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.