There is a famous scene in EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which a group of Edwardian tourists attend a performance in Tuscany of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. ‘However bad the performance is tonight,’ one of them quips, ‘it will be alive. The Italians don’t love music silently, like the beastly Germans. The audience takes its share – sometimes more.’
Though forewarned, his companions find themselves discomfited by what they hear that night from an audience that at times acts as if it were drunk. Their fellow listeners tap their feet and drum their fingers along with the music, talk through choruses, murmur and sigh approvingly throughout arias, and finally explode into jubilant shouts and applause. Forster uses this scene to symbolise the respective national temperaments of the Italians and the British: the former exuberant, warm and in touch with their emotions, the latter uptight, cold and repressed.
Opera houses of the Georgian period were noisy
In earlier eras, however, British audiences would have been noisy, too. At London’s opera houses during the Georgian period, there was a culture of audience members coming and going throughout a performance, eating, drinking, talking and flirting, which must have meant singers were used to performing against a background of constant hubbub. This relaxed, at times indifferent, attitude to watching an opera – with audiences concentrating only during the ‘big tunes’ – lingered on well into the 19th century.
As the Victorian period progressed, however, the Queen’s regular attendance at Covent Garden and the dimming of house lights eventually encouraged better decorum and a culture of quiet, attentive listening. Wagner’s theatrical reforms at the Bayreuth Festival, designed to focus audience attention firmly on the stage, also gradually began to set an example of respectful audience behaviour that was adopted across northern Europe.
Italian audiences, however, maintained their ‘liveliness’, whether at home or abroad. Critics in early-20th-century New York often remarked on the expressive Italian expatriates who were a mainstay in the gallery at the Metropolitan Opera, and the Royal Opera House in London had an equivalent contingent of enthusiastic Soho Italians who turned out in force for operas from their native land. In both cases, these listeners were well-informed: one 1920s critic said that the Soho crowd discussed singers’ voices with ‘the connoisseurship of a stableman discussing a horse’.
Hoots, shouts, dog whistles and hired claques... opera's worst behaved audiences
Singers have sometimes had to plough on through serious instances of disrespectful audience behaviour, in a variety of national contexts. It must have been challenging for the cast of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra in 1861 to continue singing as members of the infamous ‘Jockey Club’ (an aristocratic sporting club) disrupted the first performance – incessant hoots, shouts and dog whistles in protest at its lack of a conventional ballet scene that would allow the club’s members to ogle the ballerinas’ legs ultimately led to the cancellation of the run.
Where audience disorderliness has been targeted more personally at individual singers, this has not always been because of a bad performance. The premiere of Madam Butterfly at La Scala in 1904 was disrupted by what was almost certainly a hired claque. The rumpus of bellows, guffaws, animal noises and shouted personal insults – including cries of ‘pregnant!’ – meant that the leading lady, Rosina Storchio, was reduced to tears, unable to hear her cues. Such claques were often hired by rival singers or publishing houses in Italy, or took it upon themselves to attempt to bribe performers. Enrico Caruso refused to pay a claque for applause as a young tenor in Naples and after being booed vowed never to sing in his home town again.
When performers are booed... from Pavarotti to Callas
On other occasions, singers have been left in no doubt that audiences have found fault with their voice. This crushing treatment has been meted out to the best of them – even Luciano Pavarotti was booed at La Scala in 1992 when he cracked a top B. And the most vocal in demonstrating their displeasure at that particular theatre have been the infamous loggionisti (occupants of the gallery), an audience subset that prides itself on being particularly discerning.
Singers have varied in their willingness to take such behaviour on the chin. In 2006, French tenor Roberto Alagna responded to boos after his ‘Celeste Aida’ at La Scala by striding offstage and refusing to come back on; the theatre subsequently dropped him from the run. Maria Callas, on the other hand, returned to the Metropolitan Opera in New York for repeated doses of booing from merciless opera fans who had a zero-tolerance attitude towards her occasional vocal wobbles, and the playwright Terrence McNally even recalled seeing her being pelted with vegetables.
Adoration and obsession: when audiences become too enthusiastic
Warm audience responses can also sometimes cause headaches for singers. Many a prima donna has had to duck from bouquets of flowers – albeit preferable to carrots – being thrown from the stalls. Audiences have often pushed singers to their limits, demanding repeated encores of popular arias – although the more egocentric have been only too keen to oblige.
