It was during the interval in the ”family circle” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera that the elderly lady with the German accent told the guffawing man in the row behind us that Mozart’s Magic Flute wasn’t supposed to be funny. She wasn’t much taken either by the production’s flapping puppets and dancing bears. ”With Mozart, it is only the music that matters,” she insisted. So bad luck librettist Emanuel Schikaneder. This kind of engagement is part of the Faustian pact you strike when you subscribe to an eight-opera series for just $25 a ticket.
It is a remarkable deal. When the season ends next week my wife and I will have seen - albeit at something of a distance - one completely new opera (Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, directed by Zhang Yimou), as well as three new productions, including Puccini’s Madame Butterfly directed by Anthony Minghella. We will also have heard Deborah Voigt and Placido Domingo.
But when our invitation to resubscribe to the 2007-8 season arrived (”Are we free on Thursday, April 10, 2008, honey?”), we had to pause for thought. Our visits had coincided twice with those of our friend with the accent, and we had also learnt - unavoidably - of her strong views on gender relations in Japan. But hers was comparatively normal behaviour up in the family circle.
We recalled a snowy night in February when we arrived for Jenufa just as the lights went down, causing the senior citizen who had draped his coat over our seats to curse loudly at my wife. This same man was responsible for a bout of extreme rustling at the emotional end of the first act. Somehow the fact that his friend was wearing strap-on east European binoculars only added to the annoyance. And the second act was spoiled when an elderly man slipped into an empty seat nearby and started cracking and eating nuts.
It is also hard to spend the first 90 minutes of Otto Schenk’s production of Mastersingers sitting next to a man with the respiratory issues of a Wagner-loving Darth Vader. You can’t ask someone to stop breathing, although the front of house manager kindly moved us for acts two and three (albeit to seats behind a man checking his messages on an illuminated mobile phone).
But there is something besides ill manners going on at the back of the Met, I realised after talking to Grant McCracken, a social anthropologist who advises businesses. We were discussing not opera, but the Starbucks coffee chain. Starbucks, it seems, faces the challenge of encouraging its customers to linger a while, but not to fall asleep, and certainly not to change their socks. People should feel comfortable, but not too comfortable, because that, McCracken told me, is when they can start to behave in unwelcome ways.
That’s when I realised that eccentricity of the nut-cracking sort could be part of the subscription mind-set. I was already taking sandwiches to eat in the interval. How long before I started drinking tea from my flask during Wotan’s Farewell?
It was then that I experienced a small epiphany. Back in April there had been a crying baby incident during Handel’s Giulio Cesare. To say it was unwelcome is an understatement. But after talking to McCracken I reminded myself of the Met’s shortened versions of The Magic Flute put on for children around Christmas. The auditorium was filled with a crowd that cheered as the chandeliers went up while the ushers shouted in vain, ”No photographs!”
A merry background buzz rose and fell all the way through - including from our own five-year-old son asking, ”Is he dead?” or, ”Why he’s jumping?” There was a definite vitality about it all.
So perhaps this could be a way of preventing us regulars getting too comfortable and perhaps just a little too strange. Bring in the babies and the under-11 crowd. After all, they do call it the family circle.
