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Overview
Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust might motivate the occasional operagoer, for hardcore fans the real answer, according to The Opera Fanatic, is passion--they do it for love.
Opera lovers are an intense lot, Claudio E. Benzecry discovers in his look at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, a key site for opera's globalization. Listening to the fans and their stories, Benzecry hears of two-hundred-mile trips for performances and nightlong camp-outs for tickets, while others testify to a particular opera's power to move them--whether to song or to tears--no matter how many times they have seen it before. Drawing on his insightful analysis of these acts of love, Benzecry proposes new ways of thinking about people's relationship to art and shows how, far from merely enhancing aspects of everyday life, art allows us to transcend it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226043425 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2011 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE OPERA FANATIC
Ethnography of an ObsessionBy CLAUDIO E. BENZECRY
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-04342-5
Chapter One
An Opera House for the "Paris of South America"
A Taste of Buenos Aires
If you walk around downtown Buenos Aires or some of the city's nicest neighborhoods, you will see at least one newsstand per block. Newsstands are placed on the sidewalk and sell not only newspapers but also magazines, cheap books, collectibles, and postcards. Among the latter, we can observe many competing ideas about the city and its proper photographic representation: the picturesque and colorful houses of Caminito in La Boca; the old bodegas and almacenes where the tango flourishes once again; the Pink House, in the historical center of the city, where the president works. However, all pale in comparison to the image that most oft en appears on postcards and in brochures: the Colón Opera House, usually photographed at night, bathed in its exterior lights (see figure 2). The Colón, inaugurated in 1908, is a pop icon, not only in the city, but throughout Argentina. Tourists oft en take tours of the house, and the guided visits have become one of the Colón's main attractions. Books about the Colón, filled with glossy pictures of its most luxurious features and texts by writers and artists who have graced the house over a hundred years, are an industry in and of themselves. Texts are obligatorily bilingual, and, as their prices indicate, the books are aimed mostly at the city's foreign visitors. Attached to this status as a monument that represents the city and, oft en, the entire country is the conviction that the Colón is one of the greatest opera houses in the world and that its acoustics are unmatched by both older and contemporary houses like that of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Such beliefs are a means of integrating Argentina into the modern world, and they underscore the Argentinean attitude toward the Colón as a national symbol of high culture, despite the consumption of opera at various venues and by a heterogeneous population.? This chapter tells the story of how this representation came to be.
Opera and the Old City
In Tristes tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss describes an unexpected discovery: the women of the poorly organized Caduveo tribe—a tribe on the verge of extinction—adorned their faces with drawings imitating the spatial and kinship structures of the neighboring and better-faring Bororo tribe. The French anthropologist concluded that, unable to solve their issues with social reproduction and social and political differentiation and organization, the Caduveo began dreaming of the society they could not build, on the faces of their women. In a risky analogy, the Argentinean cultural critic Eduardo Rinesi (1994) hypothesizes that, unable to create their ideal society, the liberal founding fathers of modern Argentina attempted to project it in the construction of as many European-style monuments as possible. While he offers a list of theaters, squares, and monuments that he sees as key examples, he forgets, in his focus on spoken theater, perhaps the most important of them all: the Colón Opera House.
Despite the Colón's representation as the backbone of the liberal, cosmopolitan city, its history stretches back well beyond the modern period of the country's organization (1880–1910). Established in 1857, the old Teatro Colón's location alone—next to the Plaza de Mayo, considered the main square of, not just the city, but the country; the cathedral; the presidential house; and the old Cabildo, stage of the country's first efforts in 1810 to free itself from Spain—reveals its central place in the nation's conscience.
According to newspapers from that era (Echevarría 1979, 14), the inauguration of the opera house on April 25, 1908, marked Buenos Aires's graduation day: "Tonight Buenos Aires has grown. We say goodbye to the old village and welcome the city in an artistic spiritual revelry." The large stage was celebrated as "one of the biggest in the world, aft er Milano's La Scala or Napoli's San Carlo Theatre." Two Italian artists had painted the ceiling with classical motifs of nymphs and caryatids, and all the seats in the house were covered in rich, brown leather. The initial subscription series included 120 performances. When interest waned, the theater opened its doors to other shows, like circuses, and to a great carnival dance, which introduced the house to those who did not or could not attend the opera.
On September 13, 1888, the old Teatro Colón closed its doors for good. Its small size, the growing city population, and a series of several spectacular theater fires in Europe that revealed the Colón's danger as a firetrap made it no longer tolerable. However, that was far from the end of the Colón as the center of Buenos Aires opera activity. Angelo Ferrari, the Italian impresario who had run the opera seasons since 1868, allied with Mayor Torcuato de Alvear to find a more suitable location for the new opera house. Alvear had already secured permission from the newly formed Concejo Deliberante (the municipal legislative body) four years prior to sell the old property, a municipal building, to the national bank for 950,000 pesos.
