Then he sat back and said, “Again, from the beginning,” and Tonio, his vision blurred, his head aching, would start that first note and then glide into it.
But then with some infallible sense, just when Tonio was tingling all over with a desperate exhaustion, Guido would release him from this exercise and send him to the high desk to work out some problems of composition or counterpoint while standing.
“You don’t sit at desks anymore. It’s no good for your chest to be bent over. And you never never do anything that is bad for your voice or your chest,” he said. And Tonio, his legs aching, merely bowed his head, grateful for the chance to let the Accentus die out of his head for a little while.
But then would come some younger student to murder it.
He did not know how long he had been singing this elementary passage when Guido finally added two notes at the top and two notes at the bottom, and allowed him to sing the whole faster, and then a little bit faster. It was an event of sorts to have four new notes, and Tonio sarcastically announced that surely he ought to be allowed to get drunk to celebrate.
Guido ignored this.
But again on a hot afternoon when Tonio was on the verge of rebelling, Guido suddenly gave him several arias freshly written and full of changes and told him he might have the keyboard to accompany himself.
Tonio snatched up these songs before the thanks were out of his mouth. For him it was like plunging into the warm sea under the summer stars. And he had sung the second all the way through before he realized that of course Guido was listening to him. And Guido would tell him in a moment that he was dreadful.
He commenced consciously to try to apply what he had learned from the Accentus, and he realized that he had been applying it all along. He was articulating the words of these songs very distinctly but easily; and he had been singing with a new smoothness and control which made his immediate apprehension of the music infinitely easier.
He had his first real sense of power in those moments.
And when he returned to the exercises he was thinking of his voice in terms of power.
It seemed to him late that evening when he was so tired he could not think of his legs or his feet or of a soft pillow without falling over, that he had become something inhuman. He had become a wooden instrument out of which his voice rose as if someone else were playing it. He could feel his voice rising out of him; he could feel its evenness, its smoothness.
He was light-headed by the time he climbed the stairs. And turning over in bed he realized that for at least ten days he had not thought once of any of the things that had happened to him before coming here.
The next morning Guido informed him that due to his excellent progress they would begin with the Esclamazio. With any other new pupil, this jump would have been unthinkable, but Guido had ideas of his own about how to proceed.
This was the Esclamazio: the slow and perfectly controlled swelling of a note from a soft intoning of it to a louder and louder amplification of it, diminishing slowly to a soft finish. Or it might begin loud, diminish to a soft middle and then build again to a loud finish.
In either case, absolute control was essential. Again volume didn’t matter. Again the tone must be perfectly beautiful. And again days and days would pass during which Tonio performed this exercise over and over again, first on the tone of A, then on the tone of E, then on the tone of O, before going back and back again to the Accentus.
And all this was performed in the quiet, echoing stone chamber of Guido’s study with no accompaniment from the keyboard while the Maestro studied Tonio as if listening to sounds Tonio himself was not hearing.
At times Tonio realized that he despised this man so much that he could have struck him. It gave him pleasure to imagine that he was in fact striking Guido, and this made him ashamed afterwards.
But beneath these quiet peaks of unexpressed anger, Tonio knew that what tortured him truly was the realization that Guido despised him completely.
At first he had told himself, It is the man’s manner; he is