This is the first part of a short story about music, and the effect it can have on the performer
“I’ll be downstairs when you’re ready, ma’am.”
Carla inclines her head. “Thank you, George.” There is still the faint trace of an accent; forty years of life in Britain have not erased clipped vowels forged in a German childhood. The syntactic elements are stronger than the memories. Escaping East Berlin remains in her memory only as a series of disjointed flashes, a disconnected narrative more dream than reality.
She climbs the stairs leading to the stage, the air redolent of sweat and greasepaint. It is dark as she steps into the cramped vestibule at the top, the only illumination coming from a few wall sconces.
Her fingers trace the wall, familiar with each imperfection in the plaster. A bump here, a dip there, a slight mismatch at waist height resulting from an earlier repair. It is a roadmap, almost; a Braille version of her life at the opera. This lump represents her Tosca; that crease her Aida.
It is a few short steps until she enters the wings. The darkness seems to swell, expanding to fill the space she finds herself in. It unnerves her, a little, to be here alone. This space is usually milling with people waiting for their cue, and with those that have just come off stage. It isn’t the silence; all conversation in this area is always kept to a hushed minimum; most communication is in the form of simple hand signals and gestures – a thumbs-up for a receptive audience; a pat on the back for a particularly fine vocal performance – to avoid any sound leaking into the auditorium.
A few steps – shockingly loud in the silence – and she is on the stage where only hours before her voice has soared, filling the room with lyrical gold. Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio is her favourite, the one she is so acclaimed for. Her voice fits the libretto to perfection, teasing out the hidden nuances in the score and seducing audiences with its bell-like clarity.
Carla heads downstage, a wistful smile playing across her features. She loves this life like nothing else. Her earliest memories are of her grandmother’s record player. Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, and others provided the soundtrack to her early life. She can recall spending a whole summer imagining herself as Malwina Davenaut from Marschner’s Der Vampyr; Brunhilde from Wagner’s Ring cycle is another alter-ego of hers.
She hums the overture to Parsifal as her feet carry her to the edge of the stage. She gazes down into the orchestra pit. It is dark down there, and she can see almost nothing. Her mouth curves up at the corners as she contrasts the silent darkness of now with the elegance of earlier…
Carla can see the conductor out of the corner of her eye. Her timing is flawless. As his baton comes down and brings in the strings she starts to sing. Her voice rings out, crystalline textures giving shape to the recitative.
Abscheulicher! wo eilst du hin?
Was hast du vor im wilden Grimme?
She has never performed better. As the last notes die away, the audience breaks out in thunderous applause. The conductor indicates for her to take a bow and she does so. Even the musicians are applauding her.
By the time the opera has reached its finale, she is exhausted. Her performance tonight has been forged from the depths of her soul. Perspiration slicks her body under the costume. She maintains a smile as the curtain falls for the final time and is sagging the moment it comes to rest.
“Carla, my angel!” It is Robert, the tenor, Florestan to her Leonore. “You were divine!” He sweeps her into his arms, air-kissing her cheeks. He holds her at arm’s length and his smile falters. “Are you okay?”
She manages a weak smile and a nod. “Tired,” she says. “That’s all.” She allows him to lead her off the stage. The first step is an effort; the closer she gets to the wings, the lighter she feels on her feet. Her agent is waiting for her, frowning, and she falls in step with them, taking Carla’s other arm.
“Carla?” Rebecca is concerned. “What is it?”
Carla shakes off their concern. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s been an emotional night.”
Rebecca nods slowly. Her eyes say she is not convinced, but she lets it go for now. “You were magnificent,” she says. “I’ve never seen you better.”
Carla takes the lifeline that Rebecca offers. “I’ve always loved this role,” she says. “And tonight, I felt like I understood at last what Beethoven was trying to say.” This is true, at least in part. She has identified with the composer in a deeper, more intimate way than ever before. She feels that, at last, she understands him.
Ever the gentleman, Robert takes his leave as they reach her dressing room. He praises her performance again, kisses her cheek – a real kiss this time – and heads back to the stage. Carla is ushered through the door and Rebecca follows her.
“Sit.” Rebecca points to a chair. She leans against the door, arms folded, as Carla does as she is told. “What is it, Carla?”
Carla sighs. It will come out soon enough, she supposes, and Rebecca has been more than an agent to her; they are good friends, the best Carla has, perhaps. She thinks, trying to arrange the words she needs into some semblance of order.
She is spared the effort, for a moment, at least. Rebecca frowns and leans forward. “Carla,” she says. Her voice is gentle and tinged with concern. “What’s wrong with your ear?”
Carla reaches up, her fingers encountering a thick, sticky fluid that is leaking from her ear. “You should sit,” she says to Rebecca, her voice dull with finality. “There’s something you should know.”
She is sitting on the edge of the stage now, smiling. This has been her home for most of her adult life. The flat she owns is little more than a place to sleep, to listen to music; she eats there only infrequently, preferring the company afforded by restaurants.
Her first years in Britain were a whirlwind of different towns and cities as the family moved from place to place looking for work, never stopping long in any one area. Friendships were few for Carla, never lasting long, and she grew up feeling alienated from society. Opera was the one constant in her life, and her refuge. She recalls learning the libretto for Dvorak’s Rusalka by heart one summer, training her voice to follow the swoops of Renee Fleming performing the Song to the Moon aria and discovering that, not only does she possess the necessary vocal range, she also has the ear to support it.
She began attending any form of singing practice she could find – choirs mainly; some after-school singing groups. It was a way for her to fit in, to gain acceptance.
