Suddenly all was quiet. The orchestra rose swiftly into view in front of the stage. The white-haired leader bowed. There was an eruption of applause, as brief as the crack of a rocket breaking the sound barrier. The golden baton rose, a glorious burst of music filled the opera house and the velvet curtain zipped upward so rapidly that the blinking of an eye would have missed it.
The opening scene of festal entertainment in the hall of the ducal palace was a masterpiece in conception, but the gay cavaliers and ladies, the Duke's twenty-second condensation of the "Questa o quella" ballata, the plotting with Rigoletto and the mocking of Monterone were all accomplished and done with before Walther knew what was happening.
Then he realized that he was looking upon a tremendous revolving stage, divided into many exquisite sets. Each set appeared majestically, established itself, often with an almost indiscernable pause, and then moved out of view to be replaced by the next.
The second scene was the deserted street outside Rigoletto's cottage. Rigoletto appeared and disappeared, Gilda and the disguised Duke flashed through their duets, the orchestra set up the briefest of fanfares, and the lovely Maria Piavi moved to the center of the stage to sing Gilda's immortal aria,
"Caro nome che il me cor...."
The words electrified Walther to the edge of his seat. Here were the first naturally spoken words of the opera, the words of Gilda as she expressed joy at learning the name of her lover. Walther's mother had sung the haunting words on many an evening as he drifted off to sleep in his nursery. But he had never heard them phrased so beautifully as they came now from the lips of Maria Piavi. After the numbing shock of the first scene, they started the blood throbbing in his temples again.
But they were the last words he understood of the aria.
Using the archaic phrase with superb showmanship to startle her audience, Maria swung with flawless technique into a contraction of verse and music that somehow managed to convey the beauty of both in the few seconds that she held the center of the stage. It was like passing a star just before you entered hyperspace. You saw it for an instant, it awed and choked you with its wonder, and then it vanished into a nothingness that was deeper than night.
There was so much beauty in the fragment that Walther ached to hear the rest of the aria. But Gilda had been abducted to the Duke's palace, and the stage had revolved far into Act II before Walther could assimilate the realization that no more of "Caro Nome" would be heard this evening, or any evening.
Nothing mattered after this, not even the Duke's half-minute condensation of "La donna e mobile". The stage picked up momentum, thunder and lightning flashed, the murdered Gilda's body was discovered by her father in the sack beside the river, the final curtain swooped down over the grisly horror, the orchestra disappeared, lights flashed on and Walther found himself being hurried along with the pleased audience toward the exit, where servo-robots were passing out handbills and pointing to a theatre across the street.