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TWEETING MOZART

Perched above the stage at the Welsh National Opera, Robert Butler orchestrated  the first ever Twitter experience of "The Marriage of Figaro". It was exhausting ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

There’s a backstage area at the Welsh National Opera called the "technical perch". This platform and scaffolding hovers just above where the stage manager sits, by the fly ropes. It is a perfect spot from which to witness a performance with a view of the bustle in the wings.

This is where I took in a recent performance of "The Marriage of Figaro". My job was to help initiate the very first bilingual fly-on-the-wall Twitter experience of a Mozart opera. And it was exhausting.

In order to tweet in regular increments, I left the technical perch every ten minutes or so to race through six doors, three corridors and up four flights of steps to a computer in the WNO’s administrative offices. There I twittered 140 characters or less (roughly 15 to 20 words) about what I had just seen. Once the tweet was published, a woman at the next desk (first Jodi, later Rhian) translated it into Welsh. By the time that was published, I was back in the perch. This went on for the opera's full three-and-a-half hours. Some 100 people around the world had been following this stream of tweets since 11 that morning.

It was part of a wider project. A few months before, the WNO had commissioned a photographer, an artist and myself to follow the backstage life of the company. I’d recently done a long feature about the National Theatre for Intelligent Life, so was keen on the idea of writing about opera in as few words as possible. Twitter, a social network site that boasts 5m users, looked the perfect format. In 12 hours of tweeting, I figured I could ultimately conjure up a picture of life backstage.

The twittering began earlier in the day, with a short walk from the edge of Cardiff Bay, past the new Welsh Assembly (designed by Richard Rogers) to the Wales Millennium Centre (designed by Jonathan Adams). Its entrance area is so modern that it has been used as a TV location for an airport check-in, and as a futuristic hospital in "Doctor Who". The building is known locally as "the armadillo" for its curving stainless-steel roof covered in copper oxide. This is the fifth year that the Wales Millennium Centre has housed the WNO, Britain’s largest touring opera company.

I’d learnt this a few days before from one of the guides, Dafydd. Even more interestingly, he told me he’d been at school with Duffy ("She sang in my band").

And so began the tweeting. First I relayed some front-of-house news, such as the number of tickets that were left for the evening's performance. I tweeted about a brass consort playing Faure’s Pavane; a sighting of a former arts minister. Then I went backstage.

Go down long corridor with the plumbing, wiring and air-conditioning exposed above. It’s so if anything goes wrong, it can be mended quick.

Sarah from wardrobe is wheeling a steamer down the corridor. Shirts and aprons are done. ‘You iron the shirts, you steam the suits.’

Rhiannon from wigs passes me in the corridor holding Cherubino’s wig (short, dark) and Barbarina’s wig (long, ginger).

The first member of the cast to get to his dressing room, where his make-up and clothes had been laid out in front of the mirror, was the title character.

David Soar (Figaro) is doing his make-up: foundation, base, eye definition, bit of blush. Quite a polished look. His hair’s gelled back.

Most of the others didn’t turn up for another hour or two. You could tell how late it was by what was on TV.

Dark outside. The Simpsons is on in a backstage room. Buses and taxis drawing up. The audience is arriving–hats, scarves, high heels.

The backstage corridor soon became a mash-up of Mozartian sounds.

Over the tannoy, you can hear the orchestra tuning up. Outside Rosemary Joshua’s dressing room you can hear snatches of Susanna.

It was a thrill to watch the stillness of performers only seconds before they went on stage, and to witness the gap between what the audience saw and what was happening in the wings.

One chorus member is sitting in the corridor in front of a TV waiting for the Middlesborough-West Ham match to start.

I learnt two big things about opera. First, if you want to sabotage a production, remove the jug of water and plastic cups beside the props table. Every singer  visits this spot before going on. Second, if you’re in the female chorus of "The Marriage of Figaro", bring something to do. You'll have at least an hour and a half to kill in the middle.

The person in the building best suited to tweeting is the dramaturg, Simon Rees. He wrote the 1,200 surtitles for Figaro, each one two lines long, and each line a tweet-friendly 40 characters. Rees explains he can squeeze in more words if he uses "ls" rather than "ws".

Twitter is mostly something that lets friends ask one another: "What are you doing?" Cherubino’s flamboyant description of his emotional state would make a lovely twitter: "I don’t know what I am or what I’m doing. Now I’m on fire, now I’m made of ice."

I’d done about 70 tweets by the time the show ended. The stage crew was soon busy striking the "Figaro" set and assembling the "Salome" one. I thanked my translator ("diolch yn fawr") and signed out.

The feedback from "followers"--as they’re called--was warm ("how super cool this is. I’m sitting in Michigan reading about a Welsh opera"). Though several people said I’d crowded out Stephen Fry’s musings on their Twitter thread with too many tweets.  

Well, watch out, Stephen. Later this month I’m going on the road and twittering a "Day in the Life of 'Salome'" on tour; and next year I’ll be twittering a "Day in the Life" of rehearsals for "Die Meistersinger", with Bryn Terfel making his role debut as Hans Sachs.

It had been harder than I’d imagined to twitter on a subject that I usually write lengthy features about. Arts journalism is about what someone else is doing, while twittering tends to be about what you are doing. Still, Wagner in less than 140 characters? Someone has to do it.
 

Picture credit: Sue Waters, wiselywoven (via Flickr)

(Robert Butler is a former theatre critic. He now blogs on the arts and the environment at the Ashden Directory and writes the Going Green column in Intelligent Life. His last article for More Intelligent Life was about events surrounding Darwin's birthday.)