Opera Notes
Thoughts About The West's
Most Enduring Art Form

by Patrick Totty

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The Metropolitan Opera Guild Members' Travel Program

by Veronica Reed

Opera is a cause for pilgrimage -- and that pilgrimage is the Opera Tour.  Opera travel is thriving!  For opera lovers, the pilgrimage MUST be made — to a place, an opera, a house, a festival, a cycle, a singer -- so, we GO!  Our modern pilgrims are as varied as Chaucer’s, and the veterans have many tales to tell along the way — of singers heard (or not!), of nights of glory witnessed, and the mishaps and naughtiness of divas and tenors, past and present, whispered (loudly and broadly)!   

The Metropolitan Opera Guild’s Members’ Travel Program regularly summons members from around the world, as well as new converts and friends, to join one or more of these special seasonal journeys.  This is truly adventure -- anywhere something wonderful may happen  -- a great voice discovered or an opera rarity unearthed.  Once assembled, guests can proceed in a variety of modes: they can stay in European hotels reminiscent of Edwardian luxury with cuisine to match, or choose to raise a pint at a festival site in a modest village where new works and forgotten scores are actually exciting blase critics!

The stay can be as long as ten days, or as short as an Opera Weekend (our Weekends are four or five days, to allow for travel time). A Weekend in New York during the opera season will have at least three operas (one of them is likely to be at the Saturday matinee broadcast heard all over the world), including a dinner on the Met’s glamorous Grand Tier Restaurant overlooking the Lincoln Center Plaza and fountain. In January 2002, we initiated a “sampler” Weekend in London over the Martin Luther King Day holiday, which featured an opera at Covent Garden, a recital by one of opera’s most beloved singers, Renée Fleming, a West End play with Judi Dench, complete with time for shopping at Harrods’ famous sale.

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Russia’s biggest opera house is in Novosibirsk ("New Siberia")

San Francisco’s late great three-dot newspaper columnist, Herb Caen, used to love describing opening night at the opera. He’d always mention the rows of wealthy stuffed shirts who’d fall asleep before the end of the first act, snoring loudly in their tuxedos as they attempted to work off the rich dishes and copious drinks of their pre-show meals.

The snoring grandees, Caen reminded his readers, were heirs to a glorious tradition. San Francisco, a city of transplanted easterners from the 1849 gold rush on, had always been partial to opera, even if the love often was expressed more in the showing up than it was in the sitting through.

What Caen rarely mentioned, only because it made for less of a quip, was the standing-room-only crowd at the back of the opera house, a throng of poor, mostly young fanatics who would endure jostling, bad sightlines, iffy acoustics and hot, sweaty quarters just to hear their divine avocation.

Every city with an opera house has folks like that, the aficionados who love this 400-year-plus art form to bits, and who make certain that, columnists’ joshing aside, opera will continue to be the cultural icon whose possession marks a great city.

Sometimes Not So Great a City

New York, Paris, Milan, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Vienna, San Francisco: the roster of cities with notable opera houses is fairly short. Still, it’s interesting to note how many opera houses sprang up in the American West from the mid-19^th century on. Far-flung places like Virginia City and Pioche, NV, and Leadville, CO, built opera houses as soon as the proceeds from their gold and silver rushes allowed them to. The distinctive hallmark of a boomtown quickly became the number of saloons, bawdy houses, newspapers and opera houses it could count within three years of its founding.

After their booms ended, most mining towns quickly fell into decrepitude. Their opera houses, once the shining ornaments of civic pride, were soon shuttered and abandoned. Others became movie theaters or were put to more prosaic uses, such as sites for swap meets or warehouses. Fortunately, many towns’ neglect of their old opera houses was benign – few people saw any worth in them and fewer saw any need to tear them down.

That’s how many of them came to be saved. Forgotten and neglected, the opera houses lingered until somebody came along who saw their former splendor and moved to restore them.

But what about a dying mining town that didn’t get its first opera house until the 1960s? That’s what happened in Death Valley Junction in 1967, thanks to a flat tire and a vacationing former New York City Rockette, ballet dancer and mime named Martha Becket. Driving through Death Valley Junction, she blew a tire. Fortunately, the tiny mining town, way past its prime, had a gas station. As Becket awaited repairs, she noticed the old Amargosa Hotel, a two-story hulk that had once been headquarters for the Pacific Coast Borax Company and, later, a movie theater.

Becket fell in love with the site and, long story short, decided to purchase the property and turn part of it into what she later dubbed the Amargosa Opera House (she also decided to operate another part it as a hotel and curio shop). The nascent opera house was a confection that she not only decorated herself but often starred in as the only performer. She resolved to put on three shows a week, singing, dancing and acting, whether an audience showed up or not. To make up for sparse attendance, she spent years painting a mural of onlookers on the walls, a Renaissance-era audience of royalty, clergy, strumpets, bullfighters and cats.

Becket is now in her 70s, and her shows tend to last not much more than an hour these days. Thousands of people worldwide now know of her and remember her fondly as part of their visit to Death Valley. Her virtually one-woman restoration of the Amargosa landed the property on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.

Needless to say, Becket has never made it back to New York. (Click for a glimpse of the Amargosa).

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