I hate performers who debase great works of art: I long for their annihilation: if my criticisms were flaming thunderbolts, no prudent Life or Fire Insurance Company would entertain a proposal from any singer within my range.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
All singers have this fault: if asked to sing among their friends they are never so inclined, if unasked they never leave off.
— HORACE, SATIRES, 35 B.C.
The actor apes a man—at least in shape
The opera performer apes an ape— AMBROSE BIERCE
You’ve consulted the schedule, bought your ticket, and settled into your seat. All around you, folks in business threads or evening finery are reading their programs or chatting quietly with their neighbors. Suddenly, you notice the lights are going down and the curtain is going up. Yikes! You’re in the opera house! Now what do you do?
Relax. Things aren’t as desperate as they seem. In this chapter, we’ll walk you through the operagoing experience, letting you know what to expect, when, and why.
Let’s begin with an ugly reality: the cost. Opera is not cheap and probably never has been. It costs a lot of money to hire singers, chorus, and an orchestra; to design and make sets and costumes; to own or rent an auditorium suitable for music theater; to assemble a management team and staff. Opera has two characteristics that make it especially troublesome in the lean and very mean nineties: high overhead and an almost zero rate of potential productivity increase.
The overhead can be cut, and opera companies have been doing just that by sharing or simplifying productions, paring and combining staff functions and, more drastically, reducing the length of seasons. But very little can be accomplished in the way of productivity, short of slashing the time it takes to perform, say, Tosca in half. (“Do we have to do Act Two every night?” “But boss, that’s where ‘Vissi d’arte’ is!”) Within a few minutes either way, operas take exactly as long to present in the late twentieth-century as they did in the late nineteenth.
So opera is expensive, and getting more so every year. The top singers and conductors naturally command top fees; opera companies are notoriously secretive about what they pay a star, but for a run at the Met, the top fee is $12,000 a night. (Someone like Pavarotti or Domingo can earn much more, of course, in solo concerts and one-shot stadium and arena appearances. For the second “Three Tenors” concert in Los Angeles in the summer of 1994, each man, plus José Carreras, reportedly was paid a million dollars.) Orchestras, which are inevitably unionized, are very expensive to operate and notoriously loath to offer any concessions to management.
Thus your ticket may bear a price of $50, $100, or even more. Sure, you can get in cheaper, and most companies hold back some seats for the hoi polloi, or even offer standing room; in German and Austrian opera houses the Stehplatz an old and honored tradition, and one sees the standing areas crammed with students, often armed with scores. Any longtime operagoer will tell you that some of his or her fondest memories are of the days in standing-room, where they saw and heard such legends as (fill in the blanks) for the price of a cup of soup. Still, sitting beats standing any day, especially if you are over twenty-five.
The first question I can hear you asking, therefore, is: is it worth it? Why should I shell out megabucks for a seat at the opera when I can…when I can…can…?
When you can what? A ticket for a Madonna concert is likely to set you back a bundle, if you can even get one; if you have to go to a scalper, forget about it. Pro football tickets cost as much as opera tix, and even baseball is no longer as cheap as it used to be. Broadway long ago saw its first $100-a-seat show, and no one is surprised any longer when the latest British import sets a new record for costliness.
So stop complaining about sticker shock and think about what you’re getting in return. You’re receiving the services of hundreds of highly skilled professionals—on the stage, under it, and behind it—most of whom have worked all their lives to achieve the level of artistry you’re so happy to witness. Musicians study every bit as long and hard as doctors, and they generally are remunerated at only a fraction of the rate, so don’t begrudge them their earnings.
Not only are you helping to support them, you’re also supporting opera in your community. Having an opera company in one’s town used to be thought a Good Thing; an opera house, it was believed, elevated the tone of the neighborhood and helped local corporations recruit top employees from elsewhere. Alas, in the hateful social climate of America today, this argument will get you an argument in return: opera houses are “elitist” symbols of Dead White European Male cultural hegemony, the money could be better spent on the homeless or the sick or the poor or the nonwhite, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, corporations are busy firing middle managers, not hiring them; and who cares about tone anyway, when the role models for our youth are ghetto gangsters who flop around in unlaced sneakers, shoot their best friends, and think lyrics comprised largely of the word “motherfucker” are the second coming of Noël Coward?
