Favola della notte in which Venice became a theatre.
By Marialuisa Veneziano
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🎧 Music for reading
To accompany The girl behind the curtain, we recommend listening to the Prologue, "L'Armonia", from the work The Ormindo by Francesco Cavalli, represented at the Teatro San Cassiano in 1644.
A voice from the first Venetian musical theatre to follow Lucia behind the curtain, when the work began to open its doors to the city.
Click on the arrow of the paragraph, start the track and immediately begin to read: music and fable will end almost together.
Venice, in the winter of 1637, looked like a city built to deceive the eyes.
The buildings floated on the water, the streets ended in the canals and people wore masks to show more freedom what they really were. At night, the lights of the windows broke on the lagoon and every gondola seemed to bring with it a secret.
In a small workshop near San Cassiano worked Lucia, the daughter of a mask manufacturer.
His father shaped papier-mâché faces for nobles, actors and ladies. He built smiles for sad people, severe noses for ridiculous men and innocent cheeks for those who had a lot to hide.
— A good mask — he said, — You don't need to be someone else. It serves to find the courage to be yourself without being recognized.
Lucia cut out fabrics, glued feathers and painted very thin eyebrows. He was fifteen years old and a curiosity his father considered together a gift and a disgrace.
As a child he had heard about the shows organized in the palaces. Music, painted scenes, gods coming down from the sky, monsters emerging from the sea.
But those shows were reserved for princes and guests.
— Why can music only enter the palaces? — asked Lucia.
— Because the rich believe that something becomes more precious when others cannot have it.
Lucia watched the sun reflect on the channel.
— Then the sun must be very poor.
One morning there came an extraordinary news.
In the San Cassiano Theatre, an open work was not only to guests of a court, but to anyone who could buy a ticket.
It would be called Andromeda.
The whole city began to talk about it. The nobles feared they had to breathe the same air as the merchants. The merchants hoped to sit next to the nobles to tell them they saw them yawn. Gondoliers already learned the melodies whistled by musicians during the tests.
Lucia was hired as a helper behind the scenes.
The first time he entered the theatre, he remained still.
The stage was an unfinished world. There were painted columns that seemed to be stunned, clouds hanging on the ropes and waves built with wooden boards. Papers, carbides everywhere: they used to lift deities, change backdrops and make marine creatures appear.
Lucia immediately realized that the theatre was the place where the truth was said using almost only fake things.
He was wearing costumes, lighting them up and helping his father prepare the masks. He knew singers convinced that the world just ended up out of scene and musicians fighting for a note while the roof lost water.
The oldest of the engineers was Bortolo.
He knew every rope and every trap door. He knew how to fly a god without losing his wig and bringing the sun up even during a storm. But since new mechanisms came, no one listened to his advice.
— Modern machines do everything by themselves — They said.
— Even fools do many things themselves — Bortolo answered. — That's not why they work better.
Among the financiers of the show was Messer Alvise Dandolo, an elegant nobleman, passionate about music and deeply distrustful towards ordinary people.
— Art is like a gem — He repeated. — If he passes through too many hands, he loses his splendor.
Lucia, who was carrying some masks, stopped.
— A gem maybe. A song, on the other hand, grows every time someone remembers it.
Messer Alvise observed it.
— Who asked you to talk?
— No one, sir.
— Then why did you do it?
— Because not always those who have something to say receive the invitation.
The noble did not answer. He was used to the people who gave him reason and found disturbing what they offered him a thought.
On the evening of the first, the theatre filled.
There came nobles covered with velvet, merchants, strangers, artisans and young people who had spent almost all their savings to attend the show. They did not sit in the same places and did not pay the same price, but waited for the same curtain.
Behind the scenes, however, the disaster reigned.
The mask of the protagonist was broken.
The car that was supposed to bring out the sea monster was blocked.
Half the lights had turned off.
And, even more serious, some strings that supported the bottom had been cut.
— We have to cancel! — shouted the director.
— I knew it. — said Messer Alvise. — A show for everyone could only end like this.
Lucia examined the mechanisms. The knots had been dissolved by an expert hand.
He saw Bortolo walk away in the hallway.
He followed him to the warehouse.
— Was it you?
The old man didn't deny.
— They wanted to replace me with those cars.
— And you decided to destroy everyone's work?
— I wanted to prove that without me the theater can't work.
Lucia watched him for a long time.
— If you need to make others incapable, you are not necessary. You're just a very experienced obstacle.
Bortolo lowered his eyes.
The protests of the public came from beyond the door. The curtain did not rise and someone had already begun to ask back the money, voice that in theater travels more and more quickly than music.
Lucia took a large white cloth.
— You can still help us.
— After what I did?
— I'm not asking you to pretend it didn't happen. I ask you to decide what to do with it.
Lucia set the cloth at the bottom of the scene. Behind it he wore some light. With fabrics, rods and cardboard cutouts he built the silhouette of a huge sea monster.
Bortolo observed the work.
— The legs are too short.
— Get them.
— Your head won't be afraid.
— Let her live.
The old man took the ropes. His hands remembered what his pride almost destroyed.
When the curtain finally opened, the audience saw an almost empty scene.
Messer Alvise paleed.
Then the music began.
The instruments suggested the movement of the sea. Behind the cloth appeared waves of shadow. The monster grew up on the wall until it became larger than any machine built to represent it.
A child in the audience shouted:
— Here it comes!
The mother tried to silence him, but by now the adults saw the creature.
It wasn't real.
Yet it was enough.
The protagonist entered without the mask that had broken. For the first time the public could see his naked face: fear, breath, eyes facing Perseus.
Sing.
No ornament could hide the human being living in the character.
Lucia, behind the scenes, moved shadows along with Bortolo.
The machines didn't work, but the theater did.
When Perseus freed Andromeda, the spectators held their breath. Nobles, merchants, servants and strangers forgot for a few moments the price of their place.
No one had become the same as others.
But everyone was looking in the same direction.
At the end the curtain fell.
For a few seconds there was silence.
Then the theater exploded in such a strong applause that the masks hanging in the lab of Lucia seemed to tremble.
Messer Alvise reached the girl.
— Do you think they really understood the work?
Lucia looked at the audience coming out.
A gondolier imitated Perseus' song. A vegetable seller dries his eyes. The boy who cried moved his arms pretending to fight the monster.
— They didn't understand the same thing. — He answered.
— And you don't mind that?
— No. Beauty is not an order. You don't have to get the same answer from everyone.
— Then what should you get?
Lucia smiled.
— An open door.
The next day, Venice only spoke about the show.
The arias heard in the theatre passed through the shops, inns and gondolas. Some sang them well. Others turned them mercilessly. The composers would have preferred that everyone respected every note, but the music, once entered the streets, had begun to belong to those who misrepresented it.
Bortolo returned to work. He taught young engineers what he knew, no longer hiding his secrets.
He understood that knowledge does not lose value when it makes others capable. Only vanity needs pupils who remain small.
Lucia continued to work behind the curtain. He did not become a famous singer or noblewoman.
It became something more rare: a person capable of bringing beauty to others without pretending to appear at the center of the scene.
And every time the theater opened the doors, it remembered the phrase of messer Alvise on the gem.
Perhaps he was right: a precious stone, passing by hand in hand, could lose splendor.
But the music was not a stone.
It was a flame.
And a flame does not become poorer when another light is lit.
The preserved beauty for a few can make a magnificent palace; shared beauty can illuminate an entire city. The true value of art is not in separating those who own it from those who are excluded, but in creating, at least for an instant, a place where many different lives can look together in the same direction.
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