Patrick Bade
Introduction to Opera, Part 1: Italian Opera

Patrick Bade - Introduction to Opera, Part 1: Italian Opera

- [Lauren] All right, Patrick, I think we can get started. It’s three minutes past and we have over 900 participants with us. So, thank you everybody for joining. And today, Patrick is going to be talking about Italian opera.

• [Patrick] Thank you, Lauren.

Now you were listening to the quartet From Verdi’s “Rigoletto” with two of the loveliest voices of the 20th century, Beniamino Gigli, Amelita Galli-Curci. “Rigoletto”, of course, is set in Mantua, where our story tonight begins. Now, the very first thing to say about opera is that it is an Italian invention. Every other version of opera, French opera, German opera, Russian opera, Czech Opera, they are just mutant variants of the original Italian invention. And in fact, in most countries, opera continued to be performed in Italian, wherever it was, through the 18th century and even into the 19th century. Now, the second thing to say is that opera was the last great innovation of the Italian Renaissance. The Renaissance, which is one of the most profound changes in Western, in the history of Western culture. Renaissance means rebirth. What was it a rebirth of? It was a rebirth of classical culture. So Renaissance scholars, humanists, they were trying to revive the culture of the ancient world.

They were very interested in Greek theatre, Greek tragedy, and they knew that Greek theatre incorporated music at certain points to heighten the emotional effect. And really, this is what, in a way, you could say it was a slight misunderstanding, ‘cause in the ancient world, they didn’t have continuous music through the drama. They only had it at certain points. Now, the image you’re looking at, it was one of the great buildings of the Italian Renaissance. This is Paladdio’s Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza in northern Italy. It was not actually built as an opera house. It was built for the staging of classical drama. But it would certainly be a wonderful thing, I think, to see an opera by Monteverdi in this setting. Here is Monteverdi. He didn’t, strictly speaking, invent opera. There were predecessors, a man called Jacopo Peri in Florence, who was doing something, who was creating something we would recognise as opera from the 1580s. But the first great opera that we still, that is, well, once again, part of the repertoire you are likely to hear is Monteverdi’s “Orfeo”, which was presented in this building in the Ducal Palace in Mantua in 1607. So now a third point to make about opera is that it starts, I suppose in later periods it did sometimes become a very popular art form.

But it starts as an elitist art form. It starts as a court entertainment. It’s not till later, about half a century later in Venice, that you actually have operas being presented to a paying public. And then that practise spreads to Germany and then to other countries. So 1607, Mantua is a princedom, but a very important one, culturally. Great, great art collections. And it’s interesting to think that when Monteverdi was the court composer, Rubens, Peter Paul Rubens was the court painter. And Monteverdi and Ruben certainly knew each other. And it’s quite likely, I suppose, that Rubens would’ve attended the first performances of “Orfeo” by Monteverdi in 1607. He left the city the following year in 1608. Here he is in Mantua, the lagoon in the background. He’s the figure looking out towards us, to the right of centre.

And there are very many interesting parallels, really, between Rubens. And Rubens is one of the first great Baroque artists. He’s one of the creators of the Baroque star. And I would like to say that although opera comes out of the ideas of the Renaissance, it’s a very Baroque art form. Top left is a painting by Rubens of the suicide of Seneca. And that is a subject also that, that Monteverdi treated in a later opera, “The Coronation of Poppea”, a very moving scene when Seneca slashes his wrists and dies in the bath. But Baroque is a style, Baroque is an essentially very operatic style. It’s all about emotion and drama. Another Rubens in the background here, the “Massacre of the Innocents” with lots of very operatic gestures and expressions. And it’s interesting to think too, that Monteverdi and Caravaggio, I think it’s unlikely that they ever met, 'cause Caravaggio was active in Rome in the south, and Monteverdi, of course, in the north, but they’re almost exact contemporaries. And both of them are very concerned with the expression of emotion and sensation. There’s a famous letter by Monteverdi complaining about a libretto he’s been given. He says, I can’t do anything with this.

