| by Neil Morgan Martha Hart was daydreaming. She’d quit after 14 years in a
law office and was taking up photography. She was imagining ideal projects for her and her
all-manual, heavy-metal Minolta.
She liked opera. After she’d moved to San Diego in
1965, she’d attended a student dress rehearsal of San Diego Opera’s
"Faust," when a young Placido Domingo was the substitute tenor. She had studied
theatrical design at Mt. Holyoke, gone to operas in Vienna with her mother.
In 1995, after researching every book she could find on
opera, she decided no one had done the book she wanted to do. Striking cold, she mailed a
proposal to Ian Campbell at San Diego Opera.
Much stood in the way of her daydream. She was unknown.
She was unlikely to win a commission for a backstage documentary. She’d be in the
way. Nobody would underwrite it. How could she do it herself?
Campbell saw her proposal, sighed and put it aside. Two
days later he picked it up again.
He knew she was right about one thing: Most photographic
records of opera companies are posed and lifeless. They miss the feeling backstage at
breathless, terrifying moments when opera is being thought out, rewritten and finally
offered across the lights.
People don’t know what it’s like, she had
written Campbell. I don’t know either, but I’d like to catch it on film and
share it.
As Campbell reread her letter, he revisited his own
daydreams come true: seven years as an operatic tenor in Australia, then management and an
unexpected call to join the great Met in New York. Now, the nights when an untested young
singer soars into fame here on his own stage in his adopted city.
He sent word to Martha Hart to come in.
He liked her portfolio. She wasn’t asking for money
but access to rehearsals and performances. If her pictures were good enough for a book,
her fee would come after all bills were paid.
Campbell gave her the run of backstage for two seasons.
By early 1997 her life was centered in the windowless
rehearsal hall downstairs at Civic Theater. Her camera was revealing the frustrations of
director Jim de Blasis and the firey pouts of Adria Firestone, tuning up for her "100th-and-something"
role as Carmen. And Richard Leech, making himself up for his first Don Jose, staring
shocked into the mirror as that face took form.
"Everyone knew I was there," Martha Hart writes
in notes for the book, "but they quickly forgot about me." She was using fast
3200 ASA Kodak film without flash.
Sometimes she showed the casts the tiny images of her
contact sheets. Conductor Karen Keltner was intrigued: "All I see from the pit are
eyes and mouths."
She assigned herself photographs, but it was better when
she simply moved in close, watched and listened and squeezed.
Her epiphany came as she documented the frantic
give-and-take of a world premiere, "The Conquistador."
"Everything was different," she says.
"They were searching for the baseline. emotional rehearsals! Debates on
interpretation – pitch, lines, everything – the composer crying out and a singer
pleading, ‘What if we held this note a quarter note longer?’"
The book is at the bindery, proof sheets glittery with
excitement. There are 350 candid photographs and insightful captions in "The Art of
Making Opera: Two Seasons With the San Diego Opera." It includes a history of San
Diego Opera’s 33 years by David Gregson and valuable chronologies and indexes.
It’ll go on sale next month at $60.
"The company and I have given and taken a lot from
each other," she says. "It’s the most difficult and rewarding thing
I’ve ever done. There isn’t any other book on opera like what we’ve done
here."
It documents the continuity and vigor of this company. In
a moment of civic doubt, it validates San Diego’s cultural energy.
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Neil Morgan, the former editor of the San Diego
Union, writes a tri-weekly column for the Union-Tribune.
All material © Neil Morgan 1998. |
