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By Root 418 0

music stand was an old score, which he closed and handed to her. It was not a published edition but a manuscript bound in a faded orange-velvet binding, tied together with a blue silk ribbon. She recognized Tristan und Isolde written in large cursive letters on the front, along with the name Richard Wagner and the date April 14, 1860. Taking this into her hands, Anna whispered her astonishment, questioning what she held, and heard him confirm—in a voice so soft it sounded like it could have been in her mind—that yes, it was an original copy, one of only a handful, which had once belonged to Pauline Viardot, who as Anna knew had sung at the first reading in Paris. She placed the book on her knees and slowly, reverentially, flipped through the pages. It seemed impossible that a piece of music to which she and so many others had devoted their lives had once existed in such a fragile state, a few sheets of paper and lines of ink that could have easily ended up in the fires of obscurity.

She passed it back to Lawrence, who without being told seemed to understand her desire to hear this opera as if it were a hundred years earlier and they were releasing it into the Parisian night like a flock of white doves. He placed it back on the stand, opened to the middle of the second act, and began to play. As she shifted her gaze between the written music and his hands, she suspected that he, too, was—or had been—a performer, a musician and possibly a singer, which made her want to hear his voice; it didn’t matter how unpolished or crude. She wondered if she might prompt him and hesitated, recognizing the incongruity of uttering a note in such a venue, never mind that her voice was in strict recovery. A day earlier, she never would have done it, but after her Isolde—or perhaps because of her Isolde—she no longer felt constrained. She saw herself after the show in her dressing room and knew that under the piles of roses and the fading roar of the audience, there had been the tiniest doubt, not about the quality of her performance but about the rest of her life, and how it could ever measure up. Now, to feel so exquisitely alive—so full of suspense, this far removed from the theater—made her grateful.

She made her entrance, barely marking the notes, after which—as if she had decreed it—Lawrence responded in turn. Enshrouded in the music, they marched forward as a virtual orchestra seemed to attach to his fingers. No longer concerned about the wear of her previous performance, or the impact on the one scheduled three days later, she sang—“Lass mich sterben!”—and he responded with equal force. She lost all sense of time beyond a dim awareness of the twilight slowly giving way to the dark. Their voices so clearly belonged to each other—“Hehr erhabne Liebesnacht!”—that it felt equally inevitable, however long after they stopped singing, but before they had exchanged a single word, to find herself in his arms, their actions scripted but uninhibited, like they had rehearsed this scene a thousand times, crossing into the vaunted territory of instinct that every singer craves as they tumbled and groped toward an equally foregone but necessary conclusion. She still heard music, slowly receding as they kissed, violently at first and then with more tenderness, as she gasped under his weight and gave in to the desire to possess him—höchste Liebeslust!—in the same way he possessed her.

WHEN ANNA AWOKE, the room was black except for a rutilant glow around the windows, the last remnants of the dying sun. Lawrence gently pushed himself away from her, and they sat for a few seconds on opposite ends of a couch across from the piano. As she caught her breath and listened to him do the same, she tried to imagine how she would have reacted the previous day if someone had described this scene to her, which made her smile. “That was unexpected but wonderful,” she said as Lawrence lumbered across the room and switched on a torch lamp next to the piano; the light filled the space with shadows.

He turned toward her as he picked up his pants from the floor.