First Times: You Never Forget Your First Opera

Do you remember the first time you went to a bank? Probably not. I certainly don’t. 

But if you ask a serious football fan when they first saw their home team playing, you can bet they’ll remember. And if you ask someone who likes opera when they saw their first opera, the chances are they’ll remember too. 

Opera is overwhelming. It’s not exactly easy to forget. Getting sucked into the power of opera is also a little like getting drawn in to dedicated support of a football team: it tends not to fizzle out or get replaced by more mundane concerns. Once you’re in, you’re in.

Bristol, 1995: The Night That Changed Everything

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the first live opera I saw. That’s partly because of an intense conversation around the company who provided it – Welsh National Opera. It might also be because it’s been a decade since I left Britain and moved to Europe – a milestone which prompts a lot of looking back. 

My first opera was weeks in the planning. It happened in March 1995 at the Hippodrome, a theatre in Bristol, in the south-west of England. I didn’t live in Bristol, but I was at boarding school in the city. I got special permission to step beyond the school’s heavy iron gates and persuaded my mother to drive the two hours to Bristol, take me to see The Marriage of Figaro, drop me back at school and then drive the two hours home again.  

That was thirty years ago. I reckon I’ve seen The Marriage of Figaro about thirty times since. But still, I can recall a surprising amount about that first time. I remember where we were sitting, halfway down the stalls, slightly to the right, with my seat on the aisle. 

I remember the high-doored sets, and I remember the sight of the conductor, Carlo Rizzi – whose name, hair and very presence seemed so exotic to me (a proper Italian!). I remember something about the human movement around the stage. I couldn’t quite follow the intricacies of Figaro’s plot, but nothing has changed there. I still can’t. 

The biggest surprise to me was the sound of the live orchestra – particularly in the opera’s Overture, that unmatched music of joyous abandon, all pinned-in by classical precision. The music was exactly as it was on the recording I’d been listening to obsessively, and yet, at the same time, it sounded different. 

Most of all, the experience in the theatre awakened me to what opera actually is – to the gulf between falling for a musical score by listening obsessively to it, and seeing opera made before my eyes and ears by real human beings. 

From the Stalls to the Stage Door

We often leave theatres and concert halls a little changed by what we’ve experienced there. That experience at the Hippodrome changed things very significantly for me. I got a job checking tickets at a theatre to see more opera (one visited by Welsh National Opera and what was called Glyndebourne Touring Opera), and after university I got a job at an orchestra in order to see more concerts. 

Behind the desk where I now spend my days writing about music and opera – where I’m writing this now – is a shelf full of the programme books that are distributed at opera performances. A few more get dumped there every month from the opera companies I cover on my little patch of northern Europe. Also there, its distinctive white spine pinging-out from mostly dark colours, is the programme from that 1995 performance of The Marriage of Figaro. 

I got it down recently, curious as to what it is I had actually seen at the Hippodrome in March 1995. I was gobsmacked to read that the performance had been directed by Giles Havergal, a director with whom I’d recently been in touch (sadly, he would die only a few weeks later, in August this year). I also saw that a young Katarina Karnéus had sung the role of Cherubino. These days, I regularly see Karnéus perform in productions at The Gothenburg Opera. 

In a sense, the Bristol Figaro was the very definition of “ordinary” – in so far as any live opera performance can be ordinary while concurrently defying the laws of logic and science. What I think I mean, is that it was a frequently-performed opera from a touring company in an ordinary theatre in a provincial city. There were no ‘star names’ – though plenty, like Karnéus, of very good ones. 

That’s the thing about “first time” experiences – they only have to be special to the person experiencing them. I knew, as soon as the performance had finished, that seeing Welsh National Opera perform The Marriage of Figaro would prove a major milestone in my life, even if I had no idea how important the act of watching opera would become to me. And yet, the artists who participated – the likes of Roberto Scaltriti, Rebecca Evans and Jason Howard – had more effect on me than Luciano Pavarotti or Joan Sutherland ever would. 

