Donna Leon - The Jewels of Paradise

In the voice of an actor in a war film suffering from shell shock, he said, “They were going to destroy all of the cards. My superior told me. It was a direct order.” He paused and took in two very melodramatic breaths. “First I threatened to quit if they removed it.”

She covered her mouth with her hands, though it was insufficient evidence of her horror. Then she said, “You’re here, so you didn’t quit. What happened?”

“I threatened to tell his wife he was having an affair with one of my colleagues.”

Instead of laughing, which would have been her normal response, she asked, “Would you have done it?”

Ezio shook his head. “I don’t know, really. Maybe.”

“But he gave in?”

“Yes. He said we could keep them, but we weren’t to let anyone use them. The bulletin he sent said that the catalogue was to be fully computerized and the only access to the collection was to be via the computer.” Ezio made a gesture that looked suspiciously like spitting on the floor. “He told us to do it, and then he cut our funding. So there’s no money.”

“And the computer catalogue?”

He paused, smiled, changed roles, and became any diplomat when asked a direct question. “It’s being worked on.”

“And your superior?” she inquired.

Again, the gesture. “He’s been reassigned to a provincial library.” Before she could ask, Ezio explained: “It seems three of the last people he hired were relatives of his wife.”

“Where is he working now?”

“Quarto d’Altino.” He smiled. “It’s rather a small library.”

As so often happened when Caterina heard the tales told by friends or colleagues who had remained to work in Italy, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She set her bag on one of the tables at the center of the room and opened it to take out notebook and pencil. When he saw her do this, Ezio said, “I’ll go get you your entrance card.” He pointed to an empty carrel that stood between two of the windows. “You can use that one if you want. Leave the books there while you’re using them. When you’re finished with them, put them on the desk near the door over there,” he said, pointing to the desk, “and they’ll be reshelved.”

She nodded her thanks. Ezio said, “This might take some time,” and left.

Caterina went over to the window and looked down at the Piazza. People passed to and fro, no one much bothering to look to the sides of the Piazza. Everyone entering was intent on the facade of the Basilica, as Caterina thought they should be, and those leaving often turned around to have another glimpse of it from a distance, as if needing to assure themselves that it was not an illusion. To her right, the flags flapped in the freshness of springtime and she relaxed into the ridiculous beauty of the place.

Turning from this, she went to the catalogue and found the drawer that ran from Sc to St . From Scarlatti to Strozzi, which would also contain Stradella and Steffani. Under “Steffani,” she found entries in many different handwritings and just as many different spellings of his name. She also found a cross reference to “Gregorio Piva,” which a feathery note on the card explained was the pseudonym Steffani used for the musical compositions of his later years. She retrieved her notebook and wrote down the call numbers for the books that looked like biographies of Steffani or might be more concerned with his life than with his music, then went to the shelves and began to hunt for the volumes.

By the time Ezio came back, more than an hour later, Caterina was sitting in the carrel with about forty centimeters of books lined up on the shelf in front of her. She turned when she heard him come in, keeping her finger in the book she was reading. He placed the card on the open page, bent down to give her a kiss on the cheek, and, saying nothing, left the room. Caterina put the card in the pocket of her jacket and went back to reading.

The habits of the scholar had dominated Caterina’s selection. First check the publisher to see how serious the book was likely to be, and then a quick check for footnotes and bibliography. Anything that appeared to be self-published or that lacked notes or bibliography, she left on the shelves. What scholars were thanked in the acknowledgments? The culling process had taken some time, leaving her delighted that so much had been written about him.

She started to take notes. Same information about the family: humble but not poor. Early gift for music. At twelve, so beautiful was his voice that, while still a choir student in Padova, he had been sent to sing some opera performances in Venice. Was it success that had made him outstay his leave by several weeks? Despite his curt letter of apology, no punishment was given when he returned to Padova.

The Elector of Bavaria heard him singing in Venice and invited him to Munich, where Steffani was appointed musician to the court. To perfect his art, he was sent to Rome for a time and no doubt began his ecclesiastical training while there. His upward rise continued, all fairly normal for an ambitious young man of his era.

His career took wing with his move to Germany. Soon he was an abbé, though Caterina could find no reference to his ever having said a Mass or administered any of the sacraments. Was abbé merely a title or did it entail clerical obligation as well as status?

She pulled her thoughts from speculation and returned to Munich and to Steffani’s growing fame as a composer. He was in the employ of a Catholic elector and much in his favor, but in 1688 he chose to leave when the position of Kapellmeister, which he believed he deserved, was bestowed on Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei, the son of the composer who had been his teacher in Rome.

Luckily, he had been seen and heard in Munich by Ernst August, the Protestant Duke of Hanover, who headed a court thought by some to rival that of France. Invited there as a musician, he accepted and was soon moving in the highest intellectual circles, a friend of philosophers—Leibniz, for one—musicians, and aristocrats.

His talent apparently flourished, his reputation grew, and he turned out yearly operas to ever greater success. But then, in the early 1690s, when it seemed he could become no more famous than he was, he suspended it all to go on a delicate ambassadorial mission, which two writers attributed to the need to “convince other German states to look with favor on the accession of Ernst August to the title of Elector of Hanover.”

After the death of Ernst August, Steffani moved for a few years to the court of the Catholic Elector Palatine at Düsseldorf, where he worked as a privy councillor to the Elector and at the same time as President of the Spiritual Council—another mystery to Caterina. His social stature must have risen because he used a pseudonym for the operas he still continued to write, no doubt to avoid popular suspicion that a high-ranking clergyman would engage in behavior as morally and socially compromising as the writing of operas. As for writing under his own name, there were only the chamber duets and the Stabat Mater, which he wrote toward the end of his life.

Grateful for all his services, the Elector Palatine interceded on Steffani’s behalf with the Vatican. The pope finally gave in and made him a bishop. When she read that this was, unfortunately, only titulary and produced almost no income, Caterina muttered, “The wily bastards.” Then, unexplained, Steffani abandoned the Catholic duchy and returned to Protestant Hanover, where he remained until his death.

The books contained two pictures of him, the most common a lithograph made a century after his death and said to be a copy of an original, though in the ensuing century someone had added a goatee to his chin, as unflattering and unconvincing as those added to the photos of unpopular politicians. The other was the contemporary portrait of him that she recalled, wearing his bishop’s cap. In the first, he looked earnest and busy, with his bishop’s miter and crosier visible behind him. In the second, he was dressed in his ecclesiastical best. He looked reserved, but chiefly he looked well fed.