Operatic Intrigue
The Comic, Tragic, True Tale of Opera on Huntington
Avenue
Don't get me wrong. I love boston, and I think it deserves its reputation
as the "Athens of America." Even though-to my untrained ear-some
native Bostonians talk funny (in their dialect, my name comes out as "hollow"),
I have discovered since moving here to teach at Northeastern three years
ago that the Hub offers a culture vulture like me more than enough to feel
fulfilled.
Several world-class art museums. More colleges and universities than
you want to count. The Boston Symphony, one of the world's finest orchestras,
and many other instrumental ensembles. An active theater scene, both nonprofit
and commercial. The Boston Ballet, one of the country's youngest and most
dynamic dance companies. Plenty of cinemas, with snack bars stocking designer
health food and imported chocolates.
And let's not forget some of Boston's more earthy attractions. The Celtics,
Bruins, Red Sox, and (a short drive to the south) the Patriots. Cuisine
of all nations-even Julia Child lives in nearby Cambridge. Colorful politicians
with national aspirations. Whale watching off Cape Cod and fireworks on
the Fourth of July on the Charles River Esplanade.
But there's one thing Boston doesn't have much of: opera. True, there
are several small companies, most of them performing within walking distance
of the Northeastern campus. In recent years, Boston Bel Canto Opera, Boston
Academy of Music, Boston Baroque, and Opera Unmet have produced concert
and semistaged performances at Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory,
which lies adjacent to N.U. Every other year, the world-renowned Boston
Early Music Festival and Exhibition presents a short run of a little-known
opera (usually from the seventeenth century), like the lavish production
of Luigi Rossi's Orfeo presented at the Emerson Majestic Theatre in June
1997. The most established by far of Boston's opera companies is the Boston
Lyric Opera, which offers limited runs of three operas a year, with a mixture
of local and imported vocal talent.
Usually so proud and smug about our city's many cultural assets, Bostonians
blush when you ask them about the opera "problem." How can it
be that Boston, a city crammed with connoisseurs, intellectuals, eggheads,
and blue bloods, trails operatically far behind places like St. Louis,
Houston-even Omaha? Only comparisons between the Red Sox and New York Yankees
produce more defensiveness and angst.
Over the years, many theories have been advanced to explain Boston's
difficulty in sustaining an opera company-its "operapathy." The
Metropolitan Opera House in New York (not to mention the New York City
Opera) is too close. Boston doesn't have the required "booster"
mentality. The dominant puritanical attitudes of Massachusetts clash with
opera's glamorous, flashy aesthetic. People here seem to prefer literature
and sermons. Or maybe the problem is a fundamental anxiety over the erotic
content of most operatic libretti, so often crammed with sex, violence,
adultery, and suicide. Remember that (hopefully increasingly irrelevant)
phrase "Banned in Boston"?
It's true that Boston audiences seem more interested in substance than
style. Even at the Boston Lyric Opera and Boston Ballet, sensible shoes
and professorial tweeds are often as adventurous as wardrobes get. Yankees
don't go in for needless display. One early spring night not long after
the April Fool's Day blizzard of 1997, I even saw a fellow wearing knee-high
boots and tie at a performance of Donizetti's frothy and tuneful The Elixir
of Love. Then again, there was two feet of snow on the frozen street outside.
At the beginning of this now rapidly vanishing century, it looked like
things could turn out very differently for opera in Boston. In 1909, just
eleven years after the founding of Northeastern, the Boston Opera House,
a state-of-the-art facility with legendary acoustics and sumptuous decor,
opened on Huntington Avenue, midway between the Museum of Fine Arts and
Symphony Hall. Lavishly underwritten by Eben Jordan (of Jordan Marsh department
store fame) and other prominent Boston philanthropists eager to assert
Boston's cultural supremacy over New York-its upstart rival to the south-the
BOH was the first opera house in America to have a revolving stage, among
many other modern amenities. On November 8, with most of Boston's social
elite in attendance, the Boston Opera Company staged its first opera in
the new house, a star-studded production of Ponchielli's La Gioconda. During
the extended intermissions, the nearly 3,000 members of the audience admired
the sky-blue ceiling with white clouds, the glittering chandeliers, the
Palm Room on the second-tier box floor for smoking and chatting, the Italian
Renaissance proscenium arch over which the names of the operatic composers
Wagner, Mozart, and Verdi had been enshrined in plaster, gilt, and paint.
But in that era before government support for the arts, the Boston Opera
Company survived only five glittering seasons before expiring of debt and
insufficient popular support. In 1918, the BOH was purchased by the mighty
Shubert organization, which owned and operated theaters all over the Northeast.
For the next forty years, until 1957, with Northeastern gradually expanding
all around it, the BOH was used by touring companies, including the Chicago
Lyric Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, whose annual visits were one of
the highlights of the Boston social and artistic season. Among the great
singers who performed at the BOH were Caruso, Mary Garden, Lawrence Tibbett,
Kirsten Flagstad, and Renata Tebaldi. Meanwhile, this cavernous and beloved
temple of that most impossible and spectacular of all the arts was aging
and deteriorating, the victim of deferred maintenance and the unforgiving
New England climate.
