Melody: A Tragic Tale of Beauty and Death SynopsisA young girl in Cinque Terre, Italy was frightened in the presence of her grim and sarcastic father, Cesare, and often cried in his presence. Although her name was "Aurora" or "Dawn" her father, mocking her frequent tears called her "Melody."One night Cesare disappeared into the darkness never to be seen again, but by then the young girl's friendly neighbors also called her "Melody" a name that she responded to for the rest of her life. When her mother became ill and could no longer work, Melody begged for scraps of food in the village to keep her mother alive. However, Melody's overworked mother at last became ill and passed away. Melody found her lying still and cold on her bed one morning with the smile on her face with which she had greeted the lord. Melody would no longer have to beg for scraps in the village market to keep her mother alive. After her mother's funeral in the village church the priest, Father Alfonsi, introduced Melody to the Mancinis, a wealthy couple who were willing to adopt her. Although she was happy to have a place to live and to become well nourished, her presence ignited angry feelings in her adoptive parents and eventually she had to leave their home. Then her tutor, the seminarian Antonio, took her to the village orphanage where Melody received lessons in reading, writing, and Italian history from Antonio and was taught to sing by Sister Claudia who led the church choir and who was especially friendly with Melody's tutor Antonio. When this situation placed Antonio, who had discovered that his desire to experience love with a woman had as strong, or stronger, than his love for the Lord, in an awkward position between Claudia and Melody who had both fallen in love with him. Consequently, at Claudia's suggestion, Melody was recruited by the opera company based in the Cinque Terre village just next door. What followed in Melody's life was both her rise as a soprano in the opera company and increasing competition with Claudia who was to leave her clerical habit behind so as to become Antonio's lover and, hopefully, the mother of his children. After two tours with the opera company that took Melody both to Florence and later to Rome, she returned to her native Cinque Terre village, Vernazza, to perform Puccini's Tosca at the end of her second tour with the opera company. There, because she saw the tenor, Salvatore, who sang with her in several operas and who had courted her passionately, locked in a passionate embrace with another man, and then saw her former teachers Antonio and Claudia entering the pews carefully because of Claudia's obvious pregnancy, Melody finished a brilliant rendition of Tosca by jumping off the set toward the front, rather than toward the back as Tosca was supposed to do, and lying on the floor of the stage unmoving as the audience erupted in screams. While her former tutor Antonio climbed onto the stage and fell on her body crying "Melody, Melody, Melody" in an unthinking repetition of the last lines of La Boheme, the Director of the opera reacted in a different way and called for a stretcher. Whether and how Melody survived her dramatic act to end Tosca will be revealed in a possible sequel to the novel.