Vienna Nocturne (18 page)

“And here I am!” Stephen exclaimed, looking around him. “I have not seen much of it yet, but I love Vienna.”

“Anna is admired here,” said Mrs. Storace. “She can hardly take a step but someone is soliciting her or offering her his elbow.”

“All the better for me and my opera,” Stephen said with a smile.

“She’s the only reason the emperor agreed to do your opera.”

“Mama,” Anna said.

Stephen shook his head. “It’s all right—I’m not ashamed.”

“Nor am I.” She took his hand. “I need your music. Yours. Only yours. Everything else is so dull, I can’t tell you how dull—it has no
relation
to me, my heart is elsewhere, there’s nothing anymore to sing for—”

“Good gracious,” Stephen exclaimed. “Who is this changeling?
What have they done with my butterfly sister? Where has your joy gone?”

“So you see it was all for my own sake,” she said, smiling helplessly. “And now I fear I’ve only made things worse—your prima buffa should not look like a ship at sea. I’ll ruin everything.”

“Nonsense,” he said. The opera will be nothing without you. Nobody has heard of me.”

“Yet,” she said.

He laughed. “Yet! Soon the whole world will know, thanks to you. I always said we were going to be a team, didn’t I?”

“John Fisher,” Mrs. Storace said abruptly. She fixed her gaze on the ground. “It was John Fisher took the joy out of her, and I could do nothing to stop it. How many days and nights I wished you to come, Stephen, but she wouldn’t write you.”

“There was nothing to say!” Anna cried. “It’s all over now and I’ll have none of this about losing my joy, whatever in the world that means. How could I lose my joy when Stephen is here and it’s almost springtime and I have a new Storace opera to present to everyone? I’ve never been happier. I don’t know how I’ll sleep tonight.”

“Neither do I,” Stephen said. “Oh, Anna. To have an opera of my own performed—on such a stage, with such singers, with you! To think I almost gave this up.” He sprang to his feet and paced the room, glancing at himself in the mirror above the fireplace. “It’s what I was born to do, just like Papa said. I’ve been denying God’s will, denying my nature. Even the air is different here. It hums. One can feel the music in it. But wait until you hear my opera. It will be like nothing anyone has ever heard. I can’t help but think that this is the pinnacle—this, right here, this itself, or at least the beginning of the pinnacle, the pinnacle at the foot of some more majestic, higher pinnacle. Can’t you help it, either? This moment is ours at last, just as Papa imagined us, ourselves united in the most beautiful, the most perfect art in the world, your voice and my music!”

“Stephen,” Anna said, “you mustn’t dream so hard. It makes me nervous.”

“No matter! All you have to do is sing the thing before the emperor and all the great plush regatta of his court and concubines. That alone will be more than I have dared let myself dream even in my hours of greatest self-intoxication.” And he looked at her kindly and patted her hand, as if he felt that all this would reassure her rather than make her feel more apprehensive.

Even with her husband gone she was still not herself. Her voice had lost its freshness. Rauzzini would have noticed the vocal strain that she battled in private but could not determine how to resolve.

Stephen found his sister more subdued than he remembered her. Her expression would sometimes sadden when she thought no one was looking, and she moved more slowly because of the baby. But her cheeks had a good color. Her eyes were as bright as ever. She had written to him after Christmas to say that her husband had been sent away because he hadn’t been a good man. For a girl like his sister, who was all amiability and affection, to have married wrongly—married, perhaps, a scoundrel—was beyond bearing. There was no man on earth who deserved her love. But the evening of his arrival when he tried in his fumbling way to ask after her health, she smiled as if amused and passed on to easier subjects.

“This is my Lidia,” she said. “She’s my lady’s maid and my true friend. You must get her to sing for you sometime, Stephen. She has a lovely voice.”

“It would be my great pleasure,” he said with interest, bowing to the girl. She was tall and brown, and had firm, honest features. He thought immediately that he would like to draw her.

