Sam Cutler

With a life-long interest in architecture I have always been fascinated by the Sydney Opera House. Apparently Jorn Utson’s masterpiece is the “most recognisable building in the world” know from Lithuania to Limpopoland by high born and low, peasants and princes, intellectuals and fools - everybody who’s anybody knows the place. It’s the iconic structure of the twentieth century.  With this in mind I was thrilled to be invited to a performance of Aida at the Opera House and dressed in my finest rags I prepared myself for my first visit to the building. A life-long dream of visiting one of my favorite buildings was about to be realised!

I had seen opera at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, at the Berliner Ensemble in what was then East Germany where I saw the Three-penny Opera staged by Berthold Brecht, I had organised performances at the Concertegboew in Amsterdam and the Munich opera House, now I was about to see the interior of the Sydney Opera House. It was a magic moment in my long love-affair with the world’s performance spaces.

With a friend I arrived in a taxi to be deposited at the foot of a long and massively wide staircase by which one approaches the building - the staircase was rather intimidating in scale and struck me as over-poweringly “linear” with the long lines of each of the steps making a kind of concrete fan-ribbed cartesian origame upon which the building sat in its self-satisfied singularity. The steps felt somewhat “brutalist” and reminded me of a staircase I’d seen at a temple in Egypt in the Valley of The Kings. These were stairs designed to intimidate the “mere mortal” and to re-enforce the status of the building to which they led. The Pergamon altar stolen from the Greeks and now residing in Berlin has a similar monumentality about it - massive stairs leading one onwards and upwards to some “heavenly” destination. I didn’t like the staircase and was interested to see that no-one used it to approach the building but instead entered below and behind the staircase thereby saving on the considerable exertions needed to climb to the top. From the bottom of the stairs one looked up at the building and no photo that I have ever seen does justice to the loveliness of the architect’s vision. It was a moment in my life that I shall forever remember.

As we skirted the staircase and made for the entrance behind and below I could not stop looking upwards at the facing gothic arches of the roof-lines which stand against the night sky like perfect accompaniments to the cosmos. Here was a building that joined us here below to that which is above and I was struck by its “religiosity” rather as one is struck by a medieval cathedral’s drawing of the human spirit from the ‘mire’ of the here and now to the consideration of the significant ‘other’. I really did feel as if I was entering a temple and self-consciously removed my cap as I passed through the doors into the vestibule. Somebody has said that talking about painting is like dancing about architecture, in other words that the experience of the form is irreducible to mere words, and I must admit to feeling totally inadequate to the task of coming to terms with the experience solely through language. My spirits soared as the building ’spoke’ to me, and as my companion and I walked up the inner staircase to the Opera concert-hall my eyes were continually drawn to the magnificence of the ceiling-shells which could be seen through monumental glass walls comfortingly embracing the whole structure - it was as if, like Jonah, one found oneself in the belly of the whale whilst being (at the same time) able to look out from the ‘guts’ to the encompassing outer skin which held it all together.

With some ten minutes to go, a fag was in order, or should I say (more accurately) a cigarette. We made our way to a terrace where one was allowed to smoke and joined a few disconsolate nicotine-junkies guiltily dragging on their cancer-sticks and trying to look nonchalant. I pulled my tobacco pouch out and crouched down Indian-style to roll a cigarette and dropped my rolling papers on the floor. They immediately disappeared down a crack between the concrete slabs of the terrace and I was unable to retrieve them. The terrace had been formed of poured concrete in sections about ten metres square, and between the slabs was a ‘crack’ left by the builders presumably to allow for the expansion of the concrete or to facilitate the drainage of rain-water. The cracks were the width of my small finger. I wondered about women in high-heels walking there - seemed a bit risky to me for their heels would surely go the way of my cigarette papers and disappear down the cracks with potentially alarming results. I noticed that all the smokers were men ! Anyway, the papers were gone  (never to be retrieved) and we had to bum a cigarette from a fellow smoker. I wandered away from my companion for a moment, the better to get a solitary experience of the building.

I was standing in a ‘valley’ formed by several roof-shapes and had the feeling of being comfortably ensconced between a woman’s breasts. I remembered the scene in La Dolce Vitas where Anita Ekberg leans down from a massive bill-board and plucks the man from the street and places him in the fork of her breasts to nestle contentedly in her bra. I felt like that man, cosseted, nurtured, and maternally comforted by my secure surroundings. The milk-white tiles of the roof-surface arched away from me in several directions, the water of the harbour glistened below as the stars signaled above. I felt like a soul lost at sea and surrounded by the shapes of mythical whales as I ‘floated’ below the unlimited sky and felt beyond any immediate danger. The ’shells’ of the roof  reminded me of a dinner party I had attended several nights earlier. The hostess had cooked muscles in a large saucepan and was worried that there were too many muscles in the pan. The shells shapes had joined together in a tumble of forms in her saucepan and here in front of me were replicated in the shape of the various roofs of the building.  Inexpressably lovely in their sensuous symmetry and organic unity the roofs of the building embraced the contents in much the same way as a perfectly sewn kid-skin glove contains and compliments a delicate hand. Here were the most beautiful roofs I had ever seen, a ‘modernist’ take on the tiled roofs of Antonio Gaudi that I had seen in Barcelona. Crisp and white and curved by ‘nature’ though undoubtedly built by man.

