The Black Opera (72 page)

“You want me to transpose every principal role, where it's possible.” Roberto sounded both troubled, and oddly exhilarated.

“That's right. If one singer can't manage Nora's role—we'll divide it up between
all
of ours!”

Conrad sat, picked up his steel-nib pen, and drew his folder of the libretto towards him.

“And, besides that… By the time it comes to the
finale ultimo
—I don't know how many singers we'll have.”

Luigi Esposito came into the San Carlo's auditorium, possibly attracted by the shrieks of singers given new material—so closely resembling the old material—so close to the rise of the curtain. Conrad caught sight of him leaning against the back wall, and left Il Superbo in the chaos of arguing with chorus and orchestra.

Having explained his situation, he raised a brow.

Luigi looked innocent.

“You
always
know what's going on.” Conrad didn't mind paying for his information with compliments. “It's been an hour since I saw the King; what's happened?”

“I don't know much…” The police captain dusted off his white gloves. “Word's come back from Commendatore Mantenucci. His men and Colonel Alvarez's troop, they couldn't find anything on the road out of Posillipo. Last I heard, they were going through the Grotto to scout out the Flavian Amphitheatre.”

Conrad didn't bother to ask how Luigi heard things; the police chief's network of informants rivalled the Commendatore's.

Luigi added, “Colonel Alvarez sent orders for another company to join them. If it was me going after the Prince's Men, I'd have sent for more. But I hear the Commendatore's expecting ‘a handful of ruffians, conspirators, renegade gentlemen and their servants'…”

The impersonation was highly accurate. Conrad couldn't help a grin.

“Don't be too concerned,” Luigi finished. “In the police, we're used to dirty fighting with the people we don't name. One has to hope that the Prince's Men won't be expecting Colonel Alvarez's troops.”

Conrad let himself think how badly he wanted to hear that the black opera company was found, captured—was not somewhere out in the countryside of Campania, threatening
L'Altezza azteca
.

He thought bitterly that the worry allowed him to avoid the one thing that tore at him with wolf's teeth.
Where's Leonora?

A shiver of the earth penetrated the walls of the San Carlo, causing a sudden silence among the stagehands and musicians. After a few moments it ended, and they returned to their work.

Glancing back at Luigi, Conrad thought—even in the dim lighting—that he looked unusually grim.

“What?”

“Oh—nothing about the opera, Corrado.” The reassurance fell from Luigi Esposito's tone. “I just—don't like my orders. Naples is not to be evacuated.”

The sounds of tuning-up echoed from the orchestra. Conrad glimpsed Paolo with their father's violin, gesturing with the bow. His mouth went dry.

“I understand, I think. If you
did
give an order to evacuate, the city would be in chaos. People rioting, roads blocked by coaches… Most people still wouldn't get far enough away in time.”

Luigi looked down at his hands, and then up, meeting Conrad's gaze with a pained look.

“Corrado, doesn't it occur to you? If Ferdinand gives the order to evacuate Naples today, the Prince's Men would instantly know we're aware of their plans. He won't give away that advantage.”

To sacrifice Naples so as to have the black opera fail
—

“I understand.”

Conrad exchanged a look with Luigi, seeing both how much the other man disliked necessity and bowed to it. There was nothing to say.

He left the police chief a short time later, and determinedly made his way down into the body of the theatre, where frantic rehearsals proceeded under Paolo's tyrant hand.

A voice that is Dead, that has no human restrictions, that can span bass to soprano
—

“I
am
an idiot!” He said it out loud, just as he came up with the person he searched for. Taking Sandrine's arm, and momentarily ignoring her curious look, he escorted her to one of the boxes at the side of the stage. “I need to talk to you about Contessa Leonora's voice.”

“Leonora's
voice?”

It took a surprisingly short time to summarise what Roberto had told him. And would, he considered absently while he spoke, remove the need to make an announcement.
Sandrine will have it all around the company in ten minutes
.

She stared at him when he finished, absently adjusting her plumed head-dress.

Conrad took his copy of
Reconquista's finale ultimo
out of his coat pocket. Sandrine studied the staves scribbled on a fresh sheet of paper by the Count.

“A woman can sing this?”

“Nora
can sing this.” Conrad absently pencilled an alteration to one word of the libretto. “She has no human limitations now. Sandrine,
please
. You could do this—”

He found a soft fingertip pressed against his upper lip, and stuttered to a halt.

“This is opera,” Sandrine said softly. “If there was anywhere I wouldn't object to doing this… But it isn't possible. Corrado, it's true I used to sing tenor with a baritone lower range. Now I sing mezzo, with a contralto base—like Colbran, but without her soprano
tessitura
. It took a long time to train myself to use my upper range for speaking and singing. More to the point—”

She fixed him with a glare, as he tried to interrupt.