Apparently, while I wasn’t looking during the five years I spent in Europe, an inane, pernicious collection of “feelings”—we don’t have thoughts, or values, anymore, only feelings—has taken root. I suppose this is not the place to get into a discussion of the multicultural society, except to note that opera surely is one of the finest examples of multiculturalism the world has ever seen. And don’t kid yourself: the money that is not spent on opera (or libraries or theaters or symphony orchestras) will most assuredly not find its way to the homeless or the poor. The next time you hear some moron decrying “high culture” remind him that (a) the poor, as no less a person than Jesus once noted, will always be with us and (b) you have just as much right to your pleasures as Snoop Doggy Dogg has to his.
But let’s assume you’ve smashed your piggy bank and come up with the scratch to buy a ducat or two. The next question (at least from your date) is going to be: what am I going to wear?
Again, relax. You can pretty much wear anything you want, although I must admit to being of two minds on the issue of suitable dress for the theater. On the one hand, you should be comfortable in, and not intimidated by, your surroundings; on the other, you should not look like a slob. The older I get, the more I appreciate my fellow operagoers’ dressing like ladies and gentlemen; the opera house is the only venue I regularly frequent where I can sport my tuxedo without being taken for a waiter, and I like that. All men look great in a tux, and there is something about a formally attired audience that promotes bonhomie and good manners. Dressing up for the opera also affords women a bulletproof excuse to buy a new outfit (“Do you honestly expect me to go to the opera in this old thing? Don’t you want me to look good?”). The tuxedoed gent with the bejeweled lady on his arm makes the perfect operatic couple. Why, it’s the next best thing to the high school prom.
Not every night, of course. Nowadays, the rule for formal attire is: on opening night; at the first night of a new production (called a prima, in opera-ese); and at a benefit. In New York City, for example, the Metropolitan Opera has periodic benefits for the Opera Guild, and everyone shows up dressed to the nines, if not to kill. At other times, business attire is fine.
It also depends on where you live. Opening night at the Met, the San Francisco Opera, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of the season’s social highlights in each city, but the audiences are radically different. New York draws the crème de la crème, and the crowd is peppered with social mavens, politicians, diplomats, celebrities, and the like. In Chicago, with fewer celebs to go around, the tone is resolutely Middle American (and a little dowdy, it must be admitted), while in San Francisco the large, socially eclectic opera-loving public shows up in everything from tails and top hats to the very latest in B&D leather-wear.
Basically, use your judgment. The exigencies of employment often demand that we come to the opera house directly from the office, and it’s perfectly okay for professionals of both sexes to arrive in business suits and dresses. Younger people may want to dress however it is younger people dress these days, which is fine. Just one caveat: keep it clean and, if possible, pressed.
So here you are, in your seat. Before the performance starts, it’s a good idea to look over the program. These vary from the pathetic little Stagebills New Yorkers receive to the wonderfully detailed and instructive program books typical in San Francisco, which really deserve to be taken home, studied, and kept. Whichever you get, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the cast and with the plot précis, if you don’t know the plot and the opera is not being presented with surtitles. Nothing is more annoying to those around you than fumbling with your program during a performance, flipping the pages, holding it up to the light, or, worst of all, idly reading the ads because you’re so bored. During the show, the program belongs on your lap, in your purse, or under your seat; it should be neither seen nor heard.
Now to surtitles, or supertitles as they are also sometimes called. I love ’em, and cannot think of a single reason why they should not be used. They are the translations of lines of the libretto projected onto a screen just above the stage, and they have revolutionized the appreciation of opera in this country. Americans are famously averse to foreign languages—oddly, since on the streets of our major cities one can hear forty or fifty different tongues and dialects—and they are just as averse to homework. So telling Americans to read the librettos beforehand and try to puzzle out how the sounds of the Italian or German texts correspond with the English meanings is a hopeless cause. (You should, of course, but I accept the fact that you won’t.) The result of this lack of preparation has been generations of American operagoers sitting in stony silence as Da Ponte’s jokes flew by, or scratching their heads at the plot twists of Il trovatore.
