The Black Opera Page 5

  Impolite to call them Protestant, here.

  “—And I remember listening to them sing of the all-seeing, all-punishing Deity, and thinking they sounded the way mice would sound, if mice worshipped a cat.”

  Ferdinand’s eyebrows shot up, his bland expression surprised into keen intelligence. “Rather an Old Testament view… So you’ve been exposed to heresies as well as the true Faith. Your opinion of the Holy Father and the Church is—?”

  Conrad closed one fist around the chain-links, tight enough to leave marks.

  Tullio always tells me I don’t have the brains for a convincing lie.

  “I don’t deny the Church’s miracles, sir. Or rather, I don’t deny that, by the singing of Mass, the sick are healed, daily, and ghosts are laid to rest, and the walking dead appeased. I’ve seen this.”

  “But?”

  “But—!” Conrad gestured, and restrained himself at the sound of clinking metal. “I do deny that this has anything to do with a Deity! Nothing about it demands a god in explanation. Why aren’t these things regarded as a part of the natural world which we don’t yet understand?”

  Ferdinand’s pace slowed. He clasped his hands behind him as he walked. His bright gaze appraised Conrad. “The natural world? Do you hold with Dr Schelling’s ideas of Naturphilosophie, then—that all of nature is a single organism, aspiring upwards to a more spiritual stage, no matter how low it may be? A speck of dust, a weed, a reptile; all aspire to rise and become part of the single great World-Spirit?”

  Conrad couldn’t help an impolite snort. “I rather think that’s religion under another name! Wasn’t Schelling a poet as well as a professor of philosophy, sir? Poets often have a difficult time telling science from mysticism.”

  Conrad could have sworn the King of the Two Sicilies momentarily looked highly amused.

  “And this from a man who writes poetry for a living!”

  “I don’t write poetry, sir. I write librettos.”

  “And the difference?”

  “The English poet Mister Lord Byron doesn’t have to take his poem back during rehearsals and turn one stanza into one line—or one line into six lines on a different subject altogether.”

  “Ah…”

  Man-sized Roman amphorae stood against the palace wall. Vines grew up from urns, curling around the stanchions that held the awning. The sun cast coiling shadows on the flagstones, at which the King tilted his head, appearing thoughtful.

  “No God, only material nature. That sounds very much like ‘denying the Church’s miracles.’”

  “Sir, the Church claims miracles are caused by a deity rewarding and punishing us according to the condition of our immortal souls… But even a glance shows virtue often isn’t rewarded, and sin isn’t punished. Besides, I met during the war a Monsieur Xavier Bichat, a physician, who developed an analysis of human tissue types. He found no ‘soul’ there, no matter how deeply he dug.”

  Conrad glanced away off the terrace, at where the bare masts of merchant ships rocked rhythmically; crews rowing between them and the shore. One warship—an English frigate, from the flags—cut white water at her prow, running down towards Sorrento. Flocks of bum-boats, lateen-sailed feluccas and dhows, and fishing boats (all equally full of traders) disconsolately tacked back towards the harbour.

  “Bichat theorised there might be some vital Galvanic force of life that arises purely from our material bodies—a vital force which may be capable of things we don’t yet understand—a force which produces our conscious souls. Yes, I’ve attended Madame Lavoisier’s salon, and heard other natural philosophers claim M. Bichat is wrong! But they won’t go to Church doctrine when they seek to disprove his findings. They’ll theorise and experiment. Porca vacca! these aren’t amazing speculations—even the Mister George Lord Byron has written about them! And Madame Shelley, too. My ambition, sire, one day, is to adapt her ‘creature given life by man’ to the opera stage.”

  Better the King have it all now, Conrad decided. Along with a chance to throw me out, rather than explode at me later.

  “All these unexplained phenomena—miraculous healing, the Returned Dead and the like—they should be investigated. Nothing should be sacrosanct!—I was for example in London when Signore Buckland himself showed off the bones of his Megalosaurus, which he discovered in their southern quarries. The bones of an amazing saurian sixty or a hundred feet in length, never yet found alive by explorers anywhere, and discovered in fossils that make the world hundreds of millions of years older than the Church Fathers tell us!”

