Finally the Maestro put down his pen, blew out the candle which had become nothing but a solid little flicker of yellow in the bluish light, and started talking without any formal greeting.
“Your voice is extraordinary. You’ve been told that enough,” he said as if arguing with somebody, “so don’t expect further praise from me until you earn it. But you have gotten by for years doing what you like and what you don’t understand, singing songs well only because you have a perfect ear and you have heard others sing them properly. You shied away from anything you found difficult, taking refuge again and again in what was enjoyable to you, what was easy. So you have no real control over your voice, and you have many bad habits.”
He stopped and ran his right hand back through his brown curly hair as if he hated it. It had the shape of a cherub’s mop in some painting of the last century, luxuriously full and curling upward at the ends; but it looked neglected and slightly dusty.
“And you’re fifteen years old, which is very late to start really singing,” he continued. “But I can tell you right now that you’ll be ready to perform on any stage in Europe in three years if you do everything that I tell you to do. Whether or not you really want to be a great performer doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. I’m not asking you. You have a great voice, therefore I’ll train you to be a great performer. I’ll train you for the stage, for the court, for all Europe. And after that you can do what you want with it.”
Tonio was furious. He rose to his full height and advanced on the glowering, flat-nosed figure at the harpsichord.
“You might have asked me why I came back here yesterday!” he said in his haughtiest, coldest manner.
“Don’t ever speak to me like that again,” Guido sneered. “I’m your teacher.”
And without further explanation he presented the first exercise.
They began that day with a simple Accentus.
Six notes were shown to Tonio on an ascending scale, “Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La.” Then he was presented with a more complicated embroidering upon these notes, so that in singing the whole he was singing a gently ascending melody with little ups and downs, each tone having at least four notes around it, three going up, one coming back down again.
It was to be sung in one breath and each note was to be sung with equal attention. At the same time the vowel sound was to be pronounced perfectly. And the whole was to be absolutely fluid.
And it was to be sung over and over and over again, day after day, in this quiet empty room, without the harpsichord for accompaniment until it ran naturally and evenly like a golden stream from Tonio’s throat with no indication of the breath he had taken at the start of it, or of any breathlessness at the end of it.
The first day Tonio thought he would lose his mind from singing it.
But commencing the second day, certain this monotony was a subtle form of torture, he witnessed a change in himself. It was as if his temper had created a bubble, and at some point in the afternoon the bubble popped. And the peeling of the bubble fell back like the petals of a bud and a great flower rose out of the center.
This flower was a hypnotic attraction to the notes Tonio was singing, a drifting with them, a slow dreamy awareness that each time he started again with the Accentus, he was tackling some new and fascinating little aspect of it.
By the end of the first week of this, he lost all track of various problems he solved, he knew only that his voice was changing completely.
Again and again Guido pointed out to him that he had sung Ut and Re and Mi more lovingly than the other tones. Did he love them more? He had to love all equally. And over and over again Guido reminded him “Legato,” link them all slowly, perfectly together. Volume didn’t matter. Expression of feeling did not matter. But each tone must be beautiful. It is not enough that it be perfectly on pitch (he told Tonio several times almost begrudgingly that he had the gift of singing on perfect pitch, but Alessandro had long ago told Tonio this), the tone must be beautiful in itself like