Last word
Opera nights
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
An English opera-lover paying his first visit to the Scala resembles an Australian cricketer going to Lord's for the first time. We have opera houses here, just as there are cricket grounds in Melbourne and Sydney, but jeez, or streuth, or whatever the appropriate expression is, it's not the same thing. In one respect my visit to Milan a fortnight ago was more impressive than the analogy suggests: Lord's is not an attractive place, especially since they destroyed the Tavern: Worcester and Canterbury, and for all I know Adelaide, have prettier grounds.
But the Scala is an exceedingly beautiful theatre, which no-one could say of Covent Garden or the Coliseum. The Scala looks like an opera house, with six tiers of boxes and with completely flat stalls. The last point may seem recondite. When Covent Garden was finally half made over to the Royal Ballet they raised and raked the stalls, so that the balletomanes could see their absurd heroes' feet. The acoustics have never been the same since, or so say reliable witnesses (P. HopeWallace) • with longer memories than mine. The Scala's acoustics (or 'acoustic' as people — surely solecistically — say nowadays) are wonderful, almost as good, in an almost completely different way, as those of Bayreuth.
That was the good news. As luck had it, the performance of Rossini's Mose in Egitto which I went to hear was one about which it would be charitable to say as little as possible. Not that dignified silence was the response with which it was greeted. Though a non-booer, I was cruelly amused to hear an Italian audience giving singers the uccello (they hiss rather than boo). The unhappiest man of the night was the tenor, who was far from his best (I assume). In the Act Three ensemble he has to step forward and sing the line `Mi manca la voce', words greeted by the gallery with ill-dissembled merriment.
Neither inept production nor poor playing could conceal that Mose has something. Or rather it has several things, beginning with a fairly ludicrous plot (when has that stopped any opera, from 11 Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda to The Ice Break?); most people are familiar with the story of the Israelites' escape from Egypt, but I don't think that the love-interest comes in the original: must re-read Exodus.
There is certainly some lovely music, especially in the last Act. Perhaps we shall one day hear the work again in London. (When it was first done here, in 1822, it went under the title of Pietro l'Eremita; what can the story have been?) Incidentally, writing about Mose in his life of Rossini Stendhal says of Act Two, 'This entrance of Moses recalls everything that is sublime in Haydn', a most unusual and stimulating comparison. Rossini is not a genius of the very first rank, like Haydn; but he is a wonderful composer.
Back in Blighty I saw another opera which no-one would call a work of pure genius but which is an extremely interesting one: Hansel and Gretel. Interesting, and somewhat chilling besides. A German children's opera, written when Hitler was four, in which the hero and heroine incinerate the villain in an oven ... But most of all, enthralling musically. Just how much of a `neo-Wagnerian' opera it is I had not realised. Humperdinck was Wagner's assistant and friend, and there are direct echoes here of the Master: compare and contrast the musical characterisation of Mime and of the witch.
Humperdinck even wrote some additional music for Acts One and Three of Parsifal, which was required because of the exigencies of staging, much as Leonora No. 3 was (tiresomely) interjected as an orchestral interlude in the last act of Fidelio because Mahler needed extra time for scene-shifting. Quaere: is this additional music of Humperdinck's ever played? I've never heard it.
Having seen Mose in a most beautiful and comfortable theatre I saw Hansel in what must, in a strongly contested field, win the title of Theatrical Dump of the British Isles: the New Theatre, Oxford. One significant contrast: at the Scala there is a numbered coat-hook for every seat. At the New Theatre there is no cloakroom at all: if you have a hat and coat they go under your seat.
More important, the New Theatre has wretched acoustics, in common with many other provincial British theatres, though worse than most of them. Pondering the poor audibility of Saturday night's performance, I remarked to an opera-producing friend that I had always had a feeling that, whatever the scientific evidence, the fashionable gauze frontdrop must have a deadening effect on the voices behind it. It is an unscientific belief, was his reply — but one which is universally shared by singers.
Still, even in the most squalid and illdesigned English theatre it is possible to get a drink, if you don't mind fighting for it. The Scala has two matching and magnificent foyers, one above the other. The audience gathers there in the intervals, talks and smokes — but not a glass to be seen. There is a bar, but hidden away in the bowels of the building. At Covent Garden there are at least five pubs within intervalling distance, at least three bars in the House; and on special nights they erect another one in the foyer: a happy reminder of what a nation of drunks we are.
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