The Summer of the Rosenkavalier

By Carole Kulikowski

How does a young American girl, who knows nothing about classical music and whose musical role models are rock and roll idols, transform herself into the most famous female opera singer of the Baby Boom generation? In The Summer of the Rosenkavalier, follow the career of Anna Trent, from her choir singing, garage band days in 1960’s Kansas to the present day opera stages of Europe.
It is a summer of crisis for Anna. Besides performance anxiety, she has much to fear and worry about – her fiftieth birthday, aging, health problems - real and imaginary, the loss of her desirability (imaginary), difficult colleagues (real), a neglected daughter, a devious au pair and the two men in her life – her philandering Svengali like English conductor husband and a younger American conductor – her lover and her first extramarital affair. The novel follows the humorous escapades of the Trent entourage during the summer months, as opera fans turn themselves into modern pilgrims and worship at their favorite shrines, the European music festivals, where Anna performs.
Throughout her career Anna has learned from the characters she has portrayed, models of either how to behave, or more likely, how not to behave. This summer, she will have lessons to learn from them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carole Kulikowski
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301252541

Carole Kulikowski

Carole Kulikowski is an artist represented by Ceres Gallery in New York City.

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The Summer of the Rosenkavalier

by

Carole Kulikowski

Smashwords Edition

Published by Carole Kulikowski

on Smashwords

Copyright ©2013 by Carole Kulikowski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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For my parents,

my lovely mother, Eleanor,

and my poet father, Karl

CHAPTER 1

In Bocca Al Lupo, in the Mouth of the Wolf

Never, never say good luck to an opera singer before a performance, for you might be courting catastrophe. They are a very nervous and superstitious lot. A comforting, theatrical, break a leg is more appropriate.

In Italy one could say in bocca al lupo, meaning in the mouth of the wolf, the Italian equivalent of good luck and have courage. The expression comes from overly imaginative, frightened opera singers who have stood on stage and looked at auditoriums that resemble the mouth of a wolf, its shape like the animal’s jaw and the rows of balcony stalls like its teeth, ready to tear them apart.

The opera singer, Anna Trent, is about to enter the mouth of the wolf. Before a performance she feels as much terror as one would facing such a ferocious beast for her art has such an element of risk.

Imagine having a job that requires absolute perfection and that one little cracked note could bring the scorn of thousands, boos and hisses, public humiliation. Why did La Trent subject herself to such fearful misery? For the hope that all the ceaseless study and rehearsals would carry her through a triumphant performance where she would try to communicate the composer’s and her vision, entertain, move, give to the audience moments of transcendent beauty and a touch of the sublime. And it all would end in standing ovations, flowers being thrown, applause and shouts of Brava! With these high expectations, Anna is always a wreck before a performance.

To the general public Anna Trent is known as much, or more, for her Rolex and American Express ads, irritating Public Broadcasting Station pledge drives, fashion spreads in Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, art films and having a sandwich named for her at the Carnegie Deli in Manhattan, Chicken à la Trent, chicken (it is well known that Anna has performance anxiety problems), whole wheat bread (she is very health conscious), two cheeses (supposedly one for Anna and one for her conductor husband, Terrence Trent, the chef was probably a critic), and a slice of ham (the chef obviously was rubbing it in a bit).

To opera fans, Anna Trent is a legend, the prima donna absoluta of the Baby Boom generation. Not since Maria Callas has a soprano inspired such worshipful devotion. Her opera and concert performances are always sold out, with a few fanatic fans even lining up days before the box office opens. Her albums are bestsellers - at least by classical music standards.

In the insular world of classical music, Anna is treated like royalty. Fans overwhelmed by her presence absentmindedly bow or curtsy. The opera world revolves around her like the old joke, how many sopranos does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, for the world revolves around her.

But walking city streets, Anna has to adjust to the real world. She can go unrecognized and be jostled like any ordinary pedestrian, although she is invariably noticed when she leaves the opera house in full stage makeup, with bouquets of flowers in her arms and followed by an entourage of admirers. Anna understood that her colleague, the tenor, Luigi Piviritti, never has this lack of recognizably factor but she cattily assumes that is not due to his renown as a singer but his formidable size.

