Vienna Nocturne

A PARTIAL GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION

While not meant to be exhaustive, this guide might help readers from hesitating over some of the foreign names in the novel.

He spoke first of her breathing, then of her bearing and strength. He showed her, with lightness and ease, with playful, wry animation, how
he
breathed, as he had been trained. Such training as he had undergone could not be replicated. But he would do his best, if Anna would try. She said she would.

He exhaled in a hiss from full, strong lungs while she counted out the seconds. Her own exhale she could not sustain long, but it was wonderful failure, failure that might someday be overcome. He demonstrated for her, too, the
messa di voce
, the placement of the voice, in which he sang a single note from softest to loudest and back again, and touched, along the way, all the gradations of loudness and softness between. She failed here, too, but still he made her feel already taken, already touched, with the fever of aspiration—to learn and master everything. It would be like becoming an acrobat, Rauzzini said. Soon enough one might fly. Already he was pleased with her, already praising her quickness and skill. He said that in time they would begin two-note scales, then
three notes, then as many notes as could be contained in the measure of a single breath. She had never in her life felt as dancing and vivid as now. She forgot herself. He did not sing much, but when he did, the sound went all around her and through her body. It was as though her soul became huge with life and joy, and she could not believe that she had been so nervous, nor that she had not been more.

The year was 1776. Her name was Anna Selina Storace. She was eleven years old. She could play harp and guitar and sing anything by sight. Her elder brother, Stephen, was a prodigy on the violin, and had been sent to Naples to study at a conservatory. Her father was Italian, a double-bass player who had lived in London for twenty years and who arranged and translated Italian burlettas for Marylebone Gardens. He was a hopeful man who was always losing money. His unhappy wife, born Elizabeth Trusler, was the daughter of the proprietor at Marylebone, a pleasure resort just outside of London, not as plush or posh as Vauxhall or Ranelagh but characterized by the Truslers’ simple, rustic food: fruit tarts from their own gardens, and cheesecakes, cream, and butter from the sleek dairy cows that lowed and grazed in the lawns behind the theater. There were breakfasts, balls, and fireworks. The patrons were not wealthy but neither were they poor.

Anna had sung and danced in her father’s burlettas at Marylebone for as long as she could remember. She was a lively, clever child who wanted only to be pleasing to everybody. Her eyes were large and dark and mutable and seemed to express more depth of feeling and quickness of mind than were found in many an adult. Her thick, black-brown curls made Mrs. Storace despair that she would be taken for a Gypsy. Her stature was small and neat, and she carried herself gracefully, after her mother, who in times of greater prosperity had had a French dancing master.

The night before her first lesson with Venanzio Rauzzini, Anna had hardly slept. Every quarter of an hour she’d woken to see if it was time to get up, but it was always the depths of night, everyone
asleep but herself, her heart fluttering with excitement and her feet too hot. At last the sky had lightened and she’d heard Bridget beginning the morning chores.

“Up already?” Bridget had said.

Anna had looked at the good woman with solemn eyes. “It’s the most important day of my life.”

“Then you’d best get more sleep, my love,” said Bridget, but she gave Anna her bread and butter and let her stay.

The morning had lagged on as the night had done and then suddenly it was time to dress and go with her father to Rauzzini’s house in Covent Garden. When they entered the castrato’s apartment, three small dogs trotted down the hall to greet them. “I never thought he’d have
dogs
,” she whispered.

“He doesn’t have children,” said her father. He licked his lips and tugged his wig, which was too small. There were mirrors on the walls. Anna was afraid she looked shabby. The servant opened the tall inner doors and the dogs rushed before them into the drawing room, which was decorated richly in red. “Salutations,” said Venanzio Rauzzini, turning with an easy grace to meet them.

He spoke in Italian—a high, sweet, full voice. There were rings on all his fingers, and at his breast, a pin in the shape of a phoenix. He wore a fine blue coat and jeweled buckles on his shoes. His large, heavily lidded eyes had an expression of dreaminess and calm, and his face was as round and as smooth as a boy’s. He possessed an unusually tall frame, with wide, plump shoulders, gangling arms, and ample legs, and yet he carried himself so proudly, and moved with such elegance, that according to his reputation he could not enter a room without drawing every eye upon him to admire.

“You’re very young,” he remarked.

“I’m just small,” Anna exclaimed. “I’m already eleven.”

“Already?” he said. He gave her a warm look. “I’d have taken you for ten at most. Well, then, come with me. We’ll leave your father with my pups. You can play with them later, if you like. They’ve come all the way from Munich.”

She followed him to his music room, which smelled of books and cinnamon, and felt instantly relieved. Here she belonged, here she was home, with this purpose and this teacher. He held in his mind the knowledge she required. She need only convey to him now that she was better and brighter than any little girl on earth.

“She’s a pearl,” said his servant when the Storaces had departed.

Rauzzini looked at the other man and smiled. “Yes.”

He felt unexpectedly lively in the wake of the little girl’s visit, could not suppress his smile. One wanted a purpose, after all. One wanted a project, a pet. He had everything material but no children and no family. To be a castrato singer was to be a man from an alien land—not even a man. And yet even such a man might long to have a child. One could have wealth and favor, one could populate one’s house with trinkets and dogs, yet in the dinginess of London, and the remorseless, accelerating march of time, there was aimless, itching spleen. Each day his own singing—what he lived for, for which his young body had been violated—relieved him of that spleen. But he could not sing forever.