# Disastrous opera performances you've seen?



## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Sometimes even the best opera falls flat due to inept staging, bad singing, accidental problems with the set or scenery, other events.

Sometimes the opera itself is to blame, either an awful "hidden gem" by an otherwise fine composer that's just bad music. Or maybe a premiere of a new opera that's equally awful.

What have you seen, comically bad stagings or singing or whatever, or operas that should have never seen the light of day in the first place? And for this thread, not well-known historic disasters, but only operas (or individual singers or scenes or similar) that you personally witnessed...

I'll start. The small but delightful opera company where I sang did wonders with tight budgets. This local company is miniscule compared with our "colleague" company, Houston Grand Opera. Nevertheless, this small semi-pro company put on 4 productions a season, all public domain works, a full staging, sets and scenery and costumes, in the original language, accompanied by a modest but very good chamber orchestra.

One of our operas was Tales of Hoffmann. This is an ambitious opera for a small company to produce because of a fairly large cast and somewhat elaborate staging. And this came to bite us, unfortunately.

In the first act, where the "robot girl" Olympia is mistaken by Hoffmann for a real girl (due to his wearing rose-colored glasses). he's first infatuated with her when he sees her "revealed" in the Doctor's study. Well, in our production, we had this circular curtain surrounding Olympia that slightly resembled the old-style shower curtain ring often used above free-standing bathtubs that don't have enclosures. It was a metal ring, horizontal and about 6 feet in diameter, from which hung a curtain. Hoffmann would "turn a crank" -- actually a non-functioning ratchet wheel, and the stage crew would hoist the curtain on cue, revealing Olympia.

Except that the stage crew was goofing off (some local high school boys were our "finely tuned" stage crew, ha ha) and didn't pull the cord. So Hoffmann was left standing on stage, "gazing in rapture" at a curtain ring instead of the girl behind it. Naturally, the tenor still started his aria of delight, singing to just a hanging drapery in effect, extolling on her beauty when nobody could see her.

You could hear our stage director running down the back stairs and across the back of the stage to hoist the curtain herself. Of course by the time she got there and pulled the rope, the aria was nearly finished, so the circular curtain lifted briefly, we all got to see Olympia for a second or two, then the drapery had to be lowered per cue, because Hoffmann needed to break off his fixation.

The next night, fully chastened, the teenage stage crew was ready, and hoisted the curtain. However they were early doing it, and were told "not now!!" so the curtain lowered, now too low (the rope had tape wrappings showing how low and how high to hoist it but you can't really expect a high school boy to recognize a bright strip of red tape, can you?

So the curtain around Olympia went up and down and down lower and then caught on the stage and tore open when lifted again. It was like a Marx brothers gag.

But the true disaster was yet to appear... In the Venice canal scene (act 3 but many companies switch acts 2 and 3 these days) you have the lovely evening at the canal, the beautiful bacarolle sung, as the principals arrive via canal boat. In our small production, we only had one gondola so it was decided that Nicklausse (Hoffmann's friend and actually the Muse) would be the only passenger.

The "grand canal" was simply a section of the wood-floor stage, set far toward the rear of the stage, a little "aisle" marked off by wood margins that went all the way across the stage. There was a row of "shrubbery" and garden walls (painted boards) blocking view of the wood aisle, and the "gondola" was simply a 4-wheel heavy duty furniture-dolly on which a mockup gondola was nailed.

Offstage were, yes, our highschool boys and a rope attached to the front of the gondola. So Nicklausse would recline on the gondola, one of our chorus was the gondolier, and the boys would pull the rope, bringing the gondola onstage from the wings, across the back of the set to stop midway, Nicklausse to disembark, and the gondola to sail away again as our eager stage crew pulled the dolly offstage.

Except that the gondola wheels got stuck in the guideway. The "gondolier" (a chorus tenor) tried his best to unstick the wheels by using his pole but the more he pried at the wheels, the more the offstage teenage boys pulled the rope, tighter and tighter.

So the gondola was stuck about 1/3 across the stage, but Nicklausse and the gondolier improvised, the gondolier helping Nicklausse step over the cardboard shrubbery and leave the gondola. The gondolier followed as per his cues.

Unfortunately, with two people no longer on the "gondola" wheels and holding it in place, as soon as they stepped off, the offstage boys (still pulling on the rope with all their might) "won the war against gravity" and the gondola, particle board chassis and sides, lower furniture-moving base, and 4 big rubbery wheels, soared into the air and bounced across the rear of the stage, crashing into an arrangement of flowers (real ones this time) and finally came to rest, upside down, wheels spinning squeakily. Not the best ending for that romantic entrance, eh?