What I need is something that will enable me to excite and move the passions. So Baroque paintings are, I think Baroque is the style of the open mouth. There’s another detail of a Caravaggio. He’s very interested in the psychology of the people he paints, and he’s interested in expressing extreme emotions and extreme sensations. Here’s a detail of his “Judith and Holofernes”. Look at Judith’s face. I mean, the complexity, the conflicting emotions. I mean, this woman, she’s just had sex with this man and she’s now hacking his head off. And she’s obviously feeling very mixed emotions about this. Another contemporary, slightly younger, Bernini, the first great Baroque sculptor. He took this to extremes. This is his image of a soul burning in hell. And he wanted to know what that would be like. And he apparently put his foot into a fire and had somebody hold up a mirror to watch what it would do to his facial expression. Elsewhere in Europe too, in the north, this is Rembrandt, early in his career, so 1620s, early 1630s, standing in front of the mirror, I imagine him every morning looking into the mirror and pulling funny faces to, again, to try and find ways of describing emotion.

Now, another point I want to make about opera is that it is of course a hybrid art form. You are mixing the spoken word or the drama with music and also the visual arts. And the Baroque in general is very interested in fusing different art forms. And the great magician of this, again, is Bernini. This is his famous chapel in Rome in Santa Maria della Vittoria with the ecstasy of Saint Teresa. And the whole thing is really presented as an operatic drama. You can even see the sort of the boxes on either side with the spectators of the drama. And as I said, Baroque itself, it’s a hybrid art form and a highly operatic and dramatic art form. This is one of my favourite Baroque churches. This is the wonderful Asamkirche in Munich. rather uptight Northern European Protestants walk into this church and they’re shocked.

They say, “Oh my god, this is not a church. This is an opera house.” Again, the Asam brothers with fantastically, the high altar is turned into an operatic drama with the Virgin jet propelled. She’s actually held up by iron bars from behind, zooming up towards heaven. And all her apostles flailing their arms around with emotion. So Baroque paintings, often, there’s a wonderful Monty Python sketch where all the figures in the paintings in the National Gallery carry come to life. And the shepherd in the hay wain goes to God in another painting to complain about the noise coming from the Baroque rooms. And they were specifically the Rubens. And Baroque paintings, you feel that there should be a soundtrack, that you can almost hear them singing and weeping and wailing. And this brings me to my first proper operatic excerpt. And after the great success of “Orfeo” in 1607, Monteverdi presented in opera the next year about Arianna abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. And unfortunately, most of that score has disappeared. But one scene, which was a tremendous success at the time, the lament of Arianna has survived. And I’m going to play you the opening of this scene. And there is a contemporary description of how the audience, which consisted of courtiers in Mantua was so gripped and so moved that everybody in the room was weeping.

Sorry, it’s not happening. Why is it not happening? Sorry about this, I did check this earlier and it was working, but it’s not seen to be now. So I think I’m going to have to move on from that. You can check it out, oh yes, here it is.

• It’s coming through. It’s just.

• Now I’m not going to attempt to give you a chronological history of Italian opera tonight, that would need a whole series of lectures. So what I’m going to do is point out certain aspects of Italian opera that seem to me to be crucial to its understanding. First of all, language. The Italians are lucky in having the most singable language in western civilization. Italian is a marvellous language to sing, got beautiful open vowel sounds, very crisp consonants. It’s a gift. It’s a great gift. And I’m going to demonstrate the beauty of the sung Italian language with Luciano Pavarotti. He wouldn’t be actually in my top 10 favourite tenors of all time, but nobody could deny, first of all, that he has this wonderful open throated sound. And that I think is, again, it’s very connected with the language. It’s very much more difficult to make this sound in French or German or Russian. French, the language is, you know, it’s very much in the nose, it’s all . so it pushes the voice into the nose. German, it’s all in the throat. It’s very guttural. But as I said, you’ve got these lovely open vowel sounds with Italian.