Enter surtitles, which first came into common use in the early 1980s. From the start, they were loved by the public and hated by some snobbish critics, whose objections against surtitles were basically two. The first, abstract, contention was that by having the text telegraphed, the singers’ expressivity was somehow being shortchanged; that having jokes projected on the screen before the words left the singers’ mouths in effect ruined the punch line. The second, more practical, objection was that surtitles were (a) inaccurate, (b) infelicitous, and (c) poorly synchronized with the action.
Maybe so. But Protest No. 2 has largely been alleviated through experience. And Exception No. 1 is simply ridiculous. Today, when opera is funny, people laugh—did they ever do that before? So what if they laugh a beat before the singer actually utters the side-splitting line? Is opera some kind of test, on which the audience reaction is being graded for timeliness? Better to have a reaction than to sit there mute and surly.
I’ll give you a good example of why surtitles work so well. In the second act of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which is the second installment in the Ring of the Nibelung cycle, there is a very long marital spat between Wotan and Fricka, the chief god and goddess. Outside of German-speaking countries, this long stretch of musical dialogue is greeted with total incomprehension. And yet, it is very important: Wotan and his wife are discussing issues of fidelity and honor that will directly bear on the fate of the human characters, Siegmund and Sieglinde. It’s imperative that we understand what they are saying, because otherwise it seems that Wotan is simply being browbeaten and henpecked by his shrewish wife, and that Siegmund must die because his dad just can’t take this yenta’s yammering anymore.
In the mid-eighties, however, I attended a production of the Ring in Seattle, and it was a revelation. For the first time in the many, many Rings I’ve seen, the audience was wholly caught up in the drama. A flick of the eye, a quick read of the dialogue, and back to the stage: there was not a sound in the house except those Wotan and Fricka were making, nor the slightest sense of the usual is-this-damn-thing-ever-going-to-be-over feeling that one detects during some of the Ring’s shall we say less-inspired passages.
The way to handle surtitles is to understand what they are. They are not a literal line-by-line translation of the libretto. There is neither the time nor the space for that. Instead, they offer a sense of what the characters are singing, a guidepost against which you can measure the opera’s progress. This is why surtitles are no substitute for your having read the libretto or a good analysis before you sit down, but unless your command of the European languages is impeccable, and your ear supernaturally acute, you’ll be glad your crib sheet is right there in front of your nose.
A hush has come over the audience, and now the applause starts to build. You have a moment of panic! What are they doing? Whom are they applauding? You can’t see anybody! And why? Nobody’s done anything yet!
Calm down. It’s only the conductor. And if you’re sitting in the orchestra seats (or the stalls or the Parkett), you probably won’t be able to spot him until he steps up onto his podium and takes his preperformance bow. It’s the folks in the cheap seats who have spotted and greeted him first.
Unlike the symphony orchestra, which performs in full view of the audience, the opera orchestra is located under and in front of the stage. The idea is that the musicians should be heard and not seen—an idea taken to the nth degree by Wagner in the house he designed for his own works in Bayreuth. There, he placed the orchestra completely under the stage, and to make sure no one would be able to see it, he built a “hood” that curves up and over the orchestra pit, shielding it, like a giant prompter’s box, from the audience’s view. There are few moments more thrilling than the beginning of the Ring at Bayreuth; there, the doors are shut, heavy curtains are drawn over the exits, and the auditorium is completely enveloped in darkness. Suddenly, a low E-flat rumbles out of the depths, like some primeval tone, the foundation of the entire universe, and indeed the entire Prelude to Das Rheingold emanates from this stygian blackness. Then, at the modulation to A-flat, the curtain shoots up and we see the Rhinemaidens frolicking in the river. My God, they’re naked…
Bayreuth is the only opera house in the world where the orchestra is invisible, but elsewhere you’re simply meant to ignore it. Sometimes this is difficult, especially when the conductor sets himself up on a high podium, and one is constantly distracted by his halo of hair or his flailing arms. But the only people who really need to see the conductor are the performers, so feel free to ignore him too.
