Riddle Me This

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Milan, 1924

Arturo Toscanini had always loved the study in his villa. It was red, white, and green—the colors of the Italian flag—with hunter-green walls, floral crimson and emerald drapes, white window treatments, and brass appointments. Musical scores, whose covers were illustrated with Art Nouveau divas by Alphonse Mucha, stood at attention on the grand piano and various rich wood music stands. These vied with antique maps and globes, busts of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo and an armoire in red and green chinoiserie that teemed with other scores and, thus, failed to close properly. This room has been around the world, Toscanini thought with a smile. Even as it stands still, it has seen perhaps more than I have.

One of the music stands had been placed before a red- and green-striped velvet chair against which rested a cello. Toscanini felt a twinge of regret and remorse. He had cheated on the cello for so long with his conducting career that whole days went by before he touched it—or rather, her.

Yet, she—it—remained as faithful as Signora Toscanini, Carla, who had just sent in tea along with petite pastries filled with custard and cannoli cream. The repast was offset by a celadon service and a lacquer tray embellished with red and green pagodas. Now as the shadows lengthened in his favorite room at his favorite time of day—sunset—Toscanini was filled with a longing beyond words, beyond dreams, even. A longing for what? Perhaps this is what drove the great Alexander, Marco Polo, and all the dead conquerors and explorers whose busts lined his study—an ever-receding horizon that could not be attained because the longing for it could not be expressed.

Toscanini gazed out at the spires of the Duomo as he heard a car pull up, then turned his attention to the composer slowly making his way out of his Isotta Fraschini with the help of a chauffeur. Toscanini winced. He decided to wait for Giacomo Puccini in the study rather than greet him in the great hall. He wanted to give him time to adjust, to give himself time to adjust.

But nothing, he imagined, would’ve prepared him for Puccini’s appearance—gaunt, stooped, trembling. As if to banish those thoughts, Toscanini smiled and embraced him tenderly. My own body could pass through his, Toscanini thought. It’s as if I’m clasping nothing but air. Toscanini motioned Puccini to a red velvet chair he had set near the tray.

“Will you take some tea, maestro?”

“With pleasure, maestro.”

The two old friends and collaborators laughed at the joke that was between “just us two.” Ever since Toscanini had conducted the premiere of Puccini’s La Bohème at the Teatro Reggio in Turin eighteen years earlier, the pair had taken to calling each other maestro as much as a gesture of affection as of respect. That jocular camaraderie belied what Toscanini saw. Puccini’s skin seemed to sink into his skull. Indeed, as he watched Puccini swallow the tea in pain, Toscanini momentarily saw the composer’s skull protrude through its flesh—the very figure of death. He wanted to recoil. Instead he took a deep breath and smiled again at his friend.

“I hope you haven’t been working too hard on the new opera, maestro,” Toscanini said. Turandot was Puccini’s biggest work to date, as layered in time as it was richly orchestrated. Toscanini had been working on the orchestrations with him. The story of an icy Chinese princess, Turandot, and the Tartar prince, Calaf, who risks his life to solve the three riddles she poses to win her, the opera was based on a tale by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami, who had written a romance of Alexander the Great, among other works. As Puccini struggled with a bit of pastry, Toscanini glanced at a jewel-colored illuminated manuscript of the romance that lay open on his desk.

“Ah,” Puccini said, gesturing as if batting away a fly. “I’m having a devil of a time with the final duet, maestro. The death of the slave Liù is such a powerful, poignant moment. She dies protecting her beloved Calaf so he can live to love Turandot. How can Calaf and Turandot’s subsequent encounter compare? And yet it must. Perhaps the time in Brussels will give me inspiration. I will sing my gong-filled Chinese melodies in my head as the doctors consider this tickle in my throat.”

Puccini struggled to rise, and Toscanini escorted him to the door, linking his arm in his in the manner of old friends. He is but nine years older than I and yet he seems so old and frail, Toscanini thought. I don’t know how much time he has.

Puccini might’ve had a premonition of the same for as they parted, he embraced the conductor with great emotion, then clasped his arm, saying, “Don’t let my Turandot die.”