Music: The Parma Affair

The provincial city of Parma (pop. 89,300) harbors the toughest opera audience in Italy. Local legend has it that the great Enrico Caruso, singing L’Elisir d’Amore, was once all but booed from the stage in a performance that did not please Parma’s exacting gallery. Next day a cabbie refused to take him to the station. The hack driver’s reason: he did not want to dirty his carriage with such a bad singer.

Parma, birthplace of Toscanini, takes such a fierce pride in the standards of its Teatro Regio that at one time or another Parmensi have booed virtually all the big names in Italian opera. “Go back to Rome, fatty!” shouted the galleries after the late Tenor Beniamino Gigli hit a sour note. Toscanini swore never again to step into the Parma pit after a heckler upset a 1912 performance of the Forza del Destino overture by shouting “Maestro, the violins are out of tune!” But lately the gallery gadflies are getting even sharper —or performers are getting softer. Opera has almost been run out of town.

Fear of Tomatoes. The trouble started in December when Italian Tenor Ruggiero Bondino, 27, screeched out an unwritten high C in the first act of Traviata. “Bleater!” screamed the galleryites. “Go back and join your goatherd!” Later, for the benefit of Conductor Arturo Basile, they added: “Kill the conductor as well as the tenor!” Tenor Bondino beat a timorous retreat to his hotel under police escort. Early the next morning he fled back to Rome rather than face the en raged Parma gallery in other scheduled performances of Traviata. Soprano Rosanna Carteri, also appearing in Traviata, fainted from tension, wailed as she was assisted to her dressing room: “It’s dreadful having to sing with the thought that every time I open my mouth I might finish with an overripe tomato in it.”

Following the Carteri incident, even veteran Soprano Renata Tebaldi lost her voice from fright before a Parma performance of Boheme (“I can’t sing tonight; something has tightened my throat up,” said she), and Conductor Basile, in an effort to appease the gallery, fired four of the weaker members of the cast. It was all too much for Milan’s Opera Singers’ Union. Unless the manners of the gallery improved, said the union, its singers would be forbidden to appear in Parma.

Bad Barber. Gallery spokesmen met with Conductor Basile and insisted: “We don’t want the impossible, just the listenable.” But in Parma, where almost everybody knows the operas of Verdi and Puccini by heart, and where youngsters pack the galleries instead of going to football games, the “listenable” is not easy to achieve. Tenors Corelli and Del Monaco, Sopranos Callas, Tebaldi and Stella, among others, have failed to achieve it. Famed Baritone Tito Gobbi fell so far short in a performance of The Barber of Seville that the opera was booed to a halt after the second act. Newspapers the length of Italy argued the Parmensi’s right to sound off, and last week 80 Teatro Regio regulars announced a temporary truce. They gave a grand reconciliation party in the Cafe Verdi to soothe harried Conductor Basile. But it was still uncertain whether opera in Parma would survive its own fans. Said one of the unrepentant faithful: “We’re reconciling with Basile now so that we can start picking on him again next year.”