And concentrate on the stage. The big curtain has risen, and most likely what you’re now looking at is a choral scene. Many operas begin with a big chorus, be they merry peasants or suffering serfs, and initially your eye will be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the spectacle. Opera is much, much grander than the average Broadway or West End theater piece, even grander than one of the budget-busting British musicals. Zeffirelli’s sets for the Met’s production of Tosca, for example, are not just sets: they are partial re-creations, at actual size, of the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, the Farnese Palace, and the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome. The only way the sets could be grander would be if they were the actual Roman buildings themselves—and believe it or not, this was actually done during a TV production, broadcast live from Rome a few years ago with Domingo as Cavaradossi.
At this point, if the sets are as grand as advertised, the audience will usually start clapping again. I think this is silly, although the production designer is presumably gratified. But the applause inevitably interferes with the music, so try to restrain your approbation until a more appropriate time—when the act or opera is over.
Another event that often provokes needless applause is moving sets. If your opera house is equipped with the latest in modern technological machinery, the scenery can elevate skyward or sink earthward; whichever direction it takes, it always seems to occasion vociferous cheers from the multitudes. At the Met, this tradition began in the 1960s, with a spectacular staging of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), and it has continued right up to Zeffirelli’s Tosca: in the last act, we first see Cavaradossi in his dungeon cell, plaintively singing the famous aria “E lucevan le stelle.” The two-stage set is then lowered by the stage elevator and presto, we’re atop the Castel Sant’ Angelo for the final tragedy. It’s exciting. But don’t cheer the sets, please. They can’t hear you, and it just spoils the music for the rest of us.
This may be a good place to tell you about what happens at the end of Tosca. Tosca jumps. Off the top of the castle and, presumably, into the Tiber, although if you’ve ever been to Rome you know it’s an Olympic leap; most probably, she just splats on the sidewalk below. Anyway, the story goes that in one production the soprano playing Tosca duly jumped (onto a hidden mattress)—and bounced right back up in the air. I personally have never seen that, but I was at a performance starring those two sylphs, Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé, in which Madame Caballé disdained the jump in favor of the noble offstage waddle: she proceeded in stately fashion into the wings like Queen Victoria sailing down the Nile on a barge.
Sshhh! Somebody’s singing.
It might be a soprano. Or maybe it’s a tenor. In opera, you will encounter several different types and categories of voice, over which people make a great deal of fuss. You’ll hear a lot of talk about a “lirico-spinto” this and a “dramatic” that, usually attached to a familiar word like soprano or bass. But what does it mean?
There are six kinds of voice: sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, altos, tenors, baritones, and basses. Mezzos, who sing slightly lower than true sopranos, and altos, who sing even lower, are often confused with each other, but they’re not really the same thing. Neither is a baritone and a bass (the bass is lower), although there is a subspecies called a bass-baritone, which is sort of like a light-heavyweight and countertenor, almost a male alto, who sings in an eerie near-falsetto: the next best thing to a castrato. There are also subcategories, which describe a vocal type or range, such as coloratura soprano (a soprano adept at high filigree singing) and spinto roles, which are simply heavier roles for a soprano or tenor. Almost every opera singer you’re likely to hear will be one of these types.
And what are they singing now? Very probably, it’s an aria. We’ve defined our terms in a previous chapter, but now’s a good time to review them. An aria is a solo song that usually describes an emotional state; there’s not much in the way of plot development in an aria, but we do learn plenty about the character’s emotional health (usually shaky) and general state of mind (usually bad). If two principals join forth in song, that’s called a duet; three is a trio, four a quartet, and so on up to sextets, septets, and even (rarely) octets. Beyond that it’s pretty hard to distinguish one voice from another, so large ensembles basically turn into choruses, which are sung by the servingmaids, spear carriers, sailors, and other supernumeraries who make up the opera chorus.
Acts—there may be one, two, three, four, even five—generally conform to well-tested dramatic shapes, ending on a high (or low) point, with a big aria or chorus rounding things off with a bang. An operatic act can be as short as twenty minutes (Puccini) or longer than an hour (Wagner). Some operas have no intervals at all, either by design (Das Rheingold, Salome, Elektra, Pagliacci, Cavalleria rusticana) or by performance tradition (The Flying Dutchman, Wozzeck). Sometimes, in order to save time, opera companies will run two acts together with only a brief pause between them, such as between Acts II and III of Bohème. In the main, however, the composer and librettist’s dramatic plan is observed.