So here is Luciano Pavarotti with his famous for, of course the thrilling beauty of his voice, particularly the top. This is what Italian’s call squillo. This a brilliant, thrilling, bright sound at the top of voice and famous for his crystalline diction. Here he’s singing the notorious, our first aria of the Duke of Mantua again, it’s “Rigoletto” which is really the sort of, you could say, a manifesto of a love rat. I heard an interview on the television a few years ago with the great Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya. You see her top left here. And she was describing how early in her career while Stalin was in charge, everything had to be sung in Russian into all the Italian, French, German repertoire was sung in Russian. It was only after Stalin died that there was a relaxation of the rules. And they were able to sing Italian operas in Italian.

And the interviewer said, “Oh, Madam Vishnevskaya what was it like? Why was it different? What was different about singing in Italian?” And she said, “Singing in Italian is like butter in the throat”, she said. So I thought I would make that point by playing the piece you’ve just heard, sung in Russian by Stalin’s favourite tenor Ivan Kozlovsky, a very great tenor, very interesting. Everything he does is interesting. But I think you can see that singing that music in Russian is a bit of a struggle.

• Very naughty, of course, where he hangs onto those notes, but thrilling. It’s wonderful singing in its way. But an unmistakably Russian and non Italian sound. And that has to do with the language. But I want to do the same trick in reverse now, one of the problems that people have, I think with Wagner, a lot of people tell me, is just the sheer ugliness of Wagnerian voices. It’s partly that Wagner puts kind of stress on the voice that Italian composers don’t. But, it’s also to do with the language, that hideous sound that German heroic tenors produces. You know, in Germany, they call them because, you know, as the voice, it goes higher and louder, it becomes more and more in the throat and strangulated. So I’m hoping that my next excerpt might actually convert some people to Wagner, 'cause this is “Lohengrin” sung in Italian by the great Italian tenor, Aureliano Pertile. And how gorgeous is this? It’s so melting, it’s so tender, such a lovely sound. If only Wagner always sounded like that.

Now I want to demonstrate the perfect Italian female voice to you. There was a time when Italy produced a very high proportion of all of the great voices of the world. I dunno what’s happened. God up there, she or he, has turned the tap off as far as Italy is concerned. There aren’t many great Italian voices at the moment, but certainly up to, I would say the 1950s and 60s, Italy was where you went for a gorgeous voice. And none more gorgeous than Renata Tebaldi. This is the Italian soprano voice. I’m going to play an excerpt from “Madam Butterfly”. Which begins very quietly, and in the middle of the voice and the voice, it, it opens up, it’s like a flower coming into full bloom. As the voice rises and becomes louder, there are no edges. Whatever way you cut this voice, top to bottom, loud to soft, it’s always rounded, open and absolutely gorgeous.

• Now, the next thing I want to talk about is emotion. The Italians are very emotional people and they express their emotion very directly. They have no problems about wearing their feelings on their sleeve. This is a problem I think for people, Northern Europeans, particularly, I would say with a Protestant background, much less of a problem I would think for Jews who also are people who express emotion very directly. They don’t hide their emotions. You know, the British people, this is a terrible generalisation, but I think there’s an element of truth in it that traditionally the Brits are from the day that they’re born, they’re brought up to disguise, to dissimulate, to hide, to repress their emotions. And I want to tell you, please, when you go to the opera house, I want you to check your inhibitions in with your umbrella and leave them behind and give yourself to emotion.

And I’m next going to play you my favourite singer of all time, Magda Olivero. I’ll be interested in how you react to her, how you react to her voice. Some people think she doesn’t have a beautiful voice. I’m always so incredibly carried away by emotion, by her intensity, her complete lack of any kind of inhibition that I couldn’t really tell you whether she has a beautiful voice or not. To me, she creates extraordinary beauty. This is a fairly long excerpt I’m going to play. I’m going to continue up to the point where she says, everything is finished. She’s dying of thirst in the desert by the way.

• I heard her sing that in concert several times towards the end of her career, the last time she was actually, it wasn’t in concert, it was in a masterclass in Holland. And she was in her eighties and she was coaching a young Yugoslavian singer. She kept on saying, “No, no, no I want more, I want more emotion. I want more emotion.” And the young singer in the end, she was desperate and she said, “Madam, I’m sorry that’s all I have, I can’t give anymore.” And very calmly, Magda went to the piano and she told the pianist to start. And she sang through the whole aria. And it was the most, I think the most incredible piece of singing I’ve ever heard and everybody was crying. I mean, it was a theatre full of people. And all around me, people were sobbing. And the the pianist told me afterwards that she was crying so much, that she couldn’t even, you know, she could hardly play 'cause she couldn’t see the keyboard. And that’s what you want. I’m afraid you don’t get that very often in the Opera House these days. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is what the Italians call bravura.

