Bartoli or Bust...??

I just got back from London, where I had the privilege of seeing Der Rosenkavalier in an excellent production with a stellar cast at Covent Garden. It prompted me to dig out a reflection I wrote after seeing La Bohème in a regional house in Italy.

October 15, 2009

I went to see an opera in Cremona on Tuesday night. It was La Bohème, a standard, and I was curious what the quality of a regional opera produciton would be here, and what the audience would be like. The theatre looked big and classy, and their season has a lot of interesting things: Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, and La Voix Humaine which really piqued my curiosity, besides the usual fare (Verdi, Bellini, etc). Naturally, I wanted to check out any theatre company that would bring in Poulenc one-woman shows.

It turned out to be a real trial to get there. I worked until 6.30 that evening and caught a taxi to the Central Station for a 6.50 train. I was in a bad romantic comedy, chasing the lead to the airport, stuck in traffic, tapping my fingers on the armrest and praying for the light to turn green. I did make the train but only because I RAN; it got in at 7.50 and the show began at 8.30. I was in my seat in good time, but not without a few grey hairs.

Finding my way to the theatre was easy, but wandering around in the dark after the show trying to find my hostel was not. It turned out to be on the other side of town (which is actually maybe 1 km, but everything is relative) and thanks to the help of two very nice Cremonesi ladies, I arrived relatively intact at 11.45, a good hour after the rumpled, disgruntled priest who opened the door would have liked, by the looks of things.

I sat next to a tenor who was also there alone, and we got to chatting. When he learned that I was from Milano, he did a double take. "You came all that way to see THIS?" He got me thinking. I did come all this way, not without a good deal of effort, from the city of La Scala, to see what turned out to be a mediocre production of La Bohème, an opera that I will probably see a hundred more times in my life. To be fair, Cremona is about as far from Milano as Aurora is from Toronto, but Italy is a lot smaller than Canada, so what doesn't seem like a lot to me certainly does to your average Italian; you can also get home from Aurora late at night, while the trains from Cremona finish at 10 pm, hence my having to stay over.

Anyway, I sat there and thought about all the fuss I had to go to in order to get my butt in the seat that night. Was it worth it?

Well let's answer that quantitatively. I've definitely seen better operas, and definitely better Bohèmes, even on DVD or youtube. Some of the Bohèmes I've seen had singers that actually acted, even. They had a cool black and white 20's flapper thing going on, which really suited the production but isn't a new idea, really, but the music itself left something to be desired. The orchestra was often too loud for the younger singers (ie Rodolfo and Mimì), a common problem in my experience with Bohème, and the singers actually didn't have the most wonderful timbres, though they were technically pretty solid. As I said, very little acting went on and the direction definitely didn't help with that. The exception was Musetta, who admittedly has more to work with, as she is, after all, Musetta. My big complaint with the singing, though, was something that really surprised me-- there was a lack of understanding of the Puccini style. The singing was not speech-like in the lower register and there was a lack of refinement in general, phrases poorly shaped and demonstrative of an ignorance of the textual significance of the melody in certain places, especially in the ensembles.

So why, when I live in Milano and can be at La Scala in 15 minutes, did I even bother?

That's a really, really good question.

Opera fans and would-be opera fans, as well as opera singers and would-be opera singers, now are able to get their hands on a plethora of media showcasing la crème de la crème of opera then and now. Think youtube, HD broadcasts, and digital remastering of all the old vinyls. We can even subscribe to online players like the Met's and listen to historical recordings on demand. We have developed extremely sophisticated tastes as a result of this, and are less forgiving of things we perceive as faults but might actually just be differences in taste, style, or performance practice.

So if it's not Alvarez, Domingo, Fleming, Frittoli, why bother? Well, I want to be an opera singer, and at least a few other people reading this blog too, and there just isn't room for that many people at the top. There has to be stops along the way. Think about it. Let's say we decided that there wasn't any point in going to the opera unless it was as good a Violetta as Renée Fleming (I happen to like her Traviata). We'd all end up forswearing our regional and independent companies, not to mention university opera programs, and opera would be relegated to a handful of huge, well-oiled corporations worldwide, the Emperor of which would be the Met, churning out polished productions attended by the highest bidders. Nothing would exist in a lower price bracket or in a smaller city than London, Milano or Toronto.
It would also mean that a lot of us would be out of jobs with no hope of a career, and some of us want a different career than Covent Garden, anyway.

It isn't practical to declare an all-or-nothing situation when it comes to art; even though we all acknowledge that perhaps Pavarotti was the best of his kind, or Picasso, or whoever, all those other people doing the same work in their own way are reaching a miltitude of people on a variety of other levels.

Even if that means that some seriously mediocre theatre has to exist, that's OK. It just means we have to lower our standards to "realistic" and know what it is we are about to see before we see it. Because someday, it's going to be me up there, or you, in Teatro Ponchielli in a small Italian town, or some backwater German regional house, and all the bluehairs and twenty somethings who want a little culture in their Friday night expect me to do my best for them.

So I consider my travails not in vain; in fact, you can conceive of them as an investment in my career. In some small way my bum in the seat helps that theatre stay open one more year and have a budget to hire new talent, and therefore maybe me or someone like me when we're ready to grow up and get paid to sing. On top of that grassroots and independent opera and regionally funded companies not only diversify the industry and provide jobs on many levels and in a lot of ways (who else has to be there for the show to go on?) but they also provide a service to the community they are in, maybe a community who would not think to make a pilgrimage like I did to the nearest La Scala. A community that goes to opera because it's there and maybe wouldn't have otherwise is not a community on which opera is wasted. There's a little opera for everyone this way, and not just the die-hards.