Upon the evening in question, then, I fashioned a good coat of dress mail, packed my best dagger, leapt into my half boots, and galloped off to the opera house, bidding my apprentice, Ascanio, continue working as steadily as he might on the satyr I had promised to have on the Pope's desk first thing Monday morning, and not to hammer past midnight, as the woman upstairs was seeking to have my studio gutted and the wind ripped from my carcass.

After checking my cloak and dagger, I found my seat with the help of a scurvy drab who seemed to look cross-eyed at my costume, for which impudence, after counting to one, I swore to steal her flashlight. But thinking better of it, and for the avoidance of such childishness right off the bat, I thanked God on my knees, vaulting from that position into my seat, though not without making a mental inventory of the other people in my row, one of whom had the face of a lion, one a scorpion, and one a crab—all excellent models for a lunette I had in progress. Just then Maestro Levine, his head surrounded by a nimbus of curls so finely wrought I wondered if they were from my own workshop, rose in the pit, and the overture began. Eight minutes in, even I with my donkey's ears understood I was hearing the most mold-breaking orchestration of my life, and that this Berlioz was out to dynamite operatic conventions with a vengeance, which pleased me to no end.

At last the curtain rose, and the liberties taken with my story were many. Dally with the daughter of the Pope's paymaster? I don't think so! But suspending myself in disbelief, I discerned the real drama inhered in the music itself, and ripe to bursting it was with psychological subtlety, polyphonic nerve, and melodic force. Then too the send-up of the papal-patron-as-philistine had me writhing in stitches, else I had taken the stage and strangled the bastard entirely.

Notes:

* Benvenuto Cellini, by Hector Berlioz, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City, Dec. 2003-Jan. 2004

Prudence Crowther's bio is forthcoming.