Antonietta, page 6
Under the glistening finish, the maple of the back and sides has a bold, broad curl so fluid that its waves seem to roll, subtly, adagio, in the shifting lights of June. On the back these waves slant upward from the joint at the middle, as if in jubilation. The corners are clean, the purfling sharp in its statement of them. The belly pine has a generous grain, and the f-holes are superbly definite, a little more upright than in the “long” violins. He is not entirely pleased with the head, which seems a bit chunky to him; he had envisioned something more feminine. But on the whole, he feels, in his joy, that the violin has a beauty worthy of its namegiver, who on this very day sheds the black of a mourner and appears in the streets in a dress of many folds which shimmer, by chance, with almost exactly the same transparent yellowy red of Antonietta’s new clothing, which Antonia has not seen. What a good omen!
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Stradivari spends the next days making a rectangular wooden case for the violin, with a recessed space inside exactly the shape of Antonietta, lined with velvet taken from one of Francesca’s expensive French skirts still hanging upstairs. He makes padded clips in the top to hold two bows. He decorates the outside with ornate patterns of roundheaded brass nails.
The wedding is set for mid-July. On Sunday, June 21, the priest of San Sigismondo posts at the church door a notice:
I, the Reverend Father Bartolomeo Grassi, Parish Priest of the Collegiate and renowned church of San Sigismondo in Cremona, announce the intention of Antonio Stradivari, of the parish of Santa Cecilia, to contract a marriage with Antonia Maria Zambelli, of this parish. If there are persons who know of impediments of any kind to this alliance, let them come forward.
On two other holy days, the feast day of St. Peter, on June 29, and Sunday, July 5, these banns are further published.
No one objects, though there are hot gusts of reminiscence in the town about the first wife’s rutting in the streets, and much talk of the age difference between the partners—what pleasures will a June bride have with a November groom? Omobono would like to object, but he cannot think of any grounds other than a burning envy.
* * *
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Ten days before the wedding date, Stradivari takes down the violin, fits it with strings, and plays on it. He also gets Francesco, who is a better violinist than he, to play for him. When he has heard Antonietta’s tone, he informs his fiancée that the wedding will have to be postponed until the middle of August. He explains that this instrument named for her must be played at the church that day, and unfortunately it needs time to mature. The tone at present is adolescent—moody and cranky, rather mushy and inarticulate—because the varnish is still too soft. It must have more time to dry. He says that you cannot rush an instrument, you have to give it time to grow up. One must be patient.
Antonia makes the face of someone who seems not quite to have grown up herself, but she agrees to wait until Monday, August 17.
* * *
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On August 12, Stradivari plays on Antonietta again, and again has Francesco play. Having heard the violin’s tone in his shop, he grows agitated and says that they must go to the cathedral. There he stations his son at the center of the choir and then walks to the very end of the nave, where he stands by the font of holy water.
He calls out:—Play!
Francesco launches into the Vivaldi melody that his father has hummed at work.
What Stradivari now hears causes a puckering of his skin, starting in the roots of his hair and working downward on his spine and along his arms to the backs of his hands and the tips of his fingers. Yes! Yes! This sound is almost what he imagined on that sleepless night so long ago. The tone is a harvest of hints of the best of all the tones of the past. It has the brilliance of the Maggini violins from Brescia; the sweet, woody, soprano Amati tone; the rounder, more throaty sonority and power of his own “long” violins; and something beyond, something new, powerful, bell-like. Pianissimo whispers are as clear at this distance as forced notes. But there is also something mysterious in these sounds that he cannot name. The edge of the timbre tugs at his heart, fills him with yearning. He has a sudden fantasy of placing a muscular palm on Antonia’s hot cheek. He feels his maleness stirring. Tears come to his eyes.
These tears, this hint of lechery, make him furious. He shouts to Francesco:—Enough!
