Singing the praises of opera in Los Angeles . . . with a clarion ring at the top

Some readers seem to think that my wife is oppressed.

I would like to point out that, in deference to her, I went to the New Music Center Opera three nights in a row last week.

And I wore my tuxedo every night.

Not only that, I missed the first game of the American League playoffs, and the first and second games of the National League playoffs.

That is devotion.

I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t enjoy those three evenings, though my shoes aren’t broken in and my feet hurt.

But I wouldn’t have missed the opening night. I felt a thrill being there at the beginning of our own opera. (I’m not counting all the false starts.)

No longer can San Franciscans look down their noses at us. They’ve had their own opera for 64 years, they’ve even loaned it to us on occasion. No wonder they’ve considered us a tacky small town.

(They’ve also had Candlestick Park a long time. It takes more than a grand opera house to offset a civic liability like that.)

“Otello,” the curtain raiser, was grand indeed. I will not try to appraise it. I am not a music critic. And Martin Bernheimer has spoken.

I will only note that Mr. Bernheimer, on the positive side, said Placido Domingo, as Otello, sang with “a clarion ring at the top . . . and with ample tenderness,” and that Gabriela Benackova, as Desdemona, sang “gloriously.”

Not bad for starters.

There was, of course, the problem with the opening curtain, and Mr. Bernheimer described that near-disaster in detail. It was a memorable moment; one that will be remembered with horror many years from now.

I can only add a description of my own feelings as a spectator. Picture the scene: The opera opens with a tempest. Thunder. Lightning. The entire company is onstage, singing their hearts out in awe of nature’s violence. Yards of billowing clear plastic simulate waves smashing against the bulwarks. The orchestra is playing up a storm.

The curtain is supposed to rise on this. But it rises only three feet. Enough to let us see the waves and the feet of the chorus. There it stays. We in the audience are aghast. What will happen? Will the conductor stop the music? Will they have to start all over again? Our hearts stop. We can only wonder at the consternation backstage.

Finally, after what seems minutes, the curtain goes down a few inches, starts back up, stops, goes down, and then rises all the way, revealing the storm-lashed set--a wharf on Cyprus.

The audience applauded--whether from relief or in appreciation of the set, I don’t know.

Afterward I heard several explanations of the incident, none very convincing. I think it was just meant to be. If nothing else, it demonstrated that the opera is a live event. It is a risky undertaking.

I was fascinated by the supertitles--lines distilled from the libretto and projected on a screen above the proscenium. I found them both distracting and indispensible. Of course everyone knows the story of Otello, but it helped to have the turns of plot explained in English. The language was hardly that of Shakespeare, however, and in the end, after the insanely jealous Otello has strangled his wronged wife and then stabbed himself, I looked at the supertitles in vain for Shakespeare’s deathless line:

I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee. No way but this,

Killing myself to die upon a kiss.

If there is any heroine in opera more wronged than Desdemona, it is Butterfly, the Japanese wife who is abandoned by the American naval officer, Lt. B. F. Pinkerton, in “Madama Butterfly,” the second opera we saw.

I’m afraid my Puritan morality robs me of compassion for the tragic heroes of these stories. To me, Otello is a vain fool and Pinkerton a weakling, and I am not moved by their anguish. I mourn only for their women.

And “Salome,” the third one we saw, doesn’t end like “H.M.S. Pinafore,” either.

Like Melina Mercouri, playing the prostitute in “Never on Sunday” who fancied that the ancient Greek tragedies ended with everyone going “to the seashore,” I long for Otello to discover his wife’s innocence in time to spare her, and for Pinkerton to do the decent thing and return to his wife and child.

By the way, the little boy who played Pinkerton’s son must have been drugged. I have a grandson about that age and there is no way he could be that good for that long.

The audience, of course, was glittering. The applause was hearty and sustained. It seemed to bode success.

As night after night I sat listening to the music of Verdi, Puccini and Strauss, my feet hurting, I thought of Herb Caen’s satirical report on the recent opening of the San Francisco Opera’s season:

“Opening nights are always ‘spectacular’ and the audience is ‘glittering,’ far eclipsing the show on stage. Four and a half hours of background music by Verdi. Pretty classy.”

In her story on the opening, Marylouise Oates quoted Thomas Wachtell, president of the Music Center Opera, as saying, “This night was a long time in coming.”

That, too, reminded me of a paragraph in Caen’s column:

“It was 40 years ago that the late Jose Hotaling ran a finger around the inside of his stiffly starched wing collar and said, ‘Do you realize we’ll be doing this every year for the rest of our lives?’ ”

I can only say, for the Music Center Opera, I hope so.