BocelliOnline

[AngelB]

......when the costume is more important than the singing voice:

London Opera Boots Soprano Over Weight
By LINDSAY HOLMWOOD, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - The Royal Opera House in London canceled a performance by American star soprano Deborah Voigt because of her weight, a spokesman for the prestigious theater said Sunday.

Voigt had been scheduled to play the lead in a summer production of Richard Strauss' "Ariadne on Naxos," but casting director Peter Katona decided that a slimmer singer would be better for the part, spokesman Christopher Millard told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Katona had selected a black evening dress for the part and believed Voigt would not look right in it, Millard said.

"Normally Ariadne is presented on a stylized Greek island with the singers wearing toga-type clothes, but we wanted to present it in an elegant, modern evening dress," Katona was quoted as telling The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

Anne Schwanewilms, a more slender but lesser-known soprano, is now to sing the part of Ariadne.

Voigt's weight remains a closely guarded secret, the newspaper said, but observers estimate it to be more than 200 pounds.

"I have big hips, and Covent Garden has a problem with them," she was quoted as saying. "Or at least their casting director, Peter Katona, has the problem, and he's made it clear that I won't be singing in his house as long as he's around. Which is sad."

Katona said: "In making these kinds of decision, it is not just a question of how someone looks; it is also how they move on stage," the newspaper reported.

Millard confirmed by telephone that size was the reason that the 43-year-old Voigt, one of the world's most sought-after sopranos, was no longer scheduled to sing in the Royal Opera House production.

He said no contract was canceled in the decision to drop Voigt from the theater's schedule, but would not provide details of any arrangement.

But Voigt, who could not immediately be reached for comment, was quoted as telling The Sunday Telegraph she did have a contract with the theater.

"It's been a legal issue between us, because I was booked for Ariadne, but then he canceled my contract on the grounds that I wouldn't fit the context of the production," Voigt was quoted as saying.

In an interview last month with the Andante recording company's magazine, Voigt reportedly expressed outrage at Covent Garden's decision.

"You know I believe this attitude towards heavy people is the last bastion of open discrimination in our society," Andante quoted her as saying. "Get this: The management of Convent Garden just released me from my contract for Ariadne auf Naxos in 2004. They simply said I was too fat! It makes me so angry."

Several phone calls to her agent in New York City went unanswered, and a message was left on his cell phone.

Voigt regularly appears at the Metropolitan Opera (news - web sites) House in New York City. She is to perform there with Placido Domingo in a production of Richard Wagner's "Die Walkuere" this spring. Later, she will sing at the Vienna State Opera.

Three years ago, Voigt sang at Covent Garden, playing the empress in Richard Strauss' "Die Frau ohne Schatten."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid;=495&ncid;=689&e;=1&u;=/ap/20040307/ap_en_mu/soprano_s_size
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Angel

[Melodie]

If this situation is being accurately reported, I'm surprised that Peter Katona still has a job - "one of the world's most sought after sopranos" is being cancelled because Katona wanted "black evening dress"? It's more than sad...it's pathetic. :

(Maybe this will be Anne Schwanewilms' big break.)

[Sally]

Article from the Daily Mail, 9 March 2004.

Why overweight women may have the skinniest pay packet.

Fat women can earn up to 30 per cent less than slimmer female colleagues who do the same job, researchers have found. But being overweight makes no difference to a man's salary.

The differences in female pay were most significant among successful career women as pressure to be slim is greatest among the higher social classes, whose members are more likely to hold such positions. Lead researcher Eero Lahelma, of the University of Helsinki, said "Obesity is a barrier for women and is associated with a clear income disadvantage, especially among women at the higher end of the pay scale.

Our study suggests that obesity is not as stigmatising for men as it is for women. Earlier studies have shown that companies are less likely to hire overweight women and attitudes to the obese should be a concern."

The university's department of public health studied more than 2,000 men and 2,000 women in a range of jobs from company directors to unskilled manual workers.

The researchers looked at each person's body weight and income and found no relationship between the men's body weight and the size of their wage packets. However, the figures showed a clear link between how much women weighed and how much money they took home.

