I’ll drink to that
Henrietta Bredin
Last Christmas I found myself greatly intrigued by how often opera plots incorporate meals and what sort of food the characters on stage might be tucking into. Of course, even more than eating which can be quite inconvenient when you’re trying to sing — operas offer numerous drinking opportunities. Many of these are written into the plot and are sung about at length. The revellers at Prince Orlofsky’s ball in Die Fledermaus raise glasses of champagne in a toast to champagne itself. Deliciously, in a production at English National Opera some years ago, the Spirit of Champagne was represented by the actress Rose English, wearing not a lot more than a six-foot plume of nodding feathers on her head and accompanied by a troupe of dancers in a fantasy sequence during which they appeared as a positive cocktail cabinet of drinks including Pastis, Tokay, Chartreuse and Curaçao.
There is in fact an Opera cocktail, the ingredients of which are few (gin, red Dubonnet and maraschino liqueur) and sound pretty disgusting as a combination but must result in a festively roseate drink when shaken with ice and strained into an appropriate and, naturally, chilled glass.
Quite a number of operatic choruses are devoted to the joys of drink, as noted by Jerome K. Jerome in his wonderful description of stage peasantry from StageLand, published in 1890: ‘The stage peasant is fond of drinking, and when he drinks he likes you to know he is drinking. None of your quiet half-pints inside the bar for him. He likes to come out in the street and sing about it, and do tricks with it, such as turning it topsy-turvy over his head. But notwithstanding all this, he is moderate, mind you. You can’t say he takes too much. One small jug of ale among 40 is his usual allowance.’ Extended roistering must be one of the more wearing aspects of performing in an opera chorus. In Faust they are indiscriminate about whether beer or wine fills their glasses, just so long as they’re always full; in The Bartered Bride only beer will do, foaming tankards of the stuff; the opening scene of La traviata requires the chorus to keep up with Violetta’s giddy determination to drown her sorrows in a sea of champagne; and in Rossini’s Count Ory, the Count and his followers (male) are not only completely stocious but also disguised as nuns.
There is an ongoing operatic drinking theme of people becoming intoxicated by downing drink they believe to be either harmless or an entirely different substance from what it really is. Albert Herring innocently sips lemonade during the festivities in which he is unwillingly crowned as May King of Loxford, not knowing that it has been liberally spiked with rum. As a result he gets an incapacitating fit of hiccups, goes on a mild sort of a bender and reappears when everyone has given him up for dead to assert his independence and untie himself from his domineering mother’s apron strings. Quite a good result on the whole. In Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, the quack roving charlatan Dr Dulcamara sells a magical elixir that is in fact merely vin ordinaire, Bordeaux to be specific. It is bought and sampled by the lovesick Nemorino, who becomes sufficiently sozzled to ignore the hard-hearted Adina, who has been stringing him along for years. Again, the end results are good. There’s a fine bit of operatic cross-referencing here as Adina, in the opening scene, is reading the story of Tristan and Isolde, and the love potion which releases their terrible and destructive desires. Wagner gives no hint as to what is really in this particular mixture but both Tristan and Isolde drink it in the belief that it will bring about their deaths. Everything that happens to them beyond that point is on an exalted plane, driven by an uncontainable, devouring passion, in a world from which all littleness has been stripped away. They have become rare, pure creatures, as untouchable and unreachable as if they were in fact dead. Is all this a direct result of their drinking the potion, or would it have happened anyway?
It can be disconcerting when opera characters are specific about their drinks. When the American consul Sharpless turns up to witness Pinkerton’s marriage to Madam Butterfly, he is offered the rather strange choice of ‘milk punch or whisky’, sensibly opting for the latter. Milk punch was a feature of my childhood Christmases for a number of years. My mother made it in a smoky-grey Perspex bowl with little cups that hung around its edge — we thought it was the chicest thing ever at the time — and the key ingredients were milk, bourbon, honey, vanilla essence and nut meg, all whizzed up with ice in the blender before serving. Children’s helpings were, to our great annoyance, minus the bourbon, as we loved its sweetish barbecued taste.
Lorenzo da Ponte, in his libretto for Don Giovanni, has his hero drinking Marzemino and pronouncing it excellent while he waits for the statue of the Commendatore to join him for dinner. It’s a northern Italian wine, found chiefly in Trentino. The Spectator’s own Simon Hoggart hasn’t tasted it but wine writer Margaret Rand has, considers it unremarkable and says that she ‘can’t think what Da Ponte was thinking of. Perhaps his brother grew it.’ An early example of product placement? Or maybe a subtle way of indicating to audiences that Don Giovanni’s appetites are voracious but undiscriminating.
My favourite drink in all opera isn’t even alcoholic; it’s a simple glass of water. Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s Arabella is a character of matchless subtlety and complexity. Caught up in a bewildering and agonising confrontation, a misunderstanding that seems impossible to resolve and that is played out in public, late at night in the tired lobby of a seedy Viennese hotel, in a heart-turning moment Arabella recognises a great truth. ‘Abwägen nicht und markten nicht and geizen nicht’ she sings — we must never weigh or measure love, nor bargain with it nor be mean with it; it must be given freely and unstintingly and without reproach. And that is exactly what she does, rescuing her desolate lover Mandryka by sweeping away with one gesture everything that has gone so horribly wrong between them. Remembering the story he has told her of a custom in the countryside where he lives, she brings him a glass of water as a sign that she loves him and gives herself to him for ever.
But I think Falstaff had better have the last word. He’s so joyously resilient, possessed of such a massive and roaring zest for life. The first we hear of him he’s shouting for sherry and he carries on demanding it at frequent intervals throughout the opera. But it’s when he’s at his lowest ebb — quite literally, having been dumped in the Thames along with a basketful of dirty laundry — that he rises to his greatest heights. Feeling cold, old and miserable, humiliated and soaked to the skin, bewailing his increasing girth and proliferating grey hairs, he takes a sip of wine. Wondrously, life returns. The sun comes out and he basks in it like a battlescarred old tomcat. In an extraordinary image, Verdi’s librettist Boito has Falstaff glory in the effects of wine, the way its vapours rise into the brain and there awaken a little black cricket, a cricket that lives inside every true drinker. When roused, its chirupping creates a delirious music that infects the entire world with pleasure. I’ll drink to that.
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