The building of a new opera house became a political affair that involved city-level and national authorities as well as private and public characters. Some members of the local porteño elite played dual roles as private sponsors of the project and public and legislative voices for its completion (Hodge 1979). Under Law 1969, the national state and the House of Representatives authorized the municipality of the city of Buenos Aires to sell the Colón in order to build a new municipal opera house, also to be named Colón (de la Guardia and Herrera 1933). Angelo Ferrari won the right to manage the opera seasons, and the construction of the building was awarded to Francisco Tamburini, then the national director of public buildings, aft er an international competition was conducted. The completion of the new opera house became a comedy of errors, involving unexpected deaths and crimes of passion spanning over twenty years.
Bourgeois Sociability and the Liberal City
Historians usually characterize 1880–1910 as the epoch of national modernization and, on the local level, as the era that inscribed the body of the city with architectural monuments, established the basis for spatial circulation, delimited social circles, and prescribed the places for the elites.? In his classic essay "The Bourgeois City" (in Romero 1983), the Argentinean historian José Luis Romero outlines the building frenzy of the period and the consequences of its modernization. In 1882, a new port was built, four blocks from the old Colón location, in order to export cattle, wool, and grain to Europe and to import the many products that filled the windows of new department stores and small neighborhood businesses. Most of the infrastructure was completed under the rule of Torcuato de Alvear, who became the first mayor after the city was officially recognized as the capital in 1880. In 1882, the city got public lighting and electric service as well as cobblestone streets; tramways were developed in 1897. However, the most important development was the opening of the Plaza de Mayo, which involved demolishing some of the more traditional buildings and constructing a Paris-inspired boulevard: the Avenida de Mayo. This avenue is where the new Municipal Palace found its home (1892). The avenue starts at the opposite corner of the Casa Rosada and ends at the National Congress, which was also planned in the 1890s but not finished until 1906. The new avenue linked all the major monuments of political power. The Palace of Justice was finished one year later next to the square where the new Colón would finally be located.
As Gorelik indicates (1998, 237), the consolidation of the bourgeois city was marked by two series of buildings: the French-style palaces in the northern corridor and a series of monumental buildings that tried to provide a respectable home for the overgrown municipal and national state governments. The local bourgeoisie tried to deepen their social distance, and opera occupied a central place in this effort (Pasolini 1999). Finishing the Colón was both a national and a municipal political affair, and the bourgeoisie threw all their weight behind the project. For instance, in 1899, the congress passed Law 3797, which expropriated the properties surrounding the location of the new Colón. The maneuvering behind this action required the power of the municipal authorities. It was they who put up most of the money and took over the task of completing the theater from the impresario Ferrari; the national state also contributed by providing the location, the former Plaza de Armas and site of the Western Train Station. The project also involved the cream of the local elite, who contributed by buying bonds issued by the state to finance construction. The twenty-five families who did so had already bought ten-year subscription-series boxes from Ferrari in 1891.
A summary of the locations and buildings that had some family resemblance to the Colón might give us an idea of the central place given by the elite to the civilizing cultural mission the theater would undertake. The architects who built the Colón were Julio Dormal, Francisco Tamburini, and Victor Meano. They worked on drawings for the Tres de Febrero Park in Palermo (the mandatory place to stroll for the bourgeoisie); helped plan the Buenos Aires State Provincial Government House in La Plata and the National Government House in Buenos Aires; built the mausoleum for General San Martín (one of the country's founding fathers), the clubhouse of the Rural Society, the Normal School, the central police station, the military hospital, and the National Congress Palace. All these buildings were intended to transform the heart of the city (its downtown area and historical center) into the heart of the nation.
Tamburini died unexpectedly in 1899, and Meano, who was his disciple, continued the Colón project. Meano was stabbed to death by his butler in 1904, and construction was finished by Dormal. Problems with construction were not, however, confined to the health of the architects. As Hodge (1979) has shown, the twenty years between the closure of the old Colón and the opening of the new building were plagued by location changes, funding shortages, transfers of deeds and exploitation rights, a kaleidoscope of lists for box owners and occupants, and congressional debates over how the money should be allocated and what the purpose, and specifically the municipal character, of the opera house should be. Two of these debates are of particular interest because they are telling of the preoccupations behind the making of an opera house. Despite what might be expected, few of the conversations referred to the class character of the opera house. In fact, one of the most important points seemed to be that, although it was located in Buenos Aires and under the jurisdiction of the municipal government, it had to represent the country as a whole. As Hodge (1979, 238) shows, the representatives of the inner provinces made it clear that the bill should spell out the name Teatro Colón without mention of the word municipal "since Argentina's reputation in the music world would have been associated with a theater by that name." The finalization of the opera house became such an urgent concern that, in 1899, when the construction process seemed to be stalled and more money was needed, House representative Francisco Bollini asked that the relevant bill be placed ahead of other matters under consideration as "the honor and prestige of the Nation and the capital were at stake" (Hodge 1979, 248, citing Diputados, September 4 1899, 784).
