George Heymont is a long-time reviewer of opera and more, who now writes the blog “My Cultural Landscape;” was the author of the “Tales of Tessi Tura” column for 15 years for the San Francisco Bay Area Reporter (BAR); and was founding National Editor of Opera Monthly, put out by the publishers of the New York Native newspaper, Christopher Street magazine, and Theater Weekly from 1988 to 1994. He has distilled the operatic, musical comedy, gay, and camp wisdom, accumulated during the last half-century, and poured it into his new book “A Dying Art Form,” not a treatise pondering the lamentable state of opera, but a page-turner of a murder mystery, with more plot twists, turns, and surprises than “Il Trovatore,” “La Gioconda,” Wagner’s “Ring,” and the Gilbert and Sullivan oeuvre.
I first met George on line for opera tickets during the Metropolitan Opera’s first season at Lincoln Center and soon met him again, backstage, in the dressing room of soprano Lilian Sukis, of whom we were both fans. I learned, very shortly, that he could do a mean impression of “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” as Ethel Merman might have sung it. A couple of decades later, he was my editor at Opera Monthly. He used to send me his BAR reviews and I sent him my Native reviews. Now we do the on-line version of the same.
Picture it: the Met, March 1987. We meet two quartets. One comprises a Wotan, an Antonia, a Don Giovanni, and a Mimì, all meeting untimely and mysterious ends, during their death scenes or at or after their final exits. The other consists of people sharing a box at “Das Rheingold,” when the first assassination occurs: just a gigolo and the dowager who bought him, and a policeman and his social-climbing fashion-plate sister, who brought him. Neither pair knew that the other would be there, but the escort-for-hire and the officer also share a special relationship.
A major role here is taken by the Lois Kirschenbaum-Queen-of-the-Standees figure—that is, of those who buy standing room rather than expensive seats, and who is the one who attends several performances a week, whether there are cast changes or not, and knows and is known by all the singers. She may be more familiar with the ins-and-outs of the opera than the management is.
Find gay, leather, and AIDs organizations, as well as the Metropolitan Opera Guild, here. A colorful lyric interlude separates the murders from their solution: a gala benefit for Gay Men’s Health Crisis at Carnegie Hall, where men change Broadway musicals’ love songs addressed to women to songs sung to men, and sing touching torch songs originally written for women, a practice well known to those of us who sing at piano bars. In “A Dying Art Form,” George gives us a grand tour of the Met, the busy backstage corridors and work spaces and the contrastingly glamorous front of the house, and of the beloved restaurants in vicinity of the Met and Carnegie. The Mineshaft and the old Eagle turn up, too. Love stories, passion, jealousy, and hate are all here. The performances are put in the context of the government regimes, local and national, then current, and events as varied as the early AIDS crisis and opera companies’ introduction of supertitles.
There’s a helpful glossary, via links to Wikipedia and other sources, for those who might need refreshers on who Leontyne Price and Renata Scotto are; who Beverly Sills, Mae West, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, and the Negroni family were; and what a guiche, a prostate, and a loin cloth are. And there’s an appendix with information about the songs that are cited.
You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll qvell. Get “A Dying Art Form” from Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing.