Interrupted Aria
by Beverle Graves Myers
Summary
Venice, 1731. The dazzling city on the lagoon is sailing toward ruin, determined to go down in a maelstrom of pleasure, music and masquerade. Opera is the popular entertainment of the day, and Tito Amato one of its rising stars.
At Tito’s debut, a prima donna is poisoned and an innocent singer arrested. To save his friend, Tito must race the executioner to find the real killer. With carnival gaiety swirling around him and rousing Venetian passions to an ominous crescendo, Tito finds that the most astonishing secrets lurk behind the masks of his own family and friends.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Bad luck that my first glimpse of Venice was marred by an insult.
“Capons, worthless twittering trash,” wafted half whispered toward us from a group of young merchants gathered at the rail of the small ship nearing the Porto di Lido. One pursed his lips in a pout and mimicked the fluttering of a fan while another extended his meaty hand in a limp-wristed gesture. They all laughed dismissingly as they strolled farther up the deck.
Felice and I kept our eyes carefully lowered to the sparkling green water of the lagoon. It was not as though we hadn’t had our share of sneers and remarks since leaving Naples, but they still rankled.
My friend and I were castrato singers. As young boys, we had been gelded for the sake of our beautiful, soprano voices which had then been trained to the pinnacle of technical brilliance by the most exacting voice maestros in Italy. At the Conservatorio San Remo, we had learned that we had the blessed Saint Paul to thank for our condition. “Let your women be silent in the churches,” he had proclaimed. Generations of churchman had taken that command to heart. Taking a leaf from the Persians’ book, the papal choir directors had created castrati, not to serve as compliant slave boys, but to honor God with the closest approximation of heavenly voices that this earthly realm could produce.
Angelic castrati voices still filled the cathedrals, but every young eunuch at San Remo knew that the popular demand for our unique talents had shifted to the courts and opera houses. A talented castrato soprano was a valuable commodity, especially in mercantile cities like my Venice where every patrician was also a businessman and every citizen so infatuated with the opera that La Serenissima’s theaters were packed to the rafters every night.
Naples had loved us. As students, we sang at festival masses in all the great churches and entertained the wealthy and powerful over banquets and intimate dinners. Neapolitans by the hundreds crowded the conservatorio theater for every concert. As our maestros marched us through the streets of the beautiful city on the bay, two orderly lines of well-scrubbed boys in the yellow-sashed San Remo uniform, we heard whispers of praise, not insults.
“Watch that little dark one there, the voice of a cherub” or “That one is divine. He will be another Farinelli”.
On our own for the first time, Felice and I were just beginning to understand that the same people who applauded our singing from the lofty perspective of their theater boxes were often disgusted and embarrassed when confronted by physical reminders of how we acquired our luscious voices.
The merchants by the rail had started arguing about the price of Turkish tobacco, and I realized they had probably forgotten the two young singers so anxiously peering through the breezy, late autumn sunshine at our long awaited destination. What would Venice make of Tito Amato, her returning son?
Reviews
"Readers familiar with Venice will delight." Publishers Weekly
"Riveting first mystery." Chicago Tribune
"A lavish mystery with a number of fascinating characters.” Mystery Women
Author's Biography
Beverle Graves Myers hails from Louisville, KY. Her Baroque Mystery series is set in the musical world of 18th-century Venice and features Tito Amato, an opera singer with a stellar talent for sleuthing. Bev also writes short fiction which has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies.