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Vissi d’arte is about love and music. The drama and passion associated with opera plots are evoked in this story set in an opera school. It begins and ends in England, but most of it is set in the Australian city of Melbourne. Spanning six years, from 1968 to 1974, it tells the story of student opera singers and their often fraught path from their auditions to the start of their professional careers. Readers will discover how opera singers are trained during their singing lessons, and the drama, movement and language classes in the opera school.
Love affairs begin and end. Friends and enemies are made. Alliances form among the students and staff. Political clashes about conscription and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war erupt. Convention competes with change. Shadows from a tragedy in 1930, threaten the career of an innocent girl. Past and present collide. Central to the novel is a mystery about the founder of the theatre, Harriet Shaw. Her reasons for giving up a glittering career as an opera singer at Covent Garden puzzle her nephew Nicholas Forrester and his girlfriend who is a journalist. Harriet, who has kept her secret for forty years, feels hunted as her carefully constructed story about her past begins to collapse. Melbourne is seen through Nicholas’s eyes. He arrives from London, in January 1968, in the middle of a heat wave. He discovers a clean, modern city with skyscrapers and gracious Victorian buildings. Wages are good and there is a low level of poverty and unemployment. Rented flats and houses are plentiful and cheap. He is amazed by the clean streets, superb restaurants and low cost of living. Vissi d’arte is about ambition, love, conflict, success and failure. The characters are from diverse backgrounds, but united by their love of opera. To achieve their dreams they must overcome despair, mistrust and the death of hope and love. The Inspiration Gertrude Johnson returned to Melbourne in 1935 after a successful operatic career in London and Europe. She sang the tremendously difficult role of the Queen of The Night at Covent Garden. Her concept of a National Theatre with schools for opera, ballet and drama was a brilliant one. The reasons why her dream was never fully realized are documented in National Treasure – The Story of Gertrude Johnson and The National Theatre by Frank Van Straten. VISSI D'ARTE - the aria from the opera Tosca Floria Tosca is one of the most tragic characters in opera. While many heroines are victims of their own weakness Floria Tosca is a victim of circumstances. Scarpia, the head of the secret police force, tortures her lover, Mario, and sentences him to death. When he tells Tosca that if she gives herself to him, he will release her lover, she refuses. He then says, 'A scaffold is being raised. According to your choice, your Mario has one hour left to live.' Tosca falls to her knees and prays. Vissi d'arte begins :- 'I have lived for art and for love.' It ends with :- 'In this my hour of grief why, my Lord, do you repay me like this?' Use this LINK to read extracts from Vissi D'Arte. |