For the last decade Anna Trent has been the most famous female opera singer in the world, but the popularity of Piviritti and his little trio called the Three Tenorittis, their ability to sell out stadiums and recordings, irritate her considerably. She comforts herself by thinking it has taken three tenors to overshadow her one soprano.

Presently, the audience is entering the ornate nineteenth century building of the Vienna State Opera for an afternoon performance of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose). Backstage, stagehands gently position the cumbersome scenery into place, lighting cues are being checked on computer panels and the singers are slipping into their eighteenth century costumes. In the pit, the members of the orchestra tune their instruments. At the bar, waiters polish wine glasses which will be used during intermission for celebration or to diminish disappointment with the performance. All is anticipation and excitement for Anna is singing the role of the Marschallin for the first time in Vienna.

Looking in her dressing room mirror, Anna is feeling her own anticipation. She looks at the clock and thinks, still time, as she applies makeup trying to make her almost fifty year old face look thirty-two.

First the base, the ivory foundation to wipe away the wrinkles and age spots she calls freckles. Luckily this procedure is not a Herculean task, for Anna can easily pass for forty, perhaps thirty-eight with good lighting and the viewer’s generosity. But as she looks anxiously in the mirror she realizes her face will never, ever, look thirty-two again, baring the assistance of plastic surgery.

With makeup Anna slowly puts on the Marschallin’s face, while practicing a few musical scales to warm up, then vocalizing a passage from the first act that she will sing to the Marschallin’s hairdresser,

Mein lieber Hippolyte, heut’ haben Sie ein altes Weib aus mir gemacht!

(My dear friend Hippolyte, ah, look at me and see how old you’ve made me look!)

Thirty-two is the age the composer, Richard Strauss, and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, imagined their leading lady. The Marschallin, Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg, a Field Marshall’s wife, is to be a woman of a certain age, a little past her prime but still desirable enough to have an affair with her seventeen year young cousin, Count Octavian Rofrano. The opera is set in eighteenth century Austria and at thirty-two, the Marschallin would be the eighteenth century’s equivalent of a certain age. But the world had entered a new millennium and this summer Anna would enter her sixth decade, the appropriate time she felt to tackle this role. For the year 2000, fifty is in the range of a certain age, Anna feels.

Twenty years ago Anna had sung the role of young Sophie, who gets the guy, in Der Rosenkavalier, and now she is singing the role of the older woman, who loses the guy. At that time she could only dream that if her career progressed as she wanted she would one day sing the role of the Marschallin, a more complex part than commonplace Sophie, and the most compelling character in the opera as Strauss and von Hofmannsthal realized when they started working on it. The Marschallin is a class act, a woman who has intelligence, sophistication, dignity and charm. Originally the male characters, the Marschallin’s cousins’, the middle-aged Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau and Octavian, escapades were to be the focal point of the opera but once the creators introduced the Marschallin, she took over and became the central character around whom all the other players revolved.

The centuries communicate with each other in Der Rosenkavalier. Being performed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was created in the early twentieth century, taking inspiration from the music of the nineteenth century with its magnificent Viennese waltzes and looking back at the mores of the old Vienna of Empress Maria Thérèsa in the eighteenth century, yet it all seems so contemporary.

Anna’s debut as the Marschallin had been a few months earlier at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, her home base with London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and she is scheduled to sing the role at several European music festivals throughout the summer. The critics had been ecstatic about her portrayal, Trent has placed her stamp on the role as she has done in so many other parts. Future singers will be compared to her Marschallin and most will sadly fall short., A triumph!, except for one critic who had the temerity to write that it was about time Anna sang the part, and, ... although Trent looks much younger than her age, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a singer perform the Marschallin who was thirty-two as the composer had envisioned? This Anna would never read, for her handlers kept negative reviews from her. If she received one unflattering critique out of ninety-nine glowing reviews, she would only dwell on the bad one and make herself and everyone around her miserable.

Anna inspects her highbrow in the mirror, God, where has that come from? What she had dreaded, a wrinkle straight across her forehead. The two tiny lines above her eyebrows had joined forces to make one depressed wrinkle across her brow. Nowadays every time she looked in the mirror there was a new disaster, another wrinkle, age spot or gray hair. Her body is beginning to betray her.

