LOS ANGELES PURSUES THE PHANTOM OF OPERA

Los Angeles is about to discover opera. Again. Nearly everyone is very excited. Hope springs internal.

It isn’t as if the lyric muse has never wafted the city of presumed angels . The first touring companies began passing through town in the 1880s. It was here, believe it or not, that America saw its first performance of “La Boheme.” That was in 1897, three years before Puccini’s popular saga of veristic love and pretty death in a Parisian garret made it to the Met.

In the intervening decades, poor little rich Los Angeles has seen an erratic parade of operatic efforts, a parade spanning the piddling, the bizarre and the spectacular.

Companies have come and gone. Some have originated here; others have been borrowed. Campaign promises have been elaborate, deliveries modest. Intentions have been lofty, lasting achievements dubious.

The mood is delirious these days around the Music Center, which, after a dismaying period of silence punctuated by hiccups, inaugurates its latest and most ambitious operatic project Tuesday.

Well, the mood is semi-ecstatic. Well, hopeful. Well, reasonably optimistic.

The mood among the interested outsiders who have seen it all before, and seen it thrice too often, is guarded. The iconoclasts want to wait and see and hear and check the bank accounts.

They still wonder how opera can exist, much less flourish, in the long run in a multipurpose house that also must accommodate a symphony orchestra, ballet, recitals, visiting musical ensembles and, for the time being at least, musical comedy. The cooler heads want to know how funds will be raised, how standards will be sustained, how growth and continuity will be achieved.

Can’t blame them.

They also want to know who is in charge here. The official director of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera--cumbersome name, that--is Peter Hemmings, Britain’s latest gift to the culturally deprived colonies. But, according to interviews published here and in New York, the power behind the project is Placido Domingo.

The supertenor sings Otello on opening night. He returns next season to conduct “Macbeth.” He has told reporters that he takes full responsibility for casting decisions and artistic policies. A national magazine actually has called the company his company. Yet official literature identifies him only as artistic consultant.

The difference between the earth-shattering responsibility and the unprepossessing title may not boggle. But it certainly confuses.

The Music Center has concocted a catchy motto for its opera company: “OPERA,” it says here, “ON A GRAND SCALE.”

That description is intended, no doubt, to distinguish the current effort from recent Los Angeles endeavors that enlisted fewer stars and less lavish decors. It remains to be known, of course, if bigger really means better.

The ads for the forthcoming season suggest two things: (1) that opera is a commodity to be sold like toothpaste or bad movies, and (2) that the Los Angeles audience is an empty-headed conglomerate of yahoos and yokels.

“NO MATTER WHERE YOU SIT,” blares the headline, “THEY’LL MOVE YOU.”

“They,” apparently, are Otello, Salome and Madama Butterfly. Gosh. Gush.

The inaugural “Otello” production is listed as a “world premiere.” That sounds exciting but, in context, means nothing. But hold on. The opera promises to “transport you to a world where trickery succeeds and jealousy thrives. Where true love is destroyed by a concealed handkerchief.” Wow.

A rousing exhortation follows: “See some of the world’s foremost artists sing their way through Verdi’s vocal and visual spectacle. . . .” Read this and weep.

To sing through a vocal spectacle suggests redundancy as well as grammatical awkwardness. To sing through a visual spectacle suggests a bizarre mixture of would-be metaphors.

And so it goes. “Salome” is “an erotic drama of jealousy and desire (that) begins with frustrated love and ends in one of opera’s most shocking scenes.” Ooh.

Good old, all-too-familiar “Butterfly” is a “compelling drama of love and self-deception (that ends in a) final desperate act.” As if we didn’t know that.

One hopes this sort of bilge helps the box office. The hype certainly doesn’t help the image of Los Angeles as a sophisticated locale not to be confused with Tinseltown.

One does not want to prejudge the Music Center Opera. It was a long time coming. It is much wanted, much needed. One hopes it will dazzle at its gala opening and go on to pile triumph upon triumph.

The initial plans suggest a reasonably strong roster of singers at the mercy of a not-so-strong roster of conductors. The “Otello,” with Domingo and Sherrill Milnes, promises star power, and the production, staged by Goetz Friedrich of Berlin, should be compelling.

