And if it was not her autobiography, it was at the least the door by which one could enter a life like hers.
At Madame Viardot’s school, her many successes were confided to us mostly by either of her two greatest admirers: Louis, who’d once managed an opera house in Paris, or Turgenev, who fell in love with her during her triumphant first season in Saint Petersburg. They spoke of her enormous capacity for memorization and her ability to keep many roles in her repertoire at the same time, even within a single opera, and in several languages. Once, in Berlin, during a performance of Robert le Diable, she replaced another singer as she also continued singing her own role. Later, in London, in Les Huguenots, she found herself tricked by a rival into performing the lead in Norma in Italian—but her tenor that night was going to sing his part in French. She taught herself the French as the opera began, in the wings, and her Norma was also French halfway through the performance. To the audience, Louis said, as he paused with a rare wit in his eye, it was as if the druidess had cast a spell on her own throat.
These were not lectures but they acted as such: We were to be as ruthless in the pursuit of a performance and as able. I soon inquired about learning other languages, and learning my parts, when I was allowed to, each in several languages, all of which pleased Pauline—and all of which she could teach. I began the practice of learning the other major roles of opera. I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover.
I was consumed by my apprenticeship and paid little attention to the tenor’s affairs. At first, on our return to Baden-Baden, he enjoyed himself at the casinos and baths as if he were on some extended vacation, and he was a hit at Pauline’s many dinners and events, sometimes even singing at the Haustheater, much as she’d suggested. Soon he was excusing himself to go on trips, at first for a few days and nights and then increasingly for longer—a week, a fortnight. But he would always return for the Haustheater events, as if they were to him a regular engagement at any other theater. The proximity of Baden-Baden to the major capitals and its strange role as both a sanitarium and a casino to the rich meant a variety of notables passed through, and all of them sought a place either in her audience or on her stage.
Each time the tenor returned from his trips, he found me further along in my education and praised me. He brought gifts, always. He kept an apartment in the town I rarely saw; it was impractical for me to live so far from the house. Each time he returned, some part of me was surprised to think I had not fled, but that part became smaller and smaller as time went on. I was content with my situation, happy to see him, happy to be with him.
This last, in some ways, was the most confusing for me, the part that would be the hardest to forgive.
§
It’s for the best they rejected you, Pauline said of the Conservatoire after she had heard me sing a little. Pauline then launched into a critique of their system. Too many teachers confuses, she said. The tenor tells me you studied with Delsarte, yes?
Yes, I said.
Delsarte will tell anyone he lost his voice to the Conservatoire’s methods, she said. It may even be true.
She let this stay in the air a moment before continuing.
There are two voices for an opera singer, Pauline said. Your speaking voice, which can be as ordinary as a wren’s. And then the singing voice, which can sound as strange as something the wren found and holds in its beak, as if it comes from some other place entirely. For most singers, that voice is something made from the first, carefully, with both passion and patience. A patience born of that passion. For a few, their voice is a gift and can improve with training, but it has qualities that cannot be taught. And because the singer did not make this voice herself with careful training, she does not know what those qualities are except that she finds them by singing.
She paused and then said, She also does not know when the gift will break.
She smiled at me as she said that. Be careful of your roles, she said. I sang everything out of youthful pride in my three-octave voice, and I should not have. Yours is much like my own. It will not last forever, this voice. I know this seems very cruel, as you must give everything to become a singer and then it may be taken from you all at once. The voice can go quite suddenly or slowly, but even with a slow departure, once it is underway, it will sound as if the original voice has already left you.
I said nothing, alternately warm from her compliment—she believed my voice was like hers!—and chilled entirely by this warning, which was, of course, meant to chill me.
She then began to play a slow scale and then went faster, the movement between high C to high E flat and back down again.
There, she said. Did you hear it? That’s one place you may fall.
She played it again, the notes sounding this time almost like a trap.
Don’t be afraid, she said. It’s not just the melodies we should know. We must know also where we could fail. Learn them and you will never fall, not, at least, before your time.
§
After my lesson was done, I passed by Pauline’s library, where her autographed manuscript score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni stood on a music stand. I went in, as was now my custom. The Mozart manuscript lay open, turned to a new page every day, as if each day Pauline came in and looked over the handiwork of her hero now that she was also a composer.
Le Dernier Sorcier had been a success in Weimar and Karlsruhe, and this had filled her with some new courage and happiness. She was now busy with her commission from the Queen of Prussia. Turgenev also had brightened in the reflected glory, though he sometimes seemed still pained by the regrettable controversy he made when he published praise of the production, for which he was intensely criticized—he was, after all, the author of the libretto, beyond all other personal relations to the opera, the singers, and the production. The scandal had wounded him and Pauline both; in the Haustheater we understood it as an excess of enthusiasm, the madness of love, and forgave it. But out in the world, it was egotism, nepotism, and, given the way they lived here, a disgrace.
This scandal would subside, but after I left there, in the years that followed, I would often have a chance to reflect on the doubled irony, the twin fictions of Pauline as “ugly” and the temptress who brutally controlled Turgenev. Whenever it came up in conversations, I would recoil and sometimes want to assure them as Natalya assured me, that Turgenev was the one who’d urged Pauline to take her composing more seriously as her voice began to fade—he did what he did out of his faith in her talents as a composer, as well as out of love. We all knew Pauline’s mother had forced her to sing—Pauline had wanted to stay at her piano, out of sight. I thought of this often when we sat down to our lessons there—how, as her singing voice left her, this voice, the piano, remained—the one she’d preferred all along.
When I saw them working together, their heads bent over the score, making adjustments and speaking intensely over this or that part of the new drama, I saw a kind of love I’d not seen before, a devotion unlike any other. To the extent he’d disgraced her and himself, it was born of an excess of his fear that the world—that world that had judged her voice by her face—would not accept this from her, either. And yet I also understood that he should never have published that essay. There were too many of his readers who believed our strange little paradise, these two houses side by side, were a disgrace.