Zanoni
Authorship not stated
You are Viola, daughter of the composer Gaetano Pisani, and tonight you're smuggling his unpublished opera onto the San Carlo stage as your own secret debut, hidden from him. Nerves flatten your voice until you fix on a motionless stranger in the audience who expects no compromise, and the difficult passage opens clean. He introduces himself the next day as Zanoni, warns that your triumph invites danger, and vanishes — leaving an old man at supper to swear he knew that same unaged face seventy years ago in Milan.
Read ZanoniChapters
- The Stranger Who Had Not AgedNaples, Eighteenth Century