The cool lights blazed as the cast surrounded the body of Simon Boccanegra, Doge of Venice. Plácido Domingo, in the title role, lay completely still on a raised platform. The curtains fell and the first opera of the Wiener Staatsoper’s 2011-2012 season drew to a close.
For a junior in Lawrence University’s voice department, the opportunity to see Domingo, Barbara Frittoli, and Ferruccio Furlanetto lead a cast on the Staatsoper’s opening night was enchanting. This was just the beginning. Over the next four months, I saw a total of 26 operas at the Staatsoper and one production at the Volksoper Vienna.
This immersion in opera was made possible by my study abroad at the IES Vienna Center, a Chicago-based program with centers across Europe from which Lawrence accepts direct unit transfers. In addition to the classes offered at the institute, the Center arranges housing in the Vienna area for students and helps orient them to the German language and life in Vienna. Though IES offers a variety of programs across Europe in both music and liberal arts, IES Vienna has the benefit of providing both a music program and also a “Society and Culture” program with courses from each available to students regardless of the program in which they are technically enrolled. For instance, during my time there I took both government and music courses. I was in Vienna for approximately four months and received the same amount of credit as I would during that span at a regular university, for approximately the same cost of tuition at my home school.
After a three-day orientation in the central Austrian town of Mariazell, I spent the next three weeks settling into my apartment in Vienna’s Sixth District, which I shared with a native Viennese woman, and taking the three-hour-long intensive German classes intended to jumpstart students in Austria’s native language. Thereafter, I spent my days in regular classes—in my case, mostly music and government, but available in a whole host of subjects. Classes were held at the Institute in Vienna’s historic First District, only a few quick stops away on the U-Bahn subway.
The Institute pulls professors from the University of Vienna and other prestigious locations. Rather than emphasizing extremely rigorous coursework, the classes focus on using Vienna itself as much as possible for lessons while also giving students time to learn from the experience outside of the classroom. The Institute also provides students with names and contact information for area music teachers. Students and teachers then work out the schedule and payments. I took voice lessons with an excellent faculty member of the Konservatorium Wien. Weekend getaways, as well as trips planned by the Institute, took me to destinations like Berlin, Venice, Prague, Budapest, Kraków, Munich, Nürnberg, Salzburg, and the Wachau Valley.
I spent over one third of my nights abroad, however, at the opera, eagerly waiting for a standing room ticket to see the show and learn something new about my cherished art form. Standing room tickets are fantastically cheap and offer unbelievable spots in the house, but the waits can be long and sometimes cold, and it does take a toll on the legs. But the wait was well worth it for unparalleled access to live performances.
The Wiener Staatsoper stands on the Opernring adjacent to Herbert von Karajan Platz in Vienna’s First District, very close to the famous Stephansdom cathedral. The Staatsoper is only a five-minute walk from the IES Center and easily accessible from the U-Bahn. The building itself, built of stone, is as impressive today as it was before World War II bombs devastated it. I had the opportunity to actually tour the inside of the building during the Staatsoper’s Tag der offenen Tür (Day of Open Doors), which happens only once a year. I loved the chance to examine the stage (large in its own right and mirrored on four adjacent sides for set changes), dressing rooms, rehearsal spaces, ballet rooms and, of course, the wonderful boxes and historical antechambers complete with busts of famous composers.
I had heard anecdotally about the process for obtaining standing room tickets. My first time was by no means difficult, and after just a handful of operas, I was instructing tourists from Britain, Germany, Russia, the U.S., Spain, and elsewhere on the particulars of the process. Going around the Staatsoper to the Friedrichstraße side reveals a door for Stehplatz (standing room). The door opens two hours before a performance, and hopeful would-be audience members arrive 90 minutes to two hours before the performance to line up for tickets. For operas by composers like Wagner or R. Strauss or those starring international big names, however, people often wait outside before the standing room doors open—sometimes for up to an additional three hours, like for the Ring Cycle. Inside, people either stand or sit on the floor or on folding campstools if they brought them.
Finally, 80 minutes before the performance, the ticket counter opens. The line proceeds in an orderly fashion to the counter where three ticket options are available: Parterre, Balkon, or Galerie. Parterre seating, at only €4, is possibly the best bargain for live opera in the world, with the standing places at the back of the orchestra section on the ground floor with a full view of the stage and one of the best acoustic experiences in the house. Balkon standing places are off left and right behind the balcony seats, and Galerie standing places line the entire back of the house on the highest level. At €3, these two options are a bit cheaper, but sometimes have obscured views of the stage, cutting off up to half of it. Balkon offers slightly better views, but many frequent attendees prefer Galerie for its acoustics if Parterre places are already taken.