Obese women who had been through higher education or who were employed in senior white-collar jobs were paid as much as 30 per cent less than thinner counterparts. There was also a slight reducation in levels of pay for obese women who had completed secondary school but not gone to university, and those working in manual jobs says the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Men and women are defined as clinically obese if their body mass index - a figure calculated to take into account your weight in relation to your height - is above 30. A healthy BMI in adults is between 20 and 25.

A number of previous studies have shown a link between height and earnings, with taller people likely to benefit from better salaries than smaller colleagues doing the same jobs.

One study at the University of Florida found that each extra inch in height is worth another £493 a year in terms of salary, with tall men and women both benifiting.

By Robin Yapp, Science Reporter.
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"Where are we REALLY going? Always home."

[Melodie]

Friends of the girth

As Covent Garden sacks Deborah Voigt for being too fat, Tim Ashley examines opera's attitude to 'matronly' figures

Tuesday March 9, 2004
The Guardian

'It's all over when the fat lady sings," someone once rudely quipped about opera, an art form notable for - and indeed, in the minds of many, synonymous with - the size of some of its performers. The issue of operatic weight has just resurfaced with the American soprano Deborah Voigt's announcement that the Royal Opera dropped her, on account of her seemingly hefty appearance, from its forthcoming revival of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos and replaced her with the slimmer Anne Schwanewilms. Both Voigt and Schwanewilms are, it should be pointed out, exceptionally fine singers and superb in the role. And whatever you think about her weight, Voigt is actually extremely beautiful. Someone somewhere, however, has decided that Schwanewilms's shape is more appropriate.

Voigt, whose feistiness matches the generosity of her figure and the amplitude of her voice, has refused to take all this lying down. "I have big hips and Covent Garden has a problem with them," she has declared. Covent Garden seemed not to have a problem in 1998 when Voigt was cast as Helen of Troy in Strauss's Die Aegyptische Helena. She was wonderful in the role, many critics regarding her performance as one of the finest examples of Strauss singing they had heard in ages. But the opera was done in concert, so the vexed question of theatrical verisimilitude did not, on that occasion, arise.

It has become a cliche to say that we live in an era of "director's opera", and that it is the producer rather than the singer who now reigns supreme. This is only partly true. Although there is a growing demand for theatrical veracity in opera, any operatic performance that is poorly sung is simply a non-starter. But there was a time when none of this even mattered. Jokes about the disparity between voice and appearance have always abounded, even among opera's most ardent admirers and practitioners. The late, great Harold C Schonberg, music critic of the New York Times, once famously quipped that watching Wagner's Tristan und Isolde often reminded him of "whales gravely coming together", though he added that the work's eroticism always overwhelmed him, irrespective of what the singers looked like.

Schonberg regularly heard Tristan at the New York Met, at a time when Wagner's doomed lovers tended to be played by Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad. No cared in the slightest that Melchior had a stomach or that Flagstad was, in the polite description of the day, "matronly". It was their singing that was devastatingly sexy, as their recordings reveal. Nowadays, however, we expect Tristan and Isolde to look shaggable as well as sound it, and all too often, as at Covent Garden in 2000, they achieve neither.

Paradoxically, it was one singer's decision to diet that is usually cited as kicking off the trend for veracity. Maria Callas famously shed umpteen stone in order to lend realism to her art. Few would dispute that she changed the parameters of opera in the process, yet to hold her up as a model, as many have done, is dangerous. Callas was a uniquely tortured being who pushed herself to the point of masochism in performance, and to expect other singers automatically to follow suit is preposterous. We should also remember that, as with Melchior and Flagstad, it was Callas's voice rather than her appearance that held people spellbound, as great singing always does.

Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballe are rightly cited as being Callas's legitimate successors. Neither of them was a wasp-waisted beauty queen, nor, for that matter, a great actress. Sutherland, by her own admission, was no natural stage animal, and frequently amused reporters by stating that "general pained expressions" sufficed for acting. Caballe, meanwhile, regularly used to make jokes about her size. "It's such a shame," she once told a TV interviewer, "that I can't sing Salome any more. I did it many, many times before I was big," she added, roaring with laughter as the interviewer writhed at the thought of her ripping off those infamous seven veils.

Caballe's attitude is often reminiscent of Luisa Tetrazzini, one of the great divas of opera's putative golden age at the turn of the 20th century. Tetrazzini, a large lady if ever there was one, always boasted that she left her stays off while singing, unlike many of her contemporaries, who squashed their bodies into unhealthy corsetry, sometimes damaging their voices in the process.