This is the moment where Northeastern enters the tangled tale of opera
in Boston. It's a complicated and melancholy story about changing taste,
unfortunate timing, urban "renewal," institutional expansion,
and governmental neglect. On August 30, 1957, alarmed by the increasing
frequency with which bricks and masonry were falling off the front of the
BOH onto the sidewalk below, the Boston Building Department pronounced
the building unsafe and ordered the Shuberts to undertake immediate repairs.
This would have entailed removing all the splendid glazed terra-cotta decorative
panels on the facade and replacing them with new masonry. Barriers were
placed around the elegant but crumbling building.
But the Shubert organization in New York, which claimed to have been
losing money on the Opera House for years, was unwilling to spend the estimated
$300,000 required to restore the building and its waterlogged foundations,
set-like much of the Back Bay and South End-upon landfill. According to
most reports, the Shuberts then canceled all the bookings for the coming
season (including tours by the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Ballet)
and tried to persuade the City of Boston to purchase both the building
and property. At the time, however, Boston city officials were focusing
their energy-and funds-on the impending construction of the Prudential
Center farther down Huntington Avenue. (It finally opened in 1965.) The
Pru's design included a large auditorium originally intended to host large-scale
musical and theatrical events, including opera. It eventually served primarily
as a convention center.
After Boston declined to buy the BOH, the Shuberts
quickly sold it to a local construction company for what sounds today like
the ludicrously small sum of $135,000. Within days, the S. and A. Allen
Construction Company announced plans to demolish the building and use the
land for parking. At that moment, Dr. Carl S. Ell, who during his years
(19401959) as Northeastern's president had been shrewdly and quietly
investigating all possibilities for the crowded university to acquire property
for expansion in the neighborhood, made public his desire to purchase the
Opera House from Allen Construction. After all, the Opera House stood directly
across Huntington Avenue from the newly laid out main quadrangle of N.U.,
on the corner of Opera Place, stretching back to St. Stephen Street. On
September 25, 1957, it was announced that S. and A. Allen Construction
had sold its new acquisition to Northeastern for $160,000, and that the
university planned to tear down the structure to build what the Christian
Science Monitor described as "urgently needed additional school facilities."
In his own public statements, President Ell expressed feelings of regret
over the impending demise of a revered cultural monument. "It is fortunate,
however," he added, "that this same site will continue to serve
our community constructively, especially the young people of this area,
both present and future." Nor did any prominent government agencies
or community groups seem to dispute President Ell's assertion that "Northeastern
was a natural owner of that property" or that it was the university's
manifest destiny to develop and upgrade the area along Huntington Avenue,
then home primarily to warehouses and railroad yards. At the time, too,
in the late 1950s, "urban renewal" was the rallying cry in cities
small and large all over the United States. In New York City, two other
magnificent architectural treasures-Pennsylvania Station and the old Metropolitan
Opera House-would be destroyed within the next few years, while Carnegie
Hall and Grand Central Station would only narrowly escape the same fate.
And so, Northeastern began tearing down the Opera House in the summer
of 1958. Given its enormous size and the sentimental and historical value
of the contents, this was a long and painful process that went on for months.
Many of the furnishings were removed and given to various schools and colleges
in the area. One of the BOH rehearsal pianos is still in use today in the
N.U. Department of Music's headquarters in Ryder Hall, according to music
professor Joshua Jacobson. By summer 1958, the spot where the Boston Opera
House had once stood so grandly was an empty lot. In 1963, construction
began there on Speare Hall, a residence hall for women, which was completed
in 1964 and named after N.U.'s founder and first president, Frank Palmer
Speare. Today, the only visible reminder of the BOH is the street sign
"Opera Place" on the corner of Huntington Avenue.
Fortunately, opera did not entirely disappear from the Hub. In 1957,
Sarah Caldwell, an enterprising conductor and impresario, founded the Opera
Company of Boston. This daring and adventuresome outfit presented many
significant premieres with international stars from the late 1950s through
the 1980s, performing in unlikely venues all over town. Eventually, the
Opera Company of Boston established a permanent home in a former vaudeville
hall on Washington Street originally known as the Savoy, now renamed the
Opera House. Some of Northeastern's music students sang in the chorus.
A brilliant artist and musician, Caldwell unfortunately was a notoriously
inept administrator who managed to alienate many of Boston's leading philanthropists.
Her company finally expired in 1991, when Boston Edison turned off the
lights. Recently, there has been talk of restoring the now empty and abandoned
Opera House and bringing Caldwell and her company back. Whether this becomes
a reality remains to be seen.