Mid-performance encores fell out of favour in the 20th century, as operas began to be viewed as total art works rather than a sequence of hit numbers, and La Scala and the Met went so far as to place bans on them, yet they are not completely unknown, even in the modern age. In 2008, tenor Juan Diego Flórez began to make a habit of repeating the aria ‘Ah! Mes Amis’ (with its many top Cs) in performances of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment, reviving an earlier practice where the singer jumped at the audience’s command.
Some opera fans have developed a level of adoration for particular singers that has reached the level of an obsession. The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, who undertook an extensive, cannily marketed American tour in 1850, was widely said to have created a ‘mania’, being greeted by crowds of thousands wherever she went, her visit spawning the creation of a vast amount of merchandise and the renaming of streets and buildings in her honour. But opera fans can also be notoriously tribal and sometimes committing your allegiance to one star can mean being prepared to mistreat another. The audience at La Scala (yes, them again) once booed, whistled and pelted the stage with debris when soprano Mirella Freni replaced local favourite Renata Scotto in a performance of Verdi’s La traviata.
When fans go the extra mile...
Singers’ attitudes towards their adoring fans have also varied. No doubt some are irritated by the gaggle of enthusiasts at the stage door, but in the 1920s, two ordinary London girls, Louise and Ida Cook, managed to become friends with the star soprano Amelita Galli-Curci after hearing her sing at the Royal Albert Hall and sending her a fan letter. Galli-Curci graciously offered to give them free tickets to the Met and invite them for dinner if they could ever make it to New York, and ended up welcoming the sisters to her homes in Manhattan and the Catskill Mountains when they had painstakingly saved up the funds necessary to make the trip.
Such tenacity on the part of fans in pursuit of their goal has not been unusual, and some have proved themselves willing to go to extraordinary lengths to hear their preferred star sing. In 1964, 200 people queued in freezing cold weather for three days outside Covent Garden, prepared to sleep out on the street in their determination to secure a cheap standing position to hear Callas sing the title role in Puccini’s Tosca. Claudio E Benzecry’s book The Opera Fanatic, meanwhile, charts how audience members at the Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires have turned opera-going into an all-consuming passion, making epic journeys of hundreds of miles to hear their favourite stars.
When does a standing ovation lose its power?
Sometimes, audience members are so keen to display their enthusiasm for a particular singer that they end up irritating those sitting around them. The notorious ‘bravo man’, well-known in London but no doubt found universally, who bellows his approval before a conductor has so much as lowered his or her baton, is widely regarded as a pest. A practice of default (and thus meaningless) standing ovations, blocking the view of the person sitting behind, has also been spreading across the globe from the US in recent years.
Venting on social media... opera's worst behaved audiences
Modern technology has given audiences new mechanisms for expressing disappointment with a singer’s performance and some fans do not hold back in venting their spleen on social media. The hope, however, that this might shield singers from rude behaviour in the theatre itself seems to be a vain one. Indeed, online forums have even allowed groups of disgruntled opera lovers to plan coordinated booing campaigns, the Corriere della sera coining the phrase ‘booing terrorism’ (terrorismo buatorio) after just such an incident at La Scala at a performance of Bellini’s Il pirata in 2018. Clearly greater sensitivity in the 21st century to the fact that there is a real human being behind the celebrity persona has not curtailed the worst audience behaviour.
The practice of booing lives on around the world... opera's worst behaved audiences
Attitudes towards the acceptability of booing individual singers seem to vary from country to country, even city to city. The practice lives on, as one might expect, in Italy, and most notoriously at that famous opera house in Milan, where audiences remain highly vocal in their responses, as likely to show their disappointment when a singer fluffs a top note as their delight when a performance goes well. However, singers have also been booed in recent years at Bayreuth (so much for polite German listening) and last January the French mezzo-soprano Katia Ledoux wrote online about the painful experience of being booed at the Vienna Volksoper, graciously characterising it as ‘detailed feedback’ on the part of a local audience known to be ‘unique’ and ‘passionate’.
Being a city with a long, deep and serious engagement with opera and knowledgeable listeners does not guarantee respect. However, it is hard to imagine much boorish behaviour in Barcelona, where the audience is well known for being scrupulous in its pre-performance preparation and supportive of its local opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu. There are also few reports of booing in opera-loving Japan and South Korea (though soprano Angela Gheorghiu was booed in Seoul for attempting to stop a co-star performing an encore).
In London, booing an individual singer for his or her vocal performance is also now generally regarded as poor form, and the Covent Garden audience recently turned on an ill-mannered individual who heckled a child singer and was subsequently given a lifetime ban. Audiences in these cities do still boo, but nowadays they tend to reserve their rancour for someone else: the creative teams behind self-indulgent, gratuitous, or just plain poor productions. That, however, is a whole other story.
