One of my operagoing highlights this year was a February performance of Rossini’s Tancredi at Opera Philadelphia with Stephanie Blythe in the title role and a strong cast that included soprano Brenda Rae, tenor Michele Angelini and bass Daniel Mobbs, all conducted by Corrado Rovaris.
The performance took place at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, which opened in 1857, making it the oldest theater in America still used regularly as an opera house. It is older than both the Vienna State Opera (1869, reopened 1955) and the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier (1875). Vienna has 1709 seats and Paris has 1979 seats. In contrast, Philadelphia has 2509 seats (and the new Met, opened in 1966, has 3786 seats).
Many opera houses built in the 19th century drew inspiration from outdoor theaters of ancient Greece and smaller opera houses built in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet, there were distinct differences between the theaters of antiquity and those built after the Renaissance. The genius of the theater design of ancient Greece and Rome was that it was possible to see as well as hear everything.
Opera was born in Florence in 1597 but flourished in Venice, which built 17 theaters in the 1600s intended for opera and plays to be performed for a ticket-buying public. Unlike the theaters of antiquity, almost every building for opera was an indoor space. The first priority was to create seating (often for a few hundred people at most) that favored hearing rather than seeing. More than 150 years later, many small theaters built in Italy in the 1800s still made listening more important than seeing. Recently I attended a performance of I masnadieri in the 300-seat Teatro Verdi (1868) in the composer’s hometown of Busseto. The sound was excellent but I could barely see a thing from my seat in a cramped side box.
Larger Italian theaters in major cities had decent sightlines as well as good acoustics. The ones in Florence, Genoa and Turin were all destroyed around World War II and were rebuilt as modern spaces where one could usually see well but they were acoustically lacking.
The unacknowledged gem of Italian opera houses is the Teatro San Carlo. Opened in 1737, when Naples had replaced Venice as the opera capital of Europe, it is a large, gorgeous theater with a generous stage area, a wonderfully elegant auditorium, splendid acoustics and the animated flair that is the hallmark of Neapolitans. Stendhal wrote, “There is nothing in the whole of Europe that approaches this theater or even approximates it. The eyes are dazzled, the soul is abducted.” It was the chief Italian theater when Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini were active. Much of their sublime music was written to be heard first in the San Carlo.
According to one study, among the most acoustically successful theaters for opera were the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (1825, rebuilt after World War II); Semperoper in Dresden (1838-1879, rebuilt after World War II); the Vienna State Opera and the Teatro Colon (1908) in Buenos Aires. I think the Colon has the best acoustics of the bunch. (If Italian theaters were considered in this study, they were not mentioned).
Acoustics, as a concept, are relative because so many factors are involved. To determine if a theater has “good” acoustics you would have to take the same musicians and ask them to play the same music for the same listeners in many different theaters. All of the listeners must be prepared to listen without prejudice.
I tend to reject the assertions of people who tell me that their favorite theater has outstanding acoustics or, as I am too often told, the best acoustics in the world. This is akin to someone saying that a particular restaurant has the best onion soup in Paris. How would anyone know that unless they have tasted every bowl of onion soup in the French capital and also have the knowledge and discernment to recognize the best onion soup when they taste it?
Each one of us has a different sense of how music should sound in a theater. Should it be warm and embracing, so that all of the notes, instruments and voices blend to a glorious whole? Or should it be clinically clear so that you can pick out every individual sound? I find that people who learned music on LPs favor the warm sound while people who started with CDs or MP3s like the more clinical sound. In other words, recorded music has influenced how we react to live music while, in the past, live music was all there was. Early recordings could only approximate what live performance was like.
But there is another factor that is seldom discussed by the public but known to certain singers: the “sweet spot” on the stage where a singer sounds her best. Whether it was in Naples, Milan or anywhere else, the prima donna knew where to stand so she sounded best. In modern times, singers move about according to stage direction and opera is more theatrically valid because of that. But some singers, such as the great Renata Tebaldi, stood where they sounded best.
No one could rival Beverly Sills, who found the sweet spot on every stage she performed on and often did not budge. In the old New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, many stagings for Sills were done so that she was placed where she sounded best. If you watch this video of her as the elderly Queen Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux (admittedly, because of the character’s age, she did not have to move much), you will see how a production could be built around a singer planted on the sweet spot.
Which brings me back to Tancredi and Stephanie Blythe. There were some dead spots on the far right side of the stage in Philadelphia that deadened the sound of her colleagues. I noticed that Blythe did not go to those couple of spots, but did range widely for theatrical purposes and made the entire stage sound like a sweet spot. And that, my friends, is called artistry.