Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

The bloodied Lucia di Lammermoor, who has perhaps the most famous “mad scene” in opera, was most recently seen in Chicago portrayed by Albina Shagimuratova at the Lyric Opera (above). Last summer at Ravinia, the audience also went mad for Nadine Sierra’s performance of the aria from Donizetti’s opera with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, giving the soprano two ovations. By John Schauer e fact that soprano Marisol Montalvo has titled her July performance “Mad Scene” begs asking the question: Is opera the craziest of all art forms? e inclusion in so many operas of a spectacular “mad scene” forces the un- pleasant conclusion that opera audi- ences enjoy watching some poor vic- tim of psychosis, usually a soprano’s character, play out their deranged delusions and hallucinations onstage for their entertainment. Looked at objectively, such voyeurism doesn’t seem to be an enlightened thing to indulge in. en again, some operas have mined laughs by featuring a character who stutters, a type of rid- icule that would never be tolerated today, but there you have it. Simply put, opera, for most of its history, hasn’t been what we today consider “politically correct.” Love is usually the culprit. Underlining the—again, incorrect— weakness of women, opera heroines most o en ip out a er being aban- doned by their boyfriends. is is something that never happens to the self-assertive female leads in recent Disney movies, and seems to cry out for some new hashtag campaign; perhaps “ do-re-mi-Too.” But it gets worse. Even more than mental breakdowns, opera a cionados morbidly wallow in displays of dying and death. Is that sick, or what? Again, today’s movie directors might blow up dozens of anonymous bystanders, but, by and large, the leading lady lives; not so in opera. ink of the most famous roles in the so- prano’s repertoire: Verdi’s Violetta, Gilda, Leonora, and Aida; Donizetti’s Lucia, Bell- ini’s Norma, Tchaikovsky’s Lisa, and Bizet’s Carmen; Massenet’s Manon and ais; Wagner’s Senta, Isolde, and Brünnhilde; Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San, Mimì, Tosca—it’s curtains for every one of them before the nal curtain. Some are murdered; some die of disease; others kill themselves. And the means employed by the grim reaper o en show great ingenuity and subtlety: Lakmé dies by biting the leaf of a poison- ous datura plant; Adriana Lecouvreur inhales poison her rival has dusted on a bunch of violets; and Sélica, the heroine of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine , is the most delicate of the bunch, killing herself by sit- ting beneath a blooming manchineel tree, whose blossoms exude a lethal perfume. You can’t help but wonder why the locals never undertook a rigorous program to eradicate those pesky poison trees. Yet despite these grisly associations, operatic music seems to crop up in a burgeoning number of TV commercials lately, and you have to wonder whom these ads are aimed at. e vast majority of viewers, I’m willing to guess, cannot identify the music being used (which never has any logical connection to the featured product anyway); and for those of us who can name that tune, the jolt of recognition tends to over- whelm any impression we get of the item being sold. As a result, there are many commercials I can cite by their operatic excerpt but for which I have no recollection of the product. One shows a cat riding a Roomba oor-cleaning device to the strains of “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto ; I think it’s an ad for kitty litter, but I’m not sure. Another knowingly uses strains from Ros- sini’s Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro ; since both operas feature the character of Figaro from the trilogy of plays by Beaumar- chais, I give the ad execs high props for that arcane in-joke, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what they were advertising. Hairstyle prod- ucts? And the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen , which has appeared in countless commercials, is currently being employed by a website that sells brassieres. I’m willing to bet the actual gypsy seductress who inspired the story didn’t even wear a bra. is is all crazy. But as Gioachino Ros- sini, who throughout his career was the unquestioned master of opera in Europe, neatly put it: “ e theater is a lunatic asylum, and opera is the refuge for the incurables.” John Schauer is a freelance writer who worked at San Francisco Opera for 13 years and spins his own bizarre operatic fantasies in his novel Chaste Goddess . Mad About Opera ANDREW CIOFFI/LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 37