Aveu

Aveu, the Schumann piano piece, gives Massimo Alberti and Lelia Camin a way to recognize feeling that neither can yet state openly. Its first performance binds sound to a distant Dolomite pinnacle; later, the music is recalled in Massimo’s letter from Dasio, taken up by Lelia at Montanina, and remembered between them when they meet again. The piece matters not simply as music they share, but as a recurring pattern of memory: a sound that carries an image, and an image that lets each approach the other across distance and silence.

First performance and the Dolomite pinnacle

One morning at Montanina, Lelia has treated Massimo with an indifference that seems almost contemptuous. Then she sits at the piano and plays Aveu. Massimo follows the music with an acute sweetness in his heart, looking through the upper gallery toward a small, slanting pinnacle of dolomite caught in the blue haze. The scene joins three things in one impression: Lelia’s performance, the mountain’s remote profile, and the beginning of a passion that Massimo experiences as both an ascent beyond ordinary life and a danger of being carried away by it.

Later, inside the dark side chapel of Chiesa di Sant’Ubaldo, Massimo thinks back to the morning’s music. He tries to summon its delicate notes and the pinnacle he saw while listening, imagining it as a point of passion launched upward, surrounded by sky and abysses. The recollection follows him even while Don Aurelio is praying nearby and Massimo himself does not pray. He is drawn instead toward the sweetness of the remembered moment, though he is dissatisfied with himself for thinking of Lelia in church. Aveu has already become more than an episode of music: it is a sensory memory that persists where his attention ought to be elsewhere.

When Massimo returns to Montanina to prepare for departure, the empty salone brings the same cluster of impressions back to him. He looks at the piano, remembers the flower that fell from Lelia’s belt, and thinks of Aveu and the Dolomite pinnacle. His response turns sharply against itself: he imagines embracing the woman who has, as he believes, deluded him, then resolves to despise her. He looks bitterly toward the pinnacle and turns his back on the room. The remembered music does not settle his feelings; it makes the contradiction between desire and repudiation more vivid.

The letter from Dasio

In a letter to Donna Fedele Vayla from his solitude near Dasio, Massimo describes how memory works through objects and sensations. He has no portrait of Lelia, so he looks at a scrap of paper on which she once wrote the title of a book at his request. Beneath his closed eyes, the indifferent words take on her face; the scent retained by the paper recalls her presence. That scent, he writes, hurts his chest in the same sweet way as the divine music of Aveu when Lelia played it, a feeling that reached into his arms and wrists. The music is thus part of a bodily memory, not merely an idea he chooses to revisit.

The landscape repeats the association. Massimo goes out to look at a small pinnacle of dolomite near the rocks at the foot of which Dasio lies. It reminds him of the pinnacle he saw from the salone at Montanina while listening to Aveu, although he acknowledges that the two formations do not truly resemble each other and that he forces the likeness. His admission makes the image’s emotional work clear: the distant landscape becomes a means of returning to the earlier scene. He has searched for refuge in scorn and disdain, but in the letter he recognizes that he can no longer claim the right to despise someone who judged him without knowing him. Aveu belongs to this change in his account of himself, marking the movement from defensive rejection toward an acknowledgment of love and the need to preserve his dignity if they meet again.

Lelia’s answering performance

When Lelia reads Massimo’s letter, the music’s associations become an answering experience. The words describing the paper, the remembered scent, Aveu, and the pinnacle move her profoundly. She presses the rhododendrons she has been holding to her face and kisses the letter’s passionate words; she feels herself overcome by the possibility of living in love with Massimo, even in poverty and in a secluded mountain home. The letter brings her not only his declaration but also the precise remembered scene through which he has made his feelings intelligible to her.

After reading, Lelia returns to Montanina with a new brightness that Teresina notices. She locks herself in her room to read again, arranges the rhododendrons so their flowers hang over her pillow, and places one in a crystal goblet at the table where she will eat alone. Then she goes to the piano and plays Aveu with an intensity that she imagines might be felt by Massimo in his distant retreat. The pinnacle, too, draws her back to the music: she searches the salone for the place from which it can be seen and plays the piece again. A remembered line from verses adapted to the music gives voice to burning and dying for the beloved; she repeats the piece two or three times for that line alone. Her performance answers Massimo’s letter without sending him a new message: the same music and landscape now carry her recognition of the feeling he has disclosed.

A private language at Valsolda

When Massimo and Lelia meet again in Valsolda, the Dolomite pinnacle brings the earlier history into their conversation. Lelia asks which pinnacle he means, and Massimo is astonished that she knows of it. She quietly says that she would like to answer with Schumann’s music and put her whole soul into it. Massimo understands that Donna Fedele has spoken to her, and takes her hand. As they listen inwardly to the remembered rush and flight of the notes, the sound of the torrent accompanies their silence. The scene lets the music stand for what Lelia cannot yet explain directly: she has read his words and recognizes the feeling behind the image.

Lelia then asks Massimo to show her the pinnacle. He points to the small inclined tooth on the opposite mountain ridge, just below the summit, seeming to bite into the sky. She had guessed which one he meant, but says its effect is different when the rock stands alone in a small field of sky, as it did from the salone at Montanina. She has not merely retained the name of an image from his letter; she has learned the view through the place where he saw it. When Massimo asks whether she searched for it, she lowers her face and replies that she has read everything. Aveu and the pinnacle have become a shared vocabulary whose meaning depends on the history of attention and memory between them.

Later, hearing a melody, Massimo calls it the prelude of love and recalls being moved by Lelia’s playing on the night of his arrival at Montanina. Lelia blushes and first denies that she was the player, saying it was Marcello Trento; then, laughing, she admits that she was. The brief exchange converts the music’s earlier intensity into intimacy and play. Aveu has accompanied Massimo’s solitary longing, Lelia’s private response, and their recognition of one another; its recurrence makes a single performance echo across separation without reducing the relationship to a simple, spoken declaration.