That idea led me to wonder how often artists think about this, when they head out onto stage on a Tuesday night for an “ordinary” performance. Is any performance ever, in fact, ordinary? Do artists know they have the power to change the course of somebody’s life on a Tuesday night, without ever knowing they’ve done so?

Whether we’re opera critics or people who just like watching opera now and then, it can be cool to think of that “first time” and try to preserve the sense of open-mindedness, anticipation and wonder that came with it – even if, while we do so, we also need or want to think more critically about what we’re seeing and hearing. 

New First Times, Again and Again

Perhaps you have no recollection of your first opera at all. Maybe your relationship with the whole idea of watching opera is looser and less intense – a good thing, in many ways. Perhaps you simply can’t remember, however long ago it was.   

The Bristol Figaro was my mother’s first opera too. So I texted her while writing this, and asked her if she remembered it. “I don’t, and I feel sad to admit that,” she has just replied. “Give me some clues.” The most distinctive thing I can think of to text back is a description of Carlo Rizzi’s hair. “Oh yes,” she has replied now.

Anyway, one “first time” is quickly replaced by another. I remember my first times at English National Opera, at Covent Garden and at Glyndebourne; I remember my first time seeing an opera on foreign soil and my first time seeing an opera that I had to review. I try to shun nostalgia in my life and avoid it in my work. Yes, it can be hard. 

You might think these “firsts” soon run dry, but there are always new experiences to be had. I still haven’t been to Bayreuth or La Scala. There is an opera festival where I live that stages opera in prisons, in basements, in people’s apartments, on boats and in disused warehouses. At many of its performances, you’re left thinking “well this is the first time I’ve seen an opera staged in a [insert unusual venue].”

And I’m sure there are operas by well-known composers that have yet to enter my life and remain there, as cherished works. I was reminded about one of these a few months ago, when I was sent to review a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta. It was only the second time I’d seen the opera staged, though I must have listened to it dozens of times in between. 

I remember my first Iolanta in some detail. It was presented at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2011, in a double-bill with Donizetti’s opera Rita, which was performed first. I arrived slightly late for that (thanks to the London Underground), was put in a spare ‘house-seat’ by an usher and remained flustered up to the interval, when I got a beer. 

After the break I took my allocated seat for Iolanta, which hit me like a freight train. How could I never have heard this masterpiece by Tchaikovsky before? The singing and playing from the GSMD students was impeccable and the atmosphere of the production, which from memory involved an abandoned sanatorium and swimming pool, was cinema-strong. 

The opera unfolded itself, each scene, each melody, appearing more miraculous than the last. I made a note of the brilliant student singing the title role of Iolanta: Natalya Romaniw. I was happy to notice, just last week, The Telegraph newspaper referring to her “Britain’s finest Tosca”. 

I hope there are more of those “first” experiences to come. I’m ready for them, but I’m also resolved to see things slightly differently: to try to see every opera as a new experience, looking forward to the future rather than pegging things to the past. It’s a little like being on holiday and rather than counting the days left, deciding to imagine each day is the first day. 

I relish the chance to go to new countries, new theatres and new concert halls – to hear orchestras or opera companies for the first time. I think I’m unusual in this; I expect many people have a favourite opera house or a favourite concert hall and enjoy the familiarity and home-style comfort of it. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to hearing familiar music or works in unfamiliar places, which can have the effect of recontextualizing them somehow.

I also cherish the chance to return to places I’ve only been once, many years ago, perhaps after a special experience there – like the anticipation of seeing Iolanta again after fourteen years. Broadcasts on medici.tv can have the effect of whisking you back to a place you’ve been, without you actually being there physically. Perhaps, sometimes, they literally show you performances at which you were present, in the hall or in the theatre. 

Perhaps what I’m getting at is that thinking about “first times” isn’t necessarily about looking back; it can also be a marker for springing forward. 

In this series of articles, we’ll be looking at the idea of “first times” – asking artists and audiences what they remember of their first times at performances, on stages or maybe even with certain repertoire. It’s not just about nostalgic reminiscences of the past; it’s about how various experiences have shaped who we are, and therefore, how we make or receive art here and now – and tomorrow.