Paganini's Ghost (27 page)

There was something beneath the lining—a piece of board to give it some rigidity. My fingers encountered a tiny protrusion along the front edge—like a sliver of velvet that had come unstuck. I peered closer and saw that it was indeed a sliver of velvet, but it hadn't come unstuck. It was attached to the lining—a very small hand-stitched tag.

I tugged on the tag. The lining came away from the lid along three
sides. On the fourth—the back edge—it remained fastened, a strip of velvet acting like a hinge. Between the lining and the underside of the lid was a rectangle of card about the size of a business card. And it
was
a business card. It had Henri le Bley Lavelle's name and address printed on it beneath an elaborate coat of arms incorporating his initials.

The business card wasn't the only thing inside the lining. There was a piece of paper. A piece of paper folded in two, about ten centimetres square. I lifted it out—it felt old and brittle in my fingers—and carefully unfolded it.

There was writing on the paper—faded but legible—writing in two different hands. The first hand—at the top of the page—was bold and clear, the letters large and ornamented with swirls. I read what was written aloud to Guastafeste.

“ ‘San Carlo, March 20, 1819. I undertake within twelve months of this date to pay the sum of six thousand eight hundred francs to Signor Domenico Barbaia.' It's signed Nicolò Paganini.”

“Paganini?” Guastafeste said. “What is that?”

“It's an IOU,” I said. “For a gambling debt, I would guess.”

“Who's Domenico Barbaia?”

“He was the impresario who ran the San Carlo opera house, in Naples. And controlled the gaming tables at the opera house. Paganini must have owed him money—a lot of money. Six thousand eight hundred francs would have been a fortune back then.”

Guastafeste frowned.

“If it's an IOU to Barbaia, shouldn't he have had it? What's it doing in a gold box that belonged to Paganini?”

“Because the debt was paid off,” I said. “Look at this, lower down the page.”

The second hand was harder to read. It was an untidy scrawl, the letters cramped together, but I could just make out the words.

“ ‘The debt is now considered cleared. Isabella will love this. Domenico Barbaia, May 16, 1819.' ”

I turned the paper round so Guastafeste could read it for himself.

“Paganini paid what he owed and the IOU was returned to him,” I said. “That's why he put it in the gold case. What better place to keep it, considering how he'd cleared the debt.”

Guastafeste gave me a puzzled look.

“What do you mean?”

“Isn't it obvious?” I said. “Paganini didn't give Barbaia six thousand eight hundred francs; he gave him the jewelled violin.”

Guastafeste studied the piece of paper again.

“Are you sure?”

“Six thousand eight hundred francs was a huge sum. And Paganini, in 1819, wasn't the enormously wealthy man he became later. What assets would he have had? His violin—
il Cannone
—that was probably the only thing of any value he owned. And he was hardly going to part with that. His living depended on it. What else did he have that was worth the equivalent of six thousand eight hundred francs, or more? Viotti's gold violin, that's all. There's another clue in the wording. ‘Isabella will love this.' ”

“Isabella?” Guastafeste said.

“Let's have some coffee,” I replied.

I put the espresso pot on the stove. Then I told him about Domenico Barbaia and Isabella Colbran.

 

Barbaia is one of those characters history has forgotten, but without whom there would be no history to remember. He started his working life as a café waiter in Milan and went on to become the most influential musical showman of his day. He was poorly educated, but shrewd and hardworking and with an eye for the main chance, acquiring the concession to run the gaming tables in the foyer of La Scala and making a fortune on the side with some lucrative contracts to supply the French troops that were stationed in Milan.

At that time, no one went to the opera purely to listen to the music. To many of the patrons, in fact, music was the least of their reasons for going. La Scala was the centre of social life in Milan. For the wealthy
with no jobs, it provided relief from the tedium of their days. They would go every night during the season and listen to the same operas over and over again, although
listen
is perhaps not quite the word, for nobody actually listened to much of the music. They went to talk, drink champagne and play cards in their boxes—their miniature salons—and, as the boxes had curtains that could be drawn, make love to their mistresses or paramours or, if they were desperate, their spouses.