But what if you’ve bought a ticket to Rigoletto expecting to see men in tights and the curtain rises on a lower Manhattan waterfront populated with guys who look like their names are Gino and Fat Tony? In that case, you’ve wandered into Jonathan Miller’s Mafia restaging of Verdi’s classic and are getting your first look at radical restaging.
I’ve covered this phenomenon earlier, but perhaps a few more observations are in order. As the supply of new works entering the repertoire gradually receded—maybe a better way to say it is, as the doors of the repertoire slammed shut on new works—the creativity of opera’s interpreters had to go somewhere. You can’t expect people as trained and motivated as opera folks to just sit around humming the same tune all day, can you? So directors began to do what directors do best—monkey around, looking for a way to put their own stamp on the material.
Thus we got Despina’s Diner (in Mozart’s Così fan tutte) and Carmen set among Hispanic youth gangs in Los Angeles and a modern Boris Godunov in which the struggle for the Kremlin is conducted in ill-fitting gray Commie business suits instead of brocaded robes. As I’ve said before, I have no intrinsic objection to radical restaging—in fact, I tend to be in favor it—providing it is done well.
Miller once told me that in order for him to transpose an opera into a new time and place, he had to be able to find an exact analog. It’s not enough to want to move an opera from, say, sixteenth-century Florence to twentieth-century Skokie, Illinois. There has to be a correspondence between the two societies that would make the action, drama, and emotions plausible in either place. So when Miller updated Tosca by more than a century, setting it in Fascist Italy, it worked. A chief of the secret police (Scarpia, the villain) can be just as villainous in either time, and the opera diva Tosca herself looks just as smart in forties dresses as in Napoleonic-era clothing.
So don’t worry if what you’re seeing doesn’t quite conform to what the libretto or the analysis told you to expect. Go with the flow; be your own critic, and ask yourself how well you think the director accomplished his task. Did it work? If so, why? If not, why not? Not only do individuals have differing opinions, but so do whole cities. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle once staged The Flying Dutchman as the dream (or, rather, nightmare) of the Helmsman. San Francisco loved it, but when the production came to the Met, New York practically booed it off the stage and it was quickly dropped. San Franciscans are open to adventure; the Met audience, which prefers its opera sets to be storybook scenes, is not.
But maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse. What you really want to talk about is not whether the director has added anything new to the sum total of human knowledge, or merely vandalized a handsome old structure, but whether the singers were any good. After all, isn’t that what everybody goes to the opera for?
Not me, as I’ve mentioned before. But who am I to hold back the tide? You want to talk about singers, we’ll talk about singers.
What do we listen for in a voice? Everyone has his or her own taste, but speaking for myself I listen for three things. First, the quality of the voice itself. Is it pleasing? Do I want to listen to this person sing for the next three hours or would I rather hear a cat being tortured? A voice should be full and rounded and smoothly produced from the bottom to the top of the register; it shouldn’t have any obvious holes; it shouldn’t wobble; it should be in tune.
Next, how is it being used? Does the singer have any idea what to do with his instrument? Can he color it, shade it, or does he sing every note in exactly the same way, without any thought for the meaning of the material? Is the technique solid? Is the breathing correct? Do I have the sense that the singer is in control of the instrument, or is it likely to crack without warning? I want to feel comfortable with my singers, and so should you.
Finally, what does the singer bring to the party in the way of musicianship? Are the languages being put forth with surety and conviction? Are the dramatic nuances of the character being adequately, or innovatively, explored? Does the singer look good on stage and move well? Is he or she believable in character? Do I like watching him or her on the stage?
It’s really not much more complicated than this. In the previous chapter, we got an idea of the enormous complexity involved in the act of singing, but these are the questions you should ask yourself as you sit listening to a performer in the opera house; these are the issues on which you and everybody else will be forming a judgment.
