Smoke signals
Henrietta Bredin tracks the smokers and drug abusers in the operatic canon The indulgences of Christmas in the forms of food and drink are fairly well represented in the operatic canon but less socially acceptable indulgences, such as smoking and even drug abuse, don't feature quite so frequently. Hardly surprising, really, as singing doesn't seem naturally to combine with snorting a line or the long, luxurious inhalation of nicotine-rich smoke deep into the lungs. Surprisingly, however, back in the days when smoking was considered to be positively beneficial — 'Craven A: for your throat's sake' — a number of opera singers actually advertised for tobacco companies. The fabulously glamorous and velvet-voiced bass Ezio Pinza not only won a legion of adoring fans for his performances as Don Giovanni and for singing 'Some Enchanted Evening' in South Pacific, but was also rarely seen without a cigarette, in a holder of course, clamped between his teeth. And in 1950 he fronted an ad campaign for Camels — 'How mild can a cigarette be?'
In 1912, and again in 1914, Wills produced a series of cards of musical personalities inside their packs of cigarettes. When the first world war broke out, eight cards in the second series were withdrawn because they featured German musicians, to be replaced by more patriotic figures. Casualties included Weber, Wagner and Mendelssohn (Edward German survived the cut).
There is one opera in which smoking features very prominently indeed — Carmen. The heroine of the title works in the Seville cigar factory (a building which exists to this day, currently housing the Law Department of the University) and is required in numerous productions to make her first entrance with a cigarette between her lips. Not many singers make a convincing job of this. There's usually a great deal of gesturing, cigarette carefully/casually balanced between the first two fingers of the right hand, accompanied by rather too much spirited throwing back of the head and tossing of the gypsy locks. In fact, the role of Carmen is a sprung trap for the unwary, an invitation to overact, and the only remotely convincing interpreter of it I've ever seen (rather than heard; another matter altogether) was Sally Burgess at ENO, in David Pountney's brilliantly trashy production back in the 1980s. She was so startlingly, ferally sexy that her smouldering had no need of cigarettes; in fact, I can't remember if she even bothered to smoke one. The chorus that the factory workers sing in Act One is a sort of aural manifestation of smoke, curling langourously upwards into the still, hot air of a Seville night.
Puccini was a lifelong smoker and smoking plays a part in a number of his operas. In Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San, abandoned by Pinkerton three years earlier, offers one of the cigarettes he left behind to the American consul, Sharpless. Directors with an eye for detail will make sure that, if accepted, the tobacco is found to be unpleasingly stale. In II taban-o, the striking of a match is a key element in the plot and a pipe that has gone out is a metaphor for its owner's manhood being similarly unkindled. La fanciulla del West has a cigar-smoking sheriff, Jack Rance, a precursor of the solitary rebel figure so popular on the silver screen, played by James Dean or Clint Eastwood, and frequently given a cheroot or a roll-up as a prop.
Laudanum addiction features in Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, where the self-righteous Mrs Sedley is forced to wait in the public bar of The Boar — despite her splendidly outraged claim that 'I've never been in a pub in my life' — for the carrier's cart to arrive with a fresh supply of her 'sleeping draught'. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess has its own drug dealer, Sportin' Life, who keeps the residents of Catfish Row supplied with 'happy dust' or cocaine. The moment when Bess succumbs to his wares is the moment that precipitates her decision to abandon Porgy and throw in her luck with the dodgy dealer man, leaving with him for New York.
What is Susanna's Secret in WolfFerrari's opera of that name? Her new husband comes home to smell tobacco smoke and is convinced that she has taken a lover. As it turns out, her `vizietto profitmato', or perfumed little vice, is in fact smoking. She adores it, revels in the way that the smoke caresses her, and has to indulge in secret, as a respectable married woman of 1909, when the opera was written, could not have been seen lighting up in public. Once the truth has been discovered she converts her husbands to the joys of mutual smoking, lighting his cigarette from the one already in her mouth. A very Now Voyager moment.
Quite a few conductors smoke. Leonard Bernstein certainly did—Stephen Sondheim probably had him down as a Jet in his lyrics for West Side Story, 'a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day'. KD Lang produced a sultry album a few years ago called Drag, a delicious double pun, which had song after song about smoking, from 'My Old Addiction' to 'Love is Like a Cigarette'. And then Pina Bausch made a dance piece using the same music, which later featured in Almodovar's film Habla con ella. Smoke rings within smoke rings.
In 1927, the citizens of Vienna became hugely excited about the rival merits of two operas — Das Wunder der Heliane by Korngold (symbolist and lush) and Jonny spielt auf by Krenek (jazzy and avant-garde). A brand of cigarettes was named after each opera, so you could signal your allegiance by smoking either Helianes or Jonnys. The latter are apparently still available in Austria so I think Krenek won that battle (deservedly so, if you agree with Michael Tanner's recent appalled and disgusted review of the Korngold in these pages).
Smoking, shooting up, sniffing and snorting are positively old hat as operatic directorial conceits, particularly in the hands of Calixto Bieito, who tends to combine them wherever possible with hardcore sex and violence. As one reviewer said of his production of Don Giovanni, it creates a certain challenge for singers as 'it's not easy to deliver nicely rounded phrasing with your head up someone's skirt'. Easy to knock, but that same production provided a moment of pure theatrical clarity, a terrible poignancy that still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, when an exhausted and debauched Giovanni sings his little serenade of love, Deh vieni alla finestra', despairingly down the phone to an unknown girl, or possibly her answering machine.
Earlier this year the tenor Endrik Wottrich caused a bit of a stir when he declared that opera singers are under so much pressure that many of them are turning to drugs and alcohol for relief. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he claimed that 'doping has long been the norm in the music world', with betablockers being popped to combat nerves and tenors taking cortisone 'to ensure their voices reach a high pitch'.
On which festive note, why not light up and, as KD Lang has it, 'Puff, puff, puff your cares away'?
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