Tetrazzini believed a huge appetite was essential to a healthy voice, and allowed a highly calorific dish of pasta and chicken in a cream and sherry sauce to be named after her. In this she was by no means alone. Peach Melba was named after Tetrazzini's famous, albeit corseted rival. In Australia, I am reliably informed, you can now also eat a passion fruit and mango dessert called La Stupenda, after Sutherland's nickname. Food and legendary divas, it would seem, are regularly bracketed together in ways that are often complimentary.

The Royal Opera has said that Voigt is welcome to return to Covent Garden "in the right production". The implication, however, is that in this instance, theatrical considerations may have won the day over musical values. Covent Garden's decision also perhaps exposes an awkward double standard. Voigt, much in demand in the US and on the European mainland, is not a star in the UK, in the way that Caballe unquestionably was. Had Caballe ever been removed from a production for comparable reasons, there would have been something akin to a public outcry.

Can you imagine the mayhem that would result if someone asked Luciano "Fat Lucy" Pavarotti to withdraw, simply because of his bulk? If size, rather than singing, now matters most in opera, then it ultimately indicates a potentially dangerous impoverishment of the art form itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1165052,00.html

[Willma]

I enjoyed this article immensely, especialy the comment about "whales gravely coming together". Also, I make chicken tettrazini all the time and never knew it was named after an opera singer.

Like it or not, opera is also a visual art form and as opera goers dwindle in numbers and become less sophisticated, often seeking an entertaining night out before artistic excellence/supremacy, what they see on the stage must fall within the boundaries of what their culture considers acceptable. Belief can be suspended only so far; the costume designer can tweak the basic image only so much. If the diva can become, in the audience's view, robust, statuesque, voluptuous, imposing - okay - but if it's just plain fat, it's not going to fly. "Just plain fat" is not romantic. This does not affect men because, as in real life, men dominate and rise to alpha positions for reasons other than appearance.

Obesity is a very complex issue resulting in a lot of personal suffering and cruelty but the fact remains that is it is an epidemic in this country, a massive health/life style issue that is actually ahead of tobacco in terms of health care costs. Our children are fat and becoming fatter. Obviously, because of the changing climate, we can no longer direct them towards opera as a career choice.
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Although, in his life, he was often called the imbecile from Illinois, history has proven otherwise.

[Kenzu]

[Willma]

[Kenzu]

No pun intended.......sounds like Monty Pythons flying circus with those marvelous British comedians :lol: :lol: :lol: .....and Wilma you are right in our valuation to become different in times, before big women were appreciated nowadays skinny ones :? .
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"Ex nihilo nihil fit"

[Melodie]

A DRESS OR A VOICE: WHAT MAKES A DIVA?

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: March 10, 2004

s a longtime opera fan and a critic accustomed to examining the machinations of the opera world with a skeptical eye, I am surprised by very little. But I am flabbergasted by the decision of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London to drop the soprano Deborah Voigt from a new production of Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" in June because she was deemed too heavy for a slinky black dress that is central to the director's concept of the role.

The company's move is so appalling that you have to wonder whether there is more to the story. Probably not. In a field where company managers and stage directors profess over and over that of course musical and vocal values come first, this action against Ms. Voigt offers distressing proof to the contrary.

The Royal Opera is not just replacing one of the leading dramatic sopranos of the day with a little-known German singer (Anne Schwanewilms). It is replacing the greatest living interpreter of this demanding Strauss role. Ms. Voigt first came to attention in a 1991 production of "Ariadne auf Naxos" with the Boston Lyric Opera. I was there. Her triumph was total. The audience was awestruck. The next year she wowed Metropolitan Opera audiences with her performance of Chrysothemis in Strauss's "Elektra." James Levine, who was conducting, has made Ms. Voigt central to the Met's plans ever since.

The Royal Opera would seem to have forgotten the most basic truth of the genre. Yes, opera is a form of drama. But drama in opera has never been dependent on literal reality. Great music and great voices take you to the core of the drama and the essence of the characters. Naturally it's wonderful to hear fine opera singers who also look good and act well, and the new generation who grew up watching opera on television seems increasingly concerned with staying in shape and looking the part.

