Customer Reviews

Great Operatic Disasters

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had already read this opera classic, first published in 1979, but I bought a copy for a hostess gift and read it again. Then my husband read it. I could hear him sitting in the john and laughing hysterically far into the night (actually, it didn't take him that long to read it, because it's only 80 pages long, with many zany illustrations.)

The first two "Tosca" anecdotes in this book are 'the' opera classics. You only have to mention 'Tosca and the trampoline' or 'Tosca and the firing squad' to an opera buff to initiate a bout of uncontrollable laughter. I truly believe Hugh Vickers's theory of the 'curse of Tosca.' A friend of mine caught a performance of this opera in Rome in 2005, while the cardinals were busy electing a new pope. All went well until the banquet scene, where Tosca is being blackmailed into sleeping with Scarpia, while her lover is tortured offstage. Well, in this performance, Scarpia's pants fell down just as he was lunging for the toothsome soprano. He had to sit down and motion for one of his thugs to bring him a safety pin. All Rome trembled with laughter before this Scarpia.

Although Vickers does not name the two sopranos who were immortalized by the trampoline and the suicidal firing squad, he does name places and performances so I'm assuming that his anecdotes are not entirely apocryphal.

All of the great stories are here: not one, but two Lohengrins who had to cope with vanishing swans; Rigoletto's sliding hump (I actually attended a performance where Rigoletto took off his coat and threw it on the Duke's throne--and the hump went with it. The not-so-hunchbacked hunchback sang the rest of his aria, then showed up in the following scene at the inn with his hump reattached).

One of my favorite stories concerning mechanical malfunctions involves an Edinburgh "Don Giovanni," where the conductor placed the Commendatore and his accompanying trombonists in the Gents' lavatory to get the properly ghostly sound effects--Unfortunately, "the long-defunct automatic flush system suddenly came torrentially to life at the exact moment of 'Di rider finirai pria dell'aurora' --and since the performance was being broadcast, B.B.C. Third Programme listeners were deluged even more powerfully than the spectators."

As Peter Ustinov puts it in his introduction to "Great Operatic Disasters," "There is no art form which attempts the sublime while defying the ridiculous with quite the foolhardiness of opera." This book is packed with those moments where the sublime, like Rigoletto's hump, momentarily descended into the ridiculous.

If you know opera at all, this is a hilarious read. You will laugh at fed-up (and clever) crews getting revenge on hard-to-handle divas and quick-thinking performers creative solutions to unbelievable technical disasters. This book sets out to prove--and does--that truth is weirder, and funnier, than fiction.

Some years ago, I picked up a copy of this slender volume on a remainder table at Chapters for a dollar. The price was about right.

This is a book cobbled together with a mximum of good intentions, by all impressions, and a minimum of hard work. It is a compendium of some, but by no means all, amusing operatic anecdotes as they have been passed about for endless re-tellings by careless and often indifferent story-tellers. The famous tale of the bouncing Tosca is dutifully trotted out and given a local habitation and a name--but it also appears in other books and in each of them has a different place and time.

An Amazon reviewer has quite properly remarked on the propensity of this book to attribute anecdotes vaguely to "a famous soprano" or the like.

Another Amazon reviewer criticizes the attribution of the role of Santuzza to Lily Pons--of all people!--in the 1938 season at San Francisco. It so happens that Pons did appear in San Francisco in 1938--in "Lucia di Lammermoor" with Tagliabue and the excellent but sadly forgotten Galliano Masini, as well as in "Le Coq D'Or' with Pinza. (That same season also saw Gigli and Rethberg in "Andrea Chenier" and in "La forza del destino", Rethberg, Pinza and Baccaloni in "Don Giovanni"; Stignani in "Cavalleria rusticana"--as Santuzza, of course--and Schorr in "Die Meistersinger". Oh, the riches of those days!)

This is a lightweight book, clearly issued without serious intention of hitting the comic heights. It is, indeed, lightly amusing, but should only be acquired at rock-bottom price.

LEC/AM/1-09

I had already read this opera classic, first published in 1979, but I bought a copy for a hostess gift and read it again. Then my husband read it. I could hear him sitting in the john and laughing hysterically far into the night (actually, it didn't take him that long to read it, because it's only 80 pages long, with many zany illustrations.)

The first two "Tosca" anecdotes in this book are 'the' opera classics. You only have to mention 'Tosca and the trampoline' or 'Tosca and the firing squad' to an opera buff to initiate a bout of uncontrollable laughter. I truly believe Hugh Vickers's theory of the 'curse of Tosca.' A friend of mine caught a performance of this opera in Rome in 2005, while the cardinals were busy electing a new pope. All went well until the banquet scene, where Tosca is being blackmailed into sleeping with Scarpia, while her lover is tortured offstage. Well, in this performance, Scarpia's pants fell down just as he was lunging for the toothsome soprano. He had to sit down and motion for one of his thugs to bring him a safety pin. All Rome trembled with laughter before this Scarpia.

