impossible. Guido was clenching his teeth, and without meaning to, banging the keyboard as if he could draw some greater volume out of it.
The sweat fell from his face right onto the backs of his hands. He could not hear Tonio now. He could not even hear his own instrument.
Tonio had finished the song, he had made his bow, and with the same placid countenance gone into the wings.
From the whole first tier came a riotous applause that added nothing but noise to the hissing and screaming of the others.
It seemed to Guido there could be no more perfect hell for him than the moments that followed. The next scene was assembling itself on stage, and it was for this, the closing of the first act, that he had written Tonio’s most magnificent aria. Every melody he’d given him was expertly tuned to show off his voice, but this was the set piece, the song that must prevent the great ladies and gentlemen of Rome from rising indifferently from their boxes and moving on elsewhere.
Bettichino’s strongest aria would come right before it, but Bettichino would be heard! Guido was frantic.
The hissing had commenced again as soon as Tonio had appeared on the stage, and out of the corner of his eyes Guido saw another torrent of those little white slips of paper, covered no doubt with some malicious verse, falling everywhere.
Bettichino had come to the fore. He had now the most tantalizing and original of Guido’s accompanied recitatives. It was the only part of the opera where action and song met, for he was now singing about the story itself, yet singing not humdrum narrative, but singing with feeling.
It was here Guido’s strings did their finest work, and he himself could hardly hear or think or know what he was playing. The hisses had died as Bettichino began, and then the singer went from this into the grandest of his arias.
He had taken his time before giving the signal, the applause for the recitative producing for the first time a violent reaction in the audience. Guido took a deep breath. So Tonio had his own champions, thank God, and they were fighting Bettichino’s with the same catcalls and protests.
Guido saw the singer signal for him to start, and alone Guido led the way into this most tender of arias. There was no other piece of music to match it in the rest of the opera, save the song that Tonio sang directly after.
Bettichino slowed the tempo. Guido followed immediately. And then even Guido felt the mastery of Bettichino’s smooth and poignant beginning, his voice weaving up so delicately and yet so strongly it was like an unbreakable wire slowly uncoiling itself.
He let his head fall back. Going into the repeat of the first part, he was trilling the first note perfectly in one straight line, never deviating from it up or down, but merely punching it gently again and again, and again, as if that wire that was his voice were pulsing over and over with staccato radiance. Then he glided into the tender phrases, enunciating them magnificently, and as he came to the end, it was the swell, but this time the Esclamazio Viva, the note started at full volume and now diminished ever so gradually and so sweetly that it produced the most profound sadness.
It seemed that descending note, that note vanishing almost to the echo of itself, was wrapped in total silence. And then he let it rise again becoming stronger and stronger until he stopped it at full volume, with a resolute shake of his head.
His followers went wild. But there was no need for them to stoke the blaze in the parterre. The abbati were heralding him with a deafening stomping of the feet and hoarse exclamations of Bravo!
Bettichino circled the stage and now he came to the fore for his encore.
No one, of course, expected it to be the same—it was mandatory that it be different, and Guido at the keyboard was ready for those subtle differences—but it is doubtful anyone expected the show of tremolos and trills and then again those swells that seemed to defy human explanation. It was swells finally that were carrying the hour.
Bettichino went into the song a third and last time, and retired from the stage an unchallenged victor.
All right. Guido couldn’t be sorry for this. He couldn’t be sorry for an audience on the edge of their seats, but if these beasts had any decency they would