Miss Piggy could not have done it better. A fiery tenor, goaded beyond measure by boos and whistles from the gallery, scandalises the operatic world by flouncing off La Scala’s stage in Milan with a toss of his locks and a raised fist. Critics fear the only singing jobs that Roberto Alagna may be offered now are in the pizza bars and nightclubs from whence he sprang.
Catcalls are nothing special at La Scala, a bearpit for performers, so there is speculation over what caused the 43-year-old French-Sicilian to snap in the middle of a new production of Aida by Franco Zeffirelli last weekend.
The only happy man that night was Alagna’s understudy, who was pushed on stage in jeans and a T-shirt to give a bravura performance. A furious Zeffirelli denounced Alagna’s “unprofessional” behaviour and Riccardo Chailly, the conductor, declared he had never seen the like of it. Alagna was fired by Stéphane Lissner, La Scala’s artistic director, for “lack of respect”.
The singer, once hailed as the “fourth tenor” — a Pavarotti, a Domingo and a Carreras all rolled into one — but lately seen as a loose cannon, claimed that his life had been at risk. “What if they had thrown stones at me or some crazy person had attacked me?” he demanded unconvincingly. “After all, John Lennon ended up being killed.”
For many it is a fitting comeuppance for a tetchy star and his wife, the raven-haired mezzo soprano Angela Gheorghiu, who have infuriated managements with their demands and outrageous behaviour. Twice banned from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the pair were dubbed Bonnie and Clyde by Jonathan Miller, the director, and are known alternatively as the Ceausescus in mockery of Gheorghiu’s Romanian origins.
Both stars clawed their way from the wrong side of the tracks (her father was a train driver) to scale the wall of fame (his father was a bricklayer). With the flashing dark eyes and curvaceous body that made her the only 41-year-old opera singer to feature in the top 100 best-looking women as voted by FHM’s laddish readers, Gheorghiu has said that it “calms her down” before a performance to make love to her handsome husband. And therein, say wags, lies one explanation for Alagna’s latest hissy fit.
For years they would appear only as a pair, commanding higher emoluments, but it became clear that their voices were leading them in different directions. Whereas Alagna’s elegant if sometimes dry style was best suited to French opera, Gheorghiu’s dark, plangent timbre favoured Italian productions. This has obliged them to perform separately and Alagna has to go for long periods without calming his wife down.
Zeffirelli has offered another theory: Alagna bottled out. The singer had been edgy on Aïda’s opening night the previous Thursday, Zeffirelli said: “At a La Scala premiere the tenor can’t get nervous like a little boy. It’s unacceptable.” By the second performance it appeared that Alagna was irritated by cool reviews in the Italian newspapers and the fuss made of “the other Roberto” — Roberto Bolle, the theatre’s leading male dancer, who appeared almost nude in Aïda’s ballet sequences.
At all events, Alagna’s reaction surpassed even that of Maria Callas, La Scala’s prima donna assoluta, who was a target of the merciless loggionisti in the theatre’s uppermost gallery. The singer’s volcanic temper was legendary, leading Walter Legge, the record producer, to call her “vengeful, vindictive and malicious”, but she suffered grievously from the mob’s taunts. In a performance of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena (Anne Boleyn) in 1957, she responded to a less than rapturous reception by spitting her lines at the auditorium: “Judges! You are Anna’s judges!” Even the great Pavarotti, in a 1992 performance, was booed when he cracked a high note in Verdi’s Don Carlo. He should have emulated Joan Sutherland, who knitted blithely between performances.
It is hard to see how Alagna can recover from his La Scala walkout, the first in living memory. The management is as furious with him as he appeared to be with them on Sunday night. “I shall never come back to La Scala,” he declared. “This is not a theatre, it’s a Roman arena. I feel bitter and stunned. I sang beautifully, I was bravissimo. Too bad for those who don’t understand.”
He added that he had cancelled his 2008 commitment for Manon Lescaut at La Scala and his wife was thinking of pulling out of La Traviata in 2007. But soon he was singing a different tune, announcing that he would return to carry on as if nothing had happened. La Scala made it clear that was not going to happen.
Alagna must be wishing that he had not pulled out of the Royal Opera’s new production of Carmen in favour of La Scala’s glittering production — the set was laden with 450lb of powdered gold and when the curtain went up, La Stampa reported, the audience sat in “open-mouthed” silence. If only they had remained that way.
Alagna was born on June 7, 1963 in Clichy-sous-Bois, in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, into a family of Sicilian immigrants. He picked up his musicianship at the Sunday gatherings of his father’s eight brothers and sisters, who would sing Italian songs. “Someone would pick up a guitar or an accordion and we would perform — anything: bits of opera, folk songs, mimicry, comedy,” he recalled. “It didn’t really matter. We just made lots of noise.”
At home he would sing along to a tape recording made by his mother of Mario Lanza’s film The Great Caruso. Soon after leaving school he discovered that his Lanza impersonations could earn him money in pizza parlours and cabarets, while holding down a job with an accountancy firm during the day: “My mother was worried that I would end up as another labourer like the rest of the family. She wanted me to be an accountant; I wanted to be a pop star or a circus artiste.”
The first person to realise that he had a remarkable talent was a jazz bass player who became his teacher after asking him to learn a tape track: “The next day I come back and I sing it. You know what he does? He starts to cry.” The jazz player gave him another tape to learn: “I come back next day and sing it. And you know what? Same thing. Tears.”
A booking at the Aix-en-Provence music festival led to an audition at Glyndebourne. Within a few months he was singing Alfredo for Monte Carlo Opera and his meteoric rise began. In 1990 he made his La Scala debut. His performances in Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1994 catapulted him to international stardom. The same year brought tragedy: his first wife, Florence Lancien, the mother of their two-year-old daughter Ornella, died of a brain tumour.
Two years earlier he had been rehearsing for La Bohème at Covent Garden when he heard a woman’s extraordinary voice from behind a door: “Because of the sound I was hearing, in my mind she had to be fat. Eventually I opened the door and was absolutely shocked to see Angela, so young and lovely.”
Others might later compare Gheorghiu to Morticia from the Addams family and refer to her uncharitably as Draculette because of her debut in Transylvania. But for Alagna “it was love at first sight”. It was at Covent Garden in 1995 that the couple realised they wanted to spend their lives together — while he was starring in Romeo and Juliet and she in La Bohème.
Within months Gheorghiu had divorced her Romanian husband Andre, an engineer. She married Alagna in New York in 1996 at a ceremony conducted by Rudy Giuliani, the then mayor, an opera fan. Tragedy soon struck again when Gheorghiu’s sister Elena, also a singer, died in a car crash. The couple adopted her daughter Uana, now 15, who attends a school in London. Ornella is educated in Paris, where the Alagnas have a home.
Then the stories began about the couple’s haughty ways. Gheorghiu’s most famous clash was with Joe Volpe, the Met director, when she refused to cover her luxuriant black tresses with the blonde wig traditionally worn in the role of Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen. Threatening to replace her with a stand-in, Volpe ordered: “That wig is going on with or without you.” She wore the wig but covered it with a hood.
Later both Alagna and Gheorghiu were dropped by Volpe from a production of La Traviata when they objected to Zeffirelli’s set and costume designs, although they have subsequently been invited back. Opera needs its monsters and in a world desperately short of bankable stars such misdemeanours are soon forgotten.
That may not be true at La Scala. Alagna and Gheorghiu are no longer the new kids on the operatic block and their much-hyped “most romantic couple” image has been seriously tarnished. For Alagna it may be the final curtain.