I remember being unexpectedly overcome by a student production of "La Bohème" at the New England Conservatory in Boston, sung in English and performed in an intimate theater. The endearing young cast clearly identified with Puccini's Parisian bohemians. They even looked a little tired and hungry, as haggard students often do.

But my first ever "La Bohème," a Met production that I attended as a teenager, starred Renata Tebaldi as Mimi. Ms. Tebaldi did not remotely resemble a consumptive and penniless seamstress. She looked like a pleasant, well-fed Italian lady. But her lustrous and poignantly beautiful singing was the embodiment of youthful desire, of sudden love coupled with a wariness of heartbreak.

Next week the Met introduces a new production of Strauss's "Salome" with Karita Mattila in the title role. Ms. Mattila, a strikingly lovely and slender woman, has apparently slimmed down even further for this role. Attractive as she is, Ms. Mattila will probably not resemble the adolescent Salome of the Bible. It won't matter, though. Opera creates its own kind of reality. What will matter is how well Ms. Mattila sings.

Commenting on the Royal's Opera's decision in a recent interview with The Sunday Telegraph in London, the company's casting director, Peter Katona, explained that its new Strauss production would forgo the typical setting. Instead of placing Ariadne on some stylized Greek isle dressed in a togalike costume, their Ariadne would be costumed in a sleek black modern dress.

But the character is not a Greek goddess. She is called the Prima Donna and is a typically temperamental soprano. She has been hired by the richest man in Vienna to sing the role of Ariadne in a serious new opera by an ambitious young composer as an entertainment for some dinner guests. In previous productions Ms. Voigt has brought a wonderfully self-debunking comic touch to her portrayal. But after the prologue, when the opera of the "composer" is finally performed and the Prima Donna, playing Ariadne, begins the long soliloquy, Ms. Voigt fills those arching Straussian melodic lines with radiant outpourings of sound and effortlessly lifts them to the balconies. Suddenly the comic opera turns profound.

You can only feel for Ms. Schwanewilms, the soprano replacing Ms. Voigt. She is going to have to look pretty terrific in that dress to make London operagoers forget that they are not hearing Deborah Voigt.

This action also raises sobering administrative questions. The Royal Opera receives generous government support. Of course Ms. Voigt will be paid for performances she was contracted to sing. Does the Royal Opera have money to burn? How will it explain this move to patrons paying a top price of nearly $200 for prime seats?

Also, Ms. Voigt signed her contract nearly five years ago. When was the modern-dress concept arrived at? Is the company making this wrong-headed decision just to placate a director's last-minute whim?

Later this month Ms. Voigt sings another of her signature roles, Sieglinde in Wagner's "Walkure" at the Met. Though Sieglinde is a demigod, the daughter of Wotan, she does not know this when we meet her. She is a sad and lowly young woman who has been forced into an abusive marriage with an oafish warrior. What should Sieglinde look like? Probably some slip of a thing. But in all of her past performances Ms. Voigt has been so vocally splendid and expressively honest that she becomes an affectingly believable Sieglinde.

Ms. Voigt said recently that she has again gone on a regimen of dieting and exercise. More power to her. But let her sing Sieglinde the way she always has, and Met fans will love her despite the size of her hips.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/arts/music/10TOMM.html

[Willma]

Who is being invited to the opera house these days - diehard opera fans or plain folks with entertainment dollars to spend? If it's entertainment, those hips are just too much of a stretch. That's his call.
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Although, in his life, he was often called the imbecile from Illinois, history has proven otherwise.

[Scarpia]

[Scarpia]

[Willma]

[quote="Scarpia"
He's right. And Tetrazzini was probably right too. Some critics and biographers have suggested that Callas' drastic weight loss contributed to the rapid deterioration of her voice. In the kind of demanding repertory she performed in she no longer had enough body mass to support her voice properly. I haven't seen or heard of any thin Normas, Isoldes or Turandots.

:kermit[/quote]

There is a tremendous problem with an art form that necessitates and promotes morbid obesity. Not only are the visuals becoming increasingly at odds with modern eyes - and that is where beauty is beheld - they tells us that the people before us are self-destructing for the sake of their art or because of emotional issues. Either message certainly puts a damper on a night's entertainment.
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Although, in his life, he was often called the imbecile from Illinois, history has proven otherwise.

