Revealing that Tonio is actually his illegitimate son, he has Tonio castrated, and sends him off with Guido to study in Naples.Īlthough everyone in Venice is inclined to believe that Carlo was behind his castration, Tonio cannot accuse him of the crime because doing so would result in the extinction of the Treschi family. Although Andrea attempts to cut Carlo out of the family, Carlo returns after Andrea's death, and plots to regain his original position. Tonio, on the other hand, learns that his older brother Carlo was exiled for embarrassing the family. After a suicide attempt, he becomes a music teacher in the Naples conservatorio. Although Guido becomes a star of the opera as a teenager, he loses his voice at eighteen, as many castrati did. Set in eighteenth-century Italy, Cry to Heaven focuses on two characters, peasant-born Guido Maffeo, who is castrated at the age of six to preserve his soprano voice, and fifteen-year-old Tonio Treschi, the last son of a noble family from the Republic of Venice, whose father, Andrea, is a member of the Council of Three of La Serenissima. Taking place in eighteenth-century Italy, it follows the paths of two unlikely collaborators: a Venetian noble and a maestro from Calabria, both trying to succeed in the world of the opera. Cry to Heaven is a novel by American author Anne Rice published by Alfred A.
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