A Day At the Opera At The Movies

Faithful readers will recall that about ten days ago now I went to see Renee Fleming at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa. Such is the life a jet-setting opera star that within three days Fleming was giving much the same recital (I think) in Jackson, Mississippi, where her feet had never trod. Now, within ten days of my seeing her from the nosebleed seats of a concert hall in Tampa, there was Renee Fleming, on a movie screen about two miles from my house. She was in the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, introducing Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. I know this because I was in that movie theatre.

You see, Simon Boccanegra was being broadcast to movie theatres throughout the world today. Comparatively few people in this world, I suspect, can say that today they drove two miles to a shopping mall, walked into a movie theatre located within that mall, and saw an opera taking place live from America’s most celebrated opera venue. I wish for all of you the joy I felt as I walked into the auditorium and joined about a hundred other people. Most other days, the theatre is as nondescript as most like it, sitting in a mall, waiting for shoppers to kill time. Today, the mall and the world outside of it seemed to melt away for three hours and forty-three minutes. When I saw Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West in 2006, I recall thinking that going to an opera must be like getting a day pass into heaven. How right I am.

The mechanics of the broadcast itself are kind of fun to watch, I must say. Between acts, there are Steadicam shots backstage as the Met’s unsung heroes, their techs and stagehands, take down and build sets. Short of watching an alchemist at work, that is as close to magic as you can get in a live stage show. Also there are interviews with the principals and conductor (today including the legendary Placido Domingo and the great conductor James Levine). There are cameras in the orchestra pit as well. Today there was at least one revealing shot. Between scenes of Act I, Maestro Levine could be seen with his left arm casually draped over the back of his stool, waiting for the cue to resume the performance. As if Maestro Levine hadn’t done this some 2,500 times already.

The opera? Oh. I forgot there was one. Well, let me say that Simon Boccanegra contains some of the most heartrending scenes of familial love, I’m sure, in all of opera. It’s a well-wrought tale of reconciliation and forgiveness amid palace intrigue. I found myself marveling at Placido Domingo’s stage presence. He dominates an opera without chewing the scenery. Going in, I found out that the title role that Domingo was singing had originally been written for a baritone. Domingo, a tenor, makes the role all his own.

It is one thing to hear an opera, to let the rich and magnanimous voices soak into your skin like the warmest water, as I have now for the better part of my adulthood listening to the fabled Saturday Afternoon Met Opera radio broadcasts. It is quite another thing to see an opera with an audience. For the third time in my life, and the second time in ten days, the fact that I am probably the only person under the age of forty in the Tampa Bay area who actively listens to and appreciates opera was pushed to the side. I would like to think I was a part of a communal experience. But as they all do, the communal experience ended, and the audiences all over the world discharged into the February chill. The skies were just as ponderous over Tampa as they were in Manhattan. But Opera, as it does when it’s at its best, had cast away the clouds and let everyone soak in its sun.

NOTE: Margaret Juntwait, who normally presents the Met Opera radio broadcasts, is on my list of Facebook friends. In the event she reads this, I am sorry I did not get to hear her today. But I know now, or am re-learning at least, what Margaret has known for a long time now. The opera house is a magical place.