The Last Aldini

A New Translation

By: George Sand

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Lélio is a celebrated tenor — the leading male voice on the stages of La Fenice and La Scala, admired by audiences across Italy, admired even more closely by any number of women, and as far as anyone can tell, entirely unmoved by all of it. No one has ever known him to have a love affair. His friends find this baffling. One evening in Venice, he decides to explain.

The story he tells begins in Chioggia, where he was born the son of a poor fisherman. He taught himself music from wandering street singers. He became a gondolier. He heard a woman playing the harp through a palazzo window and followed the sound to its source. And so he found himself, a teenage boy of the lagoon, in the Palazzo Aldini, in the presence of Bianca.

Bianca is a Venetian widow — beautiful, intelligent, charitably disposed, and far above him in everything the world considers worth counting. She takes him in, teaches him, arranges his education, and comes to feel something for him that the world around her will not accommodate. Between them stands everything: her rank, his origins, her daughter, the servants who watch and judge, and Nello's own fierce working-class pride — which refuses to let him become the curiosity of a noble household, even a kind one. He leaves.

Ten years later, now known as Lélio, first tenor of the San Carlo in Naples, he sees in the audience a young woman whose dark beauty and ironic manner begin to occupy him against his will. She is the last of the Aldinis. And the story that was supposed to be finished turns out not to be over.

First published in 1838, La Dernière Aldini is one of George Sand's most genial and least-read novels — a divertimento, she called it, with Venice as its setting and music as its soul, about a man from the lowest rank of society who becomes, by talent and discipline and a very specific kind of pride, genuinely great. It was admired in Russia more than in France; Dostoevsky translated it, only to find it had beaten him there. The class argument it makes is not new, but the wit with which it makes it is rare, and the double love story at its heart — its structural symmetry as precise as a well-composed aria — gives this lightspirited novel a formal elegance that rewards attention.