Aztec death masks and cargo lifts

During a behind-the-scenes tour, Israeli Opera general director Zach Granit reveals a bit of the thinking process behind the upcoming productions

The Israeli Opera revealed its next eight productions for the upcoming season as general director Zach Granit and press officer Yonat Burmil accompanied several reporters deep into the depths from which the Commendatore appears singing

“Don Giovanni! A cenar teco m’invitasti” (“Don Giovanni, you’ve invited me to dine with you”) in Mozart’s

Don Giovanni.

The bass singer can be lifted up to the stage from hell itself using a lift; likewise, sets can be lowered as if from heaven using a crane. A black and white mural in the H. R. Giger-style depicting a fantasy halfman, half-metal, creature cranking a lever with a skull at its tip allows all involved to feel just how Heavy Metal opera can get.

The announced operas are Mozart’s The Magic Flute (to open on November 5), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Yevgény Onégin) (December 28). Next year the productions lined up include Verdi’s La Traviata (The Fallen Woman) (January 27), Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (Clowns) (February 27), Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (March 28) Handel’s Alcina (May 16) and Verdi’s Aida. Seventeen theatrical pieces by the late Hanoch Levin will be adapted for the opera in a special production called Big Tuches by Yossi Ben Nun, Yonatan Cnaan, Yonatan Keret, Ronnie Reshef and David Sebba.

“We all of us of education / A something somehow have obtained” wrote Alexander Pushkin in the 1833 novel which inspired Tchaikovsky. Yet it was a joy to listen to Granit – “Without constraint in

conversation / ... touching lightly every theme” – when discussing the complex work of running an opera house.

“An opera production takes roughly two years to put together,” he informed us, “and roughly 200 costumes must be designed and created.” On our tour, we will get to meet and hear from some of the people who do just that. “When we began working on these productions in 2020 we could not know for sure that we would have COVID-19 vaccinations,” he added, noting that

Culture and Sport Minister Chili Tropper has done an outstanding job in supporting the opera.

“Only three people can sit here,” Burmil explains while we are taken backstage and shown the Deputy Stage Manager chair. By this, Burmil means that only three people in the opera have the needed skills to command the complex signals and protocols needed for an opera to run smoothly. The DSM can call anyone in the building, from the singers who are waiting for their cue to enter the stage to the people who

must now lift a set or drop one, she explains. This means “these guys always stay calm, no matter what.” They also file a report at the end of each show on what went well and what did not.

OPERA LOVERS often point out that in our current productions a singer is expected to run around the stage, fence, and at times even swing from a rope while singing while in earlier times singers were judged mostly by the quality of their voice and were expected to stand still and sing. A factor in this change is technology. In the past, singers had to keep eye contact with the conductor to see where the opera is headed. Today, video monitors allow the DSM and the singers to keep up with the orchestra even if they are removed from it. The 1,600-seat hall has an orchestra pit that can be altered to best serve the needs of the production. The musicians can be raised from the pit or more rows added to accommodate more musicians.

We come to the wardrobe where assistant Maya Levy tells us what it is like to work with Danish costume designer Anja Vang Krag on La Traviata. The decision was to reimagine the ball at Flora’s house as a fashion show. “Everything here is made by hand,” Levy explains, “each item requires hundreds of hours to make.” Head of the props department Dafna Shenev points to photographs of Mexican death masks worn during the First of November Day of the Dead holiday – here used for visual reference – and to charred lungs that will be incorporated in the production. The items not only have to be made, they also need to be durable, to function during a performance. Props master Laurie Cohen presents us with an artificial cocktail with a breath-taking level of precision in the fruit slice sticking on top of it. When someone asks, she explains that 3D-printing technology is not yet able to answer such needs; what we see was carefully made by human hands.

Maybe such fine work is not apparent to those sitting far from the stage but for the singers and actors, it can be a huge difference. Wardrobe manager Iris Ratinsky tells us that for Pagliacci they reconceived the Italian village where the opera is set as a collection of families each of which suffers from a sort of deformity.

“Take a family of circus acrobats for example,” she says, “they all have large muscles right? So our job is to create costumes for the singers who compose this family [so that] they can perform as they wear them but also clearly give away their family identity to the audience.” The director of this opera is Inbal Pinto. “We try everything ourselves before we give it to the actors,” Ratinsky adds.

As we scurry in the secret passages of the opera I note a sticker which says “Kol beisha – nifla” [A woman’s voice is a fantastic thing] in contrast to the Jewish Talmudic idea “Kol beisha – erwa” suggesting there is something sexual about hearing a woman sing. If other opera houses can face the risk of staging The Death of Klinghoffer, about the 1985 murder of Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer by PLO terrorists, our national opera exists in a country where plenty of people would rage against the potentially polarizing political content in producing such an opera here. Many more would join the fry not because of politics, but due to their religious convictions against hearing women sing, and would support shutting down the opera for good if they could.

We quietly enter a practice room to enjoy listening as pianist Alexander Ivanov accompanies mezzo-soprano Shay Bloch as she sings a Russian aria from Eugene Onegin. Is it “Ah, Tanya, Tanya”? Her powerful voice lifts our spirits as we emerge from the building to enjoy the sunny heavens above.