It's not so long ago that Pavarotti was booed at La Scala Opera House in Milan. One commentator blamed "the gods" and said: "Tonight Verdi is weeping." I thought that was pitching it a bit strong myself.
Even Pavarotti is allowed to an off-night and the audience is quite entitled to show its disapproval.
Certainly the La Scala Opera buffs are tough - especially "the gods" - but they are as pussycats compared with the tigers that frequent the Parma Opera House.
Toscanini used to say about his home town: "Parma is famous for ham, cheese . . . and me!" He might have added the name of Renata Tebaldi, one of the greatest divas of all time. Or, indeed, of Giuseppe Verdi himself, just up the road at Busseto - a neighbour's child, you might say.
Even Callas was booed
Small wonder that each and every denizen of that beautiful old Roman city believes himself or herself to be the world's greatest expert on Italian opera. If a singer goes off the note, they hiss and boo; if the singer continues to offend - musically - they throw seat cushions. As they did at Maria Callas, having cheered her to the rafters the evening before.
Boxes rise vertically on three sides of the auditorium, up from the parterre. Behind each box, across a corridor, is a small private room where food and drink are consumed right through the performance. It seemed to me that the audience spent as much time eating and drinking and talking about the music in these little rooms as they did in the auditorium listening to it.
I was lucky enough to be in the company of a correspondent from Corriere Della Sera, one of Italy's greatest newspapers. We were given the grand tour by the public relations officer of the opera house and introduced to the occupants of the boxes at every level; from the tiara-ed contessa on the first level, where a white-gloved flunkey poured champagne, to the less-well-off denizens of the upper levels, who had us sampling family recipes and regional dishes and seemed to be having a lot more fun.
One night, I was told, the baritone went off key in the very first minutes of the first act. They hissed and booed until he went back over the piece and started again. That happened a few times, but the poor man couldn't get it right. When the audience realised this they kicked up such a row that the performance had to be cancelled. And they didn't ask for a refund at the box office, just went home satisfied that standards had been upheld. Only the Italians are capable of such style.
Parma Opera House
The Parma Opera House opened in 1829 with the first performance of Bellini's Norma. In the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in the 1950s I heard Ebe Stignani and the aforementioned Renata Tebaldi in that opera. In the famous mother and daughter duet, the soprano-daughter was about 20 years older that the contralto-mother, and looked it. But when the two perfect voices soared together that minor detail was shown to be of no importance and the only reality was the perfect sound, never to be forgotten.
The Mayo diva
We were all opera buffs in those days. At least for two or three weeks in the year, when the La Scala touring company came to Dublin. And the price of a seat in the gods was a shilling or 5p. One night after the show we were waiting outside for a glimpse of our idols - I recall among others Paulo Silveri, the greatest Rigoletto of all time - when out came the Mayo diva, Margaret Burke-Sheridan, who had retired more than 20 years previously. We gave her a great cheer and I heard her say to her escort, tearfully: "They remember."
But the greatest night at the opera I ever experienced was in London, backstage at Covent Garden, for the first performance of Berlioz's The Trojans. The opera requires 11 or 12 principal singers, a huge cast, including a childrens' choir, a full corps de ballet and two orchestras, one out front and the other in the wings watching the conductor on closed-circuit television.
It goes on for nearly five hours and the action requires trees struck by lightning in a storm on stage, a fire, Irish wolfhounds and god knows what else. Among the principals that night was our own Dermot Troy.
The Covent Garden building is huge. The space from the footlights back is about as big as the auditorium itself. It was fascinating to watch all the different disciplines working together in a seemingly haphazard fashion to present the flawless performance on stage.
How did I get to be backstage at Covent Garden for a performance of The Trojans? . . . I've run out of space . . . that'll have to wait for another day.