Where we lay our scene

And so to the opera. I have been to Verona and seen both Aida and Carmen in the Arena there, something that I've intended to do for a few years now.

Verdi's opera was the first to be performed in what is apparently the third largest Roman Ampitheatre still in existence, marking the centenary of his birth in 1813, and they still do it every year. One can see why because it's a work that lends itself to the very large numbers of extras needed to fill the enormous stage. This production was suitably spectacular with hordes of Egyptian soldiers marching to and fro with various spears, shields, lighted torches and so on; there were priests; there were Nubian slaves being led to captivity; and there were dancing girls . There were even horses, anachronistically being ridden rather than pulling chariots; a mistake that any wargamer could have pointed out. Musically it was very good. One's hearing takes a few minutes to adjust to the acoustics, but they are superb; those Romans certainly knew what they were at. The performance lasts for hours and hours until well after midnight - not helped by a couple of breaks for rain - and the metal chairs are not at all comfortable. It stops people falling asleep I suppose.

Carmen was also very fine, although less well suited to the environment. On the one hand it's easy to fill the big stage  by throwing in extra soldiers (dragoons I believe), gypsies (many of whom actually look like pirates for some reason); factory girls (rather bizarrely dressed for tennis in 1920s suburban England) and toreros (interesting fact: Bizet and/or his librettists invented the word toreador because the extra syllable was needed to fit the music); yet more dancing girls (for the avoidance of doubt I rather enjoyed the dancing girls); and sundry gratuitous horses and donkeys (one of the horses got spooked and for a brief moment I thought that we were in for a rerun of the animatronic pig ramming the scenery episode from a few weeks ago). On the other hand the dozens of extras and animals have the effect of making it less clear who is actually singing. The dialogue in particular - Carmen is in the form of an opéra comique - gets swamped. However, it would take a harder heart than mine not to be moved by the final, climactic scene and the large crowd was silent as - spoiler alert - yet another operatic heroine didn't make it to the final curtain. Of course they don't actually have a curtain, instead they have yet more extras walking on from the side with a sort of multi-section screen thing. The other noteworthy difference to a normal theatre is that the conductor can't walk through the orchestra to his podium so he has to enter from one side. They actually sprinted on at the start of every act and this puzzled me somewhat until one of my travelling companions - himself the widower of an opera singer - explained that they were doing it because there was such a large space to be traversed that they were worried that the applause might have stopped before they had reached the middle. The ego of the artist is a fragile thing.