On this freezing March Easter weekend, my Saturday looked to be perfect – a dress rehearsal of Carmen at the Royal Opera House in the morning and, if the tube is behaving, a quick lunch and onto the Metropolitan Opera’s live transmission of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill.
I discovered these broadcasts last year in Vancouver. On Canada’s West Coast, the time difference has us up early – 10.30 for a normal opera, 930 for a Wagner. This has one huge advantage in our downtown cineplex. The popcorn concession for regular cinema has not yet opened. Muffins are available and coffee – both measuring very low on the Richter scale of noise made while being consumed. Then, during Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, one lone man wandered downstairs during the second intermission and found the fatal popcorn. Surely the noisiest foodstuff known to man –a Richter eight or nine – so why do we sell it during a cinematic performance that demands that we hear?
Daniel Barenboim discussed the current disdain for hearing and listening in last year’s Reith lectures and, perhaps, when Jack Black is crashing through his latest dysfunctional screen-life, none of us need to hear the details. But when that man made his way up the aisle in the Vancouver cinema last year, clutching his bottomless (they are always bottomless) bag of popcorn, I knew that Puccini was going to come out the worse for the encounter. Manon Lescaut, alone in that notorious ‘desert outside New Orleans’, started to sing “Solo, (crunch) perduta (crackle) abandonnata (rustle – sound of hand rummaging deep in bag for the buttery bits at the bottom.) And unlike the sweet wrapper that takes a mere whole aria to unwrap, popcorn never ends. Popcorn in cinemas has to be the closest mankind will come to a brush with eternity.
But I kept faith in the culture of Old Europe. Corn, as any geographer will tell you, is an American crop so, even if we have succumbed to this very American snack while we watch a Hollywood film, surely the Gate in Notting Hill, must know that you cannot eat popcorn during Wagner? Oscar Wilde was right about many, many things but very wrong about Wagner’s music. It isn’t so loud that you can talk through it (I paraphrase). Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with its endless yearning, its great ocean of desire, (and not for more butter and plenty of salt) is full of silences, pauses, great orchestral drawings in of breath before we are carried ever upward to Wagner’s unique form of ecstasy.
Oddly enough, the young woman at the concession stand at the Gate understood this. She was obviously not an opera goer but she had realized that ‘popcorn and opera don’t go together.’ Alas, her manager apparently does not agree. And so I walked away crestfallen from the Gate. At 30 pounds a seat, I wasn’t going to risk it. So here I sit back at the house listening to Radio 3, very sorry that I missed Deborah Voigt and the Met debut of Robert Dean Smith. For cinema managers who need guidance on this matter here is a quick list of acceptable opera foods if we really must, and it would seem that we really must, be stuffing something into our mouths at every waking moment of our day.
FOOD THAT YOU CAN EAT AT A MET BROADCAST IF YOU SIMPLY MUST:
Soup (no crusty baguettes to go with it mind!) , pureed vegetables, lightly scrambled egg but no bacon, fruit compote, yogurt (but not with bits of fruit in it – particularly not pineapple or any kind of apple) chocolate mousse – milk, dark or white – is always acceptable but no slurping your spoon.
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT EATING:
Popcorn, crisps, bagels, kit-kats, crunchie bars, snickers, raw carrots, courgettes or peppers, battered fish, fried chicken, steak and kidney pie.
Cinema personnel requiring further information should feel free to contact me at :thesinginghouse@gmail.com
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