A few potential clouds linger over the other first-week offerings, however.

One hopes Maria Ewing, a once-enchanting lyric mezzo-soprano, can handle the heavyweight soprano demands of Salome. One wonders if it was necessary to import a conductor and baritone from Great Britain for the relatively routine challenge of “Madama Butterfly.” One trusts the “Butterfly” sets, last seen here 20 years ago courtesy of the lamented Met National Company, have held up well.

No matter what, one wants to believe that opera--after 22 years of false starts, token treatment and not-so-benign neglect--will finally become a staple in the Music Center diet. If it doesn’t, the rest of the cultural world will continue to laugh at Los Angeles.

As every self-respecting would-be impresario must know, those who do not remember the fiascoes of the operatic past are doomed to repeat them. And where are the operatic snows of yesterseason, anyway?

Los Angeles may just be the last major city in the civilized Western world to acquire a large-scale opera company of its own. Previous attempts, both noble and ignoble, failed because of socio-political conflicts, unrealistic financing, inept artistic leadership or bothersome domestic priorities. Sometimes the attempts failed for some of those reasons. Sometimes the attempts failed for all those reasons.

There were successes, of course. Unfortunately, there were no long-lasting successes.

Touring companies frequently brought some sort of opera to Los Angeles at the end of the last century. They bore such names as the Abbott, the Juch and the National.

In 1897, a pair of enterprising impresarios, L.E. Behymer and C. Modini, imported an Italian company called the Del Conti. It had been appearing in Mexico and, as the fates would have it, happened to be trying out a controversial new work by one Giacomo Puccini: an opera about the romantic entanglements of some bohemians in nearly contemporary Paris.

In 1900, Behymer introduced the vaunted Metropolitan to the West. A decade later, theLombardi Opera, which eventually became the nomadic San Carlo company, visited this city for the first time.

The Chicago Grand Opera, a far more glamorous enterprise, trod the local boards for 11 visits between 1913 and the end of the ‘20s. It was during the first Chicago season, incidentally, that Luisa Tetrazzini, the awesome coloratura diva, suffered traumatic combat with Cleofonte Campanini. He was not only a powerful conductor but her near-rival in egomania.

Ronald Davis recounts the infamous Los Angeles “Rigoletto” in “A History of Opera in the American West”:

“Madame (Tetrazzini) had just ended Gilda’s ‘Caro Nome’ with her usual cadenza, but in the midst of the vocal frills had managed to lose her pitch, ending several notes away from where she should have been. Campanini saw his revenge.

“He took a firm grip of the baton, signaled the orchestra, and produced a crashing chord that jarred the roof and showed every one in the opera house the discordant, spine-chilling distance that she had removed herself from the correct pitch. This marked the last occasion that the two worked together.”

Small wonder.

The great baritone Antonio Scotti brought an Italian-flavored, Metropolitan-oriented troupe here in the 1920s, thanks to a conductor-impresario named Gaetano Merola. None less than Feodor Chaliapin headed a comparable itinerant contingent with a Russian accent during the same period.

In those days, travel was cheap, scenic values were flimsy, union demands--if any--were modest, and the operatic gospel was not yet being preached via national radio, much less television.

Merola, who was to found the San Francisco Opera, cooperated with a local visionary, Merle Armitage, for nine star-studded seasons at Shrine Auditorium beginning in 1924. Their project, a cooperative effort temporarily aligning Baghdad on the Bay with the City of Angels bore various guises: First it was the Los Angeles Grand Opera Assn., then the California Opera Assn., then the Los Angeles Grand again.

The roster for those seemingly glorious seasons reads like an operatic Who’s Who. It included Louise Homer, Claudia Muzio, Lily Pons, Elisabeth Rethberg, Lucrezia Bori, Maria Jeritza, Rosa Raisa, Rosa Ponselle, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, Beniamino Gigli, Tito Schipa, Giovanni Martinelli, Giuseppe de Luca, Friedrich Schorr, Lawrence Tibbett, Richard Bonelli, John Charles Thomas, Ezio Pinza. And that, folks, was just the beginning.

