«Or sappi che brucio, che moro di te»

“Or sappi che brucio, che moro di te” is the line Lelia takes as her own from verses adapted to Schumann’s Aveu. Its movement from private musical reverie to remembered words in the mountains above Valsolda makes it more than a lyric fragment: it becomes a refrain through which Lelia gives shape to her love for Massimo Alberti and links the distant place where she imagined him with the landscape she has reached in search of him.

Origin in music and solitude

At the Montanina, Lelia returns to the piano after coming back to the villa. Teresina notices a new brightness in her eyes, but Lelia does not explain it; she goes upstairs, locks her door, and reads again. She arranges the rhododendrons upside down on the bed’s back so their flowers hang near her hair, then takes one downstairs and sets it in a crystal goblet before the place where she will eat alone. The sequence gives the scene a deliberate privacy: the flower, the solitary meal, and the music all become objects and actions through which feeling can be sustained without being spoken to another person.

She plays Aveu with an intensity that makes her imagine the piano might understand if it had a soul. She also wonders whether Massimo, far away in his retreat, might feel something vibrate within him. The verses, adapted to the music by a friend of Marcello Trento, stage a struggle between demon and angel, sweetness and horror, surrender and spiritual loss. Lelia selects one line from that unsettled sequence: “Or sappi che brucio, che moro di te.” She plays the piece two or three times for that line alone. The repetition is selective rather than merely musical: among the verses’ competing impulses, she holds fast to the words that declare burning and dying for the beloved.

A refrain carried into the mountains

After playing, Lelia searches the room for the point from which the dolomite peak can be seen, then returns to the piano and begins the passage again. The phrase is thus attached from the outset to a particular view as well as to a sound. At the Montanina, the peak belongs to a scene of imagined communication with Massimo, whose distant presence she hopes the music might reach.

On the ascent toward Dasio, that remembered conjunction of music and mountain returns. Lelia has hired a boy of about twelve as a guide; when a group passes them, he silently gathers cyclamens growing above the rushing stream and offers them to her. She puts them in her bodice, thinking that fortune has offered them for Massimo and that she would not have dared pick flowers for that purpose herself. At the summit of the climb, the view opens across Valsolda: Loggio, Drano, Puria, Castello, and, above them, Dasio beneath its dolomite cliffs. Lelia asks the guide to name the villages, then looks from Dasio’s little yellowish bell tower to the heights above it, searching for a point that might recall Mount Summano as she had seen it from the Montanina salon while playing Aveu.

Through the mist, she thinks she recognizes the dolomite point on a ridge descending eastward from the highest summit. The sight swells with the remembered music and the refrain. As on the previous day, when the wind and waves seemed to meet the steamer at the entrance to Valsolda and the mist broke over the mountains, the inanimate surroundings seem to speak to her. The rocks and ridges confirm, in her perception, that she is here. The phrase therefore recurs not as an abstract memory but at a specific threshold in her journey: she has found the landscape that links her present location to the earlier image associated with Massimo.

At the meeting with Massimo

The refrain’s final recurrence in the supplied scenes comes in Lelia’s encounter with Massimo. She says quietly that she would like to answer with Schumann’s music and put her whole soul into it. Massimo understands that Donna Fedele has spoken and silently clasps Lelia’s willing hand. The two listen in memory to the music’s breathless urgency and impetus, while the even roar of the stream sounds to Lelia like a disconsolate accompaniment. Music, remembered rather than played, still supplies the scene’s emotional language.

With her face lifted and streaked with tears, Lelia murmurs, “Or sappi che brucio, che moro di te.” Massimo does not know the verses. When he repeats the opening questioningly, she answers, “Niente,” but involuntarily continues to address him with the intimate second-person form of the lyric, asking him to show her the dolomite point. He points out a small tooth of rock on the opposite ridge, tilted toward the sky just below the summit on its eastern side. Lelia says she had thought it was the one, but that it looks different when the rock stands against the sky in a small frame, as it did from the Montanina salon. The private phrase has not become a shared quotation: Massimo cannot identify its source. Yet the landmark enables Lelia to explain, through the view itself, how the remembered music and her search have converged.

Significance of the expression

The line’s force lies partly in its movement between inward intensity and outward reference. At the piano, Lelia repeats it as the single verse that answers her feeling and imagines that sound might reach a distant Massimo. On the climb, she recognizes a peak from that musical memory; in the meeting, she speaks the words aloud, then turns from them to the dolomite point she had associated with the song. Each recurrence makes the phrase more situated: first a chosen lyric, then a memory carried through the landscape, finally a declaration that Massimo hears without knowing its source.

The surrounding stanza keeps the expression from functioning as a simple, settled avowal. Its imagery places sweetness beside an abyss of flowers and horror, and passionate surrender beside the sense of having lost God. Lelia’s choice of the burning-and-dying line narrows that divided lyric to its most direct expression of desire, while the continuing presence of the larger stanza preserves the conflict surrounding it. The words are at once a borrowed verse and the form Lelia gives to her own emotion. Their recurrence binds the Montanina’s piano, the imagined distance to Massimo, and the recognizable point of rock above Valsolda, without making the feeling itself something Massimo already understands.