I mean, how do you translate that? In a way it’s kind of showing off. So there is an element in Italian opera of circus, and some, again, Germans, Brits Northern Europeans can be a bit sniffy about the circus side of opera. But again, throw away your inhibitions, enjoy the spectacle, enjoy the circus. And bravura can take many different forms. It can be brilliant hanging on to top notes forever. It can just be producing a huge sound, a very big sound. Or it can be a very brilliant coloratura and ornament. So my next example, in some ways, this is a slightly perverse example again, because there could be hardly a less Italian singer in many ways than Joan Sutherland. She’s a very phlegmatic Australian. She does not have good linguistic skills. Her diction was notoriously bad actually. And she was certainly not a singer who could give way to emotions like an Italian singer could. But for the coloratura, of course, she is totally thrilling, amazing. And it wasn’t for nothing that that in Italy, she was nicknamed A la Stupenda. So I’m going to give you an excerpt from a live concert.

I think it’s actually her New York debut it’s right at the beginning of her career. And she’s singing the end of Bellini’s “La sonnambula” and the audience, you’ll see how the audience react. Nobody unless they were very old and they had memories going back before the First World War to people like Tetrazzini, there was nobody in that audience who’d ever heard singing like this. A big voice with incredible velocity and accuracy of coloratura.

• Next I want to talk about the term bel canto. Bel canto just literally translates as beautiful singing. But it has a whole collection really of connotations and meanings. It’s used usually for Italian opera of the first half of the 19th century. Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti. And in their operas, well particularly Bellini, Donizetti, the vocal line is paramount. The orchestra is often reduced as has been said to a big guitar. It just strums or does arpeggios, a very simple accompaniment. So everything is in the line. This puts great responsibility on the singer. It’s boring unless you have a singer who can put in light and shade and express. So I’m going to play another controversial singer. This is Maria Callas, love her or hate her. People have very extreme, she really is a meat or poison singer. I don’t think anybody could say it’s a beautiful sound. It’s often a very harsh sound. But she squeezes every drop of expression and emotion out of the words and this vocal line with, as I’ve said, a very simple orchestral apartment underneath. And that’s a good example of what Bellini, the composer of that music, called weeping in song.

Now very often in Italian operas, the high points of the drama will be in vocal alisanders, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets. There’s a moment of stasis and the action stops. And all the singers express their individual emotions. Victor Hugo, who wrote the play on which “Rigoletto” was based, he said that he greatly envied this possibility that, you know, in the quartet from Rigoletto, that you have the four singers all expressing very contrary, very different emotions at the same time. Obviously you can’t have that in spoken theatre 'cause you wouldn’t be able to hear what people are saying. So I’m going to play you another very famous ensemble, the climactic moment of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” when Lucia has just been tricked into a marrying a man she doesn’t love. And the true love of her life bursts into the ceremony just too late. And everybody reacts to this situation.

• So traditionally, before modern opera producers became so powerful and influential, what would happen was that the singers taking part in an ensemble would just walk to the front of the stage and they wouldn’t react to one another. They would be speaking or singing, so to speak, directly to the audience. There was often a sort of gladiatorial or competitive element with the singers trying to sing each other off the stage into the orchestra pit. This is a caricature of an early performance of “Nabucco” in Paris. Now, Verdi, of course, is the greatest of all Italian opera composers, one of the greatest opera composers ever. He’s up there with Mozart and Wagner. I suppose they’d be the trio of greatest opera composers. Long career. You see young Verdi, old Verdi. 30 something operas, many famous, great arias. I mean, any recycled CD of any great singer is likely to have an aria by Verdi or several.

