The Violinist of Venice (45 page)

She paused. “I suppose you are right about that,” she said. “But I … oh, I just do not know if I can! It has been so long.”

“You will have to practice, as the children do,” I said.

“I do not know,” she said. “I will have to think on it, and consult Giuseppe, and make sure he is comfortable with the idea.”

I rolled my eyes. “When have you ever known my brother to deny you anything?” I asked. “He will be more delighted than anyone.”

In typical Vittoria fashion, she begged me to give her time to consider it further, and we turned our attention back to Lucrezia's melody.

Later that week, however, Vittoria asked me to tea and gave me her answer.

“I will do it,” she said, her eyes shining with excitement. “You were right, Giuseppe is thrilled. And since it will not technically be in public, I do not think it violates the contract.”

“Of course it does not,” I said. “Oh, Vittoria, this is wonderful! Have you decided what you shall sing?”

“I shall write to Maestro Vivaldi and have him send us something,” she said. “Something for soprano and violin; whatever he thinks is best. If that is agreeable to you.”

Already my fingers were itching for the strings of my violin, to play something of Vivaldi's I had never seen. “Oh, yes,” I said. “I am perfectly agreeable.”

*   *   *

The night of the concert, Vittoria and I had decided that we would go first, and then leave the stage to the children.

“Oh, I so hope it goes well!” she said, pacing nervously. “Not just for me, but for the children as well!”

“It will all be fine,
cara,
” I promised her. I adjusted the sleeves of my gown. “It is going to be a wonderful evening.”

We went downstairs, where guests had begun seating themselves, directed by Giuseppe. The children were waiting in the small parlor of the
piano nobile.

“Are you nervous, my darlings?” I asked them.

“No,” Lucrezia said, though she looked uncertain.

Antonio shook his head, though I noticed he was a bit pale.

“No,” Cecilia said, sounding as if she were the only one who meant it.

“Good,” I said. “You must play as you do when it is just you three, and forget anyone else is listening.”

“The only reason you will ever have to be nervous,” Vittoria added, “is if you do not know your music well enough. And you three have it well in hand.”

I smiled at her. “Wise words,” I said pointedly.

She blushed. “For me it is a bit different.”

“Should we begin soon? Is it time?” Although Lucrezia was trying hard to act the poised young woman—dressed in her finest pale pink dress, her hair artfully pinned up like a lady's—she was near to bouncing up and down in excitement.

“I think that it is time,” Vittoria said hesitantly. “Shall we?”

We filed out of the parlor and into the main floor of the
piano nobile,
where instruments and music had already been assembled. The audience applauded as we entered. I saw Giuseppe seated in the front with Marco, their oldest son—Adriana (named in my honor) and her baby brother, little Giuseppino, having been left at home with their nursemaid—and a couple of his friends and their children. Donna Barbo and her husband, Senator Barbo, sat in the second row—Donna Barbo and I had taken to calling upon each other often, and though she was a great deal older than I, she was excellent company, with her sharp intelligence and even sharper wit. Beside her sat Giulietta and Mario, then Tommaso Foscari and his three children, who had become fast friends with my own: Isabella, Andrea, and Pia. In the last row sat Padre Davide, Giovanna, Meneghina, and Antonio's harpsichord instructor, Maestro Ferro.

The children went to sit with their uncle, and Vittoria and I took our places. “Friends,” I said, addressing the assembly, “thank you for coming. My children have put together this program all on their own, with little help from me or their teachers. I am so happy you could all come, to hear their hard work and talent for yourselves.”

I turned to Vittoria. “I could not, however—and my children agreed—pass up this opportunity to showcase another great talent among us. Without further ado,
signori e signore,
my dearest friend and sister-in-law, Vittoria Rivalli, formerly Vittoria della Pietà.”

Everyone applauded, and I took a moment to retrieve my violin—Vivaldi's violin, the one he had given me and which I had played ever since—from its case. I tightened the bow, checked the tuning, then glanced at Vittoria. When she nodded, I began to play.