She plays with her hair, twisting a lock around her finger as she sits, eyes glassy with recollection. She is unaware that she is humming that same aria now sotto voce as she gazes into the ranks of seats in the auditorium. It occurs to her that the opera house is more than just a building; it is a living, breathing creature whose lifeblood is the audience that flows through it. She can almost sense the emotions that have leeched into the very fabric of the building.
It is slumbering now, until the next performance. She is still to decide if she will be a part of it. She wants to; singing is almost as natural as breathing to her, and a life without it seems almost too much to bear.
She knows it is no longer that simple. Her worldview is undergoing seismic changes. Once-stable constants have shifted, leaving her feeling stranded, adrift on life’s ocean. It is a return to her childhood again, floating from place to place with no goal in mind.
That time, her voice was a lifeline, giving her purpose and direction. This time…well, her voice is still strong, of that there is no doubt. But this time it is different. This time her voice cannot save her.
There is a sense of finality in the way she sits. Her eyes have adjusted to the dimness and she gazes into the pit, eyes sweeping over the serried rows of stands that hold each player’s music. Her focus jumps from one sheet to another, imagining the clusters of symbols that adorn the page. She has always been fascinated by music, by the way the notes seem to dance on the page. She thinks that music is a special language, one that, once understood, is so much more than its constituent notes. An isolated minim signifies a sound, a tone. Taken together, running arpeggios can evoke thoughts of sunrise; piano trills bring to mind water flowing in a babbling brook. Harps are the wind soughing through leaves on tree branches, whilst flutes are insects at play in the meadow, flitting about the flowers, adding ornamentation where it is needed.
And there is the other side: the boom of thunder is echoed by the timpani; the brass is the warmth of summer sun on her skin; the bass section of the strings are the cavernous roots underpinning the lofty peaks of the violins.
Her eyes close and memory returns, surfacing like a bubble on a still lake. Images return, flickering through her mind like old Polaroid stills.
She is walking without a destination, her feet moving of their own accord, one step after another. She takes random turns, a left here, right there, with no idea where she is going; all she knows is she needs to walk, that if perhaps she walks far enough, puts enough distance between herself and the clinic then the specialist’s words will…what? Disappear? Unsay themselves.
Her steps slow. The words are echoing around her head. It is no more possible to leave them behind than it is to leave a part of her anatomy.
It is hard for her to make sense of the conversation with the specialist. All that is clear at the moment are random words, words that she must slot together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“Congenital.” That word keeps coming back. Other phrases pass through her mind. Sensorineural is another one, one that, when her hands have stopped shaking, she will Google on her phone.
Deep down, she knows that the meaning of the word does not matter. There is only one word that matters to her, the one the specialist spoke softly, almost as though he was hoping she wouldn’t hear it.
It was couched in sentences with other words, words designed to soften the impact. They washed over her, barely registering. She knows that when she has had time to process things, she will return to him.
She quickens her pace as the skies darken and ducks into one of those bland, nondescript coffee franchises that litter the high street of every town just in time to avoid the rain. She orders a coffee – hot and black – and sits at a table, sipping it without really tasting it. Her mind is elsewhere, on performances past and those yet to come. There is a blackness shrouding her thoughts, veiling them like a thundery sky seen through a dirty window. Her most recent role has been the flawed Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermuir, and the irony of that is not lost on her.
Unbidden, silent music starts in her mind. The score unfolds, note-perfect in her memory. She can imagine herself, commanding the stage as she sings Lucia’s famous ‘mad scene.’
There is a tickle on her cheek and she raises her hand, surprised to find her skin damp. The tears are flowing silently, unbidden. She allows them to fall unchecked. When she is finished she feels somehow cleaner inside, hollowed out.
She is on her feet again, walking the stage. Her voice is little more than a whisper as she begins to sing the lament from Wagner’s Parsifal. She reaches the edge of the stage and steps down carefully – it is quite dark here and she doesn’t wish to fall – before walking through the rows of seating. Her hand trails the backs of the seats, enjoying the feel of the material against her skin. She segues from Wagner to Telleman, Eurydice’s death aria. The acoustic of the room is such that even though her voice is quiet, it fills the room with a ringing purity she can no longer hear with any clarity.
The deafness has advanced at an alarming rate, stealing her ability to hit the high notes with pinpoint precision. The mid-range is now a soupy mixture of sounds that run together. She finds differentiating between individual voices and instruments an increasingly difficult challenge. The bass is the only section that retains any clarity and even these low tones are starting to bleed together.
The medication hasn’t helped much, hasn’t slowed the relentless march of the disease. Her fear of the approaching silence is almost palpable; it is in her first thoughts on waking and her last thoughts before fitful sleep; it figures large in her dreams.
Fighting depression has become harder with every day. The pills do little to alleviate it, and they make her sleep even more disjointed; she has stopped taking them, despite being told that to do so may have unpredictable effects on her moods. Her sleep is broken and restless; it is becoming harder to climb out of bed and face the world with each day that passes. She wanders about the flat, listless until it is time to go to the opera.
For it is only here that the colour comes back into her world. The music soothes her, fills her with rapture, lifts her mood in a way pills never can. Even now, when her ability to discern individual instruments is little more than a memory and a suffocating blanket seems to mask and obscure most of the music, leaving a homogenized mush of sound, it still soothes her, bringing a sparkle back into a life that has become drab and mostly devoid of pleasure.
She has reached the back of the auditorium. She pauses for a while, taking a lingering look back at the stage. She is smiling now, the tears drying on her cheeks. God, she loves this place; she will miss it. She rests a hand on the bar that provides a handrail down the steps that lead to the front. The polished brass feels cool and slick against the heat of her palm.
She takes the first few steps and stops, cocking her head to one side. Her hearing is better in her right ear, and she points it back at the pit.
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