stopped singing at twenty two to make some money in business, get
married, have a kid – then two months ago he read a story about Maestro in the
paper and went in for a lesson. Wow! His
voice is so big, I nearly go deaf when we’re running duets, I swear. But green, very raw, untrained. We’re hoping to have him do the Duke of
Mantua this spring, but he’s having a hell of a time with his control. They were just working through ‘Questa o
quella’ in there, and he kept coming to the pitch from underneath – bad, very
bad – and Maestro was shouting.... At
this point, Gabriella made a face I’d never seen before, dropped her jaw,
scrunched up her nose and spoke like a 93-year-old Italian man: “No! No! You
must sing... INTO the mask! INTO the
mask! You must... RING the tone from
your throat!”
“That’s
scary, Gabriella. You know, you just
became someone else there.”
“I
know. It’s very hard to get dates when
you keep turning into a senior citizen.
But I can’t help it. Say... what are you doing right now?”
“Listening
to you.”
She grinned
and grabbed my hand. “Well, come on
then, let’s introduce you.”
Gabriella
led me through the big doors into the theater.
The only thing visible on the stage was the bottom half of Rocky, the
opera company’s jack-of-all-trades, balancing on top of a tall ladder while
poking his head into the lights. Halfway
across the walkway at the back of the theater, square at the egress of the
center aisle, was an old armchair, and in the armchair was an old man.
“Professore!”
said Gabriella, dragging me forward. “I
want you to meet someone. This is Bill
Harness – he’s the one I told you about.”
Maestro
Umbra lifted his long, weathered face from a marked-up score of Rigoletto, took
a few seconds to cock his head to the right and compute the information from
Gabriella, then went into his act, flashing a broad smile and extending a large
hand.
“A pleasure
to meet you.”
“The
pleasure is mine, Maestro. Gabriella talks
so much about you, I feel I’ve already met you.”
“Ah,” he
said. “Gabriella... is a good girl.”
As I shook
his hand my eyes adjusted and I could make out the rest of him: large hazel
eyes in sad, dropping sockets, gray splotches and liver spots over his face, a
large, aquiline nose, sharp ski-slope chin, and a slightly pointed head covered
with stray patches of gray-blond hair.
His thin frame was layered into an old tweed sport coat and brown dress
pants, and above his loafers, a flash of bright red sock.
Gabriella
excused herself to continue warming up, and I took up residence in a wooden
folding chair adjacent to Maestro’s throne.
He turned to me with a crooked smile and said, “Gabriella tells me you
have been very generous to the company.
We are very grateful.”
“It’s the
least I could do,” I said, smiling nervously.
Now that the surprise had worn off, I began to remember Maestro’s
history, his years with the legendary Puccini, and found it hard to recall one
of the thirty-some questions I had stored up for just this occasion. Once I did, I got more than I had bargained
for.
Maestro
spoke to me in nearly unaccented English, but just underneath the tree-bark
tones of his aging voice you could pick out the rhythmic jaunt of an Italian
tenor. He spoke as if reading from a
score – stringing out some of his words, punching others, inserting dramatic
pauses for effect. This was clearly a
familiar recitation.
“Let me
tell you... about Gabriella. But FIRST...
let me tell you about the voice.
Voice... is breath... transFORMED... into that which we call voice. The only way to LEARN... voice...
is to have a teacher who can still demonstrate, BREATH by breath, note
by note, the corRECT way, to breathe, and to sing.
“The
reMARKable thing about Gabriella... is
that, more than ANY other singer I have known... she transFORMS... almost all...
of her breath... into tone. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent. PLUS, she is intelligent, and determined to
WORK, and to learn bel canto singing.
She is the NEXT... prima donna.”
Not
surprisingly, the rest of Maestro’s aria was a repeat of many things I had
already heard from Gabriella: the modern rush to take to the stage and start
performing major roles before the voice has been fully trained; the unfortunate
trend toward vertical-mouthed, Broadway-style belting in the major houses; the
resultant wear and tear on the throat, culminating in unpleasant tones and
shortened careers. And lastly, the
extinction of the great bel canto teachers.
