‘Aida’ Kicks Up Her Heels on Nashville Stage

There’s a new star in the town that gave the nation “Hee Haw” and a home to country performers like Reba McEntire and Vince Gill.

Opera has arrived in Music City USA.

That’s opera, as in grand opera. Not opry, as in Grand Ole Opry.

“Opera’s just been waiting to take off here,” says Carol Penterman, executive director of the Nashville Opera Assn.

And it has: Ticket sales are swift, the music is more ambitious and the number of productions is growing.

The 18-year-old opera association presented Verdi’s “Aida” last fall, in a production featuring a 3,600-pound elephant, two camels, two 10-foot pythons, a hawk and a scarlet macaw. It was sung in Italian with the English translation projected on a screen above the stage.

You won’t get that at a Garth Brooks concert.

In the production, hero Radames rides the elephant in a parade with the other animals after he conquers Ethiopia for Egypt.

“With ‘Aida’ and the elephant, we went from a B-plus to an A,” Penterman says.

Soprano Geraldine McMillian made her Nashville debut in the title role after working extensively with the New York City Opera. She’s Juilliard-trained, a marked contrast from country queen Loretta Lynn, who got her training at a Grange hall.

Vincenzo Scuderi came in from New York to play Radames and left impressed.

“To mount a production of this size and do it as well as they did is a feather in their cap. They did it splendidly,” he said. “I think what they did with ‘Aida’ really put them on the map.”

This season, the Nashville Opera has mounted “Turn of the Screw” and is preparing productions of “Cinderella” and a double bill of “Gianni Schicchi” and “Trouble in Tahiti.”

This year’s opening-night sellout was the first in 17 years. Dozens were turned away then and at a second performance three nights later.

“A lot of people have moved here from outside, and they brought with them a taste of opera,” says Mark Wait, dean of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “They become patrons of the arts here. They love opera as real aficionados.”

The association presented four operas this season and last, up from just one in 1996, and the annual budget has doubled to $900,000 in the last two years. About 70% of the funds come from corporate sponsors such as Nissan, which has a nearby plant.

Subscriptions have nearly tripled, to 932, since last year.

The operas are presented at the 2,500-seat Jackson Hall at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, just four blocks from where Hank Williams performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage nearly a half-century ago.

This is the fur-coat crowd, not Western fringe.

“There is tremendous local pride in Nashville opera, as there should be,” says Wait, who moved to the city four years ago from Boulder, Colo.

“People here are interested in a broad spectrum of the arts. A viable and active opera scene is part of that.”

Nashville’s opera began as part of the Nashville Symphony in 1980 and grew from there, still using about 60 symphony musicians for each production.

Attendance this season is projected at more than 10,300, up from 8,000 last year. Tickets are $5 to $40 apiece, compared with $25 to $150 for a weekend performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

There also are opera companies in Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville, but none has the benefit of ties to the country music industry like Nashville.

Crystal Gayle helps the association raise money. Mary Chapin Carpenter attends some productions. Carrie Tillis, sister of country singer Pam Tillis, has sung in two operas.

Even Grand Ole Opry veteran performer Bill Anderson welcomes the rival genre.

“Hey, why shouldn’t grand opera and the Grand Ole Opry co-exist here?” he says. “This is Music City USA, not Country Music City USA.

“I’d love to see an opera someday. Can I wear my cowboy boots?”

For those inclined to prefer Buck Owens to Luciano Pavarotti, Penterman offers this:

“Everybody loves opera; they just don’t know it. Country music songs and opera plots are the same, just sung differently.”