But I particularly love his ensembles. And there’s one I want to play to you, which is from “I Lombardi”, which is an opera, it’s actually the opera that followed up “Nabucco”. It was his second greatest success at La Scala. And it’s about the Crusades. And there is a trio for soprano, tenor and bass. The tenor is a Saracen hero. And he encounters this Christian hermit who blesses him and baptises him. And he promptly keels over and dies, which I’ve always thought was a rather poor advertisement for baptism. So it’s a trio. But to echo the words of Princess Diana, there are four people in this trio because there is also a very intrusive violin part. So I picture the early performances with these three singers in competition with one another. Soprano, tenor, bass walked to the front of the stage, they’re all singing to the audience. They’re all trying to out sing each other, but they’re being totally upstaged by this violin in the orchestra pit. I assume that at La Scala at this time, there was a marvellous virtuoso violinist, and Verdi just said, “Oh, well let him do his thing.” So I’m going to take the phone off. So. It will finish in a minute, I suppose.

So I’m going to play you this trio, which is wonderful, exciting. But it has its slightly comic aspect with I said the three singers competing with each other and having to compete with the pesky violinist.

• I’m going to move on. This is “Il Trovatore”, in a way it’s a caricature of an Italian opera with its ludicrous coincidences and dramatic situations. But you’re never given a chance to actually stop and think about whether this is ludicrous or not. It goes at such a pace, it’s so packed with fabulous music, exciting melodies, drama, and so on. Just completely sweeps you away. In my young and foolish days when I was totally besotted, intoxicated, I should say with Wagner. I really couldn’t appreciate these earlier Verdi operas. And I remember having a discussion with an Italian friend and I was particularly about the duet I’m about to play you part of and saying, “Oh, this is silly. This is ludicrous.” Look at the words. I mean, it’s so bloodcurdling words, “kill me, drink my blood, abuse my dead body.” She’s saying him, but to the baritone Di Luna. But the whole thing is, sounds like “Knees up Mother Brown.” I mean it’s got this very fast rhythm and it’s in a major key. And I said, “What is this? What is this? ” And he said to me, “Oh you don’t get it.” He said, “In these very dramatic situations, of course the heartbeat is quickened.” And he’s right. I think he’s so right. This is what we hear in this music. It’s the quickened heartbeat, the quickened Italian heartbeat.

• Now the great Italian tradition of opera, which began in 1607 with “Orfeo”, Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” came to a very spectacular end, a fitting end really in 1926 with the premiere, the posthumous premiere, of course, of Puccini’s “Turandot”. He died two years earlier. And as I’m running out of time, I think I’m going to skip this. You can all check out the fabulous Franco Corelli singing the big aria from “Turandot” on YouTube. If you really, and I described Renata Tebaldi as having the ideal Italian soprano voice. If you want to hear the ideal male voice, the ideal Italian tenor voice, Franco Corelli is the one. It has an incredible squillo, incredible ring to it. It’s totally thrilling. But I’m instead, I’m going to finish of course with my favourite singer. How could I otherwise, this is Magda Olivero in a live performance in Naples in 1959. She is definitely milking the audience and you’ll see the reaction she gets, for really at the result of her incredible performance of the penultimate note, she draws out this note with a huge, huge crescendo. You think, where does the breath come from to create this note? And of course the audience goes completely berserk at the end.

• That’s how you should react to a performance like that. And I’m going to finish this one short anecdote. My very dear friend Maria Teresa Tebaldi, she’s a cousin of Renata and she was also a very close friend of Magda Olivero. And in 2000, and let me see when this would’ve been, 2011, it was Magda Olivero’s hundred and first birthday. And Maria Teresa rang her in Milan and her secretary picked up the phone and there was the sound of singing in the background. And Maria Teresa said to the secretary, “Can you turn the radio down? I can’t hear you.” And he said, “Oh no, no, that’s not the radio. It’s Madame Olivero. She is practising her Madam Butterfly”, aged 101. So that is all I have time for tonight. I’d love to talk to you forever about Italian opera. Let’s see what comments and questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, you’re right. It was the quartet from “Rigoletto”. Thank you for your very nice comments. I so agree with you. The greatest quartet of all opera. It’s so fantastic. I never get sick of it. Mind you, I think “Rigoletto” is utter, it doesn’t put the foot wrong, it’s the perfect opera.