The lilting yet flowing violin melody seemed to fall from the strings of its own accord. After my few measures of introduction, Vittoria began to sing.

“Domine deus, rex coelestis,”
she sang, her sweet yet powerful voice filling the whole room.
“Deus pater, deus pater.”

She sang on, her voice tumbling through the long, melismatic passages. I struggled to keep my mind on my own playing, so engrossed was I in listening to her. As marvelous as she had sounded in practice, here she was otherworldly.

Sometimes my part doubled hers, and sometimes I went off on my own, playing little flurries of figures behind and between her singing. It was, in truth, a conversation between soprano and violin, and during practice we had learned to make it so, ensuring that neither part overpowered the other—though in truth I felt certain Vittoria's performance would outshine mine no matter what.

Soon enough we had reached the end of the aria, and I played the final measures, slowly bringing the piece to a close.

The applause was instantaneous. I could see that Vittoria was flushed, and her face almost could not contain her grin.

So this is what she gave up,
I mused, looking out at the applauding audience. I felt my own grin stretch wide as I realized that they were also applauding for
me.

Once the applause ended, we took our seats. “Beautiful,” Giuseppe murmured, leaning over to kiss Vittoria. “The angels themselves are jealous,” he said, smiling at us both, “for there are no finer musicians in all the celestial choir.”

Then the attention shifted to the children, as it should. Lucrezia, dimpling prettily at the audience, explained that their first piece was an old love song that her Zia Vittoria had taught her. Without further ado they began, Antonio playing a short introduction on the harpsichord, joined by Cecilia, who had added trills and ornaments to the simple piece. I thought I caught her throwing a glance at Andrea Foscari, to see if he noticed her skillful playing.

I found myself quite forgetting that I was listening to my own children. While they were perhaps not quite as polished as the musicians from the Pietà, that their skills went beyond their ages was obvious. Although Lucrezia's voice was not as strong or mature as Vittoria's, she projected it well, and had a lovely vibrato. Vittoria was certain that she was a soprano; she said there were certain telltale signs: her facility at handling and sustaining the higher notes, the lighter coloring of her voice.

Next, they moved on to a song by Alessandro Scarlatti, entitled
“Sento nel core.”
Maestro Scarlatti had died just a few years before; a tragedy, to be sure, for having seen many of his operas, I had grown quite fond of his work.

The song—which Vittoria had told me was perhaps more appropriate for an older singer, with a heavier voice, but Lucrezia had insisted—sounded lovely even stripped down to a bare accompaniment. Yet as much as Lucrezia captivated the audience with her shimmering voice, and Antonio solidly provided the basis of the whole endeavor, I found my attention continually drawn back to Cecilia.

She played well, better than I had at her age. She lost herself in the music, played the emotion of it as Vivaldi had always said I must, found the heart of each phrase, each note, and leaned on it until the listener nearly gave way beneath her.

She had much still to learn, but her gift was monumental. If she trained it properly, she would be greater than I ever could be. She could, I realized, tears stinging my eyes, make good on her promise to Vivaldi and someday play as well as he.

But for what? So she could marry someday, and play for and teach her children, and have no one beyond her own
piano nobile
ever know what a talent she was?

In that instant, I was angrier at the injustice of it all on my daughter's behalf than I had ever been on my own.
But,
I thought,
has this not always been enough for me? Is music not an end in and of itself?

After this song, Cecilia lowered her violin and spoke to the audience, sounding far more poised and mature than her not yet thirteen years would account for. “You have heard, earlier, that our mother is a most accomplished violinist. Yet what most people do not know is that she is also a talented composer. She has written this next piece for us, so that we might share it with you.”

With that, she set her instrument into place again and, with a nod to Antonio, began.

This was not like the concerti I had written as a young woman, melancholy and minor and full of despair at the future I knew awaited me. No, this was light and deliberately simple, a song for my children, a song of love.