  “Mines and canals are a more reliable gauge of the Earth’s age than the generations of ‘begats’ in the Old Testament?” Ferdinand suggested the blasphemy with gentle humour.

  But then, he’s a King. He can.

  “Signore Conrad, doesn’t it require faith to believe that this Earth is hundreds of thousands of years old? Or billions?”

  “Logic and reason can be applied to fossils and strata. I don’t believe or disbelieve it. I think it’s a hypothesis with some compelling proof. But I’m perfectly capable of swapping to a later theory, if it’s well supported.—The advances we could make in Naples if we had an Institut here, as in Paris, or a Royal Society like England’s!”

  Conrad broke off, too late to avoid implying a lack in the kingdom.

  Ferdinand stopped walking. “All things ought to be made the subject of experiment, you mean, by Natural Philosophers, and examined to see if they’re miraculous or secular in their operation?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  Conrad, caught off his stride, almost tripped as he stopped and turned.

  Ferdinand appeared to be enjoying Conrad’s expression. “If God is all-powerful… An omnipotent God ought not to be frightened away by Natural Scientists and their investigations, should He? If He made the Earth and the Heavens for us to study and learn from, I can hardly imagine He wouldn’t expect us to turn that learning eye on the Divinity.”

  Conrad struggled for a word—polite or impolite—but found nothing.

  The King of the Two Sicilies laughed out loud, with no malice. “I know, I know! There are men among his Eminence’s Inquisitors who would happily put Ferdinand of the House of Bourbon-Sicily on the rack for such opinions… But really, this is the nineteenth century.”

  Ferdinand unclasped his gloved hands, and waved south, towards the promontories and islands and the sails of distant ships.

  “When Signore Darwin the younger from London stopped here, on his voyage back from South America, I all but kidnapped him to start just such an Institute as you describe.”

  “Signore Darwin was in Naples?” Envy flooded Conrad. And I wasn’t here!

  “I discovered that Gabriele Corazza, our current Cardinal, has the greatest objection to being told he’s the heir of an ape—a mere soulless animal arisen by chance—and so an Institute is currently impossible. I think sometimes the Church is the greatest obstacle to religion!”

  Not all men are Kings who can say what they please in private conversation. Perhaps he just wants to hear me condemn myself out of my own mouth.

  But the Inquisition could have discovered all this, and put a report on his desk. This man is head of the Church in his kingdom. Why is he taking the trouble to conciliate me?

  Conrad spoke with challenging coolness, ignoring the wrenching apprehension in his belly.

  “I find the Church an obstacle primarily to knowledge, sir. Suppose Darwin’s beloved wife, for whom he would do anything, had not been a notorious free-thinker after Madame Wollstonecraft’s mode? Suppose he had married that cousin of his instead: a demure, ordinary, religious woman? How long might we have had to wait for Signore Darwin’s theory of life evolving through natural selection, if he faced the concern that his wife thought he might end in Hell? It might have been another twenty years…”

  Now—am I a dead man walking?

  “Sir, the Dominicans have everything well in hand. I expect my trial for
blasphemy can take place by this afternoon!” It came out more intractable than he intended.

  Conrad didn’t back down.

  The wind ruffled at Ferdinand’s carefully-cut hair. He was otherwise completely still. His pale eyes focused, and rid Conrad of any idea that the man’s quietness meant weakness.

  “Think of the power it shows you invoked, Conrad, if you got the Teatro Nuovo struck down. Blasphemy… Yes, I suppose they would charge you with that.”

  Would. Not will. Conrad’s mouth dried up with hope.

  “It may be the nineteenth century, sir, but I have no doubt the Church will call it the Devil’s power!”

  “Would you?” The King’s smile held iron. “What do you think of the fact that you got a building struck down?”

  The canvas awning rippled above, sending a wave of shadow and sunlight across the terrace. The morning air felt cool, and then warm. Without quite knowing why he knew it, Conrad instinctively realised: This is the question I’m here to answer.

  A quarter of a hour with this man and he’s exposed every religious and scientific belief I have. He hasn’t done that for nothing. If I want to know why I’m here—there’s nothing for it but honesty.