No, it wasn’t Buhling, it was Gigli.

Q: Why are there no really famous Spanish operas?

A: 'Cause there is a wonderful tradition of Zarzuela, which ought to be better known. There’s some very fine Zarzuela. You know, there are a couple of Grenados fire. There are a couple of good Spanish operas. But it is strange, isn’t it?

Q: Who invented musical notation?

A: Do you know I can’t tell you that. I’d have to look it up. Yes.

Let me see. One of the main reasons for singing rather than speaking is that more than one can. Yes, that was a point of course that I made later in my lecture.

Galli-Curci. Oh, the sound of Galli-Curci. It’s one of those voices where I just feel it’s almost like a need. I have to pull down a Galli-Curci cd every now and then, just to hear that wonderful velvety timbre of her voice. Yes. She’s such a wonderful singer.

Q: Who is my favourite tenor? And the following two?

A: I think Tauber, Richard Tauber is my favourite tenor. Kozlovsky would be up there, Schipa, Pertile and there are a few French tenors I like very much. It would be a long way down the list, I’m afraid, before I got anywhere near Pavarotti.

Vote yes if you think all opera should be sung in Italian. Do you know? Well I’m a bit perverse about this 'cause I do actually enjoy often opera sung in the wrong language. For me, actually, what’s really important is that the singer should sing in their native language. 'Cause I think singers are always more natural and spontaneous singing in their native language. Certainly I’m always up for any recordings of Wagner in Italian.

Q: Hi Judith. Wagner really sounds special in Italian. Can I recommend to you? It’s quite easy to get on cd.

A: There’s a complete “Parsifal” with Maria Callas. She’s absolutely fantastic in that. And it’s “Parisfal”, well, it’s not an opera that I feel very comfortable with, but I feel much more comfortable with it when it’s sung in Italian.

Elda Ribetti, yes. Do you know I’ve got a couple of 78s of her, that’s a name from the past. I haven’t listened to her in 40 years, but I do have a 78 RPM record of her singing the aria from “Larondine”. Galli-Curci sang at the theatre opening, in Chicago, of course. Chicago was the city that that made, made Galli-Curci into a star.

Q: Who was singing Madam Butterfly?

A: That was the immortal Renata Tibaldi.

That’s true that Vishnevskaya was married to Rostropovich, which can’t have been fun, I don’t think.

Wagner’s opera, somebody defending Wagner, not just about beauty, but about expression. All correct what you say, but why not make it about beauty? Wagner wanted, he wanted his operas, he did not approve for what later became the thyroid bark. He wanted his operas to be properly sung in a bel canto way. And they’re much, much better sung like that in my opinion.

Yes. I’m so used to historical recordings that they don’t bother me. In some ways I think they can be more truthful than a lot of modern, technically so-called perfect. Right.

To Ruth Gordon. I’m not sure what that refers to.

Q: Did any composers write for particular singers?

A: Yes, a lot of composers did, all the way through, Mozart wrote roles for particular singers. Puccini did, Massenet did of course. Yes, I think most of the great composers wrote roles for particular singers.

I’m encouraging to let go of your emotions. Yeah, I mean it is, you want to cry, anybody who can sit through a Puccini opera and not cry, I’m sorry there’s something wrong with them. You need to get help.

Singing at the moment. I don’t which moment that was. There is a list as always. Oh, incidentally, I’m afraid you got sent the wrong images. If you want the right images you can email and they will send and Lauren will send them to you. But you have got the list of all the singers. So you should be able to find that whoever it was.

Be very difficult for most sopranos to sing without emotion.

Yes, I agree with you. But you won’t find another quite like Magda, I don’t think.

Yes, it’s a joke of course, isn’t it? That she dies of thirst in Louisiana where I don’t think there’s usually a shortage of rain.

“Nessun Dorma”, right. I think I’ve just listed my favourite tenors.

Q: Was camelus Callas?

