A Night at the Opera-- Rain Con Brio

My wife and I flew to Santa Fe, N. M., the weekend of July 15-17, to see two operas.

We were in a group of 37, most of them members of the Committee of Professional Women for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, of which my wife is immediate past president.

I was one of only four men in the group, which suggests that men do not like opera as much as women, or that many of the women were either unmarried or widowed, or that their husbands were busy, or hated flying.

I’m sure men like opera as much as women do, but possibly they take a less romantic view of the logistics of a 90-minute airplane ride to Albuquerque and a 60-mile bus ride to Santa Fe just to see two operas--especially on a weekend when the Dodgers were sweeping the Cubs on TV.

I hadn’t intended to go. But they wanted at least 40 people, and it didn’t look as if they were going to make it. My wife was on the phone every evening, trying to enlist support. She didn’t actually ask me to change my mind, but she kept me informed on how slow things were going.

At last I said, “Oh, I’ll go.”

She didn’t argue; she didn’t assure me that I needn’t go just to please her. She went immediately to the phone and called a colleague. “I’ve got another one,” she said.

The worst thing was getting up at

5 o’clock on Friday morning to catch the plane. When we landed at Albuquerque and walked out of the airport to board our tour bus, I was blinded by the brilliant sunlight. I had forgotten both dark glasses and a hat. It never occurs to me that it is possible to fly out of our permanent smog.

Dottie Furman, one of our fellow travelers, happened to have a hat in her bag and lent it to me. It was an Australian campaign hat, the kind that is often worn with one brim curled up and the other down. It was bright yellow. I put it on and turned to my wife. “Do I look like Crocodile Dundee?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

We stayed at the Inn of the Governors. By civic edict, every structure in Santa Fe, private and commercial, is built in the adobe style of the ancient Indian pueblos or the later Territorial style. It looks somewhat like a movie set, but there are no high-rises in sight and no tacky fast-food joints. They have sought to preserve their historic and artistic tradition, and the effort is not altogether unsuccessful.

The opera that night was Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte.” If you haven’t been to the Santa Fe opera house, you can have no idea what the experience was like.

The day had been clear, but in the evening great sculptured cumulus clouds began to fill the sky. By 8 o’clock they had turned dark and ominous. The sun was still up when we took our seats. As it sank below the dark mountains, it colored the entire sky. We have seen some superb sunsets from our house on Mt. Washington, but never the like of this one. The bloodied clouds looked like a glorious hell by Michelangelo.

When the sun vanished, the clouds turned black. A bolt of white lightning split the sky. A few seconds later a clap of thunder shook us. More distant lightning whitened the entire horizon. Thunder followed.

Throughout Mozart’s frivolous and melodic two acts the storm continued unabated. Thunder punctuated the lovely duets, trios, quartets, quintets and sextets. Mozart tried every combination, but of course he could not have foreseen that he would have to compete with nature at its most theatrical.

The theater is covered only by two canopies, separated by a gap of perhaps 30 or 40 feet. There are no sides. Thus, the lightning was visible to the entire audience, and when it rained, spectators sitting under the gap in the canopies were suddenly showered. Those who had foul-weather gear stuck it out; most ran for cover.

The opera was in English, which produced a particularly ironic line in the second act. One of Mozart’s buoyant young heroines says, “Isn’t the weather lovely!” It brought a murmur of impolite but stoic laughter.