Appassionata

I’m the one with the first night nerves, thought Helen. Clive shouldn’t discuss his boss like this.

‘It’s incredible to think,’ she said reprovingly, ‘Mozart himself conducting the premiere of Don Giovanni in this very theatre more than two hundred years ago.’

‘And Casanova was in the audience and wrote some of the libretto,’ leered Clive, thinking Rannaldini would have left both the Don and Casanova standing this week. ‘There’s the theatre.’

Ahead, romantically and softly lit by old-fashioned street-lamps and hung with window-boxes full of clashing red-and-mauve geraniums, rose a square, peppermint-green building. The foyer was flanked with hefty pillars that would have challenged even Sampson.

‘How beautiful,’ sighed Helen. ‘If only we weren’t so late.’

‘In Mozart’s day it was fashionable to be late and not stay the course,’ said Clive as he locked the car doors. ‘The Kings and Princes of Prague used to make a quick exit from the royal box down those,’ he pointed to an outside staircase, ‘so they could rush off to their fancy pieces.’

Helen looked bootfaced. Clive was far too familiar. Then they both jumped at a deafening machine-gun rattle coming from the auditorium: the traditional applause for the conductor at the beginning of the last act.

‘Shit,’ muttered Clive.

Only by brandishing his identity card as Rannaldini’s minion, did he manage to smuggle Helen past the doorman, who had had death threats not to admit latecomers.

‘Does Signor Rannaldini know I’ve arrived?’ asked Helen as they belted up the wide spiral staircase.

‘No,’ lied Clive. ‘Once an opera starts Rannaldini cannot be disturbed. He hates to lose the mood. He paces the conductor’s room like The Prince of Darkness. Sometimes in the interval he has a shower and changes his shirt in a trance, not realizing it.’

‘There are moments when art transcends everything,’ panted Helen.

But, as Clive smuggled her into a box overlooking the pit, the door banged and, in her nervousness, Helen dropped her bag with a clatter. There was a horrified silence. Bows stopped moving, wind and brass players stopped breathing. Rannaldini whipped round in a fury, he was known to scream at latecomers, or worse still, hurl down his baton and storm out.

But, as he caught sight of Helen, huge-eyed in the half-light, diamonds glittering at her graceful neck like the Pleiades, he gave a wonderfully theatrical start and stopped conducting. Donna Elvira languishing on her balcony, Don Giovanni and Leporello swapping clothes in the shadowy garden and all the musicians looked at him incredulously as though a metronome had broken down.

Rannaldini gazed at Helen. Then a smile of such rare sweetness and joy spread across his face that a ripple of laughter went through the orchestra and the nearby boxes and everyone was desperately craning round and leaping to their feet to see the beauty who had stopped the great Maestro in his course.

Hastily Rannaldini pulled himself together.

‘I am sorry.’ Briefly he turned to the audience then back to the musicians and singers, ‘We begin the trio again. Taci injusti core.’

The exquisite music started, Don Giovanni resumed his amorous escapades. Helen was overwhelmed. Clearly, even for Rannaldini, there were times when love was much more important than art. Clive was grinning broadly when, during an exuberant tutti, he slid back into the box bearing a bottle of champagne, a glass and a plate of caviar.

‘With the Maestro’s compliments,’ he whispered. ‘He was worried this afternoon that you might not have had time to eat.’

The toast was still warm — like Rannaldini’s hands. Helen quivered with excitement. Marcus had so misjudged him. She must eat a little but she mustn’t crunch too loudly.

In the dim light she admired Mozart’s theatre. Gold tiers decorated with plump white cherubs rose up and up to a huge unlit chandelier. Oblong gilt mirrors on the inside of each slate-blue velvet box, huge gold tassels on the midnight-blue curtains on either side of the stage, the musicians’ instruments all added to the subdued glitter.

Below her, in a pit bigger than one of the Czech Grand National’s fearsome ditches, the musicians played as if their lives depended on it.

It was also a mark of Rannaldini’s genius that after such an interruption, he immediately got his glamorous cast of unknown singers back on course without any slackening of tension. It was also obvious, except to a dazzled Helen, that after her arrival both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira sang of the pangs of love with even more tearful conviction. Zerlina, exuding snapping sloe-eyed sexiness in a cherry-red peasant’s dress, on the other hand, was glaring at Rannaldini as she defiantly flashed soft white thighs and black stockings, held up by one red and one purple garter, at her stodgy lover, Masetto.

But Helen had only eyes for Rannaldini, bewildered that such energy should come out of such stillness. His hardly moving stick twitched like a cat’s tail. His hair, now raven-black with sweat, was the only evidence of expended energy.

They were into the moonlit graveyard now. As Giovanni vaulted over the wall to boast of more conquests to a terrified Leporello, Helen thought once again, with the anger of too much champagne, how like Rupert he was.

Then she gasped in terror as the gaunt grey statue of the Commendatore on his stone horse came to life and to the doom-laden accompaniment of the trombones uttered the first dreadful greeting to the Don.

‘Your laughter will be silenced before morning.’

‘Who goes there?’ undaunted by any ghost, Giovanni swung his machine-gun round the tombstones.

As the sepulchral voice rang out again ordering him to leave the dead in peace, Helen’s blood ran even colder. The statue looked so like Malise on his deathbed. Malise had rescued her from Rupert, now he seemed to be warning her from the grave to stay away from Rannaldini.

But Helen was most unnerved by the lascivious halfsmile on Rannaldini’s face as the handsome young Don, still raging and unrepentant, was finally sucked down into a quicksand of leaping flame.

‘A-a-a-h!’

It was like watching a great aeroplane crash. The Prussian-blue curtains closed like the gates of hell. There was a stunned pause as the audience realized Rannaldini had scrapped the last moralizing chorus. Then followed a deafening roar of applause. As the lights went up and the vast chandelier glittered like a huge thistle overhead, Helen could see the full beauty of the theatre, its soft blues and golds like a sunlit day at sea. But loveliest to Helen were the tier upon tier of ecstatically cheering people.

Down below the musicians were shaking hands and hugging each other in delight, as the cast trooped onto the stage, elated but slightly bewildered at such an ovation. How pretty the girls were, strong-featured, red-lipped, lusty and displaying such full white breasts as they bent to gather up the carnations raining down.

Rannaldini got the greatest cheer of all. For a man who’d been conducting for two hours forty minutes, who was black under the eyes and whose suntan had faded, he looked magnificent, smaller than any of the men but dwarfing them with his personality. Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, on either side of him, had kicked off their high heels and the audience cheered even louder as he kissed their hands and then reached out for the hand of Zerlina who was sulking down the row.

Then the chorus returned and everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Czech and Donna Elvira presented Rannaldini with pink roses and a bust of Mozart.

Helen was in despair. Surrounded by such youth and vitality, how could he bother with a scraggy wrinkly like herself? Grabbing her bag she frantically applied blusher then jumped as Clive banged on the door.

‘Time to congratulate the Maestro.’

As he led her down into the dingy catacombs behind the stage, she was reminded of Dante’s Inferno, but was reassured by a glimpse of the Commendatore. Having removed his grey make-up and his white wig to reveal a ruddy complexion and wavy yellow hair, he was now putting on bicycle clips and eating a sausage sandwich.

The conductor’s room was pandemonium. The screaming matches, the fearful bullying had been forgotten in the euphoria of an historic performance. Cast and musicians alike were pouring in to thank Rannaldini, bringing him hastily written cards with their addresses on. Rannaldini, because he could see Helen working her way down the long queue, and he wanted to create an impression of amiability, bothered for once to shake hands with everyone and promised to return as soon as possible.