Venice on a High Note

For centuries, this unlikely city, built on wooden stakes driven into mud, was one of the most important in the world. Its navy ruled. Its merchants flourished. Its art dazzled. Its smug lion was a symbol of immense power.

Today, Venice is magical and enchanting. But it is also crumbling and sinking. It has lost 60 percent of its population in the past half-century and is now at 63,000, less than the city of Tuscaloosa, Ala. Venetians don't like to hear it, but cold-eyed observers suggest it is a dying city.

In a metropolis swimming in tourists, La Fenice remained one of the places Venetians still gathered with Venetians. It was one of the vital organs of the city, and the fire incinerated it.

"I decided the fire should be part of the structure of the book because it was such a challenge to Venice itself," Berendt says. "It once had 12 opera houses. Only La Fenice remained. After the fire, there was no opera house there, no major stage of any kind, no heartbeat. Without it, Venice was really a dead city. They had to rebuild it to prove they were alive."

La Fenice Rises Again

La Fenice ("The Phoenix") gets its name from the mythical bird that burns itself on a pyre and then flies up out of the ashes with renewed youth.

The group that built La Fenice, the Noble Association of Boxholders, chose the name more than two centuries ago not because there had been a fire but because they'd been evicted from another theater and made a comeback with one of the grandest opera houses in the world.

The first version of La Fenice arose in 1792, just two years before the guillotine fell on the queen of France. The building didn't last long. In 1836, it was devastated by a fire started by a new heater. (An Austrian heater, Venetian historians point out.) Only the facade and the ornate rooms around the foyer survived.

The Noble Boxholders hired the Meduna brothers, Giambattista and Tommaso, to rebuild. The Medunas slathered the inside of the hall with impossibly lavish gilded rococo excess that is almost beyond imagination -- balconies encrusted with cupids, poets, allegories, musical instruments and rosy Muses in diaphanous gowns. Almost every inch of the walls bursts with golden wreaths, vines, filigree and curlicues. A trompe l'oeil ceiling shows a blissful blue sky filled with glittering stars and swirling with cupids and pink-cheeked maidens. Also prominent was the blue and gold symbol of the opera, designed by Giambattista Meduna: an angry, somewhat scaly bird vaguely resembling a cormorant equipped with a bill that looks as if it could open a can of soup.

In some ways, Venice is the birthplace of opera, says Patrick Smith, longtime editor of Opera News. It is certainly the birthplace of the notion of an opera house with a paying audience. That was before La Fenice, but the stage there saw its share of history.

At its best, what took place at La Fenice was at least as glittering as what the Medunas spackled across the interiors. Gioachino Rossini composed "Tancredi" and "Semiramide" for the Venetian palace. Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti composed great works for La Fenice. Giuseppe Verdi wrote four operas for the house, including "Simon Boccanegra" and his masterpiece "La Traviata." He wrote the final act of "Traviata" in one of the ornate salons of La Fenice.

In more recent times, Stravinsky premiered "The Rake's Progress" at La Fenice, and opera greats, including Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, made debuts here.

All that was swallowed by a fire mysteriously kindled somewhere high in the opera house on Jan. 29, 1996. The building was undergoing renovations. It wasn't clear what caused the fire. Venetians, for whom nothing is ever what it seems, hatched bushels of theories about whom to blame: city government (which now owns the opera house), sloppy contractors, faulty wiring, the mob . . .