Who ever said opera was boring?

I became an opera junkie out of sheer boredom. This was way back in September 1976 when I got my first job as a reporter in New Jersey. After a hard day’s work,  I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. I lived in Princeton, some 15 miles north from the paper, because it was a pretty but staid Ivy League town worlds away from drab and proletarian Trenton. But that was little comfort. As New Yorkers would always say, death is redundant anywhere in New Jersey.

Growing up in the wilds of Mindanao, my exposure to music was just a little above zilch. We had a German piano at home and I was enslaved to it until I quit lessons when I was 12 and broke my dear mother’s heart. Dad loved to belt out kundimans of his Tagalog youth to calm the nerves of  his captive audience of dental patients downstairs.

In UP Diliman,  I tagged along with fellow snobs to a few uppity soirees of Fides Cuyugan-Asencio, Aurelio Estanislao and Don David. I once heard the diva Jovita Fuentes, most charming but long past her prime, sing a shaky Puccini aria (from Tosca it was), Abelardo’s haunting masterpiece Mutya ng Pasig, and La Jovita’s personal anthem of unrequited love, Ay, Ay Kalisud! That was about all. 

Well, hoity-toity Princeton Borough boasted a fantastic public library that I naturally gravitated to after work. I would spend hours there reading and borrow   any book I wanted to. In those pre-CD and digital days, I could not but be drawn to its vast collection of LP records from classical to folk to jazz to rock,  Broadway and everything in between.

The opera section was particularly intriguing because at that point I was no more than a dilettante amused by an arcane art form most identified with old wealth, effete snobs and incurably romantic little old ladies. At Columbia, I had my culture vulture phase and went a few times to the Metropolitan Opera, notably when the Bolshoi Opera first “invaded” America in 1975.  Still, I was far from hooked.

On a lark, I took home an LP box of Puccini’s La Boheme and, to my utter surprise, spent the rest of the evening listening to and replaying it from beginning to end. Next day, I borrowed a book on how to appreciate opera and started a systematic appreciation program, composer by composer, opera by opera.

Because there was always an English translation, it was easy to follow the librettos in Italian, French or German, line by line. I quickly picked up on who sang what roles best and which recordings were ranked superior to others. My first and forever favorite Mimi was Victoria de los Angeles, almost literally with a voice like an angel’s, who some Spanish friends introduced me to many years later at her 40th anniversary concert in Barcelona.

The next logical step was to take out a subscription to the Met, for many decades and up to this day the world’s number one opera company (not La Scala, Covent Garden or Vienna State) and the largest house of all (3,000 seats).

I was lucky to move in the New York circle of music aficionados like Sister Caridad Guidote  and Dr. Dominador Almeda  (now both dearly departed), Michael Dadap, Ruth  Prudente, Nora Dumlao, and Roberta Topacio, a lovely soprano from Imus, Cavite, who all patiently initiated provincial me into the rarefied world of opera and the intoxicating glory of the human voice.

Some of us in the group were involved in the anti-Marcos movement, but we all shared a passionate love for opera. Our unofficial muse was New York-based Evelyn Mandac, a legend in Diliman before my time. She was a lyric soprano on the brink of stardom and we attended a few of her well-received recitals at Town Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall. When she became the first Filipino (no second or third after almost 40 years) to sing at the Met—as Lauretta in Puccini’s one-act Gianni Schicchi—we were all there to applaud lustily and bask in reflected glory in the Green Room after the performance.

From 1976 to 1988 when I relocated to Manila after Marcos fell from power and my opera-going days came to an abrupt halt, I was a devoted Met subscriber. Each year, I signed up for a set of 10 operas which, I  saw about once a month throughout the season from September to April. At $15 each in family circle, the second tier from the rear of the house, the subscription added up to $150 annually. I was of course free to buy additional performances, often standing room only, and I averaged seven per season.

Standing in the SRO section, often with Sister Caridad, a fine lyric soprano in her day, gave us a chance to seat in orchestra because bored rich patrons generally tiptoed out after the first act and gave their tickets to persons nearest the aisle.

All told, I must have seen more than 200 operas, most understandably repeats with different singers. I usually picked Thursday nights and learned the art of unscrambling the repertoire and cast listings to make sure I would see the big stars in the operas I picked.

