Opera is Funny, and I Don't Care Who Knows It

 

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Opera is serious, right?  It’s a fusion of music and drama.  The characters fall in love, sometimes with someone who doesn’t love them back.  Someone usually dies, sometimes more than one person.  Ancient gods go gaga over a magic ring.  Leading ladies die of tuberculosis, poison, murder, and suicide.  All kinds of dramatic things happen.  If the opera is a comedy, the audience is permitted to laugh at the funny parts, but most operas are tragedies, not comedies. 

A great performance is usually greeted with bravos and ovations.  Sometimes the audience stands up to applaud, not just when they are all putting on their coats to try to get out of the theater before everyone else stampedes out the exits.

However, funny things can happen during performances, sometimes unplanned.  There is ample opportunity for things to go wrong, and they sometimes do.

For instance, there was once a performance of Puccini’s Tosca where the entire show was ruined by a gunshot.  In this opera, all three leading characters die in a literal case of overkill.  The tenor dies in the end by firing squad.  In this production, the sound of the shot was provided by a man backstage shooting off a blank bullet from a handgun.  On one memorable night, the gun failed to go off.  The conductor held the orchestra on a chord, waiting for the gunshot.  The tenor stood and waited.

There was no big bang from backstage.  The tenor looked at the conductor.  The conductor looked at the tenor.  Finally, the conductor gave a signal.  The tenor fell down.  The firing squad exited the scene.  The orchestra continued playing the music.

The gun went off.  The audience dissolved in laughter.  A super-dramatic tragedy was instantly turned into a comedy.

In the early twentieth century, the great tenor Leo Slezak was known, among other roles, for his portrayal of Wagner’s Lohengrin in the opera of the same name.  In this opera, the knight Lohengrin makes his entrance and exit in a boat pulled by a swan.  Either this is a magical swan or swans in the Middle Ages were super birds, with the strength of huskies, able to draw a boat with a fully grown man inside.

In one performance, the boat failed to appear for Lohengrin’s exit.  Seeing this, Leo Slezak calmly turned to the audience and asked, “What time is the next swan?”

The man often designated the greatest singer of all, the early twentieth-century tenor Enrico Caruso, made his own onstage amusement by pulling pranks.  During the second act of Puccini’s La Bohème, which takes place in a café, he would take prop paper and prop menus, draw caricatures of male sexual organs, and pass them on to his female colleagues.  He also once handed a hot sausage to a famous soprano during a performance.  She was not amused.

The great Italian bass Cesare Siepi was known for his portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the opera of the same name.  At the end of this opera, the protagonist is taken down to Hell, accompanied by a chorus of demons and a lot of smoke onstage.  During one performance, the trap door that was supposed to take Don Giovanni to Hell got stuck on the way down.  Mr. Siepi stepped out of it and back into it, and it stuck again.  The handsome bass was up to the occasion.  He turned to the audience and said, “Oh my goodness, how wonderful!  Hell is full!

Fortunately for the art form and the people who practice it, instances like the ones above are the exception rather than the rule, but when they happen, they become the stuff of legend.