Only four people could know the story the stranger sketches for Lilliet. It is every singer’s dream, a chance at immortality, but it comes with a catch: The proposed opera tells the story of Lilliet’s secret past. Lilliet Berne, legendary soprano, is approached by the emissary of an unknown composer, a protégé of Verdi, with an offer to originate the leading role in his opera. 14 Arts & Books section of the novel “The Queen of the Night” by Alexander Chee included a headline referring to an 18th century opera star. Once we accept this condition, all the wild vagaries of plot and amazing coincidences, with reference to omens and curses and the tyrannies of capital-F Fame and Fate, it becomes a scintillating sort of entertainment.īook review headline: A review in the Feb. Let’s face it: To truly appreciate the comedy and tragedy of opera, we have to suspend our disbelief up there in the rigging, and so it is here.

The novel’s terms are set at once: “in a palace, at a ball, in an encounter with a stranger who, you discover, has your fate in his hands.” “When it began, it began as an opera would begin,” it begins, and it goes on like one too - a novel vaguely modeled on “The Magic Flute,” pressed through the mold of the 18th-century picaresque, with a hint of the charm of Victorian erotica, a marvelously involute plot and a whiff of the circus in the American grain.

Queen of the night chee