1 Opera came alive thanks to dead Romans
Seventeenth-century Venetians wanted to see real people in their operas — as opposed to mythical figures, gods, goddesses, or personifications of nature. So although it doesn’t sound all that exciting that dead Romans appeared on stage in opera for the first time in pieces such as Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, it was very important for Venice, and for the history of opera. Nero, who is the villain and hero in Poppea, does horrendous things in the drama. The city of Venice thought it was better than Imperial Rome in every way, so watching bad Emperor Nero at the opera house also made them feel much better about themselves.
2 If you wave a pair of castration scissors in the air, all the men in the room cross their legs
The singer playing Nero in Poppea would originally have been a castrato. We had to source a pair of 18th-century scissors, so I asked my colleagues at Hampton Court (one of the state apartment warders there is a medical history nut, and he did not let me down). He’s got a whole collection of medical instruments. They looked pretty crude and clunky and the same type of scissors are still used for sheep today. The shocking thing about the baroque practice of castration on boys is that before people sent their sons for the chop they didn’t actually know whether their castrato voice was going to be any good or not — so you may have gone through with the procedure and then still not have had a career as an opera singer.
3 It doesn’t pay to insult your patrons
I’m thinking of Mozart. He had a healthy subscription list for his concerts, which were packed full of counts and countesses — and which allowed him to rent a lovely flat in the centre of Vienna. Then he wrote The Marriage of Figaro with a bad count in it — and obviously all “his” counts were offended and refused to come to his concerts any more. Mozart had to move beyond the city walls, which had been a clear marker of his status. That was the financial price he paid for his revolutionary criticism of the aristocracy, although he now has the compensation of immortality.
4 When you’re premiering your only opera, timing is everything
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio opened in 1805 — it was terrible timing because the French had just invaded Vienna. They turned up at the opera house, they heard an opera that was a massive complaint against tyranny, they thought: “Are we the tyrants here? We don’t like this opera.” It got taken off after three nights. Beethoven went on working on the piece, particularly making it shorter, and it had its third outing in 1814. The timing was perfect: Napoleon had just been defeated and everyone had come to the Austrian capital for the Congress of Vienna. Now they were ready to hear an opera about the defeat of tyranny.
5 It takes a midwife from Nottingham to explain Wagner
I was a Wagner virgin before I made this documentary. Wagner seemed difficult to me. One argument opened things up for me — made by Catherine Foster, who is from Nottingham and used to be a midwife. Now she sings Brünnhilde in Bayreuth and is so unlike what I expected a diva to be. She said that you can actually read Brünnhilde as a feminist, sacrificing herself to bring down the system of gods and goddesses so that, essentially, a new age can begin where sensible people from Nottingham take over. I did dress up as Brünnhilde for the series. I had a really good costume: gladiator-type sandals, a spear, a shield and a sort of silver breastplate, with a long white gown underneath. I felt very powerful, in a ridiculous and camp way.
6 Parisian opera buffs came for the girls, not the opera
In the 19th century the Garnier opera house in Paris hosted the Jockey Club, which was like a Parisian Bullingdon Club. The purpose of going to the opera for the club members was to look through their opera glasses at the ballet girls and then go backstage afterwards and have an “introduction” to a dancer of their choice, at the salon de danse. They were upset when Wagner put on his opera Tannhäuser at the Garnier because he put the ballet in the first half, so they arrived at the interval expecting the ballet — and the girls — and they’d missed it. Wagner went back to Germany disgusted.
7 The best Puccini sopranos can “die” absolutely anywhere
The singer Angel Blue has been Mimì in La Bohème, I think, 36 times in different productions, so she was a very good person to get tips on how to die. Mimì contracts tuberculosis which was a weirdly sexy disease in the 19th century because of the pallor it led to. Angel said you should always ask the director if you can perform your death without the comfort of a sofa, because if you’re dying from tuberculosis you would squirm about. Then you have to roll your eyes in search of your boyfriend, Rodolfo, start a tremor in your hand, and in your final sighs keep fluttering your eyelids. And it’s very important that you stay dead until the end of the act, and for the really long pause you’re hopefully going to get before the audience starts clapping. Even though she acted out the scene for me in a pub in Camden Town, it was tremendously affecting.
8 Carmen, the unlikely revolutionary
The idea that Bizet’s Carmen may have a secret political message hints back to the Paris Commune of 1871, when the city was taken over by communards — radical socialists and revolutionaries. Among them were these slightly mythical figures, communard women called pétroleuses who would throw firebombs. The character of Carmen is herself a very revolutionary, socially unconventional person. She wears red, the colour of the communards, and she behaves in a sexually liberated way. And Carmen keeps repeating the word “liberty” — the watchword of the commune. There is an argument that Bizet was bringing memories of the commune to life in a very subversive manner: Carmen was premiered in 1875, by which time any mention of the commune had been banned.
9 You can get away with an onstage striptease if it’s from the Bible
Richard Strauss managed this with the aide of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, which he turned into an opera in 1905. At the first performance Marie Wittich, who was playing Salome, said to the composer that she wasn’t doing the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils because she was a respectable woman. They had to get a body double to do it instead, but the substitute was much thinner than Frau Wittich, so it can’t have been all that convincing.
10 Opera singers have the best retirement homes
When I’m old I want to live in the Casa Verdi in Milan. It is the composer’s former home and was then turned into a home for former divas. They performed the chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco, Va pensiero, for me. They all had professional singing careers and now they all live together in this special community. I might have to get better at singing to be allowed in.
Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera begins tonight on BBC Two at 9pm
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ten- ... -bnrqhptzn