  “I can’t explain myself without offence to ‘your Catholic Majesty’; I’m sorry.”

  Ferdinand nodded a qualified acceptance.

  Conrad searched for words, apprehensiveness driving him to choose with precision. Who knows how important this might be?

  “Sir, the Church is—threatened—if there’s a causal connection between Il Terrore di Parigi and the Teatro Nuovo fire. The Church regards opera as profane. It regards its own Sung Mass as sacred—as the sole producer of miracles. To me… they’re the same thing. Both are musicodramma. Both music and the sung word, used together to create—something—by the power or projection of dramatic human emotion.”

  He let out a breath.

  “The Church makes use of musicodramma. The Mass is one passion. Every man and woman praying at a Sung Mass or other liturgical rite is feeling the suffering Passion of Christ as if those emotions were their own. As if every dark Station of the Cross gouged their own flesh, and the rock that rolls away from the Tomb releases each of them to their own resurrection… And opera—opera is the pure extreme of secular passion. Love, revenge, triumph, grief, all as expressed by voice and music… In the opera house, they feel it as their own emotion, too. They love and they hate, oh, just as strongly.”

  Ferdinand made a gesture, indicating they should walk on down the long terrace. Conrad found his knees were not quite steady.

  The King’s expression was blandly stupid again. “So, if I ask you why the Teatro Nuovo burned down, you’ll give me one of two answers…”

  “Coincidence, sir. Many operas feature the most extreme transgressive emotion, and yet few opera houses are struck by lightning.”

  “That would be the first answer.” The skin around Ferdinand’s eyes tightened. “The second answer, Conrad, is, ‘a miracle.’ You won’t deny that something happens at a Sung Mass, when a man’s healed?”

  The brush of Canon Viscardo’s fingers against his closed eye felt immediate as the warm wind; Conrad tasted Tullio’s laudanum. “Something happens. Yes, sir. Undeniably something. I think no one as yet knows what.”

  “But something, is the point. You’ll agree that there have, in the past, been occurrences at operas that would—if they’d happened in church—been called miracles.”

  “I agree, sir. With the reservation that some of these occurrences will have been mistakes, some hysteria, some just rumour, and some not caused by anything about the opera itself.”

  Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily looked rueful. “You were reported to me as a man who might have reservations!… I agree, on the whole. Let me re-phrase. If you magnify—intensify—the emotions of a crowd, whether with community passion in Church, or individual passion in the opera house, then, some of the time, something will happen.”

  “Yes. Therefore it’s possible Il Terrore is responsible for the Teatro Nuovo fire. But also reasonably likely that it isn’t.”

  Conrad felt himself pinned under the analytic gaze of the King.

  Ferdinand broke into a rich chuckle. “You are a Natural Philosopher! You won’t commit yourself to anything being certain.”

  It felt more like praise than mockery.

  “I’d hate to disappoint Your Majesty.”

  The amused look Ferdinand gave him made Conrad’s gut lurch with hope.

  “Sir—why am I here?”

  Ferdinand stopped, resting his hand on the granite sea-wall. The lapping water below sounded surprisingly loud.

  “I’ve been given a transcript of the libretto for Il Terrore di Parigi, ossia la Morte di Dio. Also, the royal library has your libretto of two years back, from Paris. Les Enfants du Calcutta, ou, Le Probléme de Douleur. ‘The Children of Calcutta, Or, The Problem of Pain.’ For an atheist, you think much about the contradictions of religion.”

  Conrad let loose his usual frustrated reply to that. “Perhaps that’s why I’m an atheist. Sir.”

  Ferdinand’s mouth twitched. Whatever emotion he contained, Conrad saw it fade as the King’s gaze went eastward, to the blue glass of the horizon, and the double-peaked hill that is the illusion produced by the crater of Vesuvius.

  The thronged streets of the port were dwarfed by the mountain, blackly close at hand. The Palace, at sea’s level or only a few yards above it, left Conrad gaping across water at the green foothills. He remembered, from his own ascent, furrows, vine-sticks, loaded wagons, donkeys kicking up white dust.

