Opera’s arias, graces and howling hyenas

The Sicilian Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and author of the great reactionary novel The Leopard, had a low estimation of the Italian masses, the kind of people who worked in his fields and vineyards. He thought they were vulgar, sentimental and trivial. He reserved deepest scorn for their love of opera, which he believed was composed of “loud, overblown and superficial spirits, which have delighted the common herd for a century ... one of the most sinister phenomena to be found in the history of any culture”. The Leopard’s central character, the Prince of Salina, says: “We were the leopards, the lions, those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas.” When his “accumulated hatred of opera boiled” within him most violently, Lampedusa was prone to blame opera for degrading his fellow countrymen into such base animals.

The BBC’s year-long celebration of opera eschews such astringency in favour of reverence before the art form. That’s fine with me – I cleave to the jackals’ and hyenas’ side on this – but it’s a shame the Lampedusa “boiling” isn’t getting a look-in – since many people, including lots of Italians, hate opera.

This hatred is often quite different from that expressed by the Prince: people dislike it not because the herd likes it but because they can’t afford it. As the FT music critic Andrew Clark put it this week (“Purists revel on summer lawns” ), it’s an area of “shameless exclusivity” – perceived to be expensive, cliquey and snobbish. In part it’s because audiences, used to TV’s social realism, need to make a leap into a world where tenors “yell a love aria”, as Lampedusa put it. In part it’s because it can be very foolish: Graham Vick’s production of Aida (BBC4 Friday June 4), for the Bregenz Festival, had fine singing but had to put the Ethiopian captives in hoods and orange jumpsuits so we’d know that he disapproved of Abu Ghraib.

Still sillier was Rick Stein’s Food of the Italian Opera (BBC4), where the celebrity chef posited a connection between the pleasures of the voice and of the table. This link consisted of saying that Italians love both; that Rossini (reported inventor of the heart-stopping dish, tournedos Rossini), Puccini and Verdi all liked to eat; and that there are many eating scenes in operas.

Pride of the season has been Opera Italia (BBC4 Monday) in which the British-Italian Antonio Pappano, conductor, pianist and music director of London’s Royal Opera House, offered a three-part homage to the glorious arc of Italian opera. He took us from Monteverdi, the man who made the breakthrough from madrigals to sung drama in the late 16th century, to Puccini in the early years of the 20th – after which, as he said, the Italian opera age was over. Part of the joy of the pieces was the thought of how much it would have enraged Lampedusa, especially when Pappano said that “delivery boys sang the arias”. A deeper pleasure was the energy, wit, knowledge and craft with which Pappano imbued the series, eliciting from his starry list of interviewees wonderfully theatrical descriptions of the great moments.

There were also enjoyable excerpts from the operas, at Covent Garden and elsewhere, which dramatised Pappano’s words. Because Pappano is so talented, and because he and some of the backstage staff explained so clearly what it takes to build the structure of the opera world as a fit setting for the jewels of the arias, you had an insight into the vast discipline and attention to detail required for the frothy or furious fantasies that erupt on the vast stages. Pappano is a TV natural; please don’t make him into a celebrity.

Several programmes have fleshed out the hell of producing heavenly voices – one on Dame Joan Sutherland, that rare thing, a shy prima donna (BBC4 Sunday). The Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón did a fine number on What Makes a Great Tenor? (BBC4 Saturday). Dame Kiri Te Kanawa will reply with What Makes a Great Soprano? (June 19). One of her successors, the dazzlingly beautiful Danielle de Niese – a scene-stealer no other player would want to be upstaged by – showed her high-octane talent in Diva Diaries (BBC4 May 26). Villazón revealed that the tenor was a reviled figure until the 19th century. Earlier, the castrati had made up for their loss by being the darlings of the operatti. “The image of the tenor is set by his high note,” he said. If he can get and hold a fine high C, he’s won the audience; if not, all is lost. The late Luciano Pavarotti (A Life in Seven Arias, BBC4 Wednesday) who got and held high Cs like few others, made an appearance to say: “You go on stage every night with the same feeling – fear.”

There’s some great stuff still to come: Othello in September, Don Giovanni in December. Radio is in on that act – Radio 3, of course, but Radio 2 is running a prize for aspiring singers: the winner will get to sing with Dame Kiri during the Proms at Hyde Park.

Revolve in your vault, Prince: opera, whose sublime pleasures your grumpiness made you miss, might now become popular once more. “Nessun Dorma”, from Puccini’s Turandot, captivated the hyenas of the football terraces at the 1990 World Cup; Classic FM, and even an (uncomfortably) more populist Radio 3, is herding jackals into the wider repertoire. That which delighted the common herd of the peninsula for a century is again casting a wider net.

john.lloyd@ft.com

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