This is an LP I bought in the 1960s. SRO signifies Standing Room Only, a reference to Herb Alpert’s popularity. My taste in music has evolved since then. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-fifties that I began to enjoy Wagner.
On Sunday afternoon I saw Tannhäuser at Covent Garden and it was SRO. Fortunately I had a seat but I admire the stamina of those prepared to stand for four and a half hours. After the famous overture there is a dance sequence in the hedonistic realm of the goddess Venus. Her realm is furnished with a long dining table covered in a white cloth. The dancers used this like a horse in a school gym, jumping over it repeatedly. It looked silly not sexy. After that we got down to business with some magnificent singing. Wagner is especially challenging and it amazes me that the cast can both perform such technically difficult music and inject it with emotion flawlessly, almost. There is a small part for a treble, playing a shepherd boy. In this production he stands on a small gilt chair in the centre of the otherwise empty stage to pipe his pastoral song. It was comforting that he struggled a bit to hit the right notes. It shows that live performance is not always perfect.
The actor David Hemmings as a schoolboy took the treble role of Miles in Benjamin Britten’s, The Turn of the Screw. His voice broke in the middle of a performance in Paris in 1956. Britten was, unreasonably, furious and never spoke to him again. Hemming’s understudy gleefully took on the role but not for long – his voice broke too at the next performance
Opera audiences are usually quite old but on Sunday there was a mixed age group, including at least two young children. Wagnerians are a special breed and prepared to travel to get a fix. I heard people talking in German and Italian in the intervals. I will get another fix at the end of next month when I am being taken to Tristan at the ENO.
I have only once stood for an entire opera. It was Don Giovanni at La Scala. It was my first visit and I wanted to see the interior and hear at least the overture. It turned out to be such a good production that I stayed for the whole performance.
Covent garden has such an intimate and atmospheric sense of place intensified by the collective and willing participation of an enthusiastic crowd. A perfect setting for artistic performance. Another such history laden venue is the Roman amphitheatre in Verona where I once had the pleasure of attending a performance of La traviata. A most enchanting evening indeed. People begin taking up position on well worn stone steps from about five o’clock onwards well prepared with decanted vino reserves and all sorts of finger food. Anticipation intensifies as the warm sultry air is filled with a growing sense of crowd and many languages. Then, as dusk begins to fall, at the stroke of eight of the clock, hundreds of tiny candles are silently lit, one from another, all around the arena – a poignant yet simple gesture in remembrance of the blood of many Christians once cruelly spilled there. As waves of tiny lights slowly subside bringing an azure sunset into view, the first operatic strains translate us through time to Violetta’s Parisian salon and a rousing and evocative drinking song. Unforgettable!