Death at La Fenice

In Donna Leon's novel, Commissario Guido Brunetti, a senior police detective in Venice, Italy, investigates a murder where high culture and crime intersect at the city's renowned opera house, Teatro La Fenice.

During a performance of Verdi's La Traviata, the audience waits for the third act to begin, but the conductor does not return to the podium. The theater's artistic director announces that Maestro Helmut Wellauer cannot continue and asks for a doctor. Dr. Barbara Zorzi volunteers and is led backstage, where she finds Wellauer slumped dead in his dressing room with a trail of coffee staining his shirtfront. She detects the sour-almond scent of cyanide and estimates he has been dead for less than half an hour.

Brunetti arrives with three officers and takes charge of the scene. He recognizes the dead man as one of the most famous conductors in the Western world. He dispatches officers to summon the medical examiner, compile a list of everyone backstage, and contact the German police for a dossier on Wellauer.

Backstage, Brunetti encounters Signora Wellauer, the Maestro's strikingly young wife. She says she went backstage after the second act but arrived too late to speak with her husband, and her account is confused and incomplete. Brunetti then questions the principal singers. When he interviews soprano Flavia Petrelli, one of the leading opera singers of the day, she claims she only exchanged greetings with Wellauer. Her companion, an American woman named Brett Lynch introduced as Petrelli's friend and secretary, corroborates this. Brunetti senses Petrelli is not telling the full truth, and a stagehand confirms that a woman matching her description entered Wellauer's dressing room after the first act and emerged visibly angry.

Late that night, Brunetti meets Franco Santore, the production's stage director, at a nearby hotel. Santore, who is openly gay, admits to arguing with Wellauer before the performance. Wellauer had reneged on a promise to help a friend of Santore's obtain a singing role, refusing because he believed the friend was Santore's lover. Santore describes Wellauer as a man who carried a sense of moral superiority and shares rumors that the Maestro was a Nazi during the war, though Wellauer claimed he acted under duress to protect Jewish musicians. Santore also notes that Wellauer's conducting had recently lost some of its brilliance.

Brunetti walks home and tells his wife Paola about the case. Paola, a professor of English literature and the daughter of Count and Countess Falier, one of Venice's wealthiest families, immediately guesses the wife is the killer. The next morning, Brunetti reports to Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, his superior, a Sicilian political appointee more interested in publicity than police work, who demands rapid progress.

The German police report reveals key details but conspicuously omits the war years. Wellauer's second wife hanged herself in 1968. His current wife, Elizabeth, is Hungarian by birth, a doctor by training, with a 13-year-old daughter, Alexandra, from a previous marriage. The autopsy confirms death by potassium cyanide. Dr. Rizzardi, the medical examiner, observes faint marks on the body that could be injection sites but dismisses them as insignificant.

Brunetti visits Petrelli and Lynch at Lynch's lavish apartment and confronts Petrelli with evidence that she entered Wellauer's dressing room. Petrelli drops her facade and reveals that Wellauer accused her of being a lesbian and threatened to inform her ex-husband in Spain, which could cost her custody of her two children under Italian law. Lynch confirms Wellauer would have followed through, describing him as someone who believed he possessed a sacred authority to punish those he judged immoral.

During a formal interview, Signora Wellauer tells Brunetti she knows of no one who would want to kill her husband. At a party at his in-laws' palazzo, Brunetti meets Demetriano Padovani, a flamboyant art critic, who describes Wellauer as a notorious sexual blackmailer of young sopranos and destroyer of careers. Padovani mentions Clemenza Santina, a famous prewar soprano living as a recluse on the Giudecca, an island south of Venice's center.

Brunetti consults music professionals and confirms that Wellauer's conducting deteriorated significantly during rehearsals. The orchestra had quietly decided to follow the concertmaster, the lead violinist who guides the ensemble, rather than the Maestro's baton. Brunetti also interviews Signorina Breddes, Wellauer's Belgian maid of 20 years, who describes a marked change in the Maestro during this visit: He seemed distracted, suddenly older, and had begun wearing glasses, though not for reading.

On the Giudecca, Brunetti finds Santina living in dire poverty. She confirms she sang with Wellauer in Munich in 1937 and expresses gladness at his death but refuses to explain why. A friend's father, a retired gossip columnist, fills in missing pieces: After Clemenza returned to Italy, Wellauer began a relationship with one of her younger sisters, who became pregnant, underwent an illegal abortion, and died. During a second visit, Santina screams that her sister Camilla was 12 years old when Wellauer raped her repeatedly and arranged an abortion that killed her. They dressed the girl all in white for burial because she was still a child.

Brunetti now sees the pattern of Wellauer's predation. He calls Dr. Erich Steinbrunner, an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Berlin and Wellauer's oldest friend, who reveals that the Maestro complained of hearing loss. Steinbrunner found only minimal decline but referred Wellauer to another specialist. Brunetti travels to Padova to interview Dr. Valerio Treponti, who reveals that a patient using a false name, identified from Wellauer's photograph, had lost 30 to 40 percent of his hearing. The damage was sudden, irreversible, and medically unexplained, though massive doses of antibiotics could cause such nerve damage.

Brunetti connects the evidence: the injection marks from the autopsy, the rapid hearing loss, the glasses concealing a hearing aid that the maid observed, and the fact that Signora Wellauer, a doctor, visited her first husband's pharmacology laboratory in Heidelberg on her way to Venice. He confronts her with these findings.

Elizabeth Wellauer confesses. She gave her husband six injections of netilmicina, a powerful antibiotic known to cause irreversible nerve damage, telling him they were vitamin B-12. Her motive is devastating: The previous summer, she returned home unexpectedly and found Wellauer sexually abusing her 13-year-old daughter. She never discussed the incident with him. She sent Alexandra to her grandparents in Munich and began the injections, targeting the thing he loved most, his music, as punishment.

She describes how Wellauer eventually realized what she had done, confronting her with the words "You did this, didn't you?" On the night of the premiere, he invited her backstage and quoted a line from Puccini's Tosca, spoken by the title character upon discovering that her lover Cavaradossi is dead: "Finire così, finire così," meaning "To finish like this." Elizabeth understood only later that he was signaling his intention to take his own life.

Brunetti concludes that Wellauer committed suicide, using cyanide obtainable through his wartime connections and arranging the circumstances to cast suspicion on his wife as a final act of punishment. He recognizes that any prosecution of Elizabeth, whether for murder or for destroying her husband's hearing, would require Alexandra to testify about the sexual abuse. He refuses to subject the child to this. He instructs Signora Wellauer to remember their conversations differently, emphasizing her husband's depression over his growing deafness, and files his report as a suicide. Vice-Questore Patta enthusiastically claims he suspected this outcome from the beginning and takes full credit.

Seven months later, Brunetti receives a letter from China containing a photograph of a jeweled crown from an archaeological dig. On the back, Lynch, a brilliant archaeologist specializing in Chinese artifacts, has written: "Here is a part of the beauty I have returned to." There is no other message. Lynch has chosen her work over her life with Petrelli.