The room’s configuration changed: chairs were rearranged, people moved about. Mozart had taken his place at the clavier and drew several pages of music from his portfolio. Fridolin demanded quiet, and the parlor became so still that the only sounds were the crackling fire in the fireplace and the rousing November wind outside the window.
“Now,” Mozart said, “I present a challenge to Mademoiselle Aloysia in the presence of her family. Mademoiselle, I heard you say last night in the carriage that you can read all music at sight. Very well! I’ve written this song for you from a text by Metastasio, and if you can read it straight off without an error, you may have it. If not, I tear it up.”
A flurry of voices rose up, a few hands drawing her closer. “Amusing; he’s likely made it difficult. Aloysia, stand behind him to see the notes clearly. The light’s poor; who’ll hold the candle?”
For a moment Aloysia could not remember the boast she had made coming home in the carriage, expansive with her success and the quickly drunk wine, and flush with the odd sensuality of sitting almost knee to knee with this intense young man who had ridden in the gondolas of the Venetian canals. Whatever it had been, now she had to make good on it, or be shamed that she had not been taught music well enough.
Mozart adjusted the music so she could see it better, then he beckoned for Sophie, who held a candle for her sister, to step closer.
He played the first bars.
Aloysia sang the opening line of the recitative in a small, tremulous voice, as if she had never sung before anyone, but by the tender melodic line of the andante sostenuto, encouraged by the nods of the others, who saw she had made no mistakes so far, she began to gain courage.
“Non so d’onde viene quel tenero affetto
Quel moto, che ignoto mi nasce nel petto”
She knew music; she had heard it as she was curled within the womb and after she lay swaddled in her cradle. By the first gentle spill of sixteenth notes and the sustained high Bb that followed shortly after, she felt those about her stir with admiration, and her voice took on an authority of its own. Forgetting everything but the music before her, she sprang into the allegro agitato. Her voice opened like a heart in love, and she became one with the notes. Dresses, cake, muddy hose fell away as insignificant. She sang as if she had never sung before. She stood erect, one hand at her side almost imperceptibly beating time. The song returned to the first tempo, and her silvery voice rose in glittering scale to the high Eb. Mozart’s hands on the keys flashed, lifting her up. She was not reading the song; she became it.
When the last trill rang out to the dark corners of the room, beyond the piles of old music and the empty wineglasses, she stood poised, startled and motionless. “The purity of that voice,” someone said. For a moment she had been in another world. Vaguely, she felt her hand taken and someone’s dry kiss above it. She withdrew it distractedly, as if someone had mistakenly taken up something that belonged to her. There was a strange desire to cry. Could the song be over? Could it have ended and left her?
Everyone was clapping; Sophie’s arm was about her waist.
The words with their melody repeated themselves in her mind; she moved her lips, drawing a little close to the clavier as if she would begin again.
“Non so d’onde viene quel tenero affetto ...”
(I don’t know from whence comes this tender affection ...)
Mozart stood up clapping as well, but she looked at him as if he were a stranger. What had he to do with this moment? What was she thinking? The notes were his. Still, without her voice, weren’t they but dry marks? Yet how could it be? She stood confused. Was it his song? Or was it hers?
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “you’ve won the wager. The song’s yours. I’ll orchestrate it so that you can sing it in concert, and all who hear it will be as amazed as we are here today.”
She felt a moment’s fierce tenderness for him. He looked at her. For a moment nothing was ordinary, and she reached for his warm hand. Oh, she thought, come with me. Yet they were pressed in on all sides, and there was her father being