So why not recommend singers? My reason is that singers come and go, and any discussion we get into now is bound to be outdated in a couple of seasons. What good would it do for us to examine the career of Elena Suliotis or Roberta Peters? What interest would you find in an analysis of baritone Robert Merrill (other than as the singer of the national anthem on opening day at Yankee Stadium)? This is why I’ve been avoiding any direct commentary on the singers of our time, trying instead to focus your attention on the larger issues of opera performance and appreciation.
Fine, you say: tell me who’s good. Or who was good. Or who’s good that I’m likely to find on records. In other words, help!
Now you’re really getting personal. But, if you insist, I’ll give you some guidance. The performers mentioned below are some of my favorites, and they may well turn out to be some of yours. Some are still active, some retired; all are well represented on recordings, so you’re very likely to run across them as you paw through the record bins and CD stacks. Just remember that opinions are subject to change or revocation without notice, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the management of this publishing house:
Sopranos and mezzos: Leontyne Price, Helen Donath, Hildegard Behrens, Mirella Freni, June Anderson. This is a stylistically eclectic group, but one that covers most of the repertoire. Price was a peerless dramatic soprano, whose Aida and Leonora in La forza del destino were without equal. The distinctive coloring of her voice (some profess to hear a “black” sound in it) makes her as instantly recognizable as Ella Fitzgerald, and there was hardly a role she touched that she did not triumph in. Price is a sterling example of how to conduct, prolong, and even milk a career, and she remains a beloved figure in American music.
Donath is an American who did what many American singers did twenty years ago—she moved to Germany, where she married, settled, and built a formidable career. Donath has a delicious light soprano voice, ideal for parts like Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (try the Solti recording) or Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (try the Karajan); it is impossible to imagine that Donath’s best roles were ever sung any better by anybody, anytime, anywhere.
Behrens, at this writing, is pretty well shot, but what a roman candle she was! A German soprano effective in both Strauss and Verdi, she took on opera’s biggest dramatic roles—how does Brünnhilde singing “Heil dir, Sonne” while strapped upside down to what appeared to be a giant shield in Peter Hall’s disastrous Bayreuth Ring production grab you?—and convinced us they belonged to her. She was terrific in the Met’s Idomeneo, where she even managed to upstage Pavarotti, and no one was ever more convincingly nuts as Elektra in Strauss’s great opera.
Karajan may not have liked Aida screaming, but Freni managed to make us forget that her voice was far better suited to Mimi than to the Ethiopian princess. Freni and Pavarotti were both fed by the same wet nurse back home in Modena, and there must really have been something in the Italian water in those days; like the great tenor, Freni ingested a full dose of lyricism that made her suffering Puccini heroines so poignant and affecting. Petite and beautiful, Freni was a far cry—a Pavarotti high note—from the popular image of the opera diva, but nobody comported herself with more dignity than she.
June Anderson looks like Joan Sutherland, and she even sings like Joan Sutherland, but for my money she’s a far more interesting and accomplished artist. La Stupenda (yes, Sutherland was actually known by that moniker) was a one-trick pony, a pitcher with a blazing fastball but nothing else. Anderson has all of Sutherland’s technique but few of her mannerisms. Anderson uses her voice as a musical instrument rather than as a natural wonder; when she sings Lucia di Lammermoor’s mad scene, the listener is primarily caught up in the beauty of the vocal writing, in the emotions of the poor mad girl, and not in the voice itself. She’s a real musician, in other words, and in her niche of the repertoire, there are not many who can make that claim.
Mezzos are like viola players in that they don’t get no respect, but there have been many great ones, and there is one in particular I would like to single out: the late Tatiana Troyanos. What a terrific singer she was, an artist of grace and depth and accomplishment whose rich Greek-American mezzo could send chills up and down your spine. To her great roles, like Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, she brought a fierce intelligence and a grand passion matched by few in our time. What a contrast she made to the more refined (and sometimes more affected) singing of Flicka von Stade! The opera world had room for both of them and now, alas, there is only one.
Tenors, baritones, and basses: Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, James Morris, Samuel Ramey. By now, the “Three Tenors” have become such a phenomenon that I hesitate to even mention them—except that they really are the best tenors around, and two of them rank with the greatest tenors of all time. Carreras is a fine, intelligent singer who, like Freni, was asked to sing roles that were really much too heavy for him; additionally, he was stricken by leukemia and heroically battled back from it to take his place alongside Pavarotti and Domingo in 1990, when the three amigos sang their epochal concert in Rome at the climax of the World Cup.