Most of the action on the stage was watched with half an eye, or ignored altogether. The socialising really stopped only for the big numbers or the ballet sequence that every opera was obliged to accommodate and which was little more than titillation for the men in the audience—the cue for them to put down their cards, or their mistresses, and admire the dancers' legs. There was even a tradition of the
aria del sorbetto
—the sorbet aria, which was written for one of the supporting singers and gave the audience the chance to leave the auditorium and buy themselves a sorbet. Rossini famously wrote one of these sorbet arias in his opera
Ciro in Babilonia
; it consisted of just a single note repeated—a middle B flat—because he had discovered in rehearsals that the
seconda donna
could sing only that one note in tune.

But undoubtedly the greatest attraction of La Scala were the faro and
rouge-et-noir
tables that were set up in the foyer—the only place in Milan where gambling was permitted. Many people went to the opera and never actually made it to their seats. They got no farther than the foyer, where some would win and some would lose, but the only consistent winner was Domenico Barbaia.

By 1818, when Paganini and Barbaia first met, the impresario had moved from Milan to Naples, where he was running the opera and the gambling at the Teatro San Carlo. He would later go on to be instrumental in the careers of Bellini and Donizetti, but at this stage, if for nothing else, posterity owes him a debt for bringing the young Rossini to Naples and giving him the security that enabled him to develop his genius as a composer.

Barbaia was rough and a little uncouth, but he had a gift for spotting
talent and was prepared to take risks to support the musicians he employed at the San Carlo. Rossini's first opera for him was
Elisabetta, Regina d'Inghilterra—Elizabeth, Queen of England
—about Elizabeth I's supposed love for the Earl of Leicester, which is rarely heard in the opera house today. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the overture, which Rossini—adept at cannibalising his own work—had already used for his earlier opera
Aureliano in Palmira
and liked so much that he would go on to use it a third time as the overture to
The Barber of Seville
.

The title role in
Elisabetta
was written for the San Carlo's
prima donna
, the formidable Isabella Colbran. Colbran was the Maria Callas of her day, Italy's most celebrated, and most highly paid, soprano, who had an astounding vocal range and a dramatic ability that audiences found mesmerising. She was to become Rossini's wife, but at this point—in keeping with the droit du seigneur that impresarios exercised over their leading ladies—she was Barbaia's mistress.

Given his astute box-office instincts, it was only natural that Barbaia should attempt to lure Paganini to the San Carlo, and in the spring of 1819, the violinist duly arrived in Naples. Rossini was busy overseeing the revival of his opera
Mosè in Egitto—Moses in Egypt
—which had had its premiere the previous year but had not been an unqualified success because of staging problems. In the scene where Moses parted the Red Sea, the audience—much to its amusement—had been able to see the small urchin boy under the set who was operating the mechanism separating the waves. The mechanism—and the urchin boy—proved difficult to change, so Rossini's solution was to write a new aria for the scene to distract the audience. In this he was spectacularly successful. On the first night of the revival, the aria, the moving prayer “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” made such an impact that the ladies of the audience went into paroxysms and doctors had to be called to treat them. Many years later, when Rossini's body was transferred from Paris to a new tomb in Florence, it was this prayer that was sung on the steps of Santa Croce. And it was this prayer that Paganini used as the theme for his “Moses Fantasy,” dedicated to Elisa Baciocchi.

Paganini's stay in Naples was clearly not all work and no play. The IOU we'd found in the gold box was unequivocal evidence that he had succumbed to the weakness for gambling that had afflicted him since his youth, when he had had to pawn his violin to pay his debts. There could have been no question of his pawning his violin this time. The Cannon was far too important to his career. He would no more have parted with it than he would have cut off one of his fingers. But the jewelled violin Elisa had given him was a different matter. Precious though it was, it was expendable.

