Djelloul Marbrook

There are poems I can recite and poems I merely remember for the ways they moved me. There is music I love but can’t listen to while writing and music I gladly listen to while writing. The distinction doesn’t have to do with quality, it has to do with resonances between the mind at work and the mind in the music.

I once had the pleasure of telling the composer Richard Horowitz how the score of the film The Sheltering Sky had helped me finish a novel. He and the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto had collaborated on the score. I can’t imagine any composer is happy to hear his work being used as background, but he was gracious.

More recently I have been listening to the trumpet player and composer Chris Botti’s version of Nessun Dorma, the famous final tenor aria from Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot. I haven’t been writing while listening, probably because Nessun Dorma is only one of the pieces in Italia, the recording. But Botti’s exquisitely passionate sound now comes to mind as I stop in the street to jot down lines of poetry.

I’ve heard the Luciano Pavarotti, Mario Lanza and Placido Domingo versions of Nessun Dorma, and Botti’s trumpet recalls none of them to me, but it does recall my stepfather Dominick’s rendering of the aria. I remember it bringing tears to the eyes of revelers at a Masonic ball.

Opera is the story behind Dominick Guccione’s (inset, sketch of him by my mother, Juanita Guccione) success in the New World, and when Puccini died in 1924 Dominick was quick to study the unfinished Turandot.

Dominick came here from Misilmeri, southeast of Palermo in Sicily. There are still people there bearing his surname. He spoke not a word of English. His father, a sculptor, soon left Dominick, two brothers, two sisters, and their mother, and returned to Sicily. He found the new land cold and inhospitable. But he knew that Dominick, the second son, would handle it. He didn’t know how, but he knew Dominick. And he was right. Dominick’s mother called him into her bedroom on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan when his father had left and said, Domenico, you are the head of our family now, do the right thing.

He was fourteen. They were frequently without heat or food. Soon Dominick was working as a taxidermist’s apprentice by day and selling newspapers outside Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street at night. To keep himself warm he would sing. His beautiful tenor voice would carry east and west and the “swells” would linger in their carriages to hear him. One night the maitre d’ sent him away, calling him a nuisance. But the patrons demanded that the boy with the heartbreaking voice be brought back, and soon he was singing at formal parties in Fifth Avenue mansions where he met the people who would become his patrons and help him succeed in the new world.

While the conversation on Elizabeth Street often turned to how hard the Irish were making life for the Italians, Dominick saw that the Irish, who were often cops and firemen and city hall minions, didn’t hold the real power. The “swells” on Fifth Avenue did.

And so night after night, singing arias and Italian songs in his rented tuxedo, he brushed shoulders with the grand ladies and great gentlemen of the time, and soon he was managing properties for them and being cut in on real estate deals. While his siblings became Joe, Mary and Elizabeth, he was “our Domenico” on Fifth Avenue. And even when Enrico Caruso was the rage, many of those “swells” preferred their Domenico.

I can’t speak with authority about music, but I know that when Dominick sang Nessum Dorma or Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Vesti La Giubba from Pagliacci, people wept. His voice was as pure as Chris Botti’s trumpet. He knew I loved Nessun Dorma and he always smiled at me when he sang it.

I’m fairly sure the thought didn’t cross the dying Puccini’s mind, but Nessun Dorma always calls to my mind the Sicilian experience in New York, particularly New York on a Sunday afternoon when the sun, like a palette knife, would call out from the stone and concrete an ineffable melancholy.                         —DM