The Opera Fanatic
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The Opera Fanatic o THE OPERA FANATIC Ethnography of an Obsession o Claudio E. Benzecry o The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Claudio E. Benzecr y is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978-0- 226- 04340- 1 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978-0- 226- 04342-5 (paper) ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 04340- 1 (cloth) ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 04342-8 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Benzecry, Claudio E. The opera fanatic : ethnography of an obsession / Claudio E. Benzecry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN- 13: 978-0- 226- 04340- 1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0- 226-04340- 1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN- 13: 978-0- 226- 04342-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN- 10: 0- 226-04342- 8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Opera. 2. Opera audiences. 3. Music fans. I. Title. ML1700.B326 2011 306.4'848—dc22 2010034632 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992. For Monique, who feels the music like no one else Cont ents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 . Par t i Back gr ound 1 An Opera House for the “Paris of South America” 17 2 “It was love at fi rst sight” Biography and Social Trajectory of Standing- Room Dwellers 39 Par t ii For eg r ou nd 3 Becoming an Opera Fan Cultural Membership, Mediation, and Diff erentiation 63 4 Moral Listening Symbolic Boundaries, Work on the Self, and Passionate Engagement 83 5 Heroes, Pilgrims, Addicts, and Nostalgics Repertories of Engagement in the Quest for Transcendence 111 Par t iii Fina le 6 “They were playing in their shirtsleeves!” Downfall, Memory Work, and High- Culture Nationalism 147 7 “We’ve told you all about our life” Conclusions and Implications 178 . Notes 195 References 219 Index 239 Ill ust r ati ons 1. The Teatro Colón as seen from its back entrance / 4 2. A Teatro Colón postcard / 18 3. Evita in an avant-scène balcony box / 31 4. A tertulia chair / 35 5. The balcony box section / 35 6. The chandelier and the ceiling painted by Antonio Berni / 37 7. A homeless woman sits next to the side entrance of the Colón / 64 8. An opera thug standing up next to the outer border of the tertulia fl oor of the opera house / 92 9. Seating (mixed) and standing (men only) arrangements at the tertulia level / 93 10. The offi cial Colón Opera House seating chart / 94 11. Detail of the “free” area of the tertulia fl oor / 94 12. The boxes and orchestra seats as seen from the paraíso / 97 13. José Cura playing Samson in 1997 / 114 14. Soledad de la Rosa in Lucia di Lammermoor / 116 15. A wall at the opera house full of commemorative plaques / 120 16. Internationalization index of opera seasons in Buenos Aires, 1950–2005 / 138 17. The soprano Adelaida Negri at the entrance of Casa de la Opera / 169 Preface I was traveling in 2002 with a group of opera enthusiasts to La Plata—the capital of Buenos Aires State—to see a new production of La bohème. We were all going on a bus provided by the provincial government in its eff orts to reacquaint people with the Argentino Opera House, which had recently been reinaugurated aft er a twenty- fi ve- year hiatus (a monstrous fi re con- sumed the previous incarnation in 1977). The new building is a modernist cement construction, really uninviting and, more important, with capacity for 2,200 people, too large for a city full of university students that at best has 100,000 inhabitants. Because of this, and because of the importance of the Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, the buses picked you up for free at the parking lot of that “rival” opera house downtown. It was a way to get people used to the forty- fi ve- mile trip to the Argentino Opera House, not to mention a way of competing with the older house on many other levels. The government of the city, which administered the Colón, was part of the alliance between the traditional Radical Party and left - of- center forces; the Argentino Opera was administered by the Peronist party, then in opposition. Confrontations between the artistic directors of the two houses were even more virulent since one wanted to replace the other (at the Colón) and one decided to stage operas with charged political meanings, as his rival had been doing for some time. The competition was personal, political, and also geographic (rich city vs. poor province), but the terrain was artistic, and the booty was prestige and audience. The people on the bus—which, despite the aim of the trip, had a radio o xi o playing cumbia for most of the way—were mostly middle- class “opera people” who took advantage of every available opportunity to attend live opera. Between one and three hundred people travel regularly by this kind of bus to La Plata—some others make the trip by regular bus lines or car- pools—to attend performances at the Argentino. During that trip, a woman asked immediately who I was. “We all know each other, and I haven’t seen you. Are you an opera person?” When I admitted that my trip had a socio- logical purpose, she replied, “You are doing the smartest thing by coming here. This is where you learn everything you need to learn about opera. You came to the right place. You should also go to the lines to buy cheap tickets and to the standing room of the house; that’s where you’ll get schooled. The people who attend there really love opera and know all about it. They will talk to you, tell you the diff erence between a coloratura and a dramatic soprano, and you will slowly start to learn.” I took note of her advice but remained focused on the most obvious traits of the Argentinean opera world that had emerged at the beginning of my trip—the public and subsidized character of its funding, the political character of its organization, and the middle- class character of its consumption, which also included elements of the lower class—as I was trying to combine them into what I thought would be a case against Distinction. For years, ideas from that seminal book by Pierre Bourdieu had haunted my understanding of cultural practices, and, whenever someone would talk to me about the things they enjoyed, I would try to reduce them to a place— albeit highly microdiff erentiated—in the social structure. Trips like this one provided a chance to elaborate on these ideas by asking people about their personal trajectory, their education, and their personal history. I was also interested in developing an instrument that would help me classify taste and attach it to positions in a social space. I was hoping that most of these people would like other high- culture practices, as the American literature on arts consumption presumed. I was not sociologically prepared to manage what I started to learn on that trip and soon aft er, whenever I entered into conversation with opera people. I was surprised by the intensity of their engagement. I was mesmer- ized when, on the way back from La Plata, a woman my age told me that she had probably seen Bohème some fi ft een times, and heard it many more, but could not stop crying at the end, when Mimi dies, even though she knew what was coming. She had actually coined a name for this experience—the Bohème eff ect. On that trip, I started seriously considering other questions: What kinds of emotion can be produced by art? What exactly does music do to people? xii : Preface Philosophers like Plato had pointed to the civilizing characteristics of certain kinds of music; Theodor Adorno had tried to achieve a better understand- ing—through homologies between social structure, forms of consciousness, and music structure—of the ways music mediates social relationships. For me, up to that point, all this had been, paradoxically, just noise. Soon aft er, I discovered that the opera house is a place where people feel compelled to talk with strangers about what they have just heard (I explicitly exclude seen here) and compare it to previous experiences with the same work, seemingly adding to their never- ending conversation about a particu- lar opera. These spontaneous conversations would not happen at just any point; they would always be aft er very specifi c fragments of music, ones that were well- known and eagerly anticipated. This preparation would not stop the enjoyment; rather, it would increase it. Names of arias and references to music fragments spilled out every time an opera fan opened his or her mouth. Much as the mouth starts to salivate right before a candy is tasted, the aural experience seems to prepare the body for a whole series of reac- tions, reactions that are mediated through discourse as much as through embodiment. All this led me to consider how a particular work of art could be a locus for personal and emotional engagement, a place for investment that resulted in an accumulative series of eff ects that could be picked up through conversation but were best understood through observation.