Interrupted Aria by Beverle Graves Myers

The other, his best friend, Felice Ravello, is a sadder figure: Despite the operation, his voice has cracked and thickened, and he must develop other musical skills to survive. Them, Tito Amato, returning to his native city after many years in Naples at the famed Conservatorio San Remo, where he perfected his art, is about to become a star. On a chilly day in 1731, two young men arrive in the Italian city of Venice-as besieged then by nature and human frailties as the present-day version so well-chronicled by such mystery writers as Edward Sklepowich and Donna Leon.īoth of the men are castrati-singers who paid the terrible price of sexual mutilation in order to maintain their perfect child soprano voices.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. 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. The possible suspects could people the cast of one of his operas: a libertine nobleman and his spurned wife, a jealous soprano, an ambitious composer, and a patrician family bent on the theater’s ruin. Alarmed that the merchant-aristocrat who owns the theater is pressing the authorities to close the case, Tito races the executioner to find the real killer. Tito Amato, mutilated as a boy to preserve his enchanting soprano voice, returns to the city of his birth with his friend Felice, a castrato whose voice has failed.ĭisaster strikes Tito’s opera premier when the singer loses one beloved friend to poison and another to unjust accusation and arrest. Opera is the popular entertainment of the day and the castrati are its reigning divas. The dazzling city on the lagoon is sailing toward the ruin of her maritime empire, determined to go down in a maelstrom of pleasure, music, and masquerade.

Interrupted Aria by Beverle Graves Myers