Tito Amato (Audio)
4 total works
#2
Venice, 1734. Singer Tito Amato has let fame go to his head. Neglecting his vocal practice for dubious pleasures, Tito finds himself demoted to secondary roles and overshadowed by a visiting star. When the murder of scene painter Luca Cavalieri threatens
Venice, 1731. Opera is the popular entertainment of the day and the castrati are its reigning divas. Tito Amato, mutilated as a boy to preserve his enchanting soprano voice, returns to the city of his birth with his friend Felice, a castrato whose voice has failed. Disaster strikes Tito's opera premier when the singer loses one beloved friend to poison and another to unjust accusation and arrest. Alarmed that the merchant-aristocrat who owns the theater is pressing the authorities to close the case, Tito races the executioner to find the real killer. The possible suspects could people the cast of one of his operas: a libertine nobleman and his spurned wife, a jealous soprano, an ambitious composer, and a patrician family bent on the theater's ruin. With carnival gaiety swirling around him and rousing Venetian passions to an ominous crescendo, Tito finds that the most astonishing secrets lurk behind the masks of his own family and friends.
In September of 1740, singer Tito Amato receives a curious invitation. The German composer Karl Johann Weber is rehearsing a new opera at an isolated villa nestled in the hills of the Venetian mainland. Would Tito accept the lead role? Puzzled by the air of secrecy that enshrouds the production, but attracted by a generous fee, Tito agrees. Happily, Tito Will not be traveling alone. Artist Gussie Rumbolt, Tito's friend and brother-in-law, has also been summoned to paint scenes of the estate's grape harvest. The countryside is awash with the golden hues of autumn, but the bucolic mood quickly turns menacing when a notorious figure from Tito's past turns up at the villa. Then at the stroke of twelve, a soprano stumbles over a stranger who has been beaten to death with the clock pendulum. With the local constable away on a boar hunt, the midnight murderer has struck with impunity, raising terror to a fevered crescendo. So Tito pursues his own quest for answers - a quest that leads straight into the painful secrets of his heart and beyond.
Venice, 1742. Tito Amato has regained his zest for performing and is once again singing lead roles at the Teatro San Marco. On opening night, the famous castrato has the entire audience entranced - except for one box with its scarlet curtains stubbornly drawn. Annoyed at being ignored, Tito aims the full force of his golden throat at the fourth - tier box. He is astounded when the curtains part and a woman tumbles over the railing. The victim is Zulietta Giardino, a mischievous courtesan involved with a young glass maker. Did a wager over a rival courtesan's jewels spell Zulietta's death? Or did the motive involve sinister events in the glass factories of Murano?