Although Vickers does not name the two sopranos who were immortalized by the trampoline and the suicidal firing squad, he does name places and performances so I'm assuming that his anecdotes are not entirely apocryphal.

All of the great stories are here: not one, but two Parsifals who had to cope with vanishing swans; Rigoletto's sliding hump (I actually attended a performance where Rigoletto took off his coat and threw it on the Duke's throne--and the hump went with it. The not-so-hunchbacked hunchback sang the rest of his aria, then showed up in the following scene at the inn with his hump reattached).

One of my favorite stories concerning mechanical malfunctions involves an Edinburgh "Don Giovanni," where the conductor placed the Commendatore and his accompanying trombonists in the Gents' lavatory to get the properly ghostly sound effects--Unfortunately, "the long-defunct automatic flush system suddenly came torrentially to life at the exact moment of 'Di rider finirai pria dell'aurora' --and since the performance was being broadcast, B.B.C. Third Programme listeners were deluged even more powerfully than the spectators."

As Peter Ustinov puts it in his introduction to "Great Operatic Disasters," "There is no art form which attempts the sublime while defying the ridiculous with quite the foolhardiness of opera." This book is packed with those moments where the sublime, like Rigoletto's hump, momentarily descended into the ridiculous.

This delightful little book demonstrates that even in the carefully planned and rehearsed venue of high opera, what can go wrong, will! Although some of the names and places are listed anonymously, if one is an opera fan and familiar with some of opera performance history, one can figure out who did what and where it happened. Very amusing!

A small book full of anecdotes of disasters, some accidental and some intentional, in opera houses around the world.

I had already read this opera classic, first published in 1979, but I bought a copy for a hostess gift and read it again. Then my husband read it. I could hear him sitting in the john and laughing hysterically far into the night (actually, it didn't take him that long to read it, because it's only 80 pages long, with many zany illustrations.)

The first two "Tosca" anecdotes in this book are 'the' opera classics. You only have to mention 'Tosca and the trampoline' or 'Tosca and the firing squad' to an opera buff to initiate a bout of uncontrollable laughter. I truly believe Hugh Vickers's theory of the 'curse of Tosca.' A friend of mine caught a performance of this opera in Rome in 2005, while the cardinals were busy electing a new pope. All went well until the banquet scene, where Tosca is being blackmailed into sleeping with Scarpia, while her lover is tortured offstage. Well, in this performance, Scarpia's pants fell down just as he was lunging for the toothsome soprano. He had to sit down and motion for one of his thugs to bring him a safety pin. All Rome trembled with laughter before this Scarpia.

Although Vickers does not name the two sopranos who were immortalized by the trampoline and the suicidal firing squad, he does name places and performances so I'm assuming that his anecdotes are not entirely apocryphal.

All of the great stories are here: not one, but two Parsifals who had to cope with vanishing swans; Rigoletto's sliding hump (I actually attended a performance where Rigoletto took off his coat and threw it on the Duke's throne--and the hump went with it. The not-so-hunchbacked hunchback sang the rest of his aria, then showed up in the following scene at the inn with his hump reattached).

One of my favorite stories concerning mechanical malfunctions involves an Edinburgh "Don Giovanni," where the conductor placed the Commendatore and his accompanying trombonists in the Gents' lavatory to get the properly ghostly sound effects--Unfortunately, "the long-defunct automatic flush system suddenly came torrentially to life at the exact moment of 'Di rider finirai pria dell'aurora' --and since the performance was being broadcast, B.B.C. Third Programme listeners were deluged even more powerfully than the spectators."

As Peter Ustinov puts it in his introduction to "Great Operatic Disasters," "There is no art form which attempts the sublime while defying the ridiculous with quite the foolhardiness of opera." This book is packed with those moments where the sublime, like Rigoletto's hump, momentarily descended into the ridiculous.

Just one example: in page 60 it is stated that Miss Lily Pons sang the role of Santuzza in "Cavalleria Rusticana", at the San Francisco Opera in 1938. Well, Miss Pons never sang this part anywhere in the world, including San Francisco and during an earthquake!

Doesn't Mr. Vickers know that Santuzza is only sang by dramatic sopranos or mezzos, and never by coloraturas, unlike the Rosina from "Il Barbiere di Siviglia"?

This takes off the credibility of all the other stories. Besides, some of the tales are poorly documented, names are not given limiting them to "a famous tenor" or "a well-known soprano".