I recently saw Richard Wagner's Siegfried and was surprised to discover that it is approximately a million hours long with four hundred intermissions. Also, it was in German. Eye-strain set in on hour two hundred thousand, so the plot is kind of fuzzy. I think it was the opera version of either Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Maybe a fan-fiction mashup of both? There was an evil hobbit. I'm pretty sure about that.
Point being, I didn't enjoy Siegfried very much.
Sitting there in agony, I wondered why Wagner ever thought a run time of a million hours was acceptable. To that end, could someone break down the expectations of a theater-going person in the nineteenth century?
Specifically, did they....
Actually pay attention? I'm remembering scenes from the Count of Monte Christo where people canoodle, plot, wander around and do everything but watch whatever is happening onstage. They also arrive late and leave early. How did that compare to the behavior of actual patrons?
I've heard that intermissions used to be much longer; people would eat a multi-course meal in stages between acts, making the opera a full-day experience. Is that true?
Were the expectations different between classes? Did a rich man with a box do business at the opera, Monte Christo style, whereas people in the floor seats would see it as a "special night out" and pay strict attention, the way modern audiences (myself excluded) seem to?
Unrelated bonus question: did Alexandre Dumas include the opera because it was a familiar setting for his (theoretically) wealthy audience, or because it would have been an exotic backdrop for his (theoretical) middle class audience?
Thanks!
Oh man, sorry you got subjected to Wagner. Wagner's not for everyone... given the choice between free tickets to the Ring Cycle and sticking my hand in a blender, I'd ask the speed setting. I hope this wasn't your first opera!
For your first bullet point, I'm going to point you to an old answer if you don't mind, but the tl;dr is yes, Dumas actually does paint an accurate scene for opera crowd behavior in that time.... buuuut, not for Wagner. Wagner intended his operas to be watched sincerely the whole time, and when he got control of his own theater, he made it happen. But other composers, like Rossini for instance, wrote their music with the full knowledge not everyone would be listening to all of it.
No, intermissions are actually kinda a new thing, and operas never went all day. It was fine to get up and leave when you wished, without the opera pausing. There was even a conventional place in the opera where you had a sort of intermission, but someone was singing! You might be thinking of the convention in Paris in the 19th century to arrive after dinner in the 2nd act? I'm not sure. But the rhythm we expect to an opera now would be very foreign in the past, consider, for instance, that demanding encores in the middle of the opera was totally fine, and kinda expected for star singers. Also, when I say I'm a season ticket holder now, I mean I have one set of tickets to every opera this season... but back then it meant you had ownership of that particular opera box, and could go to every performance that season if you wanted. People commonly watched operas multiple times, and they'd vary from night to night.
There was not much difference between classes actually in attentiveness. You could find serious opera buffs in both the pit and the boxes, but both would have liveliness. Pitters sometimes, depending on locale and time period, would include expensive prostitutes, priests, local merchants, even comped tickets from the impresario. There would also be some repeat viewers in the pit. Oh and pits usually had open bench seating, not numbered, assigned seating, as we have now.
I have no idea on #4, but that's a damned good question! D: