Lucifer's Shadow

34 Questions of authorship

Venice loves a mystery, and it has taken this one to its heart. Here are some of the theories bandied around the coffeehouses, though no member of the Venetian public outside the rehearsal room of La Pietà has yet heard a note of the work.

The mysterious figure is none other than Vivaldi himself, attempting to revive his flagging career with a little showmanship and a new name on the frontispiece. Or the German Handel, who has not been much heard of in the city since his Agrippina made an apparently sensational debut here more than twenty years ago. Handel now lives in London. The gossip says he smuggled the new work into Venice to test the water for his return, fearing the English taste for Italian-style opera is somewhat on the wane. The German doubts the lessons he learnt at the knees of Corelli and Scarlatti will pay his English rent much longer. There is, I am told, a satire on his style called The Beggar’s Opera, which is much in favour there.

After these two comes the real nonsense. The composer is a local gondolier who learned his talents singing for his supper while paddling the Grand Canal (find me a gondolier who knows a sharp from a flat and I’ll place a pile of ducats in front of the Basilica after breakfast and expect to see them there at supper time). The work is a lost opus of Corelli’s, recovered from his tomb when his cadaver was exhumed during building works in the Pantheon in Rome. A churchwarden in Santa Croce is telling his drinking friends he wrote the piece on the parish organ after the nightly flock went home. A man has heard from another man, whose impeccable sources must never be revealed, that a half-blind watchmaker with a tiny stall on the Rialto has painstakingly assembled the work note by note over many years, knowing he suffers from a terminal disease and impending deafness. Now this poor soul desires nothing more than to hear his creation played in La Pietà by Vivaldi’s gorgeous band before expiring, content in the knowledge that he has bequeathed to the world a musical masterpiece which will live forever.

Finally, the most ridiculous of all. That it is some nobleman in the city — perhaps even Delapole himself — who has hitherto hidden his signs of musical greatness and now plays this game to make the grandest entrance of all. Furthermore, he will, when revealed, shower upon the city both financial and musical riches that shall restore the Republic to its former glories, cure the palsy, make the Grand Canal smell sweeter than a Persian whore’s bosom, etc., etc.

I listen to these fairy tales, nod sagely, and keep my peace. Once, when Gobbo and his chums were making merry with the rumours in his local tavern, I was tempted to interject an even more outré theory: that it was written by a woman. But then they would have thought me mad. Female fingers must work at nothing save the roles we give them; ’twas always thus and always will be.

So I smile and play the ignoramus. Only Rebecca and I know the truth. She has not told Jacopo, even, for fear of worrying her brother further. While we stay mute, the industry around her artistry grows. Pages for the various parts appear from the Scacchi presses, some even set by my clumsy hand. On the frontispiece, where Leo covetously tried his name, there is nothing but blank space beneath the plain title copied from her own manuscript, Concerto Anonimo, and the year.

When I stare at this bare white lacuna, I see it filled by Rebecca’s face. In the thickets of elder bushes that cover the flat, unkempt wasteland in the northernmost part of the city, above the ghetto, where none may see a pair of ardent lovers retire of an afternoon. And in her room, where we steal when Jacopo is out, and writhe together naked beneath sheets that come to twist around us in our labours, like swaddling clothes for infants who toss and turn in the grip of deep, enrapturing dreams.

Here are Rebecca’s true mysteries. The dark glitter of an eye, the turn of her hip, the soft, full weight of her breast. These are secrets that live beyond words or the tones that even she may pluck from Delapole’s gift. It seems a lifetime now since that first night, and still I wonder she should reveal them to such as me.