For the moment, the field of professional staged opera belongs to the
Boston Lyric Opera, now run by Janice Mancini Del Sesto. In its early days
during the 1980s, this company used N.U.'s Blackman Auditorium for its
home before moving to the Emerson Theatre in 1990. Last year, Boston Lyric
moved down Tremont Street from the Emerson to the Shubert Theatre, across
from the Wang Center. The Emerson had poor sight lines, limited stage space,
and a lobby smaller than many living rooms. (During intermission at a recent
Boston Lyric performance of Puccini's Tosca at the Emerson, the crush for
the restrooms at intermission resembled the scene at a Filene's Basement
sale down the street.)
Blackman has also hosted some performances by the New England Conservatory
Opera Theater, including last season's gritty and compelling Threepenny
Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. few students at northeastern aspire
to careers as opera singers, but there are some prominent exceptions. One
is
Ja-Naé Duane. Currently a senior honors student planning to graduate
in June 2000, Duane hails from West Haven, Connecticut, where she started
singing semiprofessionally at weddings (her repertoire included standards
like "Ave Maria" and the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun")
at age thirteen. At first she was thinking about a career on Broadway,
but her high school music teacher instilled in her a passion for opera.
She remembers going with her high school class to see Verdi's La Traviata
at the Met in New York. "We got standing-room tickets, and by the
end of the performance I was saying to myself, 'I have to do this.' And
then my teacher told me that I had a big mouth so I should go into opera."
Like so many others, Duane chose to come to Northeastern because of
the co-op program ("to make connections in the world of arts administration")
and also because of its proximity to the New England Conservatory and many
other musical institutions. At N.U., she began as a music education major,
but then-with the help of her professors in the music department-she took
the initiative to create an independent major focusing on the elements
important for a career in opera: singing lessons, music history and theory,
acting training, languages (Italian, French, and German), and practical
business knowledge gained in the courses offered in the department's popular
music industry program. Under a student exchange program established by
Professor Jacobson, Ja-Naé has also been able to take courses at
New England Conservatory. At NEC, she is the only female undergraduate
enrolled in the demanding Opera Workshop.
Duane has also made the most of her co-ops. In summer 1996, she was
the coproducer (with music and African-American studies professor Leonard
Brown) of the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, presented each year at Northeastern,
an experience that gave her invaluable hands-on training in musical/theatrical
production. More recently, she worked for Opera New England (which has
now merged with Boston Lyric Opera) on their productions for children,
developing contracts and grant proposals. ("It helped me learn how
to find funding for myself," she observes.) In spring 1999, she worked
for the Boston Academy of Music, assisting on three fully staged productions
at the Emerson Theatre and serving as assistant stage manager for a semistaged
production of Puccini's Il Trittico at Jordan Hall. For the last two summers,
Duane participated as a scholarship student in the Bay Area Summer Opera
Institute at the University of San Francisco, which has only heightened
her enthusiasm for pursuing a career on the operatic stage.
In order to support herself and pay the bills, Ja-Naé has at
times worked four jobs simultaneously. Needless to say, she has a lot of
energy and drive. "It takes a certain mentality to do what I've done
here at Northeastern," she admits. "You have to be determined
and know who to talk to. I cannot say it has been easy."
Not long ago, at the advice of her voice teacher, Patricia Craig, Duane
switched from the voice range of soprano to mezzo-soprano. Right now she
is preparing such roles as Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro,
the sexy title role in Bizet's Carmen, Dido in Henry Purcell's Dido and
Aeneas, and her first "pants role" (a female singer portraying
a male character) of Idamante in Mozart's Idomeneo. Among her role models
as opera singers are Maria Callas and the currently hot star Denyce Graves,
both known not only for their vocal skills but also for their acting.
"I'm really a singing actress. I just hate singers who just stand
up there and sing without acting-it's enough to make me leave a performance.
I've also acted in many nonmusical stage plays, which has helped me a lot.
Notes on a piece of paper are not music-it's what the performer does with
them," Duane says. In the future, she would like to specialize in
the late-Romantic repertoire: Richard Strauss, Wagner, Mahler songs. With
her big voice, she is particularly drawn to the roles of sirens like Salome
(in Strauss's Salome) and Delilah (in Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns).
After graduating from N.U., Ja-Naé hopes to start graduate study
at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.
In pursuing her dream, it has not always been easy for Ja-Naé
to explain to her classmates why opera matters so much. "I'm always
very aware of my audience, and opera really is so relevant to our lives.
It has love, death, sex, violence-and all those things are very much still
around us. I would like to see more productions that update the standard
repertoire, to bring these operas further into the cultural mainstream,
and better marketing. I'm very big on the idea of crossover."
Not long after arriving at Northeastern, Duane heard the story of how
the grand old Boston Opera House once stood on what is now the university's
campus. "I was upset when I realized that N.U. had torn it down,"
she admits. "Why?" Perhaps Ja-Naé Duane will be able to
give back to the world something of what was lost in 1958 on the corner
of Huntington Avenue and Opera Place.
Harlow Robinson, professor of Russian and cinema studies in the
Department of Modern Languages, has written about opera and music for the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Opera News, Opera Quarterly, and
other publications. He also appears regularly on the TexacoMetropolitan
Opera International Radio Network broadcasts, and has lectured for the
Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Seattle Opera,
the Boston Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic.
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