travelswithalice

August 22, 2006

Verona- evenings at the opera

I still have to tell you about the glorious evenings at the opera.

Madama Butterfly was beautiful, no matter the last minute change in cast (or maybe because of it?)

Carmen was much the same as the last time and Aida was not very engrossing. (My friend Cecile said her husband missed the animals onstage at the last production.)

But the arena never disappoints. When it comes to the opera in Verona, the medium is the message. The Verona Arena is not a theater, it is theater.

The 2,000 year history of its noble structure; its storied 80 seasons of opera; the exorbitant ticket prices (no refunds even when rained out) and supremely uncomfortable seats; the magical glow of thousands of candles lighting up in the upper sections as daylight fades; the moon floating behind the stage, hardly moving, merely inching sideways as the night deepens; the excited chatter of the house decrescendoing into absolute stillness as the music takes over. And then there's the secret panic inspired by 20,000 or so people in an enclosure with not too many visible exit signs.

But more on all that later.

One of the best times we had at the opera happened away from where the fat lady sings: in the arena's backlot where we prowled through Franco Zeffirelli's spectacular stage sets that littered the grounds.

We wandered in and out of mock ups of Egyptian monuments to inspect gold-leafed metal pipes that make up the menacing pyramid at the center of the Aida set. We watched enormous Japanese lanterns and the stone cliffs of Nagasaki's port being winched into place by cranes setting up for Madama Butterfly.