  For all it was spring, a covering of snow shrouded the defunct volcano. A very little haze at the summit might have been cloud, or the volcano breathing.

  Conrad tensed, waiting for a verdict.

  “You’d imagine,” King Ferdinand said quietly, “that for what I need, I need a believer. A man of Faith. I think I need a man with a proven affinity for opera—and a mind that will reject nothing when it considers what to write.”

  “You need me?”

  Conrad’s stunned thoughts escaped his mouth.

  “You need me as a librettist?”

  The shadow of the awning made it difficult to read Ferdinand’s face. His cultured voice said, “Someone to write an opera for me, yes.”

  The high facade of the Palazzo Reale echoed back a shout of laughter. Conrad belatedly realised it was his.

  He slapped his hand over his mouth and stuttered into silence, little spurts of half-hysterical mirth escaping his control.

  “Sorry—I thought—I’ve been expecting a pyre! Twenty years in an Inquisition cell—!” He found it hard to hold back the avalanche of words. “—You want me to write an opera…”

  Ferdinand’s shoulders, that had gone regally stiff, relaxed. Tension left him on a released breath. Lines showed worn into his plump face as he smiled—he looked as if he must govern his country, as well as reign.

  “I’ll certainly leave you the option of the Holy Office, if what I offer is repugnant.” The King folded his hands behind his back and looked unreasonably content to wait for Conrad to recover himself.

  “Sir?”

  “I don’t share your atheistic views, Conrad. That doesn’t mean I decry them. On the contrary. I believe that you may be exactly the man to write my opera for me.”

  Sunlight off the sea below made Conrad flinch, caught between scepticism, hope, and misgiving. He prompted, “And?”

  “And I need an opera written with the same kind of power that was generated by Il Terrore di Parigi.”

  Conrad fidgeted with his chain, seeking the link that Luka Viscardo had sealed, running his thumb over the smooth surface of the steel. The King of the Two Sicilies watched him with a hawk’s gaze.

  Be honest. No matter what it may cost.

  “I’m… not sure I could do it again.”

  King Ferdinand did not immediately jump up and summon a detachment of riflemen, or a palace aide to
shove Conrad out of the front door and into the hands of the Inquisition.

  “Sir, I don’t say this to spread guilt away from me. I say it to give credit where it’s due. I didn’t get the Teatro Nuovo struck down. It took a whole company of singers and musicians and stage crew to achieve that, as well as Giuseppe Persiani as composer and myself as librettist.”

  “A company, yes. Every man’s words, music, and voice create the opera together. But as things stand, your composer and the singers appear to have left Naples. I have the librettist left.”

  The complexity of Ferdinand’s expression was startling, on a man who at first appeared bland. He spoke with a direct, dignified, intent excitement, restrained by absolute control.

  “Conrad—you were a part of something powerful enough that it called down fire out of the heavens. Something born of Aristotle’s catharsis in drama—the purging of pity and terror in the human heart—coupled with the magia musica, that Pythagoras knew connects us with the heavenly spheres above. That is power. Yes, music and the singers and everything else is part of it. Your words give it shape. They create those situations which draw people in, make them cry, laugh, feel love or hatred, indignation or sorrow. If you assisted in causing that once, Conrad—I believe you might do so again.”

  The smalt blue of Sorrento and the southern Bay blurred in Conrad’s gritty vision, as if on a watercolourist’s palette. He hadn’t blinked as the King spoke, he realised.

  “Conrad, I need a man who will write me a particular kind of opera. The Two Kingdoms needs this. So, it seems that I need you.”

  “Because I’m an atheist.”

  Ferdinand’s amused smile made a reappearance. Along with his tension.

  “Precisely because you’re an atheist!”

  “And…”

  Conrad pulled his thoughts together. Now we come to it.

  “…If I’m understanding you, sir—you want me to attempt to cause another ‘opera miracle’?”

  Ferdinand of the House of Bourbon-Sicily shook his head.

  “Not exactly. No. I want you to stop one.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “Stop a miracle.” Conrad fumbled his chains. Coils of metal slithered and crashed to the paving stones, bruising his feet through his shoes. “How—! What—? Stop?”