It was like the site of some ancient meteor strike. A huge crater, ringed with lines of blue benches, leading down to a darkened stage below.
When the wind dropped, and the grass stopped its whispering, and the canvas roof fell silent, crickets and a tiny tumbling stream filled the rows with sound.
In the wide openings between seats and awning, the ring of mountains that watched the town rose, a deeper, richer black against the black of the night.
The lights of villas, nestled in their folds, winked as the splayed fingers of firs waved before them. They shone in the saucer eyes of stags, leaping on twitching feet, dancing without ever touching the earth, and caught in the duller gaze of bears that padded and rooted and snuffled between the trunks.
In the day, the sun that felt just metres away baked our tiny grey chalets into steaming jungles. At night, we flung the windows wide and tossed and turned, waiting for exhaustion to trump heat.
Just a few hours later, with flecks of daybreak creeping over jagged peaks, we’d start awake and drag them closed with shivering fingers, shutting out the mountain ice that had turned our jungles to arctic tundra. Breath steamed and hairs stood, and we waited once more for fatigue to battle cold.
When we emerged, bleary-eyed, we were met with whirlwind days full of every possible coming and going. Rehearsal, concerts and meetings.
But rarely on time arrivals.
So, as the bus doors hissed and the gravel crunched, we joined a murmuring crowd filtering into a performance already long begun.
Act III.
Darkness.
Silence.
Then, fine and weightless and silver-bright, a thread of sound.
Fine so that it seemed to come from no one definable point; weightless so that it seemed, like the mountains and the villas and the crickets, to hang in the air about us; silver-bright so that it, and not the lights around us, seemed to fill the stage with its glow.
It’s said the human mind understands the senses best by contrast. So perhaps the magic of that moment, when the stags stood still and the stream stood silent, when only a single flute soared in the canopy above, was that I never dreamt that such a sound, such a fragile, precious sound, could come from a page marked ‘Verdi’.
But there it was. Dancing, shimmering. Calling in the Nile’s new day.
It made me rethink Verdi completely. Maybe you too.
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