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Joan Sutherland
as Lucia, 1982
By John Schauer
Believe it or not, not everyone loves
opera. Most o en they simply doesn’t care
for the sound of operatic voices, which
are trained to ll a large hall without
any ampli cation. I once knew someone
who, a er attending an opera for the
rst time, couldn’t understand why the
singers weren’t given microphones. I tried
to explain that giving opera singers a
mic would be like giving motorcycles to
competitors in the Tour de France. Sure,
they would go faster, but it kind of misses
the point.
I should confess I didn’t always like
opera. When I was a music major in col-
lege, the instructor of my Romantic music
survey course frequently blasted us out of
our seats with recorded operatic excerpts.
Maybe it was the cheesy phonograph
being used, or maybe they were just bad
recordings, but in any case the professor
wasn’t winning converts to the art form.
In fact, a number of students actually
wore buttons that read “Help Stamp Out
Opera”—and these were music majors.
But that changed for me one day when
the soprano voice emanating from the
speaker not only wasn’t painful to listen
to, but actually was extremely pleasing. I
think it’s o en the sound of a particular
singer appealing to us that wins most fans
over to opera. In my case, the singer was
Joan Sutherland.
Sutherland had one of the most spec-
tacular operatic careers of the th centu-
ry, and some of the music that launched
it will be heard on August , when James
Conlon features excerpts from Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor
on his Chicago
Symphony Orchestra concert celebrating
Italian opera. Sutherland’s
debut in
that opera’s title role at Covent Garden
made international headlines;
Life
maga-
zine ran a double-page spread on it, and
she was showcased on a
Bell Telephone
Hour
telecast of an entire scene from
that opera. It was the vehicle of her
debuts in New York, San Francisco, and
Chicago, and she sang a portion of it the
following summer in her Ravinia/CSO
debut. So it was one of the rst operas
I made an e ort to become intimately
acquainted with.
In fact, like millions of Americans, I
rst became familiar with
Lucia di Lam-
mermoor
through the educational e orts
of those iconic cultural ambassadors e
ree Stooges. One of the most famous
passages of
Lucia
, the Sextet, was featured
in two of their lms—
Micro-Phonies
( ) and
Squareheads of the Round Table
(
), lip-syncing to a record in the rst
and sung in the latter to the lyrics, “Oh
Elaine, Elaine come out, babe.”
But even more famous is the sopra-
no’s “Mad Scene.” Scenes so titled are
not uncommon in opera; perhaps there’s
something about their ornamental vocal
technique that deprives the singers’
brains of oxygen, but for some reason,
sopranos o en lose their sanity before
the nal curtain. In Lucia’s case, she has
been tricked into betraying her vow to her
lover, an enemy of her family, and forced
into a marriage of convenience that turns
out to be incredibly inconvenient: on her
wedding night, she slices her groom up
with a knife o stage and wanders into
view in a blood-soaked peignoir to sing
a dizzying display of runs, trills, and
roulades that vividly exhibit the shattered
state of her psyche. Of course, she drops
dead a erwards. Unless it’s a comic opera
you’re dealing with, you can usually sum-
marize an opera’s ending with two words:
“She dies.”
(In this case, it is a boon to the tenor,
who gets to sing a magni cent nal scene
without having a soprano around to
upstage him, and Metropolitan Opera star
Matthew Polenzani will make good use of
that opportunity on August .)
anks to a score laden with glorious
tunes, a lot of people have come to love
Lucy. Back when this venue was known
as Ravinia Opera, scenes from
Lucia
were
presented every year but one from
through
. Beverly Sills, whom
Time
magazine dubbed “America’s Queen of
Opera” (Sutherland was Australian),
starred in a complete Ravinia perfor-
mance in
; Anna Mo o and Roberta
Peters each sang
Lucia
excerpts here
in
and
, respectively; and this
August Nadine Sierra, who has earned
ovations as Donizetti’s slasher bride in
San Francisco, Palermo, and Venice, will
take another stab at that Mad Scene—pun
intended.
John Schauer is a freelance writer and devoted
Sutherland fan who got to hear her sing
Lucia
at the
Lyric Opera in 1975.
e Slasher Bride, or Why I Love Lucy
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 6 – AUGUST 19, 2018
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