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Opera audiences pride themselves on knowing when – and how – to make noise. Cries of “bravo”, “brava” and “bravi” have become a celebrated part of the tradition, with shouted approval seen as evidence of connoisseurship.
Booing, too, has a long history, and as a brave stand-in at the Royal Opera House found out on Tuesday night, its impact may sometimes seem a little blunter.
The incident unfolded during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot when the tenor Roberto Alagna, singing Prince Calàf, fell ill after the second act and was forced to withdraw.
The company’s head of music, Richard Hetherington, gamely sang from the wings while choreologist Tatiana Novaes Coelho performed the role on stage. But when the third act resumed without Nessun Dorma because of the aria’s technical difficulty, the decision drew boos from some audience members angered at missing one of opera’s most famous moments.
While that may have seemed harsh on the stand-in, the crowd’s displeasure does not appear to have been aimed at him personally. After Tuesday’s performance, one X user criticised the ROH for not having a replacement performer available to “deliver the version of Nessun Dorma they’ve been singing in the shower since puberty”. The RBO has said Calàf is not the type of role for which a cover typically stands by during every performance.
Hetherington may also take comfort from booing’s long history in opera, although audiences in Britain are generally much more restrained than in Italy, said the opera historian Flora Willson.
“Opera seems to provoke more vocal reactions than spoken theatre or musicals, but mostly booing is directed at opera singers, whose job it is to perform frankly astonishing athletic feats on a nightly basis,” she said.
Willson compared the way audiences respond to opera singers to football. “But of course yelling and chanting in a football stadium doesn’t actually prevent a game from continuing in the way that a wave of booing can disrupt an unamplified musical performance,” she said.
At Covent Garden, there were riots in 1809, when the theatre management raised the ticket prices, Willson said. There were also protests at several opera performances in 1840 because the star baritone of the day Antonio Tamburini hadn’t been hired for the season.
In those days the theatre ran on a subscription system, so the audience felt a direct sense of ownership and right to complain when its preferences weren’t prioritised. Today, opera houses in the UK, including the ROH, are run on a different model.
“Audience demographics have also changed hugely over the past two centuries,” Willson said. “In combination with broader shifts in audience behaviour in classical music – which saw audiences start to sit still and in silence throughout performances – opera audiences have generally become much, much less rowdy.”
John Berry, the former artistic director of English National Opera and co-director of Scenario Two, said he had been in European theatres where the booing had started in the interval. “It’s a tradition in some theatres but uncommon in the UK,” he said.
Traditionally, creative teams receive the brunt of the booing at a curtain call, Berry said, and some directors “are well prepared to put on their hard hats before they walk on to the stage”. But while a few isolated boos don’t affect the success of a show, Berry said he always found booing singers “distasteful”, especially when social media has given audiences the tools to vent their dissatisfaction.
“Singers are human and sometimes they soldier on and sometimes their voice disappears completely within the hour,” he said. “Although very disappointing, these things happen – it’s a live performance, not a film, that’s what makes the whole experience of live theatre so powerful and unpredictable.”
The former Guardian columnist and opera enthusiast Martin Kettle said sometimes booing “can reflect the booer’s passion” for how they want the opera to sound and look. “But it can be very boorish, and we live in an increasingly boorish culture. Social media is often aggressive and I suppose that translates into the opera house,” he said.
Kettle witnessed a particularly cruel incident of booing at the ROH once, when a heckler shouted “rubbish” at a 12-year-old actor during a production of Handel’s opera Alcina. The heckler was drowned out by cheers from the rest of the audience (and banned for life from the venue). “It was just horrible,” he said. “It’s often an assertion of a reactionary and narrow view of what an opera ought to be like.”
The opera critic Tim Ashley said pantomime-type booing particularly worried him, “where people boo a villainous or flawed character, irrespective of the quality of the performance. It can be unpleasant, and deeply unfair on the singers.”
Ashley witnessed this during a production of Madama Butterfly at the ROH a few years ago. When Marcelo Puente, playing Pinkerton, took his curtain call, he was greeted with boos, despite giving what Ashley called “one of the most complete and convincing portrayals of the role to be heard for some time”.
For Willson, the events of Tuesday night represented “an operatic perfect storm”. Alagna is a big-name star in the operatic world, Turandot is a popular opera – often billed as a great first opera for those who want to give the art form a try – and Nessun Dorma is the best-known three minutes of music in the whole of opera.
“For better or worse, that one hit aria will have been the main reason some audience members wanted to see Turandot – and the idea that it could suddenly be cut mid-performance may have seemed outrageous,” she said.
