Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?
The first thing determined in the career of a singer is her Fach. The word is German and sounded like Fate to me the first time I heard it. It is a singer’s fate, for it describes the singer’s range and the type of roles the singer will sing. Some soprano tones are associated with virtue, others with seduction, others with grief. If your voice is a collection of the highest notes, you are to play the good girl. If your voice reaches only to the near heights, you are the spurned one or the dishonored. A bit lower and you are the rival or the seductress, and still lower, the maid or matron. To move from the confines of your Fach was to risk sounding suddenly as if there had been no education in singing at all. The voice loses all its qualities.
Mine was a voice that sounded at first as if it did not have the capacity for high notes, until they emerged, surprising, with great force. A voice for expressing sorrow, fear, and despair. The tragic soprano is what I was called, also known as a Falcon.
Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.
Three
THE PIONEER EQUESTRIENNE remembered by Simonet and his composer friend took her first steps out onto the streets of Paris when she was sixteen years old, as a member of the Cajun Maidens and the Wonders of the Canadian Frontier, a small traveling cirque. The Emperor Napoléon III had emptied out the world’s pockets for the audiences at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. And as France was especially mad for stories of America and Canada, settlers and Indians, horses and beasts from the woods, we came to supply them.
We came to Paris for the pleasure of the Emperor. Him, his appetites, his reign, all controlling me even then.
We were three palomino horses, and Mela, the roan, with an actual Iroquois for our Indian Chief, a Russian Jewess from Saint Petersburg for the Indian Princess, and a troupe of five clowns—four brothers from Minsk and a woman from Portugal who was certainly not their sister—as their tribe. The magician was from Palermo and got himself up as the Medicine Man, and there were three trapeze artists for the Spirits of the North, two women and one man, who all hailed from Poland and were, I think, lovers, all three. A Swedish giant, a complete gentleman, wore a suit of fur and a false monster head, and was called the Wendigo, summoned forth by the Medicine Man. The show’s stars were the Cajun Maidens, five powerfully built sisters, all truly from Quebec, who began their routine as if doing ordinary household chores but with extraordinary tools—sweeping a broom the size of a husband, balancing firewood on their head—and then led up to ax juggling, knife throwing, somersaults on and off of horses.
Together they were my family for five months.
The show told the story of a young woman’s escape from captivity—mine. I played the Settler’s Daughter, adopted by the Cajun Maidens after having been “captured by the Indians and raised in their wild ways.” It was said I could fire a bow and arrow or a rifle, track an animal through the woods, and while I’d lost my English living among the Indians, I could still sing one song, a song my mother taught me, which I came out and sang in a round at the end.
By appearance, I am often thought to be Bohemian or Italian, though sometimes French, English, or Scandinavian. As a girl, I was slender, small, but with a large head and features—large brown eyes, dark red hair nearly brown. Any kind of beauty I had seemed to me to be in my hair, and when I wore it bound close to my head in braids, it was like a secret.
The Settler’s Daughter was a part invented by the show boss—he’d gone looking for one to replace the girl who’d left. I never knew her, and no one ever spoke of her. The story he invented he’d adapted for me because there was no other way to explain that this girl he’d found in New York could sing but not speak.
I was silent because I believed I was damned. I was sure I was a foul liar before God, a girl who’d tried to invent a miracle, and He’d taken my whole family except me to show me what He thought of me.
The one song I sang, I believed, was all that the Lord had left me. It was the song my mother had loved to hear, the one noise I thought He’d let me make and live. As for why I joined, it was because I could do this and, I swore, only this until I had been safely returned to my mother’s people, her family in Lucerne.
When I arrived in Paris, I thought I’d nearly made it there.