Francesco comes down the nave excited. He calls out as he comes:—It is so easy to play! Did you hear what I could do? By using the bow in different ways, closer to the bridge and farther away, pressing and then letting its weight do the work? I drew out flute, and horn, and oboe, and clarinet—and a soprano’s voice! I found out something, too, Father. You must not attack Antonietta with the bow, you have to be gentle, even playing fortissimo. If you are kindly, the strings vibrate on after you have lifted the bow.
The father, gruffly:—I think the cheeks of the arching must be a little too high. A little too much Amati in the tone. Too sweet.
Francesco:—It is a joy to play.
* * *
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So many want to come to the wedding that it has to be moved from the church of San Sigismondo to the cathedral. Gossip has fueled a steamy curiosity. The groom is twenty years older than the bride. Will he wear to the wedding the horns that his first wife gave him? Is the bride fated to be involved in a scandal? Is it true, as some say, that she has scattered her favors, like soldi thrown to beggars, among numerous suitors who had not the decency to wait for her to get out of the black? The guests arrive in a merry and mischievous frame of mind, which the soft, warm afternoon intensifies.
By four o’clock the place is packed. Many priests bustle about. The groom stands waiting.
Here comes the bride up the nave! Through her veil, when she kneels beside him before Father Grassi, Stradivari sees lips that could not be more different from those of the earlier time. These seem tender small fruits of the tree of temptation. The mesh of the veil might catch fire from the beams of the flashing eyes!
Father Grassi, a fat and jolly priest, thrilled to be booming in the cathedral, sheds on the words of holy matrimony a lilting, frisky gloss that is on the edge of the suggestive—on the edge, some said later, of the lascivious. This shocks a few wedding guests but titillates the many others who came to the wedding with senses peeled by gossip. Man and wife are soon made one. They stand. Altar boys bring them chairs to sit on.
Now Francesco in the choir beyond the altar plays on Antonietta, the instrument named for the bride with the little dewy Cupid on its tailpiece, Corelli’s “Follia” variations.*2 He is accompanied by one of the Guarneri sons on the contrabass.
First comes the stately theme, adagio, that the maestro has been humming over his work:
The first of the variations follows, allegro. The music gradually casts a spell. All rustling and coughing stops. The variations grow sweeter and sweeter, more and more intricate, faster and faster. The guests imagine the stamping feet and whirling skirts of dancers of the follia. Flirtations in sound drench the listeners, who are already half drunk on the emotions of a wedding and on the beauty of the veiled bride that they glimpsed as she walked down the aisle, swinging her hips in exultation beneath the train held up by adorable nieces. They begin to hear from the violin the trills of something like seduction. It seems to all but three stone-deaf people in the crowd that the music has started to soar on the wings of the madness of love. Amor alla follia! There is a hint of scandal in the air. The voice of the violin is overpoweringly sensual as it sings a dance of desire. Its racing tones seem to ask the bride and groom: What are you waiting for? Hurry! Hurry home! The goal and reward of a wedding wait in bed for you there!
The effect on the crowd in the cathedral is startling. Antonietta is a hypnotist. Arrows from her Cupid’s quiver shower into the packed nave. The entire assemblage—excepting the three deaf-mutes—is aroused by the message of the voluptuous strains from the glistening instrument. After the bride, unveiled now in all her dazzling ripeness, rushes incontinently down the aisle hauling her catch by the hand almost at a run, the wedding guests themselves go home in haste, inflamed, the men tumescent, the women moist.
Riots of pleasure in the beds of Cremona ensue, lasting until the small hours of the morning. Wounded marriages are healed in delight. Babies are conceived. Virgins bribe their duennas to let them meet lovers in alleyways. Priests doff their habits and vows and share with each other ecstasies of the forbidden. Closer to home, Omobono hires the simulated passion of a dark-eyed puttana, and shy Francesco, alone and naked as a baby up on the loggia, plays a divine solo on his beloved organ.
