The mirror is four feet tall and slightly green.
This is not a metaphor. The glass is Murano, shipped across the peninsula at a cost that would have fed the boy standing in front of it for a year, and it has a faint verdigris cast that the maestro insists is character and the boy has learned to call character and which is, in fact, a deficiency in the tin-mercury amalgam that the glassmaker on San Marco would have corrected for free if anyone had asked, but nobody asked, because the mirror is not here to be accurate. The mirror is here to teach.
What it teaches is this: you are being watched.
Not by the maestro, who is behind him, marking time with a switch of hazel against his own thigh — ta, ta, ta-ta, ta — although the maestro is certainly watching, the maestro is always watching, the maestro watched the last boy and the boy before him and will watch the next boy and the boy after that until the maestro dies in this building which he almost certainly will, because the maestro has been at the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio a Capuana since before anyone can remember and will be here after everyone forgets. No. The mirror teaches a different kind of watching. The mirror teaches the boy to watch himself.
He is eleven.
His voice, when it arrives — and it is arriving now, the maestro's switch has found the tempo and the boy's breath has found the phrase and everything is about to happen — his voice is the kind of thing that empties a room of its ordinary business. Not loud. Not yet loud. But present in a way that has nothing to do with volume and everything to do with the fact that this boy's larynx is doing something that cannot be trained and cannot be explained and has been, for the last three years, the subject of a quiet and increasingly urgent correspondence between the maestro and certain persons in Rome who would very much like to hear the boy sing in a larger room.
The boy opens his mouth. The phrase rises. And — there. There it is. His left eyebrow lifts. His chin tilts. His shoulders shift forward by the width of a coin, an involuntary leaning-into the sound the way a man leans into wind, the way a body follows what it feels when what it feels is bigger than the body's ability to contain it.
The switch cracks against the maestro's thigh.
Ancora.
The boy knows what he did wrong. He can see it. The mirror showed him. His face moved. His body wanted something. For a sliver of a second the sound and the feeling and the flesh were the same thing, were trying to be the same thing, and this is the error. This is what the mirror is for. To catch the moment when the body tries to rejoin the voice and to make that moment visible and therefore correctable.
He sings the phrase again. This time his face is still. His shoulders do not lean. His eyebrow, which is eleven years old and would very much like to participate in the extraordinary thing happening in his throat, stays exactly where it was put.
The maestro says nothing, which means correct.
The boy watches himself in the green glass and the boy in the green glass watches back and neither of them moves and the phrase is beautiful. It is devastatingly, ruinously, technically beautiful. It rises and ornaments and cascades and resolves and the boy's face does not change and this is the lesson. This is the whole curriculum. This is what the Conservatorio has been doing to boys for a hundred years and will keep doing until someone burns it down or something worse and quieter happens, which is that everyone simply agrees that this is how music works.
You produce the feeling. You do not have the feeling. The audience has the feeling. You are the instrument through which the feeling passes. The mirror teaches you to verify that you are passing it cleanly — that none of it is sticking to you on the way through, that your face is not stealing what belongs to the room.
Somewhere outside, Naples is doing what Naples does: being loud, being alive, being a city where people sing in the streets with their entire bodies because nobody has put a mirror in front of them and told them that their eyebrow is a mistake. The fish market three blocks from the Conservatorio is, at this very moment, hosting a negotiation between two women over the price of octopus that involves more authentic vocal technique than anything that will happen in this room today. Their faces are doing everything. Their bodies are all in. They are singing with their arms, with their hips, with a theatricality that would make the maestro's switch crack until it splintered.
But they are not conservatorio singers. They are not being refined. Nobody has explained to them that the sound they make with their whole selves is raw material that must be processed — must be passed through the mirror's green correction — before it is fit for the rooms where it matters. The rooms with the good chairs.
The boy sings the phrase a third time. Perfect. Empty. The mirror confirms.
Ta, ta, ta-ta, ta.
Upstairs, in a room the boy has never entered, there is a schedule. The schedule says that every day includes one hour of singing exercises before the mirror. One hour. Every day. For years. Until the separation is complete. Until the body learns that its job is to be seen and the voice's job is to be heard and these are two different jobs requiring two different workers who must never, under any circumstances, collaborate.
The mirror is four feet tall and slightly green and it is the most important technology in the building. More important than the harpsichord. More important than the manuscripts in the library. More important than the maestro and his switch and his correspondence with Rome.
Because the mirror is where the boy learns his name.
Not his baptismal name. Not the name the other boys call him. The name the mirror gives, which is: object. A thing that is looked at. A surface that produces effects in observers. The mirror says: you are not the one who feels. You are the one who is seen feeling. These are different. Learn the difference. The difference is your career.
Outside, the fish-market women have concluded their negotiation. The octopus has been purchased. There was a moment, near the climax of the haggling, when both women were singing the same note — a particular Naples-inflected howl of outraged reasonableness — and a passing dog sat down to listen. The dog's participation was involuntary. The women's participation was involuntary. The note was involuntary. Nobody was watching anybody. The sound came from the body came from the feeling came from the octopus came from the morning came from Naples came from being alive and having a throat and not yet knowing that this is something you can do wrong.
The boy will never sing like that. The mirror has made sure. The mirror will keep making sure, every day, one hour, until the boy can produce a sound that makes six hundred people weep in a theater while his own face remains perfectly, professionally, beautifully still.
And in two hundred years, when someone tries to explain why music that was built for bodies stopped working in bodies — why opera became a thing you sit still for, why concert halls installed chairs that don't move, why the Western tradition produced the most technically sophisticated vocal music in human history and simultaneously forgot what singing is for — the answer will be four feet tall and slightly green and nobody will think to look at it, because it is everywhere by then. In every dance studio. In every rehearsal room. On every phone screen held at arm's length. The mirror won.
The mirror always wins. That's what mirrors do.
Unless someone faces the other way.