By James Jorden
The opening of a new production of La Traviata at the Met tonight offers an ideal opportunity to address a fact of modern operatic life, the booing, apparently reflexive, of the director and production team at the first night’s curtain call.
Now, booing and other expressions of disapproval have a long history in the opera house. Likely the public was booing opera singers long before anyone booed professional wrestlers or baseball players. I’ve always thought that the famous climactic scene in Dangerous Liaisons, when Marquise de Merteuil gets read to filth by the audience at the opera house, gains in power when we remember that their hissing actually has a specific meaning in the context of a theater. (more…)