Somewhere, in an opera house far from Baltimore, the Temple of Dag has materialized once again, and some newly hirsute Samson is chained to its pillars.
Lusting for righteous vengeance, he sings his heart out in this biblical tragedy of love and death and betrayal. Working himself into a fury, he finally finds the strength to bring these columns crashing down upon himself, his enemies, and especially Dalila, the sexy Philistine wench who got him into this fix in the first place.
Everybody in the audience knows what's coming. Samson strains and pulls. The column to his left begins to wobble, then the one on his right. These pillars are thick as middle-aged oak trees. As the audience collectively sucks in its breath, the columns begin to break into five separate pieces each and come crashing down onto the stage. Two other pillars of equal height break in half. They collapse directly across the stage with a seismic thud.
How do you do this? How do you arrange to have four 30-foot high pillars (granted, they're made of plywood framed over two-by-fours) collapse onto a crowded stage, separate into 14 pieces, and not hurt any of the actors, nor roll off the stage to squash the rich aficionados in the front rows?
How do you do it?
"Very carefully," says Peter Johnson, the production manager at the Baltimore Opera Company.
Cables within the columns hold the sections together while allowing them to appear to fly apart in what Johnson calls "an artistic controlled demolition." They fall where they are supposed to fall. The actors stay where they are supposed to stay -- if they expect to take a bow when the show's over.
The Temple of Dag these days could be playing Detroit, or Seattle. The role of Samson might be sung by John Vickers or Placido Domingo. Wherever the opera completes its run, the set will be folded up and maybe go to some other city there to be re-erected in some other house. Eventually, however, it will return to a large ugly building on a non-descript street in north Baltimore. It's the kind of building people aren't likely to notice as they pass by. Nor could they imagine the peculiar treasures it holds.
Inside this edifice, with its ill-lit 30,000 feet of storage space, is a kind of universe of romantic and dramatic legend. It is a space where heroic and comic operatic worlds lie dormant in the shadows, waiting for some impresario to call them into life.
The warehouse, a vast, unlovely space with a neglected look and that smell peculiar to uninhabited buildings, shelters sets owned or co-owned by the Baltimore Opera Company. Its inventory includes "Samson et Dalila," "Tosca," "Eugene Onegin," "Cavalleria Rusticana," "Pagliacci," "Norma," "Fidelio," "La Cenerentola (Cinderella)," "Regina," "Lucia di Lammermoor," "Salome," "Falstaff," "La Boheme," "Un Ballo in Maschera" and "Hansel and Gretel."
The sets have been purchased directly from other companies, or built in Baltimore by craftsmen employed by the opera company, designed and built abroad specifically for the BOC, or commissioned by Baltimore jointly with one or more companies in other cities.
This is not stagnant inventory: They provide an income stream, one the BOC wants to widen. All of these operas have been performed at the Opera's Lyric Theater over the past six years, except "La Cenerentola," which is one of the five productions planned for the 1999-2000 season. Taken together the sets are worth about $750,000. The annual storage costs in the warehouse can run to $90,000.
The warehouse also holds various pieces of stock, or generic, scenery. Some of these are strewn about the rough and dusty wooden floors. There's a bundle of firewood sticks to load onto the back of a Sicilian peasant in "Cavalleria Rusticana," for instance, and Doctor Dulcamara's carriage from "L'Elisir d'Amore," and a wooden wagon cover from "Il Trovatore." There are stone walls (foam, actually) with vines growing over them piled against corroded pilasters from a veranda, and monumental blocks for castle fortifications, religious or sacramental altars; there are trees that roll around on wheels, and columns.
Columns. If you're going to do opera, you've got to have generic columns for works like "The Marriage of Figaro," "Regina," sometimes "Tosca." They, too, lie about the floor waiting for somebody to come along and find a new and innovative use for them.
Over there is the church at the center of the action in "Pagliacci" and "Cavalleria Rusticana," that fine epiphany of sexual jealousy and sacerdotal revenge, in the Sicilian style. This set is one of the more recently acquired. The part the audience sees was built in Catania, Sicily, for the Baltimore Opera Company. It cost $80,000, and is a gem of a set. Its stone walls are fashioned from a foam substance and painted a color almost impossible to describe: gray, green, silver with a touch of ochre -- a blend that suggests a patina of great age. The supporting structure was built in Baltimore.
Johnson's crew creates its sets in a shop in East Baltimore. Last year they built the platform upon which "Norma" was played this season. It includes 120 pieces of faux stone, plus a sacred Druid oak. This latter soars 30 feet up from the stage, comes in five immense sections, and "flies." That is, it is lifted up out of sight of the audience when the action requires a scene change.
This is done by the use of pulleys, steel pipe, sandbags as counterweights and ropes. The rope is made of hemp, and the whole apparatus is called the "fly system." Because the Lyric is one of the few remaining opera houses in this country which uses ropes instead of steel cable, it is referred to in the trade by the vaguely suggestive name of a "hemp house."
The ropes are changed every year, are decidedly more flexible than cables and are strong. They have to be: The sacred oak weighs two tons.
Still, it is not the biggest thing Johnson's crew must hoist. That, he says, "is a full stage header. It is a wall: 65 feet wide and 16 feet high, a steel-framed wall in 'La Cenerentola.' It fills the whole stage. We use a truss and chain motor to fly that."