[Scarpia]

[Willma]

Doug: Opera is not a director's medium, as film is. "Concepts" don't make for exciting opera; singers, conductors, orchestras and choruses do.

Willma: A concept is an abstract idea. But in the performing arts, we don’t have ideas as much as we have conflict and tension. Without conflict and tension, or the drama of the plot, beautiful voices would just be singing jingles. So opera has to be more than just voices and instrumental music. If so, it would be REALLY silly!

Doug: Furthermore, opera is not about verisimilitude: it presents idealized worlds portrayed through music, and most of all through voices. Operatic characters are usually derived from mythological or historical sources, wherein "realism" (whatever that is) doesn't apply.

Willma: Idealized worlds imply more than we are or know, greater than we are, not less. It is difficult for us - as the general public - to regard a deformed individual, a morbidly obese individual, a dwarf or a wheelchair bound individual in some sort of dashing, physically challenging role or love object. Andrea himself said he would not attempt some operas because there is simply too much physical challenge on the stage. If we follow Doug’s reasoning, Andrea could get about the stage with a white can or have some one escort him - just as long as he sang beautifully. Perhaps that SHOULD be so, but it just ain’t. Opera is spectacle and more and more, it must appeal to the eye as well as the ear.

Doug: If a slender figure were all-important, I don't know why Mr. Katona didn't just cast Kate Moss in the role, except, of course, he knew perfectly well that nobody would want to hear her attempt to sing! There's a lot of hypocrisy in his decision, and in the arguments defending him. Mr. Katona needs to find another line of work, perhaps at a weight loss clinic.

Willma: There is a lot of hypocrisy in trivializing this issue by suggesting Mr. Katona cast Kate Moss in the roll.

Doug: By the way, attacking opera fans is not an answer, unless the attackers simply hate opera and want to see it abolished. In that case, why are they here? It's the audiences and supporters who keep opera alive, just as they've always done.

Willma: Opera will not be “abolished”. Abolishing anything is a high energy experience. Rather opera will fade away or reinvent itself, as it has , perhaps, in the musical. If this is not to be so, the opera world must come to terms with the steep learning curve it presents to the uninitiated - rather than bashing or demeaning them. The trained voice is not beautiful to most - it sounds pompous and harsh and shrill. People have been making fun of it for years - the fat lady singing and so forth.

Doug: Performers are among the most free individuals on earth, as well as the most vulnerable.

Willma: A nice thought but groundless.

Doug: How else do they manage to do things that none of the rest of us can even approximate?

Willma: I would love to talk about this at another time.

Doug: Singers are mere mortals like the rest of us, except they subject themselves to a lot more perils. Caruso was a chain smoker, who died of lung cancer. The great baritone Lawrence Tibbet, who was slender but was an alcoholic, lost both his career and his life at an early age. Another great baritone, Leonard Warren, who also was not fat, died onstage of a heart attack, right in the middle of an aria. His friend and brother-in-law, the tenor Richard Tucker, died of the same cause during a concert tour. Mario Lanza, a tenor whose meteoric career prefigured that of Bocelli, was murdered by an Italian Mafia boss whom he'd unwittingly offended. Soprano Marie Collier committed suicide. Maria Callas actually died of a broken heart, like some of the heroines she'd portrayed so unforgettably.

Willma: Everybody dies. It does mean it’s okay to be fat. Dana Reeve dies of lung cancer and never smoked. That isn’t a sign that the rest of us SHOULD smoke. Your logic is breaking down here Doug - but I am glad to know that your in fine shape despite all those hours you spend sitting on your derriere in opera houses.

Doug: As with the invisible "weapons of mass destruction" and the putative alliance between Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laaden, who actually hated each other, the facts are not all in about obesity. Recent research is casting doubt about the latter issue. BTW, I'm 5'11," fairly muscular, and weigh 152 pounds, so I'm hardly overweight and am not arguing in favour of it.

Willma: I think enough facts are in about obesity to take action - certainly if you are raising children, Doug! Don’t let them pack on the pounds. Fat is not good, especially around your heart .You mentioned in another thread, about not having enough weight to support a voice.
What’s the science behind that? Does fat make the voice resonate?

Well, it’s very late in Boston so I will hit the sack. Tomorrow’s another day!
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Although, in his life, he was often called the imbecile from Illinois, history has proven otherwise.