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Art Imitates Life, Part 1

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When operatic characters are specifically opera singers, are they hyped superstars, soulful artists, or professionals there for a gig?

In three Richard Strauss operas, they are mostly Door Number Three. And indeed, old-fashioned patronage system was often just like that: you sang whatever your hosts ordered in like so much culinary takeout, or what a composer in someone's patronage handed to you to perform. This is most apparent in the 1912 Ariadne auf Naxos, in which the pompous opera-seria soprano and tenor are ordered to share the stage with the equivalent of a troupe of vaudevillians. The latter take it in stride, as Commedia Dell’Arte players were in fact quite improvisational. But the soprano and tenor, unused to having to deal with what has not been scripted, react not only with general horror but a more practical concern: as their time onstage is to be reduced, each pleads in an aside with the Composer to cut his or her costar’s aria!

The poor Italian tenor in the 1911 Der Rosenkavalier doesn’t even get his fifteen minutes of fame. The Marschallin is so busy with other hired help and visitors that he is lucky to be heard at all. His brief aria is distinct on its first time around but, when he repeats it, the arguing of the Notary and Baron Ochs grows so extreme that his voice is drowned out in a sea of cacophony. Still, his traditional stage direction requires that he kiss the Marschallin's hand and scrape and bow his way out, regardless of how rudely he has just been treated. He daren’t indulge in divo behavior –- not if he wants to be employed by other society matrons for whom he will probably also be little more than a diversionary performing seal. The soprano and tenor invited to perform in the 1940 Capriccio are at least thrown a fish after their competitive duet: they are allowed to stay for refreshments...and greedily consume so much that the soprano becomes weepily drunk on Spanish wine and has to be removed by her costar before she causes a scene not on the program!

Yet another Italian tenor, Alfred, appears in Johann Strauss's 1874 Die Fledermaus, as the former suitor of Rosalinde, now married to Gabriel Eisenstein. He comically and effusively serenades her to soften her reserve and, depending upon the leniency of the work's staging director (Chacun a son gout, indeed), may sing quite a few bits from famous arias (even some written post-Fledermaus!) in an effort to win his romantic case (a great deal of the humor derives from the fact that, if any line from an aria seems to suit the occasion, he launches into song). He makes himself so much at home that, garbed in Gabriel's dressing gown, he is mistaken for her husband when the Warden comes to call, and for the sake of Rosalinde's honor does not disclose his true identity. The prison setting of Act III produces more operatic moments for Alfred who is now tormenting his jailer, Frosch, with his tenorizing (and we presume he has in fact done so all through Act II!). It is essential that Alfred be played as an Italian, and a rather dim-witted one at that, and so he is essentially a Germanic caricature of all imaginable excesses of a Latin lover-slash-Italian opera singer.