“She’s from Naples,” Anna said. “She grew up in one of the girls’ conservatories. But she’s about to sink into the floor from embarrassment so we’ll say no more. Come, let me show you your room.”

His mother, too, seemed diminished. He felt he did not know her and had little to say.

Anna introduced Stephen to Mozart a few days later. She helped lay out the luncheon and was all aflutter that Stephen should meet her friend. She and her mother had a gracious dining area with a long table and rich paneling. Stephen could not believe how they lived here, in such luxury. He had taken John Fisher’s old quarters, next door to Anna’s, and it gave him satisfaction to paper over the impression and smell of the man. He spread his possessions all over. He rearranged the desk and bed and put up a few of his watercolor sketches, landscapes of England.

He told Anna she mustn’t tire herself with this luncheon business, but she said with the brightest look that there was nothing wearisome about bringing together two of the best gentlemen she knew. Stephen hoped to take composition lessons from Mozart, and Mozart wanted English lessons, so that he could someday return to London. He had been there once as a little boy, before Anna and Stephen were born, and it would be just the thing for him, he said. But Anna did not have the patience to teach him English; she said she wouldn’t know where to begin.

Mozart embraced Stephen like a brother and greeted Mrs. Storace cordially. He was a pale, slightly built man in his natural hair. His big eyes, Stephen thought, like agate stones, overset by soft reddish brows, seemed to seize and stare into one’s very soul, such was the intensity of his attention and concentration. Yet he was also fidgety and shy. He had his neck wrapped in a checkered scarf because he had been ill. He ate with a ravenous appetite and avowed pleasure, two plates full; he had been up since six, composing, he said, and had taken no breakfast, only a single piece of cheese three hours in. He’d given up his opera. Nobody wanted an opera from him anyway. Now he was just composing piano concertos and symphonies,
chamber music for sweet ladies, to pay the bills. How grand it was that Stephen had gotten an opera at the Burg—Mozart looked forward to hearing it. Stephen blushed and said he’d rather it was one of Mozart’s operas and Mozart said that was nonsense. For Stephen to be only twenty-two and having his first opera premiered at the Burgtheater—that was something to be proud of.

Mozart wanted to know everything about London and the English way of being. There was a craze for all things English these days. They talked of politics and freedom and America. Mozart had just joined the Freemasons, though he couldn’t tell them anything about it, only that it was marvelous and new. He had a friend there, a lodge brother, who was a black man, an actual African, working for his freedom from a nobleman. And by God he had nearly gotten it. He was a great fellow, married to a Viennese lady. Freemasonry, Mozart said, was about freedom and humanity, how to live, how to regulate one’s mind to the highest capacity and discipline. It was a bastion of science, medicine, and all the arts.

“We used to see blacks in London,” Mrs. Storace said. “Poor creatures. And of course one finds all kinds of Turks and Egyptians in this city. I never heard of one living so kingly as your man. I suppose he can’t believe his luck.”

Mozart looked at her. “Well, madam,” he said at last. “I do not know if that is true. Perhaps someday you might ask him.”

She blanched. “I do not go out often, Herr Mozart.”

“She reminds me of my father,” Mozart said to the Storace siblings later, when they retired to the music room.

“You, too?” said Stephen with a laugh. They had been talking of their childhoods, how all of them had been paraded for their musical skills—though Mozart’s parade, of course, had covered all of Europe.

“Put her in trousers,” Mozart said, “and I’d call her my own.”

“She married very young,” Anna said. “It was practically an elopement. But she was educated, you see. She really should have been a man.”

“Our father was a bumbler,” Stephen declared. “She’s the one who taught us to read.”

Stephen felt nervous and young beside Mozart. Mozart was an open, jovial fellow, but filled with such intensity—those fishlike eyes, that flushed pallor, behind which thrummed arteries of life and thought—that one almost wished to escape for air.

