I have always thought that there is something inherently uninteresting about adults who attribute their shortcomings to their parents. That said, in this case I feel completely justified in pointing the finger of blame: I was raised to have no taste in music. It wasn’t exactly the fault of my parents, although they made no contributions to my early musical life. My mother owned two albums: The Sandpipers Greatest Hits and Barbra Streisand’s People, which she played to death. My father favored Julie London and any piano music that sounded like it was coming from a dark corner in a bar. But my stepfather, musically speaking, was the kiss of death. He kept the family radio tuned exclusively to that midcentury phenomenon known as the “easy listening” station, and we were not allowed to touch the dial. As a result, I grew up believing that music was something that needed to be turned off.
Then, two years ago, I started work on a novel whose heroine was an opera singer. Her career made sense for the plot, so I set out to do some research. I had heard a little opera at this point in my life. I had walked through rooms where other people were playing opera and thought something along the lines of: Oh. Armed only with astounding ignorance, I went to a music store and bought a copy of Madama Butterfly. At least I had heard of that one. With five different recordings to choose from, I deftly picked the one with the prettiest cover. At home, I put the CD in the stereo and began to fold laundry. I lasted about 15 minutes. The music struck me as impenetrable, unpleasant. Something that needed to be turned off.
Clearly, the music itself was not the place to start, so I went to the bookstore. This was not a scientific study, mind you. After looking at a dozen books that promised to explain opera to me, I again made a final selection based on the cover. In this case, I was in luck. I had chosen Fred Plotkin’s Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera, which I later discovered is something of a bible even for sophisticated opera buffs. What Mr. Plotkin offers is basically a college course in opera.
This time, when I sat down to listen to his first pick, Verdi’s Rigoletto, I was ready. I had read the libretto through once and now sat and listened while I read along again. I didn’t try to fold anything while the music played. And when Gilda and Rigoletto sang their first duet, their voices twining and leaping, I felt a catch in my chest. It was as beautiful, as moving, as anything I had ever heard.
With every opera I listened to, I experienced a cartoon catalog of emotions: Lights were flipped on, doors swung open. There was joy in both the music and the fact that here, in the middle of my life, I was learning about something hundreds of years old and completely new to me. Now that I knew what I was listening to, I developed the enthusiasm of a three-month-old Labrador retriever. I went through biographies of opera stars like Kleenex, many of my selections fueled by my passion for Maria Callas.
I continued through the course set out in Opera 101 and began branching out to operas suggested by friends. I fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. I saw the greatness of Verdi, hummed Puccini in the shower. I was crazy for Handel. I continued to sit down with the librettos: This is the key to learning to love opera. The music is often gorgeous by itself, but if you don’t take the time to find out what’s being said, you’re sacrificing too much.
The next logical step was to find a performance to attend, and it seemed to me that if what I was looking for was opera, I should go to the source. I’m not saying that if you’re searching for wonderful opera you have go to Italy, any more than you’d have to go to South America for a really great cup of coffee. But I went. And it was there.
One way to find great music in Italy is to blindfold yourself and throw a dart at a map of the country. Wherever it pierces the boot, there is sure to be extraordinary music. When I looked into how to go about getting tickets, I generally received the same advice: When you arrive in the city in which you want to see an opera, slip your hotel concierge a big tip and ask her or him to procure them for you. That may work, but it did not provide the level of security my cautious nature demands. If I was going all that way to see opera, I wanted my tickets before I got on the plane. Finally, I found John Grant of The Worldwide Opera Concert Information Service, in Spit Junction, Australia (www.wocis.com). I don’t know why I needed someone in Spit Junction, Australia, to book seats in a grand Italian opera house for me, but Mr. Grant was extremely helpful. The reservations came neither quickly nor cheaply, but they were correct in every detail, for which I was hugely grateful.
Along with my opera glasses and a nice dress, I brought my friend Karl to Italy. And you may think me a little overzealous, but before leaving I made us each a packet of reading material—a copy of the libretto for each of the operas we were going to see, from my very handy Book of 101 Opera Librettos, and a copy of a history and synopsis from The New Grove Book of Opera. In Italy, the descriptions of the operas in the program guides are usually in Italian, and they don’t have those incredibly annoying supertitles the way American opera houses do.
