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Philip Spiess
Nelson: My story pretty well tallies with yours, though it was in the Philadelphia Opera, at the Academy of Music, in 1969 or 1970. The opera was Verdi's Nabucco, and the lead soprano was the young Elena Suliotis (now dead), who had been mentioned by some critics at the time as the "coming Maria Callas" -- and Callas fans were outraged (despite the fact that Callas's career was over by that time). Callas herself, in fact, had praised a Suliotis performance from her box at the Met, but --
In the time period I mention, all the New York operas were on union strike for some reason. The result was that New York opera fans were coming down to see opera in Philadelphia (I was in graduate school at the University of Delaware then, so we regularly went up to Philadelphia to the opera). On this particular night, because Suliotis was performing, a pro-Callas claque had come down from New York to cause trouble, and a rumor about this spread. My friend from graduate school, Jim Scott (drunk and totally outrageous) and I (sporting my bowler hat and brass-headed walking stick) were in the upper balcony of the very steep-tiered Academy of Music (we were above the chandelier). All went well until the curtain calls at the end of Act I; when Suliotis came out, she was booed by the claque (despite singing beautifully), and the rest of us took it upon ourselves to defend her honor and her singing. Things eventually subsided, but at each curtain call things heated up again, until the intermission before the final act. The audience was tense, edgy; two young thugs from New York in from of us were about to start something when I leaned over and, brandishing my brass-headed walking stick between them, said, "Shut the f**k up, or I'll bust your f**king skulls!" They were silent from then on, but just before the orchestra struck up the final act, someone yelled out, "Callas forever!" -- and my friend Jim Scott, drunk on brandy, yelled back, "Screw Aristotle Onassis' other whore!" (referring obliquely, of course, not only to Callas, who had been Onassis' mistress, but to Jackie Kennedy, who had replaced Callas as Onassis's wife) -- and all hell broke loose! I never heard the last act of Nabucco; people were screaming, marching down the aisles, hitting each other with rolled-up programs, pushing and shoving -- it not only went on through the rest of the last act (nobody paid attention to what was going on on stage), but into the aftermath as people were leaving the Academy. People, being pushed, were falling down stairs, the Philadelphia police were called, and somehow we escaped -- and went off to a quiet post-opera dinner (and more drinking) at Victor's, an Italian restaurant that catered to the opera crowd, having a massive collection of opera on 78 r.p.m.records (hence "Victor's," as in RCA), where they would play the recording of whatever opera was being performed at the Academy. Maybe we heard something of Nabucco that night!
I've heard Domingo many times, both in Cincinnati (see my comments on Tales of Hoffmann) and here in Washington, where he was director of the opera for a good number of years. When we heard him sing the role of Siegmund in Die Walkure, he was ill that night (cold?) also, and not in his best form, and I had specifically taken my son because the opera is one of my favorites. But there was no riot, and Domingo sort of made it through. (The valkyries parachuted in, by the way, which was slightly better than the performance by the Berlin Opera of the entire Ring Cycle which we had seen in the 1980s, in which the valkyries were motorcycle chicks in black leather!)
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