Krishna
This is the first book in the very famous series of mysteries featuring the Commissario Guido Brunetti, and set in Venice.
After two acts of an opera and an interlude, the audience, the conductor Monsieur Wellauer does not appear. The theatre director urgently announces that Monsieur Longhi will take his place. This takes place in Venice.
We learn that Wallauer is lying dead in his dressing room, with a coffee cup near him, the coffee spilt. Since it smells of almonds, a doctor who was in the audience and called backstage suspects cyanide poisoning. The person who comes to investigate is Commissario Brunetti.
Of course, Brunetti, the Italian detective working in Venice, is now famous and figures in the entire series of Donna Leon, and this is the first book where he is introduced.
He efficiently directs the arrangements with his people. Interviews all the major orchestra members including the singers.
Brunetti meets Santore, a very famous stage director, in a hotel. In the course of conversation, Santore plainly admits that he had an argument with Wallauer at the start of the event due to the latter’s disgust about his, Santore’s, homosexuality. He also reveals that Santore had probably Nazi sympathetic tendencies and was a favourite of the Fuhrer. He continued conducting all the way through the Third Reich.
His new boss, Patta is an imbecile with pretentions of grandeur.
He learns that the singer, Flavia Petrelli had an argument with Wellauer since the latter accused her of having a lesbian relationship with her close friend Brett Lynch. It matters to Flavia because the custody of her sons (after her divorce) will be impacted if her husband went to the Italian court where the divorce was finalized. Flavia admits that she and Wellauer did not like each other at all, personally.
He then interviews the young wife of Wellauer in her house.
Later he goes to the party his rich father in law (The Count) gave – he normally avoids it – and gets to know from a journalist that Wallaeur had made many enemies including an old lady who was the best Soprano who was very famous a long time ago. Some were destroyed by Wallaeur when they indiscreetly confessed to him that they were gay.
He also was known to promote young singers – with some talent no doubt – only to get sexual favours from them before unceremoniously dumping them.
Then a new conductor takes over and his wife Paola, the next morning, tells him how awful the new conductor was, reading from a paper. It triggers a brainwave in him and he goes looking for a professor who was a music critic.
The professor says that his conducting (before he died) that day was not great and he barely had control of the orchestra. Then a maid in the house (where he went again to interview the wife and then the maid) told him that the maestro, when he visited Venice this time, was not himself. Somehow he seemed to have aged more than the passage of time would account for – from his previous visit. And very strangely, she, who had been with him for twenty years was treated like a common servant, ignored and made to wait. This had never happened ever before.
Brunetti finds out that Wallaeur had a slight hearing problem, according to a doctor of the man and also a close friend. In addition, he found that the conductor was also preoccupied for some time before the day of his death.
More information about the singer – her discovery and rise to fame, and an ill fated wedding to a rich man which turned sour soon. She was rumoured to be physically abused to the point of hospitalization. A few years she disappeared but appeared later, her voice stronger than ever and after a bit of time, she got a quiet divorce. She now had several affairs, currently having a lesbian relationship with the American archaeologist, who was independently rich.
As you read, you get drawn into the magic of Donna Leon, and see why this is a successful long standing series. The family life of Brunetti – a daughter who is clever and material and a son who sees injustice in the bourgeois world oppressing the poor, the light humour that runs through it…
And the story. When he goes to interview the old singer again, he realizes that the youngest sister was raped by Wallauer while he was having an affair with the singer (elder sister) herself and when the young one got pregnant, he arranged for a dangerous abortion and left her to bleed to death in a hotel room – when she was only twelve. The scene around when he finds this truth in itself is electric.
He comes to know the real reason that Wallauer was poisoned and for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I will spare you the details. The story is good, and fun to read.
The style is easygoing. With the undercurrent of the family dynamics, office dynamics with the stupid boss and the ambience of Venice pervading the story (He takes the Number 4 boat to go from one place to another), the story is different from others, even if it all a standard mystery at the end.
8/10
— Krishna