The great Maestro sat at the piano, a small, square instrument. Upon it were piles of music, a bottle of Rhine wine, half emptied, a cup of black coffee, a plate of sliced garlic sausage, and a roll of black bread, peppered outside with aniseed. A bottle of ink was balanced on the music-desk, a blotted scroll of paper obscured the yellowed keyboard. As the great composer worked at the score of his new opera, he breakfasted, taking draughts from the bottle, bites of sausage and bread, and sips of coffee at discretion. He was a quaint, ungainly figure, with vivacious eyes, and his ill-fitting auburn wig had served him, like the right lapel of his plaid dressing-gown, for a pen-wiper for uncounted years. The Maestro was not alone in the dusty studio to which so many people, both of the great and little worlds, sought entrance in vain. An olive-skinned youth, shabbily dressed in a gray paletot over a worn suit of black—a young fellow of sixteen, with a square, shaggy black head and a determined chin, the cleft in which was rapidly being hidden by an arriving beard—leaned against a music-stand crammed with portly volumes, his dark eyes anxiously fixed upon the old gentleman at the piano, who dipped in the ink and wrote, and wrote, and dipped in the ink, occasionally laying down the pen to strike a chord or two, in seeming forgetfulness of his visitor.
Suddenly the Maestro’s face beamed with a cheerful smile.
155“There, mon cher Gladiali!” He handed the newly-written sheet of music to the boy, and spread his wrinkled fingers above the keys. “This is the great aria-solo I spoke of. Sing that at sight—your training should make such a task an easy one—and let us see what stuff you are made of. Allons!” And he struck the opening chord.
Carlo Gladiali turned pale and then red. He crossed himself hastily, grasped the sheet of paper, cast his eyes over it anxiously, and, meeting with a smiling glance the glittering old eyes of the Maestro, he inflated his deep chest and sang. A wonderful tenor voice poured from his boyish throat; heart and soul shone in his eyes and thrilled in his accents. Tears of delight dropped upon the piano-keys and upon the hands of the composer, and when the last pure note soared on high and swelled and sank, and the song ceased, the old musician cried: “Thou art a treasure! Come, let me embrace thee!” and clasped the young singer to his breast. “Once more, mon fils—once more!”
And as he seated himself at the piano, sweeping the plate of sausage into the wastepaper-basket with a flourish of the large, snuff-stained yellow silk handkerchief with which he wiped his eyes, the door, which had been left ajar, was flung open, and a little dark-eyed, fair-haired girl, who carried a Pierrot-doll, ran quickly into the room.
“Marraine brought me; she is panting up the stairs because she is so fat and they are so steep. Oldest Papa——” she began; but the Maestro held up his hand for silence as the song recommenced. More assurance was in Carlo’s phrasing; the flexibility and brilliancy of his voice were no longer marred by nervousness. As the solo reached its triumphant close, the Maestro said, slapping the boy on the back and taking a gigantic pinch of snuff:
156“The Archangel Gabriel might have done better. Aha!” He turned, chuckling, to the little girl, who stood on one leg in the middle of the narrow room, pouting and dangling her Pierrot. “La petite there is jealous. Is it not so?”
“Oldest Papa, you make a very big mistake!” returned the little maiden, pouting still more. “I am not jealous of anybody in the world—least of all, a boy like that!” Her dark eyes rested contemptuously on the big, shy, square-headed fellow in the gray paletot.
“A boy, she calls him!” chuckled the Maestro. “Ma mignonne, he is sixteen—six years older than thyself! Hasten to grow up, become a great prima donna, and he shall sing Romeo to thy Juliette—I predict it!”
“I had rather sing with my cat!” observed the little lady rudely.
Carlo flushed crimson; the Maestro chuckled; and a stout lady who had followed her, panting, into the room, murmured, “Oh! la méchante!” adding, as the Maestro rose to greet her: “But she grows more incorrigible every day. This morning she pulled the feathers out of Coco’s tail because he whistled out of tune.”
The elfin face of the small sinner dimpled into mischievous smiles.
“But that was not being as wicked as the Maestro, who got angry at rehearsal, and hit the flute-player on the head with his baton, so that it raised a hump. You told me that yourself, and how the Maestro——”
“Quite true, petite; I did fetch him a rap, I promise you, and afterwards I put bank-notes for a hundred francs on the lump for a plaster. But come, now, sing to me, and we will give Signor Carlo here something worth hearing. écoutez, mon cher!”
“Very well, I will sing; but, first, Pierrot must be comfortably seated. That little armchair is just what he likes!” And, as quick as thought, the willful little 157lady tilted a pile of music out of the little armchair upon the floor. Then she placed Pierrot very carefully in his throne, and, bidding him be very good and listen, because his bonne petite Maman was going to sing him something pretty, she tripped to the piano, and demurely requested the aged musician to accompany her in the Rondo of “Sonnambula.”
Ah! what a miraculous voice proceeded from that small, willful throat! Stirred to the depths by the extraordinary power and beauty of the child’s delivery, Carlo Gladiali listened enthralled; and when the last notes rippled from the pretty red lips of the now demure little creature, the big boy, forgetting her rudeness and his own shyness, started forward, and, sinking on one knee and seizing the small hand of the child-singer, he kissed it impulsively, crying: “Ah, Signorina, you were right, a thousand times! Compared with you, I sing like a cat!”
“Oh, no! I did not mean to say that!” the tiny lady was beginning graciously, when the Maestro broke in:
“You both sing like cherubs and say civil things to one another. One day you will sing like angels—and quarrel like devils! Please Heaven, you will both make your début under my baton, and then, if I crack a flute-player’s head, it will be for joy.”
Ten years had elapsed. Carlo Gladiali had risen to pre-eminence as a public singer, had attained the prime of his powers and the apogee of his fame. Courted, fêted, and adored, the celebrated tenor, sated with success, laden with gifts, blasé with admiration, retained a few characteristics that might remind those who had known and loved him in boyhood of the ingenuous, honest, simple Carlo of ten years ago.
Certainly Carlo’s jealousy of the prima donna who should dare to usurp a greater share of the public plaudits 158than he himself received was childish in its unreasonableness, and Othello-like in its tragic intensity.
At first, he would join in the compliments, and smile patronizingly as he helped the successful débutante to gather up the bouquets. Then his admiration would cool; he would tolerate, endure, then sneer, and finally grind his teeth. He would convey to the audience over one shoulder that they were idiots to applaud, and wither the triumphant cantatrice with a look of infinite contempt over the other. He had been known to feign sleep in the middle of a great soprano aria which, against his wish, had been encored. He had—or it was malevolently reputed so—bribed the hotel waiter to place a huge dish of macaroni, dressed exquisitely and smoking hot, in the way of a voracious contralto who within two hours was to essay for the first time the arduous r?le of Brynhild. The macaroni had vanished, the contralto had failed to appear. Numerous were the instances similar to these recorded of the tenor Gladiali, and repeated in every corner of the opera-loving world.
But it was in London, where the great singer was “starring” during the Covent Garden Season of 19—, that the haughty and intolerant Carlo was to meet his match.
At rehearsal one morning, Rebelli, the famous basso, said to Gladiali, with a twinkle: “A new ‘star’ has dawned on the operatic horizon. La Betisi, the pretty little soprano with the fiend’s temper and the seraph’s voice, has created a furore at Rome and M............