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

Too funny!

When I read your intro I was thinking of disastrous productions I've seen that weren't disastrous in the director's mind, just in mine. But your anecdote - brought other things to mind. 

I seem to recall that in the one performance of Rinaldo I saw, the sets were supposed to slide smoothly from right to left (the audience's right to left) as the scenes progressed. At one point something - a couch? - got hung up in the tracks and everything stopped moving. From the balcony I could see people working back there in the shadows, trying to get it all fixed. It didn't wind up screwing everything up royally, but there was clearly something wrong.

Then of course there were the planned disasters - From the House of the Dead, and Nixon in China - that went exactly as planned but just seemed like horrible travesties to me. Argh. Well, it's no fun to dwell on the bad ones. Well, only a little fun. :lol:


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## suteetat (Feb 25, 2013)

A production of Magic Flute when Tamino played his flute and all kinds the animal came on the stages including a big rhino. 
At the end of the scene, all the animals exited the stages either on the left or right. The rhino kind of got lost and kept banging
his head against something on the stage wing until the 2 men inside lost their footings and the guy holding the rear end
felt backward splitting the rhino into 2 parts. A guy in monkey suit came over and helped guided the rhino off stage eventually 
to the amusement of the audience.


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## sospiro (Apr 3, 2010)

suteetat said:


> A production of Magic Flute when Tamino played his flute and all kinds the animal came on the stages including a big rhino.
> At the end of the scene, all the animals exited the stages either on the left or right. The rhino kind of got lost and kept banging
> his head against something on the stage wing until the 2 men inside lost their footings and the guy holding the rear end
> felt backward splitting the rhino into 2 parts. A guy in monkey suit came over and helped guided the rhino off stage eventually
> to the amusement of the audience.


:lol:

Too funny!!


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Very funny stories -- thanks!


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## Il Seraglio (Sep 14, 2009)

Ben Heppner in the last _Tristan_ at Covent Garden four years ago was approaching disastrous. A weak performance, but he was understood to have a throat infection... so I still felt for him when he got booed and quite angry with some of the audience (despite the mindblowing ticket prices).


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## MAuer (Feb 6, 2011)

I've never understood booing a singer who is experiencing a horrible performance. That person is certainly aware that he or she sounds terrible, and often can't help it when illness is involved. Booing is simply rubbing salt in the wound, and I don't have the heart to do it. Should Heppner have canceled if he was suffering from an infection? Perhaps -- and then the same people who booed him probably would have bellyached about the cancelation.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

There have been some pretty disastrous productions of Mozart operas at Saltzburg which could have been improved by employing a director who wanted to fulfil the composer's vision rather than his own daft take on it.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

MAuer said:


> I've never understood booing a singer who is experiencing a horrible performance. That person is certainly aware that he or she sounds terrible, and often can't help it when illness is involved. Booing is simply rubbing salt in the wound, and I don't have the heart to do it. Should Heppner have canceled if he was suffering from an infection? Perhaps -- and then the same people who booed him probably would have bellyached about the cancelation.


Absolutely correct. In our little opera company, our Figaro in Nozze had come down with a terrible cold and his voice was temporarily shot, so our manager came onstage before curtain and simply announced to the audience the situation, asking that they forgive our Figaro for being under the weather, as we didn't have an understudy available. So Figaro performed well, acting terrifically as he always did, but low-volume on the singing. And the audience cheered him at curtain calls as he deserved.

Sometimes there's an onstage disaster with scenery or whatever, sometimes a specific singer screws up, but booing is rude and bourgeois, showing a low sort of audience concern. Sometimes the audience might laugh at a mixup -- occasionally there are such when the performance is live -- and we even laugh offstage about it, too. But booing is crass.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

DavidA said:


> There have been some pretty disastrous productions of Mozart operas at Saltzburg which could have been improved by employing a director who wanted to fulfil the composer's vision rather than his own daft take on it.


Correct. It's one thing to be innovative and use new ideas to present a classic. Great example is the recent Met production of Rigoletto, reset into 1960s mob-ruled Las Vegas. I saw the production live on HDTV broadcast and it worked just fine (I've since bought the DVD, too) because the original impact and beauty of the opera was undimmed. But that's one thing, and to totally circumvent an opera's original intent and structure just to adulate the director's misshapen "vision" is another.


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## suteetat (Feb 25, 2013)

Il Seraglio said:


> Ben Heppner in the last _Tristan_ at Covent Garden four years ago was approaching disastrous. A weak performance, but he was understood to have a throat infection... so I still felt for him when he got booed and quite angry with some of the audience (despite the mindblowing ticket prices).


