Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She’s increasingly eager to groom our public look. “Jonie”—and yes, he stands for it—“you’re getting noticed. You’re earning a name for lightness. You have to watch out for anything lugubrious. Find work that lets you sail.” She squelches attempts to sing anything written later than 1930. She arms him with an arsenal of shiny pellets, each one finished in two minutes. She feeds him Fauré. She goes through a Delius kick—“Maude” and “A Late Lark.” He sings them, like appearing onstage in pastel tights.

Lisette sands down the cheats he’s developed to hide his thinner notes. She pushes him to get a single burnished arc out of all three of his voice’s regions. No one has ever heard in him what she hears. No one has ever dared him on as she does. At his lessons, she sings back to him. When she sets him aside and takes up the notes, it’s like brass after bronze. His instrument is more magnificent than the one she’s been dealt. But her presence blows my brother’s away. She merely has to think the notes; they fall from her in the effortless afterthought of inner recall. Her singing draws him to his fate. Even I can’t turn away.

She huddles up to him as he sings, pressing on his sides, patting his flank, resting her cool palms against his neck. It’s a loving cruelty, torturing him with touch. But this is how they learn best now, locked in a constant clinch, passing information through the siphon of skin.

“Grow huge,” she tells him. “Not in mass; not even in volume.” He must learn to place not just his sound but his very soul into the dark back corners of the most cavernous halls. One day, she’ll have him storm the arenas of drama and demand a hearing. Until then, he must perfect the high, clear force of lieder, a different matter altogether.

She wants us to hear how opera is really done, in the trenches, under fire. She gives us two tickets for her coming performance — Fiordiligi in Così, for Mr. Bing. “Mozart?” Jonah teases her. “What nationality was he again?”

She tucks him under the chin the way Maria Theresa once coddled the boy composer. “He sure as hell wasn’t German, darling. He loved those Italian libretti, you’ll notice. And he’d have lived in Paris forever, by choice.”

Her coolness betrays how much is at stake. A role in Così, at the Met. She seems, at most, a little harried. “Lives don’t come down to one moment,” she claims. We know she’s lying.

She gives us the golden tickets and shoos us away. “Have a good time, boys. I’ll be the one in the big wig and white petticoats.”

We wear our concert clothes for the event. It’s overkill, but it preempts trouble at the door. We head down to Broadway and Thirty-ninth, hoping to slip in without a scene. The seats Lisette gives us are magnificent, a few rows back from the block she gives her family. Jonah waits for the curtain, biting his cuticles until they bleed. He’s in agony, worse than anything he’s ever felt before going onstage himself. Here at eye level, he can see what his teacher cannot, up there behind the blinding lights.

“You feel that?” he asks. I nod, thinking he means the electricity. “They want her blood. They want her to fall to pieces.”

It’s crazy. We’re talking a midsized role in Mozart’s “problem” opera, the one nobody quite gets. Disaster will, at worst, send her back to San Francisco for a few seasons. Triumph will, at best, win her another chance to prove herself to Bing.

“That’s paranoid, Jonah. Why would anyone want her to fail?”

“What do you mean? For the excitement. The drama missing in their own lives. Look around. These people would love a good wipeout. Now that would be real opera.”

As soon as the curtain rises, Jonah stops worrying about whether his teacher’s going to die and starts worrying about whether she’s going to stay faithful to her feckless lover. He’s lost from the overture’s first theme. Doesn’t she love her officer? Why doesn’t his departure destroy her? How can she fail to see through these turbaned Albanians, gotten up like fifty-cent Turks?

In the intermission, he’s ruined for talk. He has it in for Despina and Alphonso. Only sheer, faithful concentration can hold their devious plot at bay. But all around us, the audience is deep in appraisal. They weigh the orchestra, the conductor, the leads, Mozart — deciding who should live and who needs to die for humanity’s sins. I know enough not to cough, lest they train the fire hoses on me. The matron next to me ruffles through her program. “Who is that gorgeous thing playing the faithful one?”

Her cadaverous escort coughs. “You mean Soer? She’s been around. Up-and-comer. Second lead sort of thing. Could go all the way.”

“She’s good, don’t you think?” I look to Jonah, but he’s busy fending off the first act’s dangers, guarding his teacher’s chastity. “The note doesn’t say where she’s from. Is she French or something?”

The cadaver just snorts. “Lisa Sawyer. Hails from Milwaukee, where, I understand, her father makes what passes for beer. Emphasis on passes.” He flips through his own program, frowning. “Hmm. They don’t mention that?”

The woman raps his shoulder. “Nasty. Is that her real color?”

“‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ Apparently, only half of the city knows for sure.”

She slaps him on the wrist with her rolled-up program.

Jonah comes out of his trance. “What do you think of the tempi?” I ask. He corrects them all, from memory.

The curtain rises on the second act, plunging us back into life or death. Jonah grips the armrest throughout Lisette’s second big aria, anticipating the octave-and-a-half swoops, sure she’s going to give in and get laid by this pseudo-Albanian, her sister’s fiancé, her betrothed’s most trusted friend. Everybody does it. Does she love this other man? Why is her fall so much sweeter than her earlier sworn chastity? His whole body sighs with her thrilling debasement.

Lisette doesn’t always soar. Some of the highs lack support, and her rapid, dipping passages take cover. Still, she’s supernatural. She inhabits the stage, never having lived anywhere but in this story, never experiencing any time but this one renewing night. Fiordiligi has waited patiently for just such a supple body to reawaken in after long hibernation. Never has a singer taken such shameless physical pleasure in a role. Lisette is wayward, consumed, consummated by the unlikely luck of this part. By her “Per pietà,” Jonah is lost, and even I forgive her anything.

“She is fun to watch,” the cadaverous man concedes in the extended applause. “A real piece. Piece of work, that is.” His consort smacks him again, this time with her knuckles.

From the “toast” quartet through the fumbling denouement, Lisette glows, divinely human. She radiates the social, unable to exist except through the grace of those out front, in this hall, from the pit to the upper balcony. She needs society, feeds off others, and yet her art lives in the most sealed of vacuums. The struggle of 1963 is nothing to her, not even unreal. This might be the Burgtheater, Vienna, 1790: a dress rehearsal in paradise, the morning after the last revolution.

Tonight, she is the privileged world’s darling. Applause brings the cast out again and again. Sheaves of roses float up to her onstage, more than for Dorabella and Despina combined. During her bows, she finds us and locks our eyes: You see now? Living maximum need? An old trick, a staple for those who live by an audience’s love: She knows how to gaze so that everyone in the house feels singled out.

We don’t even consider the receiving line. Lisette Soer is the toast of New York tonight, until tomorrow replaces her. She wouldn’t even recognize us in the adoring fray. The couple alongside me declines, as well. But they’re still talking about her as they file out ahead of us, on their way to whatever postopener postmortem their people retire to.