A: In some ways, yes, I think there are both the singers who have voices which are not conventionally beautiful. There is some overlap. I prefer Magda Olivero in most Puccini and various roles. Callas, I think of course her great, she was greatest in the belcanto roles. And Jaconda of course, fantastic role for Callas. But yeah, you could do an interesting compare and contrast. The one role where it’s really a tossup who’s the better I think is Tosca. They’re both fabulous in Tosca in their different ways.

Yes. Southerns a mad scene, of course. Yes, it is absolutely staggering.

Q: Why are today’s accompanying?

A: I don’t know. That was a mistake. But as I said, you can get the right, it’s not the notes actually it’s just the images, the notes are the correct ones I think.

Recommend Venera Gimadieva as Violetta. I haven’t heard her.

Magda Olivero is the full name and it’s on the list. Yeah, Mozart of course. I mean I’ve got various lectures on Mozart. We’ll see what transpires. I’m very happy to do some Mozart lectures. And I’m glad you liked the amazing Kozlovsky. He’s the completely extraordinary.

Gigli, your mum’s favourite tenor. Tauber is my number one favourite. But you know, the others I mentioned I’m very fond of too.

Opera takes us out of ourselves and our mundane existence. I so agree with you. I so agree. It was very cathartic. Thank you Hindi.

Actually, I want to tell you a story about how I first heard, if I’ve got a second, Renata Tibaldi. I was five years old at the time. One day I was playing in an orchard in front of my grandparents’ house. And I went by mistake into their neighbor’s house, which was identical. And that was the first time I ever met a Jewish family. They were called Kay. And I was a small child, distressed, confused. And I just remember them enveloping me in warmth and love. And from that moment they adopted me and they knew I liked singing. And they sat me on the sofa and they said, oh, here’s a record of a new singer called Renata Tibaldi. And I liked it very much. And they gave money to my mother to get her to buy me an LP of Renata Tibaldi. Which I still have. Some lucky person saw Callas and the wonderful hairy chested, fiery Fedora Barbieri in “Norma”. That must have been abs, I bet Barbieri was good too. Must have been amazing. Greatest sextet.

Yes. Probably the Lucia. It’s fantastic piece, isn’t it? Called park and bark. Yes. Good. I’m glad somebody’s hooked on opera. I probably better stop soon.

See one of the big three and then decide, “Boheme”, “Aida”, “Carmen”. You are quite right. But I think for me the number one would be “Boheme”. That’s always the, I think it “Boheme” has more laughs, more tears, more tunes, more emotion per square inch than any opera ever written. I always say it’s the one to start with. There are no boring moments in “Boheme” you can’t possibly be bored.

Oh yes. When singers just come to the front of the stage. Yes, I see what you mean. Yeah. I had the experience of Italian with an Italian stroke Jewish opera. That must have been something.

Yeah, that’s double emotion for your money then, isn’t it? Good.

Yes. Italian is such a, a really beautifully enunciated Italian is beyond compare. Ooh. And you’ve got, here’s Jonathan Goldberg, who managed to get an autograph of Gigli.

Yes, Gigli did go to South Africa of course, so did Gobbi. A number of great singers went.

Q: Who’s the last aria?

A: My all time favourite singer, Magda Olivero. And that is the aria from “Adriana Lecouvreur”, all on the list that you should have.

Margaret saying thanks to the introduction to Magda Olivero. Yes. The control is extraordinary. I’m glad you think it’s a beautiful sound. I do, but lots of people don’t.

Q: How do you understand that Jewish tenors were so popular with German audiences.

A: Yeah, well that’s a whole talk in itself, isn’t it? Tauber and Schmidt being the, partly they were just so much better. Most of the other German tenors were so ghastly in that period, really ghastly. So you know, Tauber and Schmidt were, oh, champagne in the desert compared the other German tenors.

Eli saying passionate opera lover from his Viennese mother. Oh, so many wonderful singers, Jewish singers of that period who didn’t get a chance to have a career.

I think I’d better stop this could go on for forever. Thank you for all your very nice comments. And I will be moving on, that last opera was “Adriana Lecouvreur” by Cilea. It’s on the list.

So I think I better stop here. Thank you all very much and I’ll see you on Wednesday for French opera.