Our first opera was Fidelio, at La Scala, the world’s most famous opera house. When you, too, as a new devotee of opera, are ready to seal your bond of everlasting love with it, do so at La Scala, as enchanting a place as could ever be imagined. The beauty of the architecture is rivaled only by the beauty of the Milanese who fill the red velvet seats. In fact, the extent to which the sheer physical splendor of the Italian people shaped every experience we had cannot be underestimated.
We couldn’t find our own seats and wandered helplessly through the corridors until an usher wearing an enormous gold chain and medallion looked at our tickets and then led us to a private box. A box? Wasn’t there some mistake? The usher unlocked first our own private coatroom across the hall and then our box. Two grand chairs sat beneath the gold-tasseled curtains, and we sat in those chairs and held hands and felt generally breathless over the loveliness of it all—the rise of other boxes stacked on top of one another like the layers of an enormous and overdecorated wedding cake; the painted ceiling; the sweep of the stage where Callas had been cheered—and hissed. “This,” I said to Karl, “is a moment I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.”
We had come early, and so we watched the people mill around and were happy for at least ten full minutes. Then we heard the usher’s key in the lock, and a Swiss couple came into our box, looked at our tickets, and explained rather tersely that they had the rights to the chairs because their tickets were more expensive than ours. The lights were starting to dim, and with all the dignity and graciousness we could muster, we gave up our beautiful chairs. Behind them, we found six small stools pushed up against the wall, but when we sat on them we couldn’t see.
It was then I noticed that in each of the boxes across from ours there were two happy people sitting in chairs while several other markedly less happy-looking people stood crammed behind them, craning their necks. So we stood and craned while the Swiss held hands and laughed quietly at Fidelio’s jokes. My heart was overwhelmed by bitterness. But despite that—and the fact that I hadn’t been so excited about seeing a Beethoven opera in Italy—Fidelio won me over and made me forget my murderous inclinations.
Teatro la fenice, the opera house in Venice that is often said to be the most beautiful in the world, was devastated by fire in 1996. Although it was closed and covered in scaffolding, I went to see it anyway. Through the metal bars I could make out the faces of the busts that line the building, their marble throats and chins charred black. No city seems more suited to opera than Venice. You can easily imagine Verdi dragging himself over the narrow bridges, contemplating throwing himself into a canal after La Traviata’s disastrous opening night.
Bologna would be worth the trip even if you never made it to the opera at all. The Grand Hotel Baglioni was so grand that I could barely manage to tear myself away from the room. Still, when we did leave, we saw a magnificent production of Puccini’s Tosca that did more with a gray staircase and a few splashes of color than I would have ever thought possible. The Teatro Comunale di Bologna may be slightly smaller than La Scala, but it is every bit as stunning.
The Teatro Comunale in Florence is a modern mass of cement and glass, as vast as the others had been intimate. Fittingly, in this huge auditorium, we saw Verdi’s Aïda, the grandest of all grand operas. In Bologna I had totally believed that Tosca would die for Cavaradossi, but in this giant space Aïda and Radames appeared scarcely aware of each other at all. There was such a preponderance of gold lamé and bare-breasted slave girls that I felt as if I was seeing the Vegas version. And yet ... when the big production scene came, there was no elephant. There wasn’t even a horse. Still, the singing was every bit as spectacular as it had been in Milan and Bologna and made me wonder what it is about Italy that makes the opera there so electric. Surely there is great opera in America, but in the same way that the croissants are simply better in France, the opera in Italy is superior. Maybe it’s the centuries of practice.
On our way back to Milan, Karl and I stopped off in Lucca. The Teatro del Giglio had been recommended, but our visit didn’t coincide with their season. Still, we managed to find some very helpful people in the office who were willing to show us the theater, which reminded me of a beautifully painted hatbox. As it seats only 749 people, I could imagine that at times you must feel like the singers are reaching for your own hand.
We walked through the lovely old city until we found the apartment building where Puccini was born. There we saw pictures of his parents, the elaborate gown created for the first production of Turandot, and the final notes he wrote. On the first floor there were bicycles and stacks of mail, clear signs of daily existence. I wondered if I could move to Italy and live in this very building and attend every performance at the Teatro del Giglio. I was hopelessly, recklessly in love with opera. I had finally overcome the mindless “music” of my youth and had been rewarded with beauty and truth.