And there is that recurring pain in her stomach, which her intimates assure her is nothing, perhaps a little ulcer. Ever the alarmist, Anna is scared. Medical examinations she could hardly remember the names of were given and so far everything is normal. Further tests would have to be fit in to her already booked schedule. Why were they all necessary if her doctor isn’t worried about something terrible? With all the stress Anna had to endure throughout her career, why an ulcer now? Is age weakening her body’s defenses?

Anna takes a few gulps of water and sings,

Die Zeit, dei ist ein sonderbar Ding… Auch sie ist ein Geschöpf des Vaters, der uns alle eschaffen hat.

(For time, how strangely goes its own way. We do not heed it, time has no meaning, but there comes a moment when time is all we feel. All the world talks of it, all our souls are filled with it. On every face its mark will show. Each mirror betrays it, all through my dreams it’s flowing, and now between us two it flows in silence, trickling as in a hourglass. Oh Quinquin (the Marschallin’s affectionate name for Octavian, his petname for her is Bichette), sometimes I hear it flowing unrelenting. Sometimes I arise in the dead of night, go to my clocks and stop them, every one. And yet, to be afraid of time is useless. For God, mindful of all his children, in his wisdom created it.)

Wholeheartedly Anna agrees with the Marschallin, let us stop the clocks. Perhaps the dark contour shadow, especially around the neck to hide what she feels is her weakening chin, would help. She hopes the lighting designer remembers to use the peach lighting on her, as she had requested, for it flatters her skin.

But fearing the lights would not provide enough of a youthful glow, Anna searches for blusher on the dressing room table that is littered with the paraphernalia necessary for her art, especially medications to keep at bay all the ills just waiting to attack her sensitive instrument, the body that supported the voice. Germs, viruses, bacteria, were all out there waiting to attack and leave her racked with colds, flus and headaches, which led to cancellations and the absolute worst scenario, disappointing her audience.

Anna shoves aside a bottle of wine for the frequent after performance celebrations, valium, vitamin C, assorted teas, cough syrup, Echinacea, smelling salts in case she fainted, migraine pills, anti-nausea pills, antibiotics, anti-anti pills, although all these pills could probably be replaced by one giant placebo.

The clutter on her dressing room table continues throughout the room. Anna is not noted for her housekeeping skills for there is always somebody around to pick up after her. Moving into a clean dressing room within a few minutes she usually made it homey looking to herself, but chaotic to others. There are books for she is a voracious reader, musical scores, recordings, videos, flowers and cards sent by admirers, framed extended family photographs of relatives she rarely has time to visit, and her daughter, Sarah’s, childhood drawings to make her feel close although she is away in boarding school. And signed photographs of herself to give graciously to fans.

The eighteenth century meets the twenty-first century in the clothes strewn about the room. The Marschallin’s panniers and huge gowns lay beside Anna’s own designer clothes, minimalist Armani for day, romantic Valentino for night. An opera singer must look glamorous for the fans expect it, her proper English husband insisted and Anna obeyed, although she preferred a sloppy tee-shirt and jeans being a comfort seeking American.

The blusher is found in Anna’s pile of about to be read if she ever found time to read books and is liberally applied to her high cheeks. Luckily for Anna and every female opera singer, opera is one of the highly visible professions where a woman is valued for her talent, regardless of looks or age. A two hundred pound grandmother can perform a dewy, youthful Juliet or Manon if she has a great voice. Even drop Salome’s seven veils and not be laughed off the stage. No one is going to yell at you if you have a second helping of French fries or an extra scoop of ice cream if you can hit those high notes and your trills are thrilling. All that is demanded is to sing the notes perfectly. Acting skills and good looks are a bonus, not a requirement. Imagine an actress of a certain age trying to get away with just talent in the theater, or worse, Hollywood. In those venues at fifty, she would be unemployable.

With trembling hands Anna continues applying her makeup as she pictures all the opera aficiados entering the building, just waiting for her to perform and do something wrong. They could forgive a singer her age, poundage and unsightliness but not hitting her high notes, the money notes as those in the business called them, is unforgivable.