Heppner was not really in a good form during that run of Tristan with Nina Stemme/Pappano. I was at one of the earlier performance in the run, while his voice was still beautiful, there was some mannerism to his singing that was bothersome. 
I have not heard him in years but his singing had deteriorated quite a bit since I heard him sang in Meistersinger with CSO/Solti that was recorded live. Now I really wished that he was not ill and canncelled his Tristan in Chicago the night I went when he sang it with Jane Eaglen back in the 1990's. Come to think about it, he did looked very pale and pasty, I thought it was just the make up, may be he really was rather sick!


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Interesting - I haven't seen it but even the conductor didn't like this perversion:

The British conductor Robin Ticciati has walked out of Zurich Opera after two performances of Don Giovanni in a bizarre production by Sebastian Baumgartner. The company’s music director, Fabio Luisis, has stepped in for the rest of the run.
The general director Andreas Homoki said he could not understand why Ticciati, if he hated the show, did not withdraw during six weeks of rehearsal. We have been hearing murmurs that the orchestra is profoundly unhappy with the company’s present direction.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

DavidA said:


> Interesting - I haven't seen it but even the conductor didn't like this perversion:
> 
> The British conductor Robin Ticciati has walked out of Zurich Opera after two performances of Don Giovanni in a bizarre production by Sebastian Baumgartner. The company's music director, Fabio Luisis, has stepped in for the rest of the run.
> The general director Andreas Homoki said he could not understand why Ticciati, if he hated the show, did not withdraw during six weeks of rehearsal. We have been hearing murmurs that the orchestra is profoundly unhappy with the company's present direction.


Please expand... what is bizarre about the production? By the way, your account of the dispute is quite well written. do you write professionally?


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

katdad said:


> Please expand... what is bizarre about the production?


You can why:

http://www.seenandheard-internation...ction-of-don-giovanni-upsets-traditionalists/


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Sorry, I don't click on links that aren't a familiar source. I'd appreciate your personal feedback on what you experienced yourself, actually, as this is the thread title -- "... performances you've seen". We each write responses and comments here and it's from individual comments that we get the most value.

Your initial report, talking "about" the situation, was, as I said, well written, makes me wonder whether you write professionally or semi-professionally (such as reviews and so on). Thanks.


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## Adeodatus100 (May 27, 2013)

There was a _Parsifal_ at Covent Garden in the late 70s. Act 1, scene 1 was set in a bombed-out cathedral. So was Act 1, scene 2. Act 2 was set in ... a bombed-out cathedral, by which time I think the audience began to see a pattern forming. On the plus side, Robert Lloyd was a superb Gurnemanz. But the bombed-out cathedral _motif_ became a tad monotonous as the opera dragged through Act 3 to its underwhelming climax, set in a bombed-out cathedral.


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## mamascarlatti (Sep 23, 2009)

A pic, to give you a flavour:










BTW "Seen and heard International" is a perfectly reputable and interesting musical review site, although some of the Regie productions featured might give you pause for thought!


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Thanks for the info. I'm just understandably reluctant to click on unknown sites. Malware lurks...

I checked the link... OMG what a travesty... just the sort of crud where the production team says "Look at me!, pay no attention to Mozart!" Arghhh...


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## Operafocus (Jul 17, 2011)

I saw a Rigoletto some years ago where the Duke was done by a Russian tenor whose name escapes me. He sang, for some reason, the entire role off the voice. The people in the audience kept looking at each other with a collective "wtf!?" expression on their faces because it was a bit like someone shoving Justin Bieber up on an opera stage and asking him to sing the arias in his limited pop voice.

Probably _the _most embarrassing moment was when he did "La donna e mobile" (aka the tune _everybody knows _and pretty much always gets a round of applause just for being _really _recognisable) and it was just met with a dead silence. The conductor didn't pick up the orchestra quick enough afterwards, so we were left with what felt like an everlasting silence where you could literally hear a pin drop. It got so uncomfortable people started shifting in their seats.

I saw the same production again (cause I liked one of the other singers) a couple of weeks or so later, and the tenor did it again. Off the voice, in falsetto. WHY? Had he been sick in the first performance I saw, surely they'd either get a replacement for him if he was still ill...? It's not like the Duke is one of those roles _nobody _can do.

Although the rest of the production was superb, as were the others performers, it really was _one_ of the worst vocal duds I've heard. Twice. I've heard some over the years, but this one was almost mind-blowing


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