Great Operatic Disasters

I had already read this opera classic, first published in 1979, but I bought a copy for a hostess gift and read it again. Then my husband read it. I could hear him sitting in the john and laughing hysterically far into the night (actually, it didn't take him that long to read it, because it's only 80 pages long, with many zany illustrations.) The first two "Tosca" anecdotes in this book are 'the' opera classics. You only have to mention 'Tosca and the trampoline' or 'Tosca and the firing squad' to an opera buff to initiate a bout of uncontrollable laughter. I truly believe Hugh Vickers's theory of the 'curse of Tosca.' A friend of mine caught a performance of this opera in Rome in 2005, while the cardinals were busy electing a new pope. All went well until the banquet scene, where Tosca is being blackmailed into sleeping with Scarpia, while her lover is tortured offstage. Well, in this performance, Scarpia's pants fell down just as he was lunging for the toothsome soprano. He had to sit down and motion for one of his thugs to bring him a safety pin. All Rome trembled with laughter before this Scarpia. Although Vickers does not name the two sopranos who were immortalized by the trampoline and the suicidal firing squad, he does name places and performances so I'm assuming that his anecdotes are not entirely apocryphal. All of the great stories are here: not one, but two Parsifals who had to cope with vanishing swans; Rigoletto's sliding hump (I actually attended a performance where Rigoletto took off his coat and threw it on the Duke's throne--and the hump went with it. The not-so-hunchbacked hunchback sang the rest of his aria, then showed up in the following scene at the inn with his hump reattached). One of my favorite stories concerning mechanical malfunctions involves an Edinburgh "Don Giovanni," where the conductor placed the Commendatore and his accompanying trombonists in the Gents' lavatory to get the properly ghostly sound effects--Unfortunately, "the long-defunct automatic flush system suddenly came torrentially to life at the exact moment of 'Di rider finirai pria dell'aurora' --and since the performance was being broadcast, B.B.C. Third Programme listeners were deluged even more powerfully than the spectators." As Peter Ustinov puts it in his introduction to "Great Operatic Disasters," "There is no art form which attempts the sublime while defying the ridiculous with quite the foolhardiness of opera." This book is packed with those moments where the sublime, like Rigoletto's hump, momentarily descended into the ridiculous.

I had already read this opera classic, first published in 1979, but I bought a copy for a hostess gift and read it again. Then my husband read it. I could hear him sitting in the john and laughing hysterically far into the night (actually, it didn't take him that long to read it, because it's only 80 pages long, with many zany illustrations.) The first two "Tosca" anecdotes in this book are 'the' opera classics. You only have to mention 'Tosca and the trampoline' or 'Tosca and the firing squad' to an opera buff to initiate a bout of uncontrollable laughter. I truly believe Hugh Vickers's theory of the 'curse of Tosca.' A friend of mine caught a performance of this opera in Rome in 2005, while the cardinals were busy electing a new pope. All went well until the banquet scene, where Tosca is being blackmailed into sleeping with Scarpia, while her lover is tortured offstage. Well, in this performance, Scarpia's pants fell down just as he was lunging for the toothsome soprano. He had to sit down and motion for one of his thugs to bring him a safety pin. All Rome trembled with laughter before this Scarpia. Although Vickers does not name the two sopranos who were immortalized by the trampoline and the suicidal firing squad, he does name places and performances so I'm assuming that his anecdotes are not entirely apocryphal. All of the great stories are here: not one, but two Lohengrins who had to cope with vanishing swans; Rigoletto's sliding hump (I actually attended a performance where Rigoletto took off his coat and threw it on the Duke's throne--and the hump went with it. The not-so-hunchbacked hunchback sang the rest of his aria, then showed up in the following scene at the inn with his hump reattached). One of my favorite stories concerning mechanical malfunctions involves an Edinburgh "Don Giovanni," where the conductor placed the Commendatore and his accompanying trombonists in the Gents' lavatory to get the properly ghostly sound effects--Unfortunately, "the long-defunct automatic flush system suddenly came torrentially to life at the exact moment of 'Di rider finirai pria dell'aurora' --and since the performance was being broadcast, B.B.C. Third Programme listeners were deluged even more powerfully than the spectators." As Peter Ustinov puts it in his introduction to "Great Operatic Disasters," "There is no art form which attempts the sublime while defying the ridiculous with quite the foolhardiness of opera." This book is packed with those moments where the sublime, like Rigoletto's hump, momentarily descended into the ridiculous.

If you know opera at all, this is a hilarious read. You will laugh at fed-up (and clever) crews getting revenge on hard-to-handle divas and quick-thinking performers creative solutions to unbelievable technical disasters. This book sets out to prove--and does--that truth is weirder, and funnier, than fiction.