Salad Days in Naples

In my continuing hunt for Corelli's vanishing caprino, I watched a DVD of a 1958 "Forza" performance from Naples. Tebaldi, Corelli, Bastianini, Christoff, and the fine Mexican mezzo soprano Oralia Dominguez. I'd seen it before, but on a much smaller screen. In the first scene or two, I thought I noticed some objects falling diagonally to the stage floor, but I figured it might just be distortion. This is a kinoscope of an ancient black and white Italian TV transmission, and although it's clear enough given all that, you couldn't call it pristine. Then later, when Corelli's finished his big aria in Act II, I noticed them again. And after he and Bastianini finish their first duet, here come several more. I finally recognized what I was looking at: vegetables. People in the audience, high up in the theater, are throwing vegetables at the stage. The singers just ignore them. The vegetables don't actually hit anybody, but I can't tell if that's a courtesy or just bad aim.

This is a great cast and they're singing brilliantly. But in 1958, in Naples at least, opera fans took rivalries between singers seriously. Stories of fist fights breaking out in Italian opera houses continue to circulate; Corelli was famous for rushing into a box and drawing his stage sword on a guy who'd booed him, and these flying verdure put that in perspective. A lot of live recordings feature drawn out battles between fans screaming "bravo" and others not only booing, but shouting invective. Sometimes the whole audience gets in an uproar while the singers stand around and wait.

I have never seen anyone throw anything at the stage--except flowers--in my 40 years of opera-going. I remember old actors in my youth saying things like "that looks like a good throwing tomato", but I never actually saw any in use. These looked more like bunches of carrots, anyway. Which reminds me of a funny story. Singers are quite accustomed to flowers being thrown at them, and many become adept at catching them in mid-air. Maria Callas was quite near-sighted, but at a curtain call at La Scala she demonstrated her fielding technique with a clean, easy catch, pretty impressive for a half-blind woman staring across a bank of footlights. Unhappily, what she'd caught so gracefully turned out to be a bunch of turnips.