Thousands and thousands of faces, pale against the darkness, made row after blurred row of semicircles, which disappeared up into the night. From ground level, there was a feeling of reverse vertigo. The angle of the seating seemed impossibly steep, the spectators perched and precarious, on the brink of losing their balance and toppling down into the pit. The sound they made was uncanny—above a whisper, but below normal speech, a continuous, quiet buzz of conversation that was contained and magnified by the stone walls. I felt as though I had stepped into a human beehive.
We climbed to our seats, a hundred feet or so above the stage, exactly opposite a niche high in the wall where a floodlit statue of Augustus Caesar, in his imperial toga, stood with his arm outstretched to the crowd. In his day, the population of Orange had been about 85,000; it is now fewer than 30,000, and most of them seemed to be trying to find a few spare inches of stone to sit on.
A woman of operatic girth, blowing hard after scaling the steps, collapsed on her cushion next to me and fanned herself with a program. She was from Orange, round-faced and jolly, and she had been to the theater many times before. But she had never seen an audience like this, she said. She surveyed the heads and made her calculations: 13,000 people, she was sure of it. Dieu merci that the rain had stopped.
There was a sudden crack of applause as the members of the orchestra filed on stage and began to tune up, musical fragments that came sharp and clear through the expectant hum of the crowd. With a closing rumble from the kettle drums, the orchestra stopped, and looked, as everyone in the theater looked, toward the back of the stage. Directly below the statue of Augustus, the central entrance had been draped with black curtains. The rows of heads around us leaned forward in unison, as though they’d been rehearsed, and from behind the black curtain came the black and white figure of the conductor.
Another explosion of hands, and a shrill, ragged chorus of whistles from the seats far behind and above us. Madame next door tut-tutted. This was not a football match. Épouvantable behavior. In fact, it was probably in accordance with tradition, since the whistling was coming from the beggars and prostitutes’ seats, not an area where one would expect to hear genteel applause.
The orchestra played a Donizetti overture, the music floating and dipping in the night air, undistorted and naturally amplified, bathing the theater in sound. The acoustics were mercilessly revealing. If there were any false notes tonight, most of Orange would know.
The conductor bowed and walked back toward the curtain, and there was a moment—hardly more than a second—when 13,000 people were silent. And then, to a roar that must have felt like a physical blow, the man himself appeared, black hair, black beard, white tie and tails, a voluminous white handkerchief floating from his left hand. He spread his arms to the crowd. He put his palms together and bowed his head. Pavarotti was ready to sing.
Up in the beggars and prostitutes’ section, however, they were not ready to stop whistling—piercing, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistles that could have hailed a taxi on the other side of Orange. Madame next door was scandalized. Opera hooligans, she called them. Shhhhh, she went. Shhhh, went thousands of others. Renewed whistling from the beggars and prostitutes. Pavarotti stood waiting, head down, arms by his side. The conductor’s baton was up. To the accompaniment of a few last defiant whistles, they began.
“Quanto e cara, quanto e bella,” sang Pavarotti. It sounded so easy, the size of his voice reducing the theater to the size of a room. He stood very still, his weight on his right leg, the heel of his left foot raised slightly from the ground, handkerchief rippling in the breeze—a relaxed, perfectly controlled performance.
He finished with a ritual that he would repeat throughout the evening: an upward flick of the head at the end of the final note, a vast grin, arms spread wide before bringing his palms together and bowing his head, a handshake with the conductor while the applause thundered down to crash against the back wall.
He sang again, and before the applause had died away he was escorted by the conductor to the curtained entrance and disappeared. I imagined he had gone to rest his vocal cords and have a restorative spoonful of honey. But Madame next door had a different explanation, and it intrigued me for the next two hours.
“À mon avis,” she said, “he is taking a light dinner between arias.”
“Surely not, Madame,” I said.
“Shhhh. Here is the flutist.”
At the end of the piece, Madame returned to her theory. Pavarotti, she said, was a big man and a famous gourmet. The performance was long. To sing as he sang, comme un ange, was hard, demanding work. It was altogether logical that he should sustain himself during the periods when he was not on stage. If I were to study the program, I would see that it might have been constructed to allow for a well-spaced five-course snack to be consumed while the orchestra diverted the audience. Voilà!