Having taken our seats, I looked at the auditorium. It was surprisingly intimate and small. On the wooden stair-cases within the auditorium I noticed that the seat-row letters at the beginnings of the rows had been painted on the floors using a stencil, which struck me as rather crude. My row “m” letter had partly been worn away. The proscenium arch seemed too high for the width of the stage - this was definitely not the perfectly proportioned rectangular shape I had seen in many theaters. But all thoughts of the building were to fade as I prepared myself for Aida, Verdi’s tragic Opera of Egypt. The man beside me, an English tourist, helpfully observed during out muted conversation that the Opera had been written to coincide with the opening of the Suez Canal. The opening had been delayed and the opera had been staged prior to that momentous event occurring.

I stopped thinking about the building, and focussed myself for the music ahead as a lone oboe sang A440 for the rest of the orchestra and the musicians made sure their instruments were tuned. The lights lowered and I remembered my ‘critics pen’ form many years ago in London. It had been given to me by a friend so that I could write in the dark when I wished to note down a particularly vivid dream. As one pressed pen to paper a light in the barrel of the pen shone so that one could see to write. Without a critic’s pen my note-pad was useless in the dark so I would have to rely solely upon my memories and impressions.

The sets were magnificent. I was transported to ancient Egypt. The improbable drama begins with Aida singing that “my heart breaks for a hopeless love” and the enchantment begins. The slave of the Pharaoh’s daughter is herself the daughter of an Ethiopian king. Egypt and Ethiopia are at war. Both the women love the same man. My mind wanders from the improbable plot as I am enthralled by the synchronicities involved with the production. The eighty piece orchestra, the staging and lighting, the huge cast, and all artfully subordinated to the vision of the composer.  Everything in Opera is done on the grand scale and the reproduction of the crowd scenes are worthy of Cecil B De Mills at his finest. Here is a production to rival Turandot at Covent Garden for its grandeur and style. I love it. There are some memorable staging effects, not least of which is a swimming pool which stretches across the front of the stage in which during a dream sequence two lovers disport and play. Spectacular! There are dancers in flimsy gauze, there’s the Gods of the ancient Egyptians cleverly hiroglyphed onto suspended columns - I am in love with the “willing suspension of disbelief” that’s involved with it all - it’s a glorious orgy of time travel. I have effortlessly left the building to retreat through two thousand years to another time and place. I am as close to heaven as I am ever likely to be. The voice of the Pharoe’s daughter thrills me best. She is the “wicked woman” of the piece, and as is so often in dramatic art the “baddie” seems to get all the best lines. I close my eyes to the simultaneous translation of the score and drink in her singing, intuiting the meaning of her song from the sounds rather than from the Italian language. She is definitely not a happy bunny - that much is sure, and would remain so even if the opera was sung in Egyptian. Power, love, revenge - all of the emotional madnesses of our daily existence are played out on the grand stage of history and I am simply enchanted.

As the Opera ends and we leave the auditorium the building once more takes over and I am firmly centered in contemporary Sydney. We emerge from the muscle-shells onto the floor of the surrounding terrace and make the long walk to catch a cab. In the back of the cab we tell the driver that we want to go to Petersham and he asks if we’ve been to the Opera, then tells us the rather startling news that he once worked at the Opera! He explains that once he worked in the “green room” which is where the artists and musicians congregate and relax. It was strictly forbidden, he told us, for the employees to talk to any of the Opera singers but one night he saw Dame Joan Sutherland. He was so overcome that he approached her and asked her if she would give him her autograph and then realised that the only thing that he had that she could sign was a table-cloth. Dame Joan asked him whether he would get in trouble for taking the table cloth and he replied that he didn’t care, he desperately wanted her autograph and was prepared to accept the consequences. The wonderful lady smiled knowingly and told him that whilst he would be fired for stealing the cloth no-one would dare to give her any trouble over such a trifling matter. She there and then signed the table-cloth and promised to post it to the man, having also got her husband to sign. A week or so later the table cloth arrived at the man’s house, posted as she promised by Dame Joan, and he’d kept it ever since. Now that’s what I call a Dame! What a true Aussie and what a great lady! The story was so moving as was Aida and represented the perfect final compliment to an evening forever lodged in my memory.

Hooray the cab drivers of Sydney! Hooray the Opera! And hooray that wonderful Dame of the British Empire who promised a lowly worker to post him a stolen table-cloth and kept her word ! And finally, vale the architect that supreme Artist who bequeathed to this city a building which for its eloquence and mastery of the three dimensional form is nothing less than a  sublime gift to us mere mortals. As above, so below!

Onwards and upwards!