Your first ever opera

That was mine too!

Taken to see it by the family I was staying with on a German exchange visit in their local opera house (this being Germany of course, all mid size towns have one!). To be honest didn't enjoy the experience and it was decades before I got properly hooked.

Elektra by Richard Strauss at the Vienna Opera, probably in 1991. I didn't understand a word of the singing - no translations then - there was a huge foot and ankle taking up half the stage and it was very static.

La Boheme at the RAH when I was 7. I don't remember any details but I didn't enjoy it a the time. I'm still not very keen on it plot- & character-wise now. After that it wasn't till I was about 16 when I started getting interested in opera & listening to recordings. I saw a couple of cheap Eastern European touring productions - Ballo & Cenerentola - and then paid my first visit to the ROH when I was 18 for Rosenkavalier, which I immediately fell deeply in love with & it remains my favourite opera.

Of course, joem, you could get complete operas on 78s!

Right back from the earliest days of recording acoustically on 78s starting around 1897 on flat discs in the USA, the record companies had ambitions to record complete operas. Google says that a complete 'Ernani' was recorded in 1903 by the Italian Gramophone Company (HMV) but I always thought that the 1907 'Pagliacci' was the earliest. Check these out on YouTube. Other popular titles were recorded using the primitive acoustic technology but the orchestra and chorus had to huddle around close to the recording horn so the results were poor.

However, once electric recording arrived in 1925 using microphones then it was possible to record full-sized orchestras and choruses as well as individual singers so operas were perfectly possible. I was very fond of the Verdi operas recorded by HMV at La Scala in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mostly conducted by Carlo Sabajno and I still think the 'Aida' with Dusalina Giannini, Aureliano Pertile and Irene Minghini-Cattaneo is just as good as the later famous ones although you do need to make certain allowances when listening. Surprisingly, to my mind, the last side of the Triumph Scene (starting with Amneris singing 'Venga la schiava') captures more clearly than any of the later recordings all the strands of the orchestra, the chorus and the soloists thanks to Sabajno's Toscanini-like conducting. Well, maybe I am just a tiny bit biased, but listened to sympathetically it pays great rewards.

I can tell you that the Sabajno 'Aida' took nineteen 78s and the later Gigli 'Aida' (conducted by Serafin with the Rome Opera) took twenty. I think the Glyndebourne 'Don Giovanni' was also twenty but Puccini operas like 'Tosca', 'Boheme' and 'Butterfly' took a bit less, from about twelve to sixteen or so. HMV also had complete sets of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas on around ten or eleven 78s, re-recorded several times during the 78 era.

Wagner was a bit more of a problem. Columbia made abridged version of 'Tristan' (twenty 78s) and 'Tannhauser' (eighteen 78s) at Bayreuth in the late 1920s and HMV ambitiously tried recording quite a lot of the Ring in bits over several years. There was a very famous complete Act I of 'Die Walküre' with Melchior and Lehmann under Bruno Walter in Vienna on eight HMV 78s, Act II on ten HMV 78s with Hotter joining as Wotan, but to get Act III you had to go to Columbia for an American recording on eight 78s with Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde and Herbert Janssen as Wotan. HMV also issued nineteen 78s of bits of 'Siegfried' with Melchior as the eponymous hero and Florence Easton as Brünnhilde. And, do you know, that thanks to EMI's wrongheaded policy about not releasing LPs at the start of the 1950s, the complete Columbia 'Meistersinger' from Bayreuth in 1953 conducted by Karajan, although recorded on tape, was first released on thirty-three 78s.

Anyway, I can assure you, listening to a complete opera on 78s all the way through was quite labour intensive but it also made one concentrate on each of the roughly four-minute sections as one played the sides one after another. And while this had its disadvantages, it also helped one to get to know the works quite intensively – maybe not Wagner, but certainly the rest of the popular repertoire like Mozart, Verdi and Puccini and also operas like 'Manon', 'Faust', 'Barber of Seville' and 'Carmen' that I also had on well-played 78s!

People today don't know how easy they have it with DVDs, CDs, streaming, downloading and all the rest. In the days of 78s, you had first of all to carry the wretched things home from the shop and they weighed a ton...!

BTW, who was in that 'Rigoletto' at the Sydney Opera House? Was it June Bronhill and Raymond Myers by any chance?

TL

I started with Zauberflote - I think it was a Kent Opera tour in 1987. Still one of my favourite scores (even though the book is a load of tosh!)

Neither of those. I think a guy called Verdi was involved....just kidding.

I believe this may have been the production:https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/event/948

I saw Lott as the Feldmarschallin at the Chatelet - she was glorious.  Mind she is pretty much glorious in everything she does.  Particularly love her recording of La Belle Helene.

Thanks joem for that reference to a 'Rigoletto' in Sydney in 1998. It is rather sad that whoever is inputting that information for Ausstage has no idea what they are doing! To list all the singers without identifying what roles they are singing is almost useless. I recognise Warwick Fyfe and Jonathan Summers as being baritones but I don't know any of the other singers and I didn't see the production, although it was round about the time I started making my annual visits to Sydney to see my old mother and attend the occasional opera, ballet or musical while I was there.

Also, joem, I am sorry if I was rather patronising in my lengthy reply about complete operas on 78s but I did rather misunderstand the wording you used, which I can see now referred to the playing time of individual 78s, rather than the practice of recording a complete opera on a series of consecutive discs. I might as well add a coda to my lecture, which is that those complete opera sets on 78s always came in handsome albums, usually faux-leather brown but sometimes black and the Glyndebourne Mozart operas were in white cloth binding. The albums would hold up to about a dozen discs each and I think that occasionally an album would hold a complete shortish opera like maybe 'Don Pasquale' or 'La Bohéme' but longer operas would be broken down into several albums, so 'Aida' was two albums of eight discs and one of four. Oh, it was quite a performance just to buy these things, let alone play them all the way through, but that's how we got to know the works well.

The Alfredo opposite Caballé's Violetta in 1972 was the great Nicolai Gedda. I seem to recall that he didn't make a very strong impression although he sang it well, as he did everything he performed. Germont was Peter Glossop and it was conducted by Carlo Felice Cillario. What I remember most vividly of Caballé's performance was that she poured a glass of champagne down her cleavage at the start of 'Sempre libera' to indicate her resolve to live a life of pleasure, which rather surprised me!

All this kind of data can be found at www.rohcollections.org.uk and then click on 'Performance Database' for details of many opera and ballet performances at the Royal Opera House. Being old fashioned, or rather just old, I prefer to call the place Covent Garden but I happen to know that the present management hates this appellation and steadfastly avoid using it at all times.

Personally I think it sounds much more pompous to call the place 'The Royal Opera House' than to call it 'Covent Garden', especially in running text. So in my booklet notes for CDs or sales points etc I much prefer saying, for example: 'Maria Callas first sang at Covent Garden in 1952 in 'Norma'' than 'Maria Callas first sang at the Royal Opera House in 1952 in 'Norma''. And for those people who know about such things, there are also Royal Opera Houses in Stockholm and Copenhagen so should I add 'Covent Garden' or 'London' after 'Royal Opera House' or ''in London' after 'sang'? But I suppose I am pissing in the wind to bother about this sort of thing. Basta!

I usually refer to it as Covent Garden in conversation (unless I'm speaking to someone who has little knowledge of opera & is likely to think I mean the area) though in writing I use ROH as it's the shortest option, especially for Twitter. I like the way it used to be referred to as The Garden but don't use it myself, as I doubt many people would know what I meant given the usage has gone out of fashion. I only know about it through having read a few biographies of singers who sang there back in the post-war era.