A Night at the Opera

In one way, Mauaus turns out to be the Bury St Edmunds of Brazil. Although many towns have fine theatres, it's rare for the theatre to be the star attraction. Yet, thanks to the aspirations of the newly wealthy in both towns, a theatre building appropriate to their sense of themselves was put up: the new Bury elite of 1819 and the Manaus elite of 1896 having had an eye to displaying themselves as much as a taste for drama. (And it was on the stage of the Theatre Royal that the most famous line about Brazil in English drama "where the nuts come from" was first spoken.)

But there was no rubber in Bury St Edmunds, and the Teatro Amazonas is on an altogether different scale to the Theatre Royal. Chandeliers from Italy, paintings from France (the dome of the auditorium represents the view up through the bottom of the Eiffel Tower), metalwork from England - these were people determined to enjoy the fruits of their wealth in the same way people could over in Europe.

We'd squeezed ourselves two tickets for the opening night of the Amazonas Opera Festival, a sold-out event and clearly a tropical Glyndebourne, as the cars and the frocks pulled up at the theatre (now rubber-paved only at the rear, but originally the whole circuit of the theatre was like that, to avoid noise disturbing the performances).

The stalls seats, with their underfloor ventilation, are numbered. In the boxes, however, it's first come, first served in each five seat box. Since we were already sat at the far side of the stage with a restricted view, it seemed wise to queue up and at least be able to see something. The synopsis of Das Rheingold I'd printed out for Jonathan didn't seem to have reassured him that the whole affair was likely to be remotely comprehensible.

It being a gala night, we were greeted as we entered the gilt and marble foyer by people in rubber clothes (that's rubber-era clothes rather than a fetish outfit - and one I imagine unlikely to catch on in this humidity...) Clearly Manaus has some real opera enthusiasts - the festival also includes a lot of free open-air performances - but the ticket prices for this event were, I suspect, steep for a lot of the pensioners and students perched like us at the top and sides of the theatre.

Unlike, say, the Royal Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas has no Balcony or Gallery seating. Which means that no-one is quite so far from the stage as you can be at Covent Garden. But it also means that there's no scope for cheap seats - this wasn't a theatre where the rich sat downstairs and the poor sat upstairs. The very rich sat downstairs, and the modestly wealthy filled up the rest of the space. Although perhaps the rear of some of the boxes (from which visibility isn't great) provided space for servants with fans and cooling drinks.

Because it must have been pretty sweltering. Things got warm even with the air-conditioning after two hours of Wagner. In Maia's time the seats were open-weave rather than velvet, to improve circulation, and the windows were all left open (hence the need for the traffic-quietening rubber cobbles), but still...

Just as in Maia's time too, I imagine, this was a night which was about more than seeing a show. People were just trickling into the stalls fifteen minutes after the curtain was supposed to have risen. And despite the sold out notices, there were plenty of empty spaces (sponsors? patrons?) around the theatre once it started.

Everything was an interesting mixture of the pompous and the casual. Although high Manaus society (and - it seemed - a fair proportion of national and international visitors) preened in the foyer rather than come in for the show to start, we meanwhile had a good view of the rows going on between members of the orchestra and what seemed to be theatre staff, shouting at them into the pit from the front row of the stalls. Presumably this uneasy atmosphere explained why half the orchestra packed up their instruments and walked out at the end even as the curtain calls began.

Plasma screens either side of the auditorium made the usual mobile phone announcement and the less usual (but maybe Brazilian regulation) aircraft-style safety briefing. These may be a new innovation, however, since when they showed an sponsorship advert from one of the season's supporters, Coca-Cola, sections of the audience started booing, a bit of an own goal if the aim of supporting the season had been to win cultural brownie points. I couldn't tell if this was crude anti-US feeling or a local issue about money and the festival, but the applause which greeted the covering of the plasma screens made it clear they were not a welcome innovation.

Having thought that doing the Ring Cycle here was simply an appropriately gigantic undertaking, I'd forgotten that it's actually a big river opera. The idea of treasure from beneath the mighty river is a terrific metaphor for the Amazon, and the production seemed to be exploring that. A palm-leaf floor, contemporary miners digging into red earth as the dwarves, and overalled builders as the giants, all suggested that this was about the local environment. There also seemed to be a sort of DNA design theme at points, perhaps referring to the way the gene sequences to natural remedies of the Amazon (and elsewhere) can now be patented for profit.

It's an interesting dilemma. Presumably many of those attending a gala performance at the opera house are - as they were in Maia's time - those whose wealth and ability to support grand opera comes from their profitable activities. Was that why the parallels seemed a bit fudged, with the gods largely in to me unfathomable Blakes Seven outfits? Or is it that the grandiose symbolism of the Wagner actually lends itself to everything and nothing at once, so that even the most promising allegory goes astray?

The audience went wild at the end, even the young woman in our box who had spent much of an admittedly demanding interval-less two hours, rattling her (very noisy) handbag, unwrapping (very noisily) her gum and arguing with the people in the next box about whether they were in her eye-line or not. Very twins.