It is hard to tell what is what in the warehouse. It all seems like a jumble. By a window, you are told, are the stairs from which the fiery Tosca leaps to her death after her final tragic aria. There is a funny story attached to that piece of scenery, or rather another one similar to it designed to represent the battlements of the Castel Sant' Angelo. It happened at a 1960 production of "Tosca" in New York, and grew out of a dispute between the stage hands and a diva who was as hefty as she was imperious.
When the time came for Tosca to leap to her death -- and thereby exit the stage -- she sang "Scarpia, davanti a Dio," and threw herself into space, expecting a thick mattress to cushion her fall of about five feet behind the wall. Instead, a trampoline awaited Her Heaviness, and in obedience to physical law the soprano who exited so dramatically, returned, and not to take a bow.
Opera is big art, and big business. And, in the case of the Baltimore Opera, the show itself -- the entertainment, the selling of tickets, the solicitation of donations -- is not the only part of the business. Another part has to do with those 14 sets ("Cavalleria Rusticana" and "Pagliacci" are played before the same set), the stock scenery items, the nearly 500 costumes in storage, and almost an equal number of wigs.
Michael Harrison, the Baltimore Opera Company's 58-year-old general director, says the marketing effort to make the scenery pay has intensified over the past three years. Has it worked?
"Three years ago we made $30,000 from rentals," Harrison said. "Last year we made $80,000. This year we hope to earn $100,000." The wigs alone bring in about $20,000.
The BOC has always kept a few sets and some stock pieces of scenery in storage, and it rented sets itself from other companies. But only about three or four years ago, "when we seriously began forming partnerships with other companies and acquiring sets," did the idea emerge to start taking advantage of the inventory, said BOC spokeswoman Janet Mullany.
Today's customers for that inventory might include theater companies, organizations putting on historical pageants, or other kinds of temporary entertainments; directors making period movies, or companies shooting commercials.
The Opera Company's goal for five years hence is to earn $200,000 from rentals. By that time, Harrison expects the annual budget of the Baltimore Opera to be near or at $7 million, with the company producing six to seven operas a season. "We could, eventually, do eight or ten of the very popular operas, like Verdi or 'Carmen,' then throw in something difficult," he said. "We would like to begin, in the year 2003, an American opera series. One a year."
Renting sets is good business, not only for financial reasons. The more sets an opera company owns, or has a financial stake in, the more it says about the nature of the company. Only upper tier opera companies can afford to buy, build, store full operatic sets.
Opera companies are ranked in this country by the size of their annual budgets. The highest-level operas, according to OPERA America, the official ranking organization, spend $7.5 million or above. These would be companies like New York's Metropolitan Opera, or the San Francisco Opera Company, which may mount 10 to 20 or more productions a year.
The Baltimore Opera Company, with its $6 million budget for the coming season, is a second tier company. Which means that, though it is not among the biggest, it is far from small. Also, it has grown much over the years.
This year's four productions pushed the budget over $5 million for the first time. The season 2000-2001 will mark the company's 50th anniversary. Harrison says it plans five productions for that year. Not bad for an organization that began with one show a year.
Also, there are other indicators of growth. The list of subscribers grew from 4,500 to 10,000 over the past decade. Harrison is trying to push that number to 13,000 by the year 2000-2001.
In addition to building sets for the opera, Johnson also runs the rental operation. He is a serious, 39-year old man from Binghamton, N.Y., who early on had a taste for the opera. He was an actor and choral singer in his home town but realized that his voice was not of operatic dimensions, so he got into set design. He moved from Binghamton to Baltimore in 1991 where he began designing theater scenery, then went into the business of creating opera sets. "It's very specialized," he says. He's been the production manager for the Baltimore Opera Company for four years.
Complex issues
Unlike theater sets, opera sets are big, heroic, gargantuan. Renting them, profitable though it can be, is also a complicated enterprise, usually involving partners. The "Samson et Dalila" set, for instance, is jointly owned with the Montreal Opera. Eight of the others in the inventory are also owned jointly with other companies.
Baltimore is currently involved with three other companies -- Pittsburgh, the Florida Grand Opera and the Palm Beach Opera -- in the creation of a new set for "La Boheme," which eventually will be previewed for the Baltimore audience.
Rental costs of individual sets can run between $15,000 and $60,000. Everything depends on the set's size and complexity. "Tannhauser" and "Hansel and Gretel," for instance, are the more costly to sets to rent, because of all the technology involved: fans turning, people flying, machinery that has to move here and there, a large variety of scenes, and so forth. Complexity, in fact, can be the demon in opera production, as the following story suggests.
In 1936, Lauritz Melchior was playing "Lohengrin" at the Metropolitan. It was the last act, and Melchior entered into his final aria, "O Konig hor." The staging called for him to exit on a mechanical swan the moment he finished. As he sang on, the swan moved out, clickety click, on its track from the wings just before Melchior's final flourish. It waited briefly, then glided away before Melchior finished. There he stood, embarrassed, with no plan of retreat.
But Melchior was the ultimate professional, and with much presence of mind he glanced in the direction of the wings, and perhaps at the tail end of the retreating swan, and said in a loud stage whisper:
"What time does the next swan leave?"