And so she became my piano teacher also.
In several weeks’ time I was ready to sing the lesson. The voice felt made new after the long rest, stronger, surer, as if it were rooted the more deeply somehow. The noise of it was thrilling. Here in the lessons were the ways to attempt the vocal flourishes, the trills and diminuendos and crescendos I had only heard and never understood. Only when I was ready to stand did I realize how I had been raised up very slowly by degrees. Until I was singing in that position in which I would not ever lose my ground.
I made my way like this through that first winter into the spring in Weimar and Karlsruhe until we returned to Baden-Baden. By the summer, Natalya had moved on, and when the opera was performed, I replaced her onstage as Prince Lelio, singing of love to Maxine, who was still in the role of Stella. This amused the tenor to no end. Especially when I decided, with a flourish, to use that ruby rose gift from the Emperor, the one he had kept for me, as the flower the Queen gives Lelio to pass invisibly through the night.
§
At this distance, these lessons with her are, to me, her autobiography written in musical instruction. At the least, as I sat and learned to play beside her, they were a mirror to the story of a girl who had watched her older brother and sister both break very publicly—her sister singing herself to death after a horseback-riding accident, her brother losing his voice very young—and she, all the while, their talented much younger sister, who loved the piano more than she loved singing, picking out the notes before she sang. Doing as her father and mother said.
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.