Crouch End Festival Chorus!

Right, now, what we are gearing up to at this point is what regulars will know as the operatic bit in this show. Have we got any opera fans here?

...that’s the rich people. Poor people have you heard the world ‘opera’ before?

Monkeys?...Monkeys – opera that comes from an Italian word meaning ‘opera’. And the opera fans, I don’t have to tell you, opera is basically about two things. It’s about falling in love with people...and killing them. And they love singing about it too in opera – that’s the whole point.

[SINGING] I am going to kill you. No you’re noooot ETC

I am dying. I AM DYING. I’m just a poor boy from a poor family.

Now, actually, you get happy operas as well as the tragic ones – the killing ones. Here’s the way you can tell them apart. If you go to the opera, you’re not sure which one you’ve seen; you fall asleep maybe ‘zzzz which one was it?’ When the curtain falls, if everybody’s lying down...dead...it was a tragic opera. If when the curtain calls everyone’s standing up, glass of champagne ‘ha ha ha ha’: happy opera. And if, when the curtain falls, everyone is up on one knee singing the only decent tune you’ve heard all evening it was Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Now this isn’t just some idle chitchat (on my behalf). I’ve actually done some serious work on this. I have done some statistics about who dies in opera. Would you like to see my (statistics), would you like to see them?

Yeah – do it. It’ll be great. Go on. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY STATISTICS?

OK – I worked out who dies in opera. Not the chorus and blah blah but the major characters, right. Brace yourselves – I’ll explain it. It’s on the screen. In case you brought the wrong glasses, I’ll read it out.

Here’s our first opera statistics… Mozart Opera Deaths. I’ll read this out for the choir in case they…Mozart Opera Deaths. Here are three of Mozart’s operas: Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, La Clemenza di Tito – the clemency of Marshal Tito… he was well ahead of his time. Rossini. These are the major characters: 5 of them die out of 10 in 157 minutes in The Magic Flute; 2 out of 8 in 170 minutes; La Clemenza di Tito: 2 out of 4. Put that together you end up with an average of 41% of the cast on average dead at the end of your Mozart opera.

Let’s compare that to…Rossini Opera Deaths. Heard the word ‘Rossini’… have you heard the word ‘Rossini’?

Yeah, that’s the rich people. Monkeys? ‘Rossini’? Comes from an Italian word meaning ‘Rossini’.

Here are three of his operas: Otello, William Tell, Tancredi. 3 out of 5; 2 out of 6. Put it together: average of 43% cast dead.

Now, the observant people will notice that I haven’t got timings for Otello and William Tell. I haven’t got those CDs; I can’t find the information anywhere on the Internet from which I understand that nobody has ever watched them all the way to the end.

Right, now if you put enough of these statistics together you end up with THIS graph OK?

Are you with me Festival Hall? Say ‘Yes’.

YES

On the left-hand side, ‘percentage cast dead’ it says and on the bottom the composers in chronological order. Mozart 41%, Rossini 43, Wagner 36, Puccini 42 but Verdi a MASSIVE 60% of the cast…

....very popular strangely. Never to come back. Now, let’s try and put that into some sort of contemporary perspective. Colonel Gaddafi...

It’s not too soon to laugh. Is it too soon? Come on Festival Hall ‘No it’s not 1, 2’.

...in power for 42 years. Don’t trouble yourselves, I have done the sums that’s x days, y hours... 22 million blah, blah, blah minutes murdered about 200,000 people – terrible thing, not saying it isn’t. Let’s compare that to...Giuseppe Verdi.

His opera The Force of Destiny lasts 145 minutes, leaves 3 people dead. If Verdi had been in charge of Libya for 42 years...

He would have murdered 456,169 people. Is that what you call entertainment Festival Hall?

Anyway, so how can I explain it that people go to the opera? Well, I think it is the same thing that happens all round the world opera or no. We’ve all got a favourite song: however often you hear it, there’s always a couple of words you can’t quite catch. Isn’t that the...weird thing. Once you’ve misheard one or two words you can start mishearing other so all fits together with your weird versions...

Right, we are going to do two arias on this stage here. The arias are going to be ‘La donna è mobile’ from Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi. And ‘Largo (è) factotum’ from Il Barbieri de Sevilla by Rossini. Er, rich people do you recognize those names? Poor people don’t even pretend. You’ll recognize the tunes when we come to them, of course. We need firstly two soloists but we also need to help those people who don’t speak foreign languages as required by opera. So if that one of...people out there in that category, we are going to project the words above the heads of our singers as they sing.

Here to sing first of all La Donna è mobile would you welcome back our soloists, in turn, give them a round of applause MR CHRIS TURNER!