Merola and Armitage were not content with run-of-the-mill “Carmens” and “Bohemes.” They staged “Turandot” while it was still a novelty. They played “Salome” while it was still controversial. They even ventured “The Emperor Jones,” “La Navarraise,” “La Cena delle Beffe,” “Marouf” and something mysterious called “Les Fleurs du Mal.”

One wonders where they, and we, went wrong.

From 1936 to 1964, the San Francisco Opera enjoyed annual seasons of its own in the vast, financially advantageous, reaches of Shrine Auditorium. Then, in 1965, came the vaunted Music Center with its more glamorous facade and its financially less-advantageous seating capacity.

Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic mustered a fully staged “Salome” with Phyllis Curtin in the title role during the inaugural season. Contrary to avowed intentions, however, that costly effort enjoyed only one encore: Carlo Maria Giulini’s “Falstaff” 18 years later.

San Francisco played one unhappy season in the new house, returned for an ill-fated final fling at the Shrine in 1969, then confined activities to its northerly home. Music Center authorities tried to fill the gaps with token appearances by touring ensembles: First the modest but enterprising Met National Company, then the provocative American National Company as guided by unpredictable Sarah Caldwell.

In 1967, the Music Center turned to Julius Rudel and the New York City Opera for its operatic fortunes, or in some cases, its lack of same. The beginning on Nov. 17 was auspicious. The vehicle--a definitely daring choice--was Alberto Ginastera’s “Don Rodrigo.” The title role introduced a gifted, obscure, tall and plump, 26-year-old tenor from Spain via Mexico: one Placido Domingo. Plus ca change . . . .

Until the City Opera was unceremoniously evicted in 1982, the New Yorkers satisfied local appetites as best they could with a brief season each fall.

There were great nights with Norman Treigle and Beverly Sills (who later replaced Rudel at the company helm). There were exciting nights with promising young American singers. There were adventurous nights with unfamiliar operas. There were interesting nights with inventive staging schemes. And there were awful nights marked by lazy casting, tired routine and slapdash production values.

There were nights of opera outside the hallowed halls, too. A heroic loner called Francesco Pace managed to put on several seasons of valid shoe-string productions utilizing local talents. Los Angeles didn’t seem to care very much.

Hollywood Bowl saw sporadic summers of operatic endeavor, including H. W. Parker’s “Fairyland” in 1915, a disastrous “Fledermaus” in 1951 and memorable “Carmen” in 1959. The “Carmen” was most memorable because, for some reason, the body microphone hidden in Jean Madeira’s decolletage began to broadcast police radio calls in mid-Habanera.

At the Greek Theatre, one could applaud fitful starts, and one could lament unceremonious stops during the summers when cultural events still had a toehold. James Doolittle blustered. Dorothy Kirsten made seductive promises. Nothing much happened. Then came the Nederlanders and the rock-and-schlock years.

Other forces, all well-meaning but not all competent, tried to spring into the operatic breach. Allen Jensen and his Pasadena Opera smoldered for a few years in the glow of pretentious amateurism. Who can forget the 1966 “Otello” that wasted Tito Gobbi’s Iago and pretended Giuseppe di Stefano could sing the title role? The Guild Opera did yeomen’s service--as long as there was a little money in the public coffers--for opera education but never quite bridged the gap between student and adult audiences.

Grant Belgarian, the arts dean, and George London, the celebrated baritone, announced imposing plans for a USC-based company. Their project was stillborn.

A gentleman named Huey Weathersby talked big, delivered little, and ended up in trouble with the law as well as with his creditors.

A lady named Johanna Dordick managed to produce some very good opera, some deadly routine opera and some hopelessly misguided opera. She also managed to offend everyone, even her supporters, before devastating the exchequer.

While professional companies in Los Angeles proper came and went--mostly went--the Long Beach Opera under Michael Milenski established a compelling record of imaginative stagings at the intimate Center Theater. Often impressive workshop productions were offered, moreoever, at such educational institutions as USC, UCLA and Cal State Northridge.

Our operatic past may have been troubled. It certainly was vicissitudinous. Nevertheless, it wasn’t as barren as some benefactors-come-lately would have us think.

Si puo? Signore, Signori . . . .