As for Maestro Antonio Stradivari, he tears down the tenting over the great bed and, with his blushing bride finally in his arms upon it, plumbs in himself hitherto unimagined wells of patience, unselfishness, and masculine gentleness. His sensitive fingertips drink from the tingling wifely skin messages of insatiability. He rises avidly to each new carnal dare of hers, and at last, as the moment of true espousal comes closer and closer, Antonia Maria Stradivari, formerly Zambelli, emits repeated cries in tones almost as musical, as sweet, and as abandoned as those uttered in the church that afternoon by her amazing namesake, Antonietta.
*1 Gavotta from Opus 1, No. 1, by Antonio Vivaldi.
*2 Opus 5, No. 12.
Intermezzo One
After his marriage to Antonia, Stradivari entered what has come to be called his “golden period.” In two ensuing decades he produced violins that were greater than Antonietta, violins close to realizing the vision of a perfect instrument that he had had during that restless night after he first saw Antonia walk across the square. Indeed, in those years of his connubial bliss he turned out some of the greatest violins ever made, among them the ones that were eventually named the “Betts,” the “Alard,” the “Messiah.” Those marvels he sold, but he would never sell Antonietta as long as he lived.
When Antonietta was three years old, the War of the Spanish Succession between France and Austria reached its long arm to Cremona as the Austrian Prince Eugene drove to the outskirts of the city and surprised the French garrison, capturing Louis XIV’s arrogant commanding general, the Duke de Villeroi. Antonietta, hanging in the storeroom on the second floor of Stradivari’s house, was safe through it all. Over the years the maestro took the instrument out, from time to time, and played it for Antonia’s pleasure and his own, and its music never failed to excite them both. Antonia bore him five children, each of them conceived, we can guess, with the sweet, seductive tones and overtones of Antonietta still echoing on the bedroom walls. Four children survived; the first of two sons named Giuseppe died at eight months of age.
Stradivari lived to be ninety-three, and with the help of Francesco and Omobono, he built violins to the very end. Early in that final year of her husband’s ripe age, Antonia died, and he, still yearning for her company, followed within months. Stradivari and Antonia were buried side by side in a crypt in the Chapel of the Rosary, in the third bay on the right as one entered the church of San Domenico, across the street from the rooms where the voice of Antonietta had so often been heard, singing of the longing, the obsessive itch, and the fevers of the heart that had gone into the instrument’s shaping.
* * *
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In Stradivari’s long lifetime he had made altogether some one thousand violins, and when he died there were ninety-one of them, including Antonietta, still unsold in the storeroom.
Thirty years after the maestro’s death, a French violinist named Pierre-Nicolas Lahoussaye happened to join the procession of violinmakers, dealers, and performers that was still trooping through the liutaio’s old shop. Lahoussaye had spent some fifteen years in Italy, having studied under the great Tartini and having been patronized by the Count of Clermont and the Prince of Monaco, among others; he was about to leave the country for an engagement with the orchestra of the Italian Opera in London. At that time Stradivari’s and Antonia’s youngest son, Paolo, who had become a cloth merchant, was living in the house and was selling off the remaining violins.
At thirty-three Lahoussaye was still unmarried and was known as something of a rake, compensating for his small stature in his many flirtations, with elegant manners, foppish clothes, and a certain amount of bluster. He tried his hand at eight violins in the Stradivari house that day. The ninth he took up was Antonietta. He noticed the Cupid on the tailpiece but said nothing about it. He had only played a few bars of a Tartini sonata when he broke off and, affecting a casual interest, asked Paolo the price. He was not pleased to be told that this fiddle was Paolo’s father’s favorite and so would cost forty-five Tuscan gold coins called gigliati, whereas other instruments were going for from twenty to thirty. Nevertheless, bursting with excitement at what he had heard, he paid the sum. He also bought the case Stradivari had made for the violin. A few days later he left for England.
* * *
—
Seven years after that, a fanatical collector of violins, violas, and cellos named Count Cozio di Salabue, of Casale Monferrato in Piedmont, bought from Paolo and his cousin Antonio every one of the then remaining instruments made by Stradivari and his sons, together with all his tools, and his patterns, molds, and labels, and even the drawings that the maestro had kept stored in the chest in the corner of his shop. There was nothing left then in the house on the Piazza San Domenico of the great man’s craft, save a few scraps of wood stored up under the roof of the loggia, where the after-echoes of the young widow’s clogs on the cobblestones on that fateful morning were perhaps—who knows?—still ever so faintly whispering.
