Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable keeps opera singers on call

Covent Garden’s new production of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable opens on Thursday. Unstaged in Britain since 1890 and only occasionally revived elsewhere, it’s an opera that very few singers will ever have performed, learnt or encountered.

This means that the management cannot rely on the seat-of-the-pants procedure which obtains for a ubiquitous pieces such as Tosca or Carmen, whereby if a principal singer falls sick (which opera stars with delicate throats have a nasty habit of doing), the casting department will phone round the world and find someone who knows the role and who is willing – at a price – to be flown in and slotted into the production at a few hours’ notice, or to sing from the wings off a score while the ailing principal mimes on stage.

Audiences always enjoy the element of extraneous drama this provides, and sometimes the result – with everyone involved put on their toes – can become the stuff of legend.

Even if it doesn’t, this is a much cheaper modus operandi than the theatrical system of understudies, which keeps people on permanent call throughout the rehearsal period and run of performances. The hope is also that the seat-of-the-pants method allows the management to pick up a performer of a higher quality than some stripling hired to sit about on standby.

It’s a risky business, however, not least because of last-minute hitches at airports and the incredible difficulties of securing visas for anyone who hails from beyond the EU. More obscure or challenging pieces, however, do necessitate a full line-up of singers on call and on site: these performers are known in opera as “covers” and can sometimes be drawn from within the cast. For the recent Ring cycle, Alwyn Mellor, who sang the Valkyrie Gerhilde, also “covered” Susan Bullock’s Brünnhilde (below). Such covers also stand in and fill the gap at rehearsal if a principal is temporarily absent.

Robert le diable and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, which follows it into the repertory next month, both need to be fully covered. This adds considerably to the expense of staging them, but in such cases, there is no alternative – a casualty could mean cancellation of the performance.

Covent Garden stipulates that covers stay within three miles of the opera house until after the last interval. This dates back to a dreadful evening in 1994 when the principal baritone in Manon suddenly fell victim to a vomiting bug in the course of Act 1. The cover had gone home to Sussex, and the only possibility was to call on David Syrus, the lynchpin of the Royal Opera’s music staff, who was sitting in the audience.

“I have a loud voice, but not a nice one,” Syrus wryly recalls. “I sang the part off the score from the wings and got through somehow. But later I was told that the management was in receipt of letters from aggrieved audience members complaining that I made the most hideous noise they had ever heard!”

Bad sex, good books and a lovely stocking filler

Tomorrow night, the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award will be announced at a party that is a highlight of literary London’s Christmas season. The prize goes to the year’s most excruciatingly embarrassing description of erotic congress, with the finalists’ palpitatingly purple prose being read to a well lubricated audience.

It’s all hilarious fun, sponsored by Nancy Sladek’s splendid monthly The Literary Review, to which I am proud to be an occasional contributor. This is a magazine which is as nice to work for as it is enjoyable and stimulating to read, so I’m shamelessly going to puff it by recommending a subscription as the perfect Christmas present for anyone with an appetite for the latest in good books.