Throughout his life, Paganini was careless in his relationships with women. He did not have the temperament or the inclination for monogamy, and his lifestyle, in any case, was not conducive to it. He was constantly on the move, travelling from one city to another, playing concerts, then moving on. In modern times, that would be tiring enough—as many an international concert soloist could vouch. In Paganini's day, with journeys made by horse-drawn coach over unmetalled roads, it was exhausting. Few women would have been prepared to put up with such hardships. They would have wanted stability and a settled life, which Paganini was not able to give them. Even when he was in his forties and he fathered a son, Achille, he did not change his ways. A doting, besotted parent, he simply jettisoned Achille's mother—paid her off with a financial settlement she was only too happy to accept—and took the boy with him on his travels.

If he was so indifferent to the feelings of the women in his life, why should Paganini have had any greater attachment to the gifts they gave him? Elisa's present of the jewelled violin was not as generous as it seemed, given that it had been looted from a convent by one of her soldiers, but she must have made it in a spirit of love. Whether Paganini received it with the same sentiment may be open to question, but he hung on to it for many years after their split. If the gaming tables of the San Carlo had not come in his way, maybe he would have hung on to the violin even longer. Was that why he had dedicated the “Moses Fantasy” to Elisa? I wondered. As a kind of recompense for using her gift to pay off his gambling debt, as a way of alleviating the guilt he
must surely have felt? Six thousand eight hundred francs was a considerable sum. Domenico Barbaia would have happily taken the jewelled violin in lieu of the money, and then . . .

“And then what?” Guastafeste said.

“It's there in the IOU,” I replied. “ ‘Isabella will love this.' Barbaia gave the violin to Isabella Colbran.”

W
hat happened after that? I wondered. What did Isabella do with the jewelled violin? Most jewellery is made to be worn, but she could hardly have pinned a twenty-centimetre-long gold violin to her gown. Did she have it broken up and the jewels reset into more practical forms? I couldn't see it. Only a vandal with no aesthetic taste would have taken apart such a fine work of art, and Isabella Colbran was no vandal. She was an educated, discerning artiste. She would certainly have kept the violin intact, perhaps displayed it on her dressing table, where she could admire it when she was doing her hair and makeup.

Isabella was one of the greatest singers of her day, a beautiful, supremely talented woman, yet her life was fated to end unhappily. When Barbaia gave her the jewelled violin in 1819, her relationship with the impresario was already coming to a close. She had almost certainly started an affair with Rossini, and who could blame her? Rossini was young and good-looking—the baldness and corpulence that
was to afflict him later was still just a shadow on the horizon. He was a phenomenally gifted composer with a love for the good things in life and a wit that any woman would find attractive.

Occasionally, I have been known to speculate about which great composer would have made the most convivial companion for a night on the town. Mozart? He was, by all accounts, a warm, gregarious individual, but his childish, scatological sense of humour would, I fear, have quickly become tiresome. Beethoven? Well, his deafness—not to mention his irascibility—wouldn't have made things easy. There might have been some cruel amusement to be had out of scribbling a provocative comment in his “conversation book” and then retiring to a safe distance to watch the explosion. But that's not something I could ever do to another person, let alone someone as great as Beethoven. Brahms? Too serious and austere. He played the piano in the brothels of Hamburg when he was a young man, but—perhaps understandably—that seems to have put him off sex and drink for life.

No, Rossini would be my number-one choice. A
bon viveur
with a fondness for food, wine, and music—what better companion could you hope for? They say that Rossini wept only three times in his life: once when he heard a singer murdering one of his arias, once after the premiere of
The Barber of Seville
—which was a notorious disaster—and a third time, at a picnic, when the truffled chicken fell in the river. That's the kind of man he was. Leaving aside
The Barber
—the most joyous comic opera in the entire repertoire—how could you not like a man who went out in drag with Paganini during carnival season, the two friends singing and accompanying themselves on guitars? Or who coined the immortal words about Wagner: “Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.” Or who, when his friend the composer Meyerbeer died and Meyerbeer's nephew showed him a funeral march he'd written in honour of his uncle, remarked, “Excellent. But wouldn't it have been better if you had died and your uncle had written the march?”