The Turin daily newspaper La Stampa carried a story so shocking to the Italian psyche that it reverberated around the whole nation and even made the rest of the world take notice. "Italian men cannot sing any more," the paper reported last week. "Opera houses are in alarm over the lack of tenors." A lack of tenors in the land of Pavarotti, to say nothing of the land of Caruso and Gigli!
Imagine Brazil without footballers. That's how big it is. La Stampa spelled out some details of the national crisis. Of 60 singers recently auditioned by Milan's La Scala opera house for its 10 chorus vacancies, only three had proved acceptable. In Turin, the Teatro Regio had failed to find a single suitable candidate from among 40 applicants. In Florence, the Teatro Comunale had been forced to search for singers as far afield as Argentina.
How could this be, the paper asked? No one sings in the street in Italy any longer, someone observed. Perhaps after all these years of unrestricted traffic, urban Italy had simply become too noisy. Not really, said another expert, since no one sings in the quiet of the countryside either.
La Stampa turned for enlightenment to the chorus director at Turin's Regio opera house. Well, said Bruno Casoni, there are several reasons. Italians have stopped singing in church, for one. Italian folk music no longer exists. And the strangest thing has been happening at Italy's music conservatories. The foreigners have taken over. "The few young Italians who enter now find themselves overwhelmed by Korean and Japanese students."
Haven't we heard that lament before? We certainly have. For this is a distinctive late 20th-century complaint. A Welsh coal-miner would have understood it. So, too, would a French steelworker, an American mid-west farmer, or a Malaysian labourer. From Thailand to Turin, the song remains the same. It seems that even grand opera has been changed by globalisation.
It is not a new phenomenon, but the difference between opera even 50 years ago and opera today is much greater than the difference between 1950 and 1900. Throughout the first half of the century, opera performance tradition and singing styles were national in character. As economic, political and cultural barriers have dwindled, so the old differences between operatic traditions have weakened. Air travel, the recording industry, the communications revolution and the oligopoly of a few powerful artists' agencies have homogenised and internationalised the operatic world, as they have done with music as a whole.
Star singers have always crossed borders. But, until recently, if you went to the opera you would hear singers who mostly came from the country you were in. No longer. Early in the 1990s, just after German unification, I went to a performance at the Semper Oper in Dresden, which had been famous for maintaining a distinctive tradition within the old East Germany. The performance was sung in German, but most of the singers were Poles. I asked where the East German singers were. All gone to sing in the West, I was told. The Poles were filling the vacuum.
American singers have conquered the operatic world over the past 30 years. In the US, though, casts now are routinely multinational. The Washington Opera will open its autumn season in October with a Chinese baritone singing Rigoletto, opposite a Russian Gilda, conducted by a German. The company's director, Placido Domingo, a Spaniard, is the quintessential international operatic singer of the era.
Today's new international tradition has replaced the old national traditions. Continental Europe's dominance has been eroded by the rise of British and American singers. And now, singers from Japan, Korea, and China are beginning to play an increasingly significant role, and not just in "oriental" operas like Madame Butterfly or Turandot. Opera buffs are like cricket fans, though. They are always shaking their heads and saying that it was never like this in Caruso's day. Still, in an otherwise ever-changing world, the Italian tenor has always seemed one of the last immovable national stereotypes.
"To this day," wrote the opera historian and former Guardian critic, John Rosselli, a few years ago, "the cartoonist's shorthand for an Italian is an enthusiast with a black moustache, ready at any moment to burst into an aria."
For more than three centuries Italian was the natural, the essential language of opera. After all, they invented it, and for years opera was performed in Italian, by Italians, throughout the western world. At Covent Garden 100 years ago, even Die Meister- singer von Nurnberg, a German work if ever there was one, was done in Italian as I Maestri Cantori di Nurembergo.
To beguiled visitors, seeing only what they wanted to see, Italian life has always seemed inherently operatic. Observing the country through rose-tinted designer glasses, visitors expected Italians to burst into song to express their feelings, and in the past they sometimes really did. A visitor to Verdi's country home near Parma described how a group of workers in the fields, seeing the composer and his guest passing in a horse-drawn buggy, broke immediately into a rendering of a chorus from I Lombardi. When Verdi died in Milan in 1901, the mourners in the streets sang the slaves' chorus from Nabucco in tribute.
This image of the instinctively gifted Italian singer is not pure fantasy. But Italian singing was always very much a schooled and trained tradition. It didn't just reproduce itself immaculately. Singing teachers inculcated the vocal arts in churches and conservatories. Italy still has 57 such conservatories, which long ago laid the foundations of what Stendhal, in his life of Rossini, described as "the triumph of Italian musical sensibility".
What is happening in Italy has already happened in other national singing cultures over the past half-century. Countries such as France, Germany and Russia once had their own rich and distinctive operatic traditions, as Italy, pre-eminently, also did. Yet, since the passing of the generations who were trained in the pre-war era, the operatic traditions of Germany and France have been gradually dissipated, while, with the end of the cold war, that of Russia has been exploded.
Distinctive French operatic singing now exists almost entirely on records. Go to Paris, and you will be hard put to hear a French opera and, if you do, it won't be sung by French singers. The same is very nearly true of the German tradition, where the absence of Wagner singers, especially tenors, has been a complaint for years. The best Wagner CD for ages was released earlier this year: on it, the Israeli Daniel Barenboim conducts Act One of Die Walkure at the Berlin Opera. The singers are Domingo, the American Deborah Polaski and the Englishman John Tomlinson.
BY contrast, the Russian tradition survived largely unchanged and a thing apart until the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Kirov Opera company came to London for the first time, just over a decade ago, only Sergei Leiferkus of its principal singers had even begun to establish a reputation outside Russia. Most of the Kirov's artists were outstanding but unknown outside their own country. It was an exciting encounter. British audiences loved the Russian sound and style which the Kirov revealed to them. "My God, there's someone in Leningrad who knows how to teach singing," the editor of Opera magazine said during the first interval of Eugene Onegin.
It could not happen now. Economic collapse at home and the existence of a rewarding market for their services abroad have driven more and more Russian singers westwards. Leiferkus and his colleagues do most of their singing in the West. Like La Scala, the Kirov battles heroically to maintain its unique tradition in the face of such forces. Ultimately, though, it too is on the slippery slope towards internationalisation.
Italy may indeed lack tenors. But then so, at the moment, does almost every country. As soon as "the new Pavarotti" comes along, and he surely will, the cupboard will not seem so bare. But he may not come from Italy, any more than Domingo did. Right now, in fact, he's probably growing up somewhere in Pyongyang.