But composition lessons had already been proposed, and Mozart suggested looking over some of Stephen’s pieces now, why not this instant? Perhaps a selection from the new opera? Stephen could not refuse. Anna asked if she might sit and watch. Her brother, though he had not been expecting a lesson today and would rather have been taught in private, said that of course she might.

He and Mozart sat at the keyboard with one of Stephen’s favorite arias from his opera and the orchestration to which he’d been setting it. Mozart proceeded to reduce it to rubble.

He was not harsh, but neither did he coddle, and for that, at least, Stephen was grateful. Mozart spoke in a low, mild voice, so that only they two could hear, and made small markings on the paper or played examples and ideas to explain his reasoning. When he praised, it seemed praise truly felt: he would stop to explore some surprise or beauty in Stephen’s line or harmony, and wonder at how it worked, and speculate how it might be still improved, so it left one feeling oddly cheered, even in the wreckage of everything that was drab and hackneyed and ugly and wrong. Mozart’s powers of concentration were all-consuming. The walls might have collapsed in flames around them and he would have kept murmuring and analyzing. He must do the same with his own work, one felt, only perhaps with still more strictness and rigor, and for this, too, one was wholly grateful even as one was stripped raw to the bone. Stephen hardly knew whether to laugh at himself or weep. It seemed impossible folly that his opera would go up in two months.

“We must do this again,” he said to Mozart rather weakly after they’d gone through everything. “I’ll pay you, of course. I’m going
to have to think for days but I’d like to see you again—there are so many things I’ve got to learn.”

“I like it very much,” said Mozart, nodding at the page. He was silent a moment and then asked, “I wonder if you might indulge me in letting me play this aria with your sister? Would you mind singing, mademoiselle? It’s been too long since I played with you. If we run through this aria I could show your brother what I mean about the accompaniment.” His face as he said this had a dreamy quality; his eyes seemed the color of a briny sea. Flushed and smiling, Anna rose and went to the piano. Stephen with some reluctance took her place on the sofa. Her maid, Lidia, stood just inside the doorway. She’d come so quietly he hadn’t noticed her. She had a chin, he thought, like an arrow’s point.

Mozart smiled at Anna. There was a scarcely perceptible pause. Then he looked down and began to play.

Anna already knew the aria. She sang it easily and well. One forgot, watching her, that she was heavy with child. She seemed all girlish grace. Her color was high and her smile infectious. She got this look often when she sang, as though her life had become whole, as though she wished to do nothing ever but this. Now, however, the feeling seemed deepened. Had she not looked so happy one might have thought she was about to cry. Perhaps she was so affected because her brother had returned, or perhaps it was love and expectation for her child. Stephen had forgotten how beautiful her voice was and how unhampered by artifice. She sounded only like herself.

Mozart, however, was changing the entire accompaniment. Stephen, listening to his music in the hands of another—only altered, at times dramatically altered, by what this far more skilled composer suggested with harmony and texture and dynamic—felt riveted and strange. He was almost queasy. Was he so conservative as all that—so conventional? This particular aria had been his favorite. It had been, to him, one of the best things he’d ever done in his life. But it turned out to have been rubbish.

His sister was happy, singing with Mozart. He had come here expecting her to be troubled or wounded and it turned out she was happy and well. Watching them was like watching swallows in the air. He could not touch them. He was wholly barred. Though it was his music, the best parts of it were what they did with it, the phrasing, the tempo, the embellishments, such as would never have occurred to Stephen by himself. He could have gone on his knees.

“There,” Mozart said. “You see? Of course it was only a little improvisation. You’re a treasure, mademoiselle, to follow me.”

Stephen groaned. “You’re giving me headaches, Mozart.”

“As my father always told me,” Mozart said, putting on a long face, “
Learn or die! Learn or die, my son!
”

“I thought it was better before,” Lidia said softly to Stephen as they were parting. “I liked yours better.”