“I would sing of love in so new a way,” Lucrezia began, the lively and vibrant melody falling from her lips like a shower of gentle spring rain. Cecilia's violin part, which I had set to both imitate and embellish the melody, danced with her sister's singing, creating a harmonious counterpoint that rang out more brilliantly than I had ever imagined it could when I placed those blots of ink on the page. Even Antonio's part had an echo of the melody here and there, not just the simple chords that were usually given to the harpsichord.

They performed it just as I had imagined they would, and better.
No, I could not have written that; whatever I did write they have taken and transformed and made into their own, into something better than I dreamed.
And when they finished, Lucrezia was pulling me back up to the front of the room, to bow again. I knew I should say something else, if the applause ever faded; congratulate my children, say how proud I was. But I could not find the words.

My teary eyes flitted from Giuseppe and Vittoria to my nephew to my friends and then to Tommaso Foscari, wearing a huge smile and looking as proud of me as Giuseppe had been of Vittoria.

Surely there are many, many new ways to sing of love; ways that I have yet to discover or even imagine.

 

MOVEMENT SEVEN

THE RED PRIEST'S ANNINA

November 1727–April 1734

 

66

ORLANDO FURIOSO

I did not see Anna Girò make her operatic debut in Venice, in Albinoni's
Laodicea,
in 1724. Nor did I go to see her sing in her first role that Vivaldi wrote for her, in his opera
Farnace,
which premiered at the Teatro Sant' Angelo in February of 1727.

In truth, I was torn by uncertainty. The desire to see my daughter—fueled in no small part by simple curiosity—was almost overwhelming. Yet still I resisted.

Anna Girò was slowly becoming the talk of Venice. Her early performances did not receive much praise, when she was noticed at all among the crowd of ostentatious divas and preening castrati. Yet it had been conceded by many of the operatic critics that she was quite young and had potential, once she had learned more about singing and the operatic stage.

However, she remained a relative nonentity in the opera world until she was taken on as a protégée by the great Maestro Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi, it seemed, was both teaching her how to be a great diva, as well as writing roles for her low voice—unusually low for someone so young. And in Venice, where no morsel was too small to make a fattening meal of gossip, the exclusive attention paid by a well-known composer, impresario, and violinist to a heretofore unknown singer gave society's tongues plenty to wag about.

For a while it was accepted that she was simply the maestro's favorite pupil. Yet by the time it was announced that she was to appear as the sorceress Alcina in Vivaldi's
Orlando furioso,
premiering at the Sant' Angelo in November of 1727, the rumors had begun to brew into the storm that would hang over Vivaldi's head for the rest of his life.

While there was the odd critic who raved about her performance in
Farnace,
most critics and the discerning, operagoing Venetian public seemed to think that while her acting skills were of an extremely high quality, her voice was not. And, everyone was asking, should not Vivaldi know this better than anyone? Why, then, was he devoting so much of his surely valuable time to a rather unremarkable student?

Only three souls living knew the truth: Vivaldi, Giuseppe, and I. I knew without needing to be told that Anna still did not know the truth of her parentage. I also knew Vivaldi would not reveal it to her, out of respect for me and for the secret we had scrupulously kept all these years.

But as far as the rest of Venice was concerned, there must be only one explanation: Anna Girò was Vivaldi's mistress. It was whispered by the most notorious gossips until it became common knowledge. Already they were calling Anna
l'Annina del Prete Rosso:
the Red Priest's Annina.

My initial reaction to the rumors was horror; luckily, it was from Giuseppe that I heard it first, so there was no need to hide my response. Yet eventually—though my disgust with those who delighted in such unproven rumors did not abate—that horror faded, replaced by a rather wry sense of irony.

This was all in addition to the reputation Vivaldi had gained of late for being somewhat grasping, determined to receive his due for his art at any cost. He was, it was said, capable of being a most unpleasant man when crossed. I could not quite reconcile these accounts with the man I had known so well. Could he truly have changed so much?