Last month a friend persuaded me to leave the aesthetic security of Baroque opera and come along to hear Bellini’s I Puritani at the Zurich Opera. Bellini, he argued, wasn’t all that far from Baroque; the change would do me good; I’d love it. No more than weak flesh, I agreed but, during the more than three hours of the performance, I saw nothing that in any way moved me away from my preference for Baroque music.
Subsequent, and sober, reflection upon the cumulative awfulness of that evening has led me to formulate a number of warnings meant to govern attendance at the opera. Though they were formulated in response to a particular performance, I suspect they might serve equally for all opera productions, and so I offer them in a spirit of goodwill and aesthetic generosity, hoping that opera goers who find themselves in a theater where any of these rules are broken will find the courage to leap from their seats and flee screaming into the night.
1. Beware of beds. If, at any time during a performance, a bed appears on stage in a place other than a bedroom it is probably being used as a symbol. Opera directors often use symbols in place of ideas. They are not the same. The Puritani bed came gift wrapped in a red (another symbol) bow.
2. Characters must not be dressed like Walt Disney cartoon figures. In this case, the queen of England wore a dress frighteningly similar to that worn by Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, complete with the high-raised collar, which supported her neck as if she’d suffered whiplash while trying to hijack Cinderella’s carriage.
3. The tenor’s hair must never be longer than the soprano’s, especially when his is a vile persimmon red.
4. Animals should be kept from the stage. In this instance, when the hero appeared on stage, looking rather like Prince Charming (see Rule 2, above), he carried on his wrist a feathered thing meant, I suspect, to be a hawk or other bird of prey. With clocklike regularity, this feathered creature flapped both wings in perfect mechanical unison, as if attempting to hasten the drying of its deodorant, then looked sharply right, then left, its search as vain as my own for something worth looking at on that stage.
5. The chorus should never be made to run in aimless circles. Even the fact that the circle is made of grass cut from a putting green does not make this behavior significant.
6. Cast members should be discouraged from wearing pot holders on their heads. A shaven-headed male performer appeared, in the absence of my opera glasses, to be wearing just that. Perhaps it was meant to be a wig, but wigs are usually larger than compact discs, and so I am forced to believe it was a pot holder, a particularly nasty brown, greasy one. The other characters’ wigs, though equally nasty, were large enough to be perceived as wigs.
7. The soprano, during the course of the evening, should not repeatedly glance about in horror as if wishing desperately that she had listened to her agent when he suggested that, instead of this, she accept the contract to sing The Merry Widow in Graz.