A Night at the Opera Even Groucho Would Have Loved

I had two warnings. First, it was Wagner. Second, the performance began at 7 PM when all the other operas in our season subscription had started at 8. Still, it was a shock to look at the preview e-mail from the Met and find the running time for Tristan und Isolde would be five hours.

We reached our seats only a couple minutes before curtain and when the lights dimmed, Met managing director Peter Gelb stepped from the wings to announce that the tenor Gary Lehman would be both making his Met debut and singing Tristan (which Mr. Gelb cheerfully and helpfully declared "impossible to sing") for the first time. Now I'm still very much in the beginning stages of learning about opera, but I know enough to recognize that double whammy is roughly akin to Billy Crystal making his Yankees debut in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series with the Yankees down by a run and two outs. Mr. Gelb made no mention of the unfortunate tenor who debuted in the role a few nights before (substituting for Ben Heppner who is ill at home in Canada, regarded as one of the few contemporary tenors up to the rigors of Tristan) and was subsequently hammered in the NYTimes review.

To a warm welcome, Mr. Lehman carried ably through the first act, where Tristan is less a presence than is Isolde, who was performed by the renowned Deborah Voigt, also debuting in the role. Problems began in the second act when Ms. Voigt fled the stage in the midst of their love duet. Mr. Lehman gamely carried on singing to an empty stage for a bit longer as murmurs grew in the crowd and, finally, mercifully, the curtain came down. There was some discussion in the seats around us whether this was illness or a diva act at having to perform with the debuting tenor. Majority view was illness, a conclusion supported by her also missing a later performance in the run. In her stead came Janice Baird, making it two Met debuts for the opera leads, and the performance resumed. We staggered out at 12:30, but Tristan adventures continued in the next performance when a scenery malfunction slid Mr. Lehman down into the prompter's box and gave him a head injury. He continued that night but was himself replaced by a third lead before, finally, in the sixth and final performance of the run Mr. Heppner and Ms. Voigt sang together.

It's enough to make one begin to think of Tristan und Isolde as the "Scottish opera." I do know that while my enjoyment of opera is growing, I'm clearly not yet at the Wagner level. Five hours, even without the evening's bizarre events, was a long haul for me.

It turned out to be quite a month for opera, with this gem from the Pittsburgh Opera. At a performance of Aida, the conductor wound up singing the part of Radames in the fourth act while continuing to direct the orchestra. The singer playing Radames -- who had warned management that he was not well -- finally could no longer carry on, although he silently continued to act the role. The company had arranged to borrow a singer from the Met, but his plane was delayed, and so the artistic director asked the conductor who had studied voice in Australia, to step in. NYT quotes: Antony Walker, the conductor, "It was quite a nerve-wracking thing to do, but I realized there wasn't much choice. " And Christopher Hahn, the artistic director, "The could be one for the history books." Amen to that.