“I spoke to
Licia Albanese last year. Do you know
her?”
I nodded.
“She said,
‘BLESS you, Maestro, for you are the LAST...
of the bel canto teachers – the LAST.
Even in Italy, there are NONE.
No... bel canto teachers. Gabriella...
she is my mission, my gift to the world.
And she sings BEAUtifully. You
think?”
“That’s why
I’m here,” I answered.
“This is a
very smart thing you say.” Maestro smiled and turned his eyes over my
shoulder. “And here she comes now.”
Gabriella
patted me on the head and knelt before Maestro to discuss a few fine points of
her audition piece (her audition was merely a formality, of course, but, as was
typical, she took it quite seriously).
I excused
myself to go to the men’s room, then returned to find a small, thin man at the
piano, following an attractive black-haired soprano through an aria from, I
think, “Manon.” She possessed an exquisitely light, lyric tone, smooth as
butter on a hot pan, and an exceptionally careful touch with her dynamic lines,
giving each word and note its due. She
also had the most ecstatic look on her face when she sang. The sound from her mouth caused her lips to
rise slowly from her teeth into a blinding smile; she leaned back her head as
the sound grew and flashed her dark eyes to the front of the stage, as if this
musty, near-empty theater were the front porch of heaven itself. I could not help but root for her.
“What do
you think?” It was Gabriella, sinking into the seat next to me. This was always a trick question with
Gabriella; she was so harsh on her fellow sopranos. I took a stab.
“I think
she’s good,” I answered. “Really light
tone. Nice line.”
“And she’s
cute, too,” she said, reading my look.
“Well,
yes,” I agreed.
“We’re
thinking of her for Susanna – who is also cute.
Well, I’ve got to get ready Ta-ta.”
“Break a
larynx,” I whispered.
Gabriella
was up next, singing “Porgi, Amor,” the Countess’s mournful second-act
cavatina, and I couldn’t help but notice that her voice had grown stronger even
since closing night. Pretty soon it
would be too big for the theater – and for Bainbridge Island. She bounced a sustained A off the brick wall
and into my ear, giving my brain cells a nice scrambling-over.
Later on,
at the Pegasus, she asked me what I thought.
“Not
much. Besides you and the lyric, not
much. Those two baritones were both a
bit weak and awkward, and that Asian soprano, I don’t know, just seemed a
little unsure of her entrances.
“She should
be. She’s sixteen.”
“No!”
“Yes. Verrry ambitious, too. Has fashioned herself into a nice little
divette already – now she just has to wait ten years for her actual talent to
catch up. I think we might be able to
use her for Barbarina, though. We might
have to. This bloody opera is four hours
long, Billy.”
“I
know. I think you guys are pretty insane
to try it.”
“That’s us,
the State Funhouse Opera Company and barbecue.
Don’t worry, though, we had most of the casting figured out before we
even scheduled it. Got a mezzo from New
York to play Cherubino.”
“Wow! Do
you have to fly her out?”
“Not at
all. For a real mezzo, the chance to
play Cherubino – and actually get paid for it – that’s worth a lot. She’s lucky if she breaks even on the deal –
but then she’ll have that role on her resume.
And Colby – that’s the lyric you heard – she’s up from San
Francisco. And we’re talking to a Count
from Fresno.”
Gabriella
seemed to pull a switch in her head, and grew strangely quiet. I sensed from the way that she was mentally
counting her fingers (taking inventory, I suppose) that she was about to
surprise me.
“Billy?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“I... hope you don’t mind, but I told Maestro that
you’ve been a little down lately, and he said... maybe...
what you needed was a little work, and I kind of... volunteered you.”
I set down
my bagel and eyed her (sure enough) with some surprise. “I...
well, I hadn’t really thought about it, but... what kind of work?”
Gabriella
took two fingers and walked them slowly across the table, stopping two inches
from my hand and looking up.
“Maestro
needs a new fence.”
Photo by MJV
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