Ombra Mai Fu

 So, between whiles and muse, Simon and and I have been doing shorts to add to Gina's completed section for Fae Tales 2, and you know how it is when you listen to music and start getting plot bunnies spawning ... this is one of those occasions. I recommend Franco Fagioli as one of the best counter-tenors I've ever heard [I'd love to hear Marco from Poets of the Fall sing this one.] If you don't know the aria, you probably do once you hear it. this is the video which inspired the story:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8eL-1a0As

 

Ombra mai fu

 

Nobody doubted that Luca Angioli had the voice of an angel as much as his surname suggested. He was a counter-tenor of unsurpassed beauty, and his voice had changed so subtly over his puberty that the priest had wept for joy that the boy soprano choir boy still gave joy to those who heard him.

The village scraped together enough to send Luca to a choir school, and now he was to play the title role in the opera ‘Xerxes’ by the German composer Handel, which as all music lovers know has only one aria to its name, but what an aria!

The aria’s name was ‘Never was a shade’, but almost everyone called it ‘Ombra mai fu’, from the first line, and in it, Xerxes, King of Persia, praises the gentle plane tree and the shade it casts.

Perhaps the matter would not have started if Luca had not remembered that there was a plane tree at the back of his father’s property, and decided to rehearse by singing to it. He put on his costume and went out into the dusty yard, pausing only in the shade of the plane. He breathed in, and opened his mouth, letting his beautiful voice soar.

 

Ombra mai fu                                

Di Vegetabile,                                

Care ed amaile                              

Soave piu

 

Frondi tenere e belle                                     

Del mio Platano amato,                                

Per voi risplenda il Fato                

Tuoni, Lampi, e Procelle                

Non vi oltraggino mai la cara pace,             

Ne giunga a profanarvi Austro rapace.        

 

Never was made

A plant

more dear and loving

or gentle.

           

Tender and beautiful fronds

Of my beloved plane tree,

Let Fate smile upon you.

May thunder, lightning, and storms

Never bother your dear peace,

Nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.

 

 

It was as he sang the last line that Luca felt himself to be observed, and he looked instinctively up. The green eyes of a beautiful woman, hair pale and seeming green under the canopy of leaves, looked down at him.

“Hello!” said Luca. “I did not know you were up the tree. Are you new in the village?”

“I’ve been here longer than you, Luca Angioli” said the woman.

“If you want to jump, I’ll catch you,” said Luca, who fancied himself a ladies’ man, an image not dispelled by the admiration of village girls.  He never misbehaved; he had too much respect for his grandmother and her pudding spoon, if less of any moral code.

She swung her legs over, and jumped, almost floating into his arms. He swallowed hard.  She was naked.

 “You know my name, but I do not know yours,” said Luca.

“You may call me Phyllissa if you wish,” she said.

“Phyllissa! A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. I want to kiss you.”

“Luca Angioli,” she said, “If you kiss me once, I will be bound to grant you a favour. If you kiss me twice, I will be bound to grant you three more favours.  But if you kiss me three times, you will belong to me.”

Luca laughed, and kissed her.

It was a heady experience, and he could hear sounds more sharply, even the running of the sap in the tree.

“And what favour will you ask of me, Luca?” her voice was soft like the breeze through leaves, and yet sultry.

“I ask to hold the other three in abeyance until I need them,” said Luca, who was nobody’s fool.

She laughed, and let him kiss her again.

And then, somehow, she was up in the tree again.

“Good luck, Luca Angioli,” she said.

 

Luca sang his heart out at La Scala.   Critics raved.  It was said to be the best performance of ‘Ombra mai fu’ ever heard. Luca had been singing to Phyllissa, and to Phyllissa alone, and he was inspired. The opera ran twice as long as anyone expected; people came just to hear Luca sing, and he performed many encores.

All things come to an end, however, and Luca returned, contented, to his village, and resumed the task of calling the cows for his father.

But he also went to sing to the plane tree.

Her hair was dark now, towards the end of summer, and it was definitely green.

She came down to him, and he kissed her.

 

***

 

It was a nine-day wonder of a story, how the counter-tenor who had rocketed to fame had disappeared so suddenly. Nobody counted the word of his niece, who declared that a door had opened on the plane tree, and he had walked inside it with a beautiful woman.  Ponds were dragged, and it was assumed that fame had been too much for him, and that he had committed suicide.

 

***

 

The plane tree bore fruit, and Luca’s father left the odd sapling to grow.  Seven years passed, and then, on the eve of Luca’s niece’s wedding, Luca turned up.

With a bride, whose hair was as red as the autumn leaves of the plane tree, and seven red-haired daughters.

“Will you be going back into the tree, Uncle Luca?” asked Giulia, his niece.

“Not for seven years,” said Luca. “It was the deal I struck. Seven years in her world, and seven in mine, and her daughters the right to choose to be of her kind or mine when they are grown. You see, she gave me three favours which I asked to hold in abeyance until I needed them.  By the third kiss, I belonged to her; but I went into the tree wearing a crucifix and with seven in my pocket, and I fastened one around the neck of each of my daughters as they were born, so the fae folk had no power over them. And the favours I asked were that we should alternate seven years in each world; that my offspring should choose their world, and that she would learn of God’s love so that her soul would not perish with her tree.”

“And because the third favour was asked for the love of me, and for my benefit, I was able to comply,” said Phyllissa.