The day of that concert, with a ticket waiting for me in the Eternal City, I was stuck in Hamburg, trying desperately to find a flight from anywhere in Germany to Rome. But the Germans were playing in the soccer finals that night—they eventually won, as if anybody could possibly care—and so I was unable to get to the damn concert. Yes, friends, I now hold the distinction of (a) missing the “concert of the century” and (b) turning down a ride to upstate New York with a bunch of friends in 1969, because who wanted to go to something called “Woodstock,” anyway?
Of the other two, what more can one say? Pavarotti is a huge man with what may be the most beautiful Italian lyric tenor voice in history; beside him, Caruso sounds like a barroom belter. No one has ever sung Rodolfo in Bohème with more beauty and ardor than Lucianissimo; no one has poured more passion into the now-clichéd aria “Nessun dorma.” At his best, which he can still reach, Pavarotti is one of the great vocal wonders of the world, a voice imbued with a special timbre that thrills millions of people all over the world.
(Not that he can’t use a little help from time to time, which we critics are happy to provide. When Pavarotti sang his first Radames in Aida in San Francisco in the early eighties, I took a dim view of this move to a heavier role, and said so in the pages of Time. A few days later, my review was front-page news in the Italian papers: “Luciano: pay attention to your roles!” screamed one headline, pointing that Time was looking askance at this lapse in judgment. He dropped the role shortly thereafter.)
Domingo’s voice may be less immediately striking, but no less distinctive. Where Pavarotti is lyrical, Domingo is dramatic. His voice has a darker, weightier sound, perhaps betraying its origins as a baritone, but it rings at the top like a true tenor’s should, and its flexibility and durability has allowed Domingo to perform an astonishing number and variety of roles. The restless Spanish-Mexican tenor has more than one hundred roles in his repertoire, and he is still adding new ones, in every conceivable style and national school. He sings Puccini and Verdi; he sings Massenet and Bizet; he sings Wagner (Siegmund and, soon, Tristan). Domingo not only sings, he also plays the piano very well, conducts expertly, and has even started to work in operatic administration as a hedge against the day when retirement comes. Pavarotti and Domingo are two of the most remarkable voices of this or any other era: remember that, the next time you hear someone moaning about the lost golden age.
Basses and baritones are inherently less sexy than tenors, but Morris and Ramey are two Americans who have made terrific headway on the international stage. Morris has become one of the great Wotans, a singing actor who illuminates his roles not only with an effortlessly produced voice but with a formidable musical intelligence as well. Ramey is not half the actor Morris is, but his range may be wider, and there is no one to touch him in the Italian basso repertoire.
Obviously, these are only a handful of the noteworthy singers of our time, and it does not even begin to touch on the great singers of the past. There are, however, plenty of books on those subjects if you want to learn more about such figures, and while I do recommend reading, even more do I recommend listening to as many of them as you can and forming your opinions.
Because, in the end, that’s what being an opera fan is all about. I would prefer that you save your zeal for the works themselves and not the performers, but if you must, you must, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Fandom is what keeps opera houses filled the world over.
And, truth to tell, there are few moments in life more thrilling than the collective hush that comes over an audience when a new voice suddenly emerges from its incubational cocoon and you are there to witness it. Suddenly, there is a sense of excitement and even danger in the air: could it be? Is he, or she, the one? Is this the voice we’ve been waiting for? Is this the real thing? Can this be…love?
And then the cheers sound, rolling over the auditorium like ocean waves. The aria stops, the conductor puts down his baton; the singer steps out of character for just a moment to acknowledge the cheers of the multitude, hand on heart, eyes turned heavenward. When a great voice comes along you’ll know it, and you can only hope to be there when it does.
And here you are, sitting in the opera house! It’s okay, you can clap now. But don’t whistle—in Europe that means you hated it, and remember that many of the singers are European. Better to yell “Bravo!” like that guy in the leather pantsuit next to you.
There, that was easy, wasn’t it?