Apart from the New York City Opera, the Met’s poor sister across the Lincoln Center Plaza, I only went to two other opera houses, the Royal Opera at Convent Garden in London and the State Opera in Vienna, both only once while backpacking in Europe all by myself.

Opera, unlike theater and the movies, has very limited offerings. The same classics are shown over and over again with the only real excitement provided by new productions of the same works and the rare appearances of visiting superstars. 

Of the 15 or so operas offered each season, at least half would be standard Italian warhorses (Verdi, Puccini, Rossini), a third would be German (Wagner, Strauss, Mozart), and the rest an eclectic  mix of  Bizets, Donizettis, Bellinis, and Cileas. In the years I haunted the Met, they threw in Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Britten and even Gershwin’s jazzy Porgy and Bess with Afro-American stars Grace Bumbry and Simon Estes.

While living in Princeton, the first Met production I saw was its old reliable Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s tale of the poor geisha and her faithless American lover, with Gilda Cruz-Romo and John Alexander as Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton, respectively. The love duet at the end of the first act with fireflies in the garden shimmering at dusk  and the shattering finale when Cio-Cio-San commits suicide sealed my lifelong love for the art form.

Cruz-Romo and Alexander led the resident stars with Jon Vickers, Eva Marton and Katia Ricciarelli for the Italian repertoire. James Morris, Hildegarde Behrens, Carol Vaness and Kiri Te Kanawa accounted for the German contingent. The brilliant house conductor was James Levine who ruled the Met for some 30 years.

For almost a decade, the reigning diva was Renata Scotto who monopolized the best roles and new productions (Macbeth, Adriana Lecouvreur, Otello, La Boheme, Sour Angelica) and invariably opened the season in September. Her Madama was regarded as incomparable and I saw her thrice in it, each time mesmerized beyond words. Her undoing was Bellini’s Norma, the signature role of Maria Callas, for which she was almost booed off the stage when her voice cracked or wobbled as she sang Casta Diva. Retirement came swiftly and she was soon engaged in farewell concerts and giving master classes in her native Italy.     

In the 1970s and 1980s, soon after the golden age of Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nillson, Richard Tucker, Tito Gobbi, Franco Corelli, and Carlo Bergonzi, the stars of the first magnitude were Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, Monserrat Caballe, Beverly Sills, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Marilyn Horne, Mirella Freni and Jessye Norman.

Because superstars often make extraordinary demands on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, their appearances tended to be rare but much-awaited events at the Met. When they did come, often to grace lavish productions built around them or to open the glittering new season, there was great excitement and everybody fought tooth and nail to get tickets to their performances.

What were the most memorable performances and happenings I witnessed in those wonderful years?

Topping my list was Joan Sutherland who snubbed the Met for years (she wanted her conductor-husband as part of  a package deal) until one day the proud management caved in and she agreed to showcase three of her greatest roles, one per season—Donezzeti’s Lucia di Lamermoor and La Fille du Regiment plus  Bellini’s I Puritani, all of which I saw. Her mad scene in Lucia was simply divine, her show-stopping colaratura trills dazzling to perfection. A a triumph of inspired casting, she and Alfredo Kraus in Regiment  brought down the house. Puritani was achingly poignant and heart-breaking because Joan was by then in sudden and terminal vocal decline and, indeed, she graciously retired not long after.

If Kraus stunned a skeptical audience which deemed him a relic of the past into wanton adoration, there was Carlo Bergonzi, long unheard of and even presumed dead, who substituted at the last minute in Verdi’s Ballo en Maschera and drove the audience wild. He showed everybody what old-time Italian tenors (Caruso, Di Stefano, Corelli) could do to whip an audience to its feet and roar with gusto for what seemed eternities after the curtains fell.

Rarely staged anywhere because of its epic sweep (Spain’s Philip II  and the murder of his son of the title role set against the Holy Inquisition ) and the absolute need for  superb voices in the most famous and technically-daunting  of operatic quartets, the Met’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlo was nothing short of  a miracle. All at the peak of stellar careers, Placido Domingo, Mirella Freni, Grace Bumbry and Nicolai Ghiaurov really set off vocal fireworks considered impossible to match before or since. You could almost hear a pin drop the night they sang at full throttle.