Thinking of what one of her innumerable therapists had said, The audience wants you to succeed and entertain them for they are not paying good money to see you fail, Anna’s sensible inner voice said this is true but there is a nagging doubt that others want her to fail to the point of humiliation. Obviously the naive therapist did not know opera fanatics to whom the art is akin to a blood sport. As an opera fan herself, Anna enjoys the failures of her colleagues as much as their good performances, for they are gossip worthy and memorable. It is the mediocre performances that are forgettable. Besides, it made her feel so relieved and happy not to be in the singer’s place, although a little guilty at her gleeful pleasure.

The audience, rivals and critics, even her fans, are brutal. They all demand perfection. Feeling very imperfect at the moment, Anna would like to be back in bed where she usually spent the day of a performance resting. This is necessary for two reasons, the night before a performance she slept fitfully; it also allowed her to avoid talking, for lengthy conversations could hurt her singing voice. The day after is spent recuperating from exhaustion and the after performance highs and celebrations, or crying over the few fiascos so far in her career. At least at this stage, she did not spend the day vomiting as she used to.

Lately, Anna’s husband has little tolerance for her anxieties. When they were first married Terrence was solicitous about her fears. Endearing hugs and words of encouragement flowed from his mouth with kisses or he gave her rousing cheerleading pep-talks that would send her unafraid to the stage, You are wonderful. The best. There is nothing to fear for they will be as mad about you as I am, and so forth. After twenty years of marriage, Terrence’s attitude now is a blunt, Get over it. Her formerly charming caprices irritate him, had become paranoia, weakness, somehow personal affronts to him, and just a plain nuisance.

Loudly Anna sings, as the Marschallin, this time to give herself courage,

Ein biss’l vielleicht, …Und wär’s dafür gestanden?

(A little perhaps, but I recovered my courage and to myself I said: now what indeed should I fear. And does it really matter?)

So be it. Anna starts darkening her eyes with eyeliner and mascara. Eyes that are large, dark and expressive, which one ecstatic reviewer said could penetrate to the last row of a theater. Waving her mascara wand as Terrence would wave his baton, she would retaliate against his harshness, by embracing her fear.

Since nothing in Anna’s upbringing had prepared her for an operatic career, she has a right to be afraid. It had been thrust upon her by fate, sheer chance. In her youth, all she wanted to sing was rock and roll. Her role models were not opera singers like Callas and Tebaldi but rock and rollers like Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.

In the small town in Kansas where Anna had grown up, nobody knew about opera. The only people who listened to it were the Italian family who lived down the block. Anna remembered Saturday afternoons when she and her friends would bicycle by their house and through the open windows would come sounds of the radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in faraway New York City. They would mimic the operatic voices then peddle away laughing.

The only classical music in her house were the long playing records that had excerpts from popular symphonies and operas that her mother had bought in the supermarket, hoping to give her family a little culture and because they were on sale. Nobody ever listened to them after the initial forced hearing. The music ordinarily played in her home was the big bands, ballads, or musicals that her parents favored or the children’s blasted rock and roll.

From the middle middle-class, Anna’s childhood had been as flat, uninteresting and featureless as the Midwestern landscape she grown up in. Except for her big voice and being slightly overweight, one gift and one not quite a tragedy, she was a very ordinary kid.

But ever since uncle, Vincent, had put her on top of the Thanksgiving table at the age of four and she had belted out a rousing How Much Is That Doggy in the Window? in a loud, clear ringing voice, Anna had wanted to be a singer. Hooked, she loved the attention. Everybody thought she was adorable. She made them happy and in turn was made happy. And the sound of her voice, its power, filled her with joy. She was born for the stage, or at least the Thanksgiving table.

CHAPTER 2

The Voice and I

Silence, that is how Anna’s life began.

This story was told to a reporter early in her career and it is recounted in almost every interview Anna was to give, becoming part of the Trent legend. It is an irony that the greatest female singer of her generation began her life without a voice, the irate primal scream of a new born child.

Born prematurely, Anna was taken from her mother’s womb and there was silence. A silence which terrified her for her first two children had come into the world screaming.

The doctors worked frantically, perhaps there was a slap. Weak from the pain of birth, her mother was barely able to raise her head and could only make out the white gowns that hovered over the child. Where was the baby? Where was the sound? Then it came, clear and piercing, an infant’s wail.

Someone said, She’ll be alright.

Anna’s mother relaxed and saw the baby for a few seconds