“—I've
never
trained for transitioning between the two voices! I have no idea how I'd go about finding my way through the
passaggio
between a baritone-shaded tenor and a high mezzo!—And I'm not going to learn before two o'clock this afternoon!”

“Merda!”
Conrad relieved his feelings. “No, not you, Sandrine.”

He rubbed at his eyes, watching the Conte di Argente down in the orchestra pit.

“Il Superbo's never believed anyone could sing this but Leonora. He's rescoring the last finale as a stretta, transposing it for all the principal singers, so everybody is singing part of it. I suddenly had the thought that you'd be the one who could sing it all.”

Sandrine Furino touched him gently on the arm, but didn't vocalise her sympathy. “You may want to talk to Estella and Signore Velluti about anything above high B. You're thinking in terms of range, Corrado; not whether someone has the resonance, tessitura, flexibility… It takes a long time to train a voice, and a long time to
re
-train one.”

“I thought I'd solved our problems.” Conrad sighed.

Sandrine nodded absently. She couldn't keep her eyes off the scribbled page of score. “Corrado, better get il Superbo to make more copies of this
Reconquista
—look at them over there, they're turning into a mob!”

“No one will have time to do more than learn their own part. The way we're going,” Conrad muttered, staring up at the rows of unoccupied boxes, “we'll still be rehearsing Act Four while you're singing Act One!”

“They'll hang il Superbo, and you too.” Sandrine snickered. She tucked the folded paper into the bodice of her costume. “Oh, Corrado, don't look so worried! Our singers are very forgiving!—Well, more than the Prince's Men would be, I think—Conrad?”

Conrad jolted out of his momentary daze.

“I've got it!”

Dropping Sandrine from his attention as if she were part of Angelotti's scenery, he tucked himself into a corner by the proscenium arch, with a silver-point pencil and a sheet of paper, and engaged himself in six minutes of rapid-fire, utterly-certain, scribbling.

Emerging, he found himself in the middle of singers on the stage, most of them waving either a short copy, or—in the case of Estella Belluci—Roberto's full score of
Il Reconquista d'amore
.

“I can't sing this!” Estella protested, waving her free hand at both Paolo-Isaura and the Conte di Argente.
“No
woman could sing this! If I sing Isabella as it demands to be done, I'll burst a blood-vessel and drop dead on the stage. If I sang even
part
of it, my voice would be wrecked forever!”

“Who says
you'll
be singing Isabella di Castiglia's part?” Velluti glanced up from unbuckling his stage breastplate, and ran his hand through his dark hair—which gave him the look of a rather large Naples street-brat. The great chandelier cast bright enough candle-light that Conrad saw the acquisitive glint in the man's eye.

“No woman
can
sing that,” the castrato said. “Not a mortal woman, anyway. But the soprano part of it is within my tessitura, and—I may lose my voice permanently, but all the same. Let
me
try.”

Velluti gave a sudden grin. “If I succeed and I lose my voice, people will travel miles just to see the castrato who did it, so I'll still have fame and fortune! If I fail… If
we
fail, I don't think it matters whether I've got my voice or not.”

Roberto Capiraso looked up from where he sat at the upright forte-piano. “I'm sorry to remove your chance of fame and fortune, Signore Velluti. Our
finale ultimo
is not to be one singer, nor the
prima donna
with an accompanying comprimaro singer, or accompanying chorus. Conrad once said to me, ‘put the effort in that you would to the end of Act Two'—so I'm scoring this the way an Act would work when it needs to drag the audience back into the theatre after the interval. I'm scoring Leonora's
finale ultimo
as a sextet.”

A thunder of protest broke. Conrad put his hands up, gesturing for silence.

It fell only when Roberto Capiraso stood, by the forte-piano, his dark gaze picking them out one by one. “Yes, I know it isn't done. The heroine or the hero sings at the final curtain. We'll be the first to do it differently.”

The silence deepened. Every singer and musician watched their composer. Conrad could see that all of them, by now, were aware that he had been one of the Prince's Men, and their enemy.

Roberto sounded both acid and grim. “Leonora has the advantage of being able to sing this part—but one voice is
one
voice. It can't be six different voices, in unison, in harmony, in counterpoint… If you can't do what she can do, do what she
can't
. If her range and colouring are more than human—then we'll see what polyphony can do.”

Slowly, the singers began to nod agreement.

Conrad smoothed out the paper he had crushed in his fist and walked forward, his boots loud on the stage boards.

“Now you're all here, I want to confirm that there'll be libretto changes as well. No—”

He lifted a hand, quieting them.

“Nothing major except the
finale ultimo
, and there I've written a handful of new lines, and added one piece of stage business.”

Paolo groaned under her breath, evidently trying to figure out how she could adapt anything new into the tightly-woven dance that was the staging and blocking.