Totally unexpected was what turned out to be Leontyne Price’s last performance in her greatest role as Verdi’s Aida. My friend Elvie Tengco and I had subscription tickets and were surprised we were offered $300 each for our $15 Family Circle seats as we got to the Met. We absolutely refused to be mercenary and never regretted putting sublime art before quick profit.

Leontyne had announced that day that she was signing off and this was definitely of historic importance in the opera world. To describe her final Aida as sublime could not quite capture the magic that the great soprano bestowed upon her most grateful public. For me it was the equivalent of watching the Russian prima ballerina Natalia Makarova’s ethereal dying swan in Swan Lake; you could not but be reduced to tears of  joy.

In October 1975, as I mentioned earlier, the Bolshoi Opera took over the Met stage for about a week. Speaking of grand opera, the Soviets really outdid their American hosts in production and star power. There was the great mezzo Elena Obratzova as Marina and the baritone Vladimir Atlantov as Boris in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the glory of Russian opera. Tchaikovky’s brilliant  Eugene Onegin and Pique Dame were also in the repertoire.

Not to be outdone, the British staged their own cultural invasion, which was kicked off  by Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, the grandest of all paeans to Elizabeth I and the English Renaissance. America’s closet anglophilia and obsession with royalty really came rushing out on opening night upon the entrance of  HRH the Princess Alexandra of Kent, a celebrated beauty and first cousin of  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. There was a palpable hush and a flurry of curtsies as she swept in draped in the crown jewels up to the diamond tiara and blue sash of a royal order.

In contrast, President Jimmy Carter’s surprise attendance to watch Madama Butterfly appeared disarmingly folksy and democratic. Of course, security was very tight. But there was the peanut farmer from Georgia flashing his toothy grin and shaking hands in the first hopeful year of his term, long before the Iran hostage crisis and the oil embargo took away the bloom of his presidency.

The Met was not all grandeur and without lighter moments which somehow put   great voices and personalities in more human and disarming light. When Caballe and Pavarotti, both impossibly heavyweight, sought to embrace in the first act of Puccini’s Tosca, the audience gasped audibly because it was like two mountains bouncing off each other. Instead of dramatically jumping to her death from a parapet in the end, the diva simply ambled off the stage, wrote one aghast critic, “like Queen Victoria taking a walk in the park.”

In opera, total suspension of belief is accorded the very few stars who never fail to deliver impossibly perfect performances.  They may be bad actors who don’t even look the part or try to, but the superhuman notes have to be there.  In Caballe’s  case, she held her trademark pianissimos for so long, almost inaudible whispers but crystal clear in tone, that nobody dared to breathe or clap until the last fading note dissolved into the air.

But for my money, nothing beats what the New York Times splashed in its front page in October 14, 1982 as “A Night at the Opera.”

It seemed an uncanny take on the Marx Brothers’ classic film satire. This time, it wasn’t the fat lady but the cadaverously thin tenor who sang out of tune (he actually emitted not a single note) and turned grand opera into total farce.

The night before, Placido Domingo as Enzo was in evident vocal distress as the curtains were raised for Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, a dark tale of intrigue and murder set in Old Venice. There was a long intermission after the first act, followed by an announcement that the tenor was indisposed and his lead role would be taken over by Carlo Bini, a second-rate Italian tenor. Everybody groaned in disappointment, some heading for the exits in protest.

Well, the curtain goes up and Bini is supposed to step in strong singing the main tenor aria Cielo e mar. But nobody comes out from left wing of the stage. The conductor repeats the intro and still no tenor. He begins a third time and a tiny figure appears, clearly pushed onto the stage by someone from behind. He has a look of horror on his face. He starts to sing but no voice comes out. The audience starts to laugh.

It was at this point that the mezzo Mignon Dunn grabs the frightened tenor by the waist and belts out her own aria. Still no sound from the tenor in the ensuing duet. But Dunn, the soprano Eva Marton and the rest of the cast pretend Bini’s singing and just wouldn’t let him flee from the stage. The furious tug-of-war evoke a series of quirky Keystone Kops routines. The laughter and the booing keep swelling, prompting the exasperated conductor to walk out. A substitute quickly appears in the pit and somehow the show limps on and on to a merciful finale.

Never was there so much mirth and laughter at the Met. And to think that La Gioconda wasn’t  even a comedy.

Who ever said opera was boring? I never did.

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E-mail the author at noslen794@gmail.com.