I passed her opera glasses back to her.
The curtain rose. Guards sat outside a palace at night, anxious to help their Count di Luna catch the trovatore who had been coming regularly to serenade the Duchess Leonora at night. The Count loved her jealously and, having failed to court her successfully, was anxious to end this interference. The guard captain sang to the guards of the Count’s tragic history to keep them awake—how as a child, the Count’s younger brother fell ill, and the Count’s father blamed a Gypsy and burned her at the stake. After the fire, a child’s bones were found among the Gypsy’s ashes and the brother was missing. It was said the Gypsy’s daughter had kidnapped the sick boy and left him to burn with her mother in revenge. Only the Count’s father was sure his youngest boy was still alive somewhere and charged the Count with finding his younger brother.
But for now, the Count was in love, and his guards were ready to help him.
The curtain closed and reopened to applause. A beautiful young woman in a veil stood in a garden at night, another woman approaching her through the dark, calling for her. When the woman in the veil turned to face us, the applause deepened. Adelina Patti was tonight’s Leonora, the best possible surprise. I had not seen her since she had changed my life with her Lucia. My fears left me; surely this would be the best night of my life.
She began Leonora’s first aria, of a mysterious knight in black armor she’d crowned the victor at a tournament, and described how she fell in love with him then. War had begun shortly thereafter, separating them, and she’d sustained herself on her memories of that day until one night here in the garden she was surprised to hear the song of a troubadour, her name on his lips. When she came to the garden, she saw it was him, the love she’d feared lost.
The night I’d heard her sing as Lucia was nothing compared to this—on that night I had only remembered the music, which moved me. This, however, was my first experience of the ridiculous and beloved thief that is opera—the singer who sneaks into the palace of your heart and somehow enters the stage singing aloud the secret hope or love or grief you hoped would always stay secret, disguised as melodrama; and you are so happy you have lived to see it done. The singer singing to you with the full force of what you feel is transfigured and this transfigures you; you feel as if it were you there in the opera, the opera your story, the story of your life. And so I stared in amazement from the box as Patti sang what was in my heart, what I hoped was my secret future; and in her slow, soaring, searching aria full of surpassing sweetness I found my first real consolation since leaving Compiègne. By the time she began her defiant cabaletta—My fate will not be complete if he is not by my side! If I do not live for him, for him I will die—her final note sustained like a sword held to the sky, the crowd rose to its feet cheering, the flowers raining down on the stage, and I, I caught myself. I had already stood, clutching the edge of the box.
The Count appeared alone then, singing stolidly of his hopes for his love for Leonora. Also of his jealousy. And so I sat.
I knew then I would sing Leonora if I could. I wanted nothing more. I was her, and she was me.
This was, of course, what the tenor had hoped for, what he’d never been able to arrange for me or describe. The roles he had tried to tempt me with were like little crumbs he had laid out for me compared to this. He knew this was the quickening; he knew what I would know after this night: that it is impossible to sing opera if the singer has never felt this.
The song for the entrance of the trovatore, Manrico, began next. It is one of the most beautiful, I think, of the songs there are for men. He is announced first by a harp, which is his lute, heard in the distance as he approaches through the forest at night, intent on Leonora, who listens for him from her window as Count di Luna, on hearing him, hides in the dark garden.
Alone on this earth,
at war with his fate,
one hope in his heart,
of a heart for the troubadour!
If he possesses that heart,
beautiful in its pure faith.
He is greater than any king . . .
The troubadour king!
Leonora rushes to the garden and embraces the Count, not the trovatore, mistaking the one voice for the other, the one man for the other, upsetting both. I knew the story well enough from the tenor; this is a clue that the trovatore is the Count’s long-lost brother, his hated rival for Leonora’s affections, unknown to him. But I knew, even if the tenor had a brother who sang, his voice would not sound like the tenor’s; there could be no mistake.
The tenor was not in the audience because he was on the stage.