By mid-1907, the work was all but finished. After eighteen years of construction far exceeding the thirty months outlined in the original contract signed in 1890, the Colón was ready to open. Construction had cost over four times the original estimate.
Who Was on First?
So who filled the Colón in its first years? While it is impossible to reproduce a given night at the opera house, a combination of several primary sources (playbills with the list of subscribers from 1908–10, 1912, 1914, 1924–25, and 1927) and secondary sources (de la Guardia and Herrera 1933; Matamoro 1972; Hodge 1979; Rosselli 1990; Sforza 1990; Pasolini 1999; Sanguinetti 2002; and Buch 2003) allows us to attempt a reconstruction of the hierarchical architecture of a stratified audience. In the orchestra seats, especially the first and second levels of boxes, we find those who had bought the ten-year subscriptions and the municipal bond to subsidize construction. This population of wealthy landowners, merchant entrepreneurs, and successful members of the financial industries occupied the thirty-eight central boxes among the seventy-four lower-and upper-balcony boxes. Sanguinetti (2002) adds to these names others repeated throughout the orchestra seating and remaining boxes: Roca, Alvear, Mitre, Pueyrredon, and a few others that remind us that the who's who included many of the last names that have shaped the country's history since 1810.
The map of the remaining important boxes obeyed the logic of the marriage between a politico-bureaucratic organization and the original impresario who managed the seasons. Fifteen boxes (five in each of the three levels of balconies) were allocated to the heirs of Ferrari. The remaining boxes were allocated to the president of the Republic, the city mayor, members of the municipal commission and the commission that oversaw the activities of the Colón. The president would attend at least twice a year to celebrate the two key national holidays, May 25 and July 9. While some presidents, like Marcelo T. de Alvear, who was married to a former opera singer, attended more oft en, those two occasions were almost mandatory. That is true even in the case of Hipólito Yrigoyen, who, although from the same party as de Alvear, the popular Unión Cívica Radical, would fall asleep during performances, much to the dismay of other audience members. The presidential galas, as they were called, were a central part of the subscription series, and all the subscription packages included at least one.
The most obvious display of the connection between opera and the modernizing elite came during the celebrations for El centenario, the hundredth anniversary of the country's independence. As the cultural historian Esteban Buch (2003, 32) states, the celebrations of May 25, 1910, attempted to transform Buenos Aires "into the capital of the world for a day." President Figueroa Alcorta received the prime minister of France, the president of Chile, the president of Peru, the German military chancellor, and the Spanish princess as well as internationally prominent figures such as Ramón del Valle Inclán and Guglielmo Marconi. The pinnacle of the celebration was the gala performance at the Colón, where the president was flanked, not only by these and other special guests, but also by most of the foreign ambassadors, all his ministers, the judges of the Supreme Court, and key members from Congress. The presentation of Rigoletto at the Colón was designed to show the success of Argentina's civilizing project: Buenos Aires, and Argentina, had finally arrived.
A comparison of opera debuts in Buenos Aires with those at renowned opera houses like La Scala, the Met, or Paris demonstrates how well synched the Colón was to the international scene. For instance, La traviata opened in Buenos Aires in 1856, just three years after its world premiere. This synchronicity accelerated with time, as evidenced by the premiere of Pagliacci, which appeared in Buenos Aires on February 28, 1891, only a few months after the work won an award given by Ricordi in Italy. La bohème premiered in Torino just four months before its Argentinean debut, and Madame Butterfly opened in Buenos Aires less than two months after its final revision in Brescia, on May 28, 1904. Turandot premiered in Buenos Aires on June 25, 1926, exactly two months after its world premiere at La Scala. Even operas premiered in the United States, like La fanciulla del West, which opened in Buenos Aires in July 1911, appeared in Argentina within a short period. This trend led to some operas actually premiering in Buenos Aires, like Isabeau, which appeared in 1911—with music by Mascagni (famous for Cavalleria rusticana and Iris) and a libretto by Luigi Illica (Puccini's main librettist)—but did not have its American premiere until 1927.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE OPERA FANATIC by CLAUDIO E. BENZECRY Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Introduction
Part 1: Background
1. An Opera House for the “Paris of South America”
2. “It was love at first sight”: Biography and Social Trajectory of Standing-Room Dwellers
Part 2: Foreground
3. Becoming an Opera Fan: Cultural Membership, Mediation, and Differentiation
4. Moral Listening: Symbolic Boundaries, Work on the Self, and Passionate Engagement
5. Heroes, Pilgrims, Addicts, and Nostalgics: Repertories of Engagement in the Quest for Transcendence
Part 3: Finale
6. “They were playing in their shirtsleeves!” Downfall, Memory Work, and High-Culture Nationalism
7. “We’ve told you all about our life”: Conclusions and Implications
Notes
References
Index