Act Two
1778
Salzburg, March 22, 1778
My dear Wolfgang!
By the time you read this letter, you will be in Paris. I am sending it in care of Baron Grimm, who will know where to reach you.
Be careful, my son. You have been given great gifts, you must not let that city of twinkling lights bedazzle you. I saw Count Kühnburg, the Chief Equerry, yesterday; you will remember that he is a man of rather easy morals, yet even he said that Paris is a bower of temptations, and that you should be on your guard against plausible young Frenchmen, and even more so against the women, who want nothing more than to catch in their cobwebs young men of genius, really in order to get their hands on their money or even to force them into the servitude of marriage. Carry a clean thread into the labyrinth of the city, son, so that you can find your way back out again. You are only twenty-two. You do not yet have the maturity to see through tricksters of both sexes, who by flattery and charm would find ways to subdue you and bilk you. Such a disaster would kill your devoted father!
The French consider themselves gourmets. Do you know what their cuisine reminds me of? To me their food tastes like the droppings of birds. If you say that, the French will reply that you should enjoy them, because their birds are elegant ones: larks, finches, and so on. No matter. Shit is shit. You must hold to your good, weighty German diet. Remember that highly seasoned foods give you indigestion; if you forget, you will soon have to be bled.
Now. First things first. You are going to Paris to make your fortune. The archbishop has been miserly to you in Mannheim. I am deep in debt. Bear in mind that the word talent stands in the holy Bible for a unit of money. Move quickly to make the connections that will pay off. Baron Grimm, of course, comes first. Equally important is Madame la Duchesse de Bourbon, née d’Orléans, who, when you dazzled Paris as a child, dedicated a trivial composition of her own to you. You dedicated two of your earliest sonatas to Madame la Comtesse de Tessé, who gave you a tiny watch and your sister Maria Anna a dear gold toothpick holder. Cultivate also Madame d’Épinay, who has been—sh-h-h!—mistress to Baron Grimm, and who gave your Mamma an exquisite fan.
Be bold, my son. Besiege Mesdames la Duchesse d’Enville, la Duchesse d’Aiguillon, la Duchesse de Mazarin, la Comtesse de Lillebonne, la Comtesse de Wall, la Princesse de Robeck. I know that you find begging repulsive to your modest sensibility, but you must approach these people of quality and ask for their protection, and you must do so with a measured gallantry, not forgetting to kiss hands, bow, move your feet discreetly, with toes pointed outward—they set great store by politesse. And you must do this at once. (But do not forget, son, that even ladies of rank know how to set traps! Sois sage!)
I am sending by separate post letters of introduction to the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert. Also, I am told that Monsieur Voltaire is in Paris; you could present yourself to him, reminding him of your father’s acquaintance with him; we met on good terms twelve years ago. It is essential that you become known in the circle of great minds—the nobility adores them and slips them cash.
I know that you love me and would not want to be responsible for my early death because of any carelessness on your part. I need consolation for being separated from you, unable from such a distance to hear your voice and your music and to take you in my arms. If you love me, love God even more. Be a good Catholic. Pray and put your trust in God to help you earn money. I will remain until death, no matter when it takes me away, the truest friend you have on earth.
Leopold Mozart
Paris, le 26 mars, 1778
Mon très cher Père!
We arrived in Paris, thanks be to God, three days ago at four o’clock in the afternoon. You cannot imagine the boredom of the trip. It was clear and frigid for the first eight days on the road, but for the last two it poured and blew the way Punto blows on his French horn: foomala-foom-foom! I thought the carriage windows would break from hearing such music. Mother and I sat sopping wet in the carriage. And no one to say a word to! For nine and a half days! The hours were at anchor. Je m’ennuyais à mourir.
