Opera: Home Sweet Zoo

Opera singers, as everyone knows, are exotic creatures. Nowhere have they been more clearly categorized as-such than in Cincinnati, where for the past 49 years Verdi and Bizet have been performed outdoors in the city zoo—joined, and sometimes drowned, by more basic animal noises from lions, seals, bears, elephants, peacocks and other prima donnas of the animal kingdom.

Last week the Zoo Opera dropped the curtains on its colorful, uncomfortable past. Next summer the Zoo Opera will be gone from the zoo and installed downtown. The stage will be full-sized, air-conditioning will cool the audience, and the opera company will be able to mount big works that could not be squeezed onto the old stage.

The Zoo Opera grew into one of the most interesting companies in America. It never had chic like Salzburg or Bay-reuth—but then, the European festivals do not offer beer, hot dogs and wild animals to patrons bored with La Traviata and Rigoletto. Besides, where else could one hear Gladys Swarthout and Rise Stevens break in their Carmens, see Jeanette MacDonald in Faust, catch James Melton in his first Madama Butterfly, or stroll into a Rigoletto and hear Jan Peerce and Robert Weede making their professional debuts?

Fun Palace. The audience tolerated the worst kind of summer weather, and so did the singers. Beverly Sills stood encased in a fabric column as the doll in The Tales of Hoffmann, while the stage temperature registered 160 degrees—later she threw up and nearly collapsed. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had to be carried to the wings after singing Der Rosenkavalier in a heavy hoop skirt. Cincinnati Zoo history is replete with disputes between singers and kamikaze bats, suicidal moths, unhousebroken monkeys and pigeons that expressed their opinion of performances in the only way available to pigeons.

Withal, the Zoo Opera generated a rapport between artists and audience that made for something special. "It was a fun palace," says Peerce. "An alfresco thing, where you asked a soprano to hold your Coke bottle while you went out and did your death scene. The peacocks never snouted me down. They liked tenors, it was only coloratura sopranos they hated."