After purchasing tickets, audience members rush to get in the next line, either in the inner lobby for Parterre or on the stairs for Balkon and Galerie, until the full quota for the section is reached. While waiting in this line, programs are available from ushers, 50- to 100-page booklets for €3 to €5. Finally, people file in a few at a time into the standing room area behind the brass and velvet railings. A scarf, tie, or handkerchief is placed around the railing to mark the standing room spot, a fiercely observed tradition to which all audience members are held. After the standing room process is complete (1.5 to 6 hours, depending on the popularity of the production and how early a person decides to arrive to try for the best places), it is permissible to leave the house to buy drinks or pastries within the Staatsoper itself or to visit the Würstelstand directly between the Staatsoper and the Albertina Museum of Modern Art for delectable Viennese sausage.
Through countless hours of standing and waiting in spite of the cold, the heat, or tiredness, it was the depth, variety, and gravity of the productions that drew me back 26 times. Many productions featured set designs and artistic direction set in the original period and style of the opera. Others, however, shaded the setting slightly, transforming La traviata into a landscape of shifting curtains or Fidelio into an almost fantastical prison. Still others abstracted the ideas entirely, painting Eugene Onegin against a backdrop of stark dancers in continuous snowfall or contextualizing Janacek’s Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead) in a chic white tie party.
I am a traditionalist by nature, but increasingly I found my biases evaporating as I examined whether or not the chosen setting enhanced the emotional or comedic impact of the opera. Similarly, my preferences in repertoire, voice type, and style paled as I came to enjoy each performance for what it was. I rooted for performers’ successful runs in Handel’s Alcina, thrilling high notes in Bel Canto operas, and fluid performances of Wagnerian repertoire.
In every case the question remained, “Does this work and does it impact me?” The answer was not always “yes” at the Staatsoper. Yet, of the 26 operas I saw there, only three performances really left me truly underwhelmed. From the perspective of analyzing performances and asking myself whether the choices made and the process worked well, I learned to notice things such as a singer miscast for a given role, or that the set—while an interesting idea in a vacuum—did not fit the mood of the opera. Fortunately, my positive reflections were much more numerous than my negative ones.
Because of my extensive experience at the Staatsoper, when I saw Madama Butterfly at the Volksoper at the very end of my time studying abroad, I was able to accept and even appreciate the roguish decision to have the eponymous character reject suicide only to be stabbed to death by Giacomo Puccini and his compatriots. While the Staatsoper is known for its more conservative reputation and nothing I had seen there was quite so avant-garde, simply having the opportunity to immerse myself in the semantics of the Staatsoper’s shows prepared me to judge the Volksoper’s unusual interpretation without the bias of what is considered “proper.”
To augment my experiences watching operas in Vienna, I kept a blog, reviewing the performances I attended. Taking time for such reflection proved invaluable. I drew connections and formed conclusions that left me not only with a deeper connection to a specific opera, but allowed my experience of each new opera to build on the last.
Many complain classical music is inaccessible. Waiting and standing for hours to see an opera at the Staatsoper with a complicated plot in a foreign language requires a lot more effort than seeing a summer blockbuster. Similarly, reading a piece of classic literature requires considerably more effort than reading escape literature. The requirement to invest more energy, however, is actually an invitation to delve deeply into an art form. I was fortunate to have this process of development occur in a condensed period of time in a city where so much opera is offered. Understanding and developing a connection and a perspective on the operatic art, however, is a lifelong process that grows each time we hear a recording, watch a DVD, or see a performance live—regardless of how spread out or close together the experiences.
I will never forget my nights in Vienna, crossing cobblestone streets to stand in line to see Domingo as the Doge of Venice, and Natalie Dessay stumble as a dying Violetta, or to watch the entire Ring Cycle in two weeks. The experience gave me not only a memory to cherish in my heart, but was also a time of awakening, teaching me how to immerse myself profoundly into the art of opera.
Whether I stand one day on the stage of the house myself, help bring productions to bear in other ways, or appreciate opera from my seat (or standing place!), it was my anagnorisis in the Stehplatz of the Wiener Staatsoper that marked my passage from a youth fascinated with opera to an aspiring cognoscenti fully invested in opera as an art form.
To read Skinner’s reviews of operas he attended at the Staatsoper, visit his blog at passionofopera.blogspot.com.
