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imagined themselves singing at La Scala.” He stretched his arms behind his head and grinned.
    “Have you met the other singers in the company?” Anna asked. “Are they nice? Are they very old?”
    “Oh, yes, jolly fellows all. Trust them with my life. There’s Mandini and Benucci who are much alike. Mandini’s not as good as Benucci but he’s an upright fellow, elegant, lean. Benucci’s tremendous. He’s a cannon. Great fun. What, how old? Middling of age. Younger side of middling. Then there’s the basso, Bussani, great booming fellow, and his pretty little wife, Dorotea. She’s the only other lady, almost as young as you, I should think, but not nearly as good. She’s a good old ham but the voice isn’t much. She goes with Bussani, you see. Then there’s you and me.”
    “I hope they like me,” she said.
    “They won’t be able to help it, my dear!”
    “Is Benucci the
primo buffo
?”
    “Him or Mandini. You’ll look well with either of them. Mandini you don’t have to worry about, he’s got a wife. Oh, she sings, too; I forgot about Mrs. Mandini. And Benucci—well, he’s a good chap, sings like a cannon.”
    The following morning Anna and Michael went to La Scala to sing through the first act with the rest of the cast. Michael had been there a month already, and the others longer, but the former
prima buffa
had departed for another engagement. The opera was by Antonio Salieri, visiting from Vienna. He did not know Anna’s voice but she had told him its compass in letters. She had received one aria by post in Livorno, but otherwise today would be her first encounter with the opera. The first performances would be in four and a half weeks and the other two acts were still being written.
    Opera buffa was the new, modern comic Italian opera, born from commedia dell’arte. The music was natural and the language conversational.Serious opera, opera seria, was in the old, grand style, the plots complex and often mythological, vocal prowess the most important element. The singers in opera seria sang their long, demanding arias in turn, one after another, without much interplay between them. The plots were so complicated, and at the same time so similar, that it was not worth the effort of the audience to follow them, and the words were often distorted almost beyond comprehension by the feats of vocalism—
fioratura
and roulades, ornaments and cadenzas—which were among the greatest arts of the castrati.
    But artifice now was out of fashion. These days, one could go to the opera to laugh. One could see ordinary, lower-class people on the stage, in natural, comical situations, such as were encountered every day. The ordinary man could be as entertaining as Zeus—and everyone knew an ordinary man. The music was simple, transparent, and tuneful; everything that music should be. One could understand the words.
    Anna—a clever girl with a witty stage presence, a fetching figure, and a talent for comedy—had arrived at the perfect time. She would play cunning maids and dexterous shepherdesses, girls of the peasant classes who fell in love with noble gentlemen, outwitted all those who plotted against them, and finished their lives in happiness.
    Mrs. Storace went with them to the theater, though Anna wished she would not. Still they were almost late, having gotten held up by a fish cart, and arrived out of breath at the small rehearsal hall where the other singers, the stage manager, and Salieri were waiting for them.
    “Are we late?” shouted Michael, in his quick, Irish-inflected Italian, pulling Anna by the hand. “Fish cart, fish cart! But I’ve brought her, here she is, our new girl, and her excellent mother.”
    The singers had been loosely arranged at the harpsichord, and now as Anna and Michael went to meet them—her mother took aseat to the side—they rose to greet her. Anna, flustered and nervous, received these impressions of them: that they were friendly and kind, loud and informal; that