Excerpt

OPENING NIGHT

When I was 47 I attended my first opening night at an opera. It was also the first time I had gotten inside a tuxedo.

When I told my long time friends about my plans at one of our regular poker games they wondered what in the hell I would be doing that for. My friends – Neanderthals all – were sort of aware I liked opera because it was sometimes playing when they walked into my apartment. More than once I was asked, politely but a bit condescendingly, to put something else on – anything – before dealing the cards. Jazz, Rhythm and Blues were the usual requests. That worked for me because it’s music that goes well with poker and the New World. Not with the Old, like opera.

When I got around to telling my friends about my plans: getting on an airplane, getting into a tuxedo, spending a shit-load of money, on an opera, in San Francisco, they stopped looking at their cards and began looking at me. In their faces was genuine bewilderment, the kind that speaks of a cultural divide that takes generations to narrow. Opera is uppity for my friends, as it is for many, and a magnificent target for ridicule. I knew it would not be long before the wisecracks arrived, ones designed to take on my masculinity. I usually manage to endure such smart-assing, not because I was born good at it but because I have had a lot of practice. You get good at it after a couple of decades with guys around a card table. Good-humored condescension you learn is designed to sharpen wits. So when I was asked what was in it for me to hang out with ‘all those furs and fags up there in San Francisco,’ I simply told them it was ‘much cooler up north, and that some of my best friends are homosexuals.’

The date of the opening night performance was Friday the 9th of September in the year 1983. That evening, as it turned out, would become one of the most dramatic and successful of opening nights anywhere, and a legend in the annals of the San Francisco Opera. The opera was Otello.

I approached the Opera House that evening – inside a tuxedo – with a great looking woman formally dressed in a long black gown attached to my forearm. Halfway up the steps of the War Memorial Opera House stood a sign:


In Tonight’s Performance the role of Otello
will be sung by Placido Domingo.

The Performance will begin at 9:00


I remained on the steps several moments re-reading the sign dumbfounded trying to digest what I had just read. The year before while visiting San Francisco I tried frantically to hear Domingo in the role of Otello and was unable to get a seat. I worked all my usually reliable opera contacts I had developed in the Bay area but to no avail. There were simply no seats to be had. As for standing room – and I had been there many times – I was told I had better have a sleeping bag with me if I expected to get a ticket waiting in line there. This was the only time in all my journeys to San Francisco that I have been completely shut out of an opera. Domingo’s tremendous success with Otello in New York earlier made getting last hour tickets for it in San Francisco virtually impossible.

Now Otello is my favorite opera, and although I know the music very well I had never actually seen a live performance of it. Naturally I was disappointed when I got shut out the year before. Fortunately, Domingo’s triumph in this difficult role encouraged other tenors to take on Otello. So when the San Francisco Opera began its 1983 season with a production of Otello I was excited to be finally seeing it for the first time. The scheduled cast for the opening night performance included the fine Argentine tenor Carlo Cossutta as Otello, and the wonderful Margaret Price as Desdemona, a terrific pair of singers for any opening night.

On the morning of the performance before my arrival in San Francisco the real drama began: Cossutta awakes unable to talk. At 11 a.m. Cossutta visits his doctor who tells him emphatically he is not to sing. So, an opening night event in San Francisco – a bit deal up there – and no Otello to sing it? What to do now. Cancellation of opening night seems inevitable, there only a handful of tenors in the world capable of singing this difficult role. And only 8 hours before curtain time. Fortunately, Terrance McEwan, the general director of the company had other ideas. A couple of hours after the bad news McEwan manages to locate the reigning Otello of the time, Placido Domingo, in New York. Within moments Domingo agrees to fly west to replace the ailing Cossutta. A $14,000 contribution by an opera lover pays for Domingo, the lone passenger on a Lear jet headed for San Francisco. Strong head winds are encountered in route and the jet is delayed requiring refueling in Lincoln, Nebraska, only half way between the prestigious Met and the SFO. No worries. This is a moment when the gods are on the side of music. This show will go on.