Opera

Henrietta Bredin on boats, trains, planes that transport singers around the stage

Opera, so they say, has the power to transport the listener on wings of sound to places beyond the imagination — on a good night, at any rate. But just to keep singers, and directors, on their toes, a number of composers have, over the years, been tickled by the notion of writing specific modes of transport into the opera’s storyline.

Puccini was car-mad, so you’d think he might have put one of his favourites into an opera. His first purchase was a De Dion-Bouton 5 CV in 1901, and some years later he commissioned a special off-road number from Lancia, for hunting trips. But the students in La Bohème are too poor to own a car, so the transport featured in his work is confined to the barge in Il tabarro, setting for torrid adultery and violent revenge among the stevedores of Paris. And, of course, there’s the US ship Abraham Lincoln, which Madam Butterfly hopes to see ‘One fine day’ and on which Pinkerton returns, having forgotten all about his Japanese dalliance, accompanied by the nice sensible American girl he has married instead. I thought for a long time that Hindemith’s opera Cardillac was about a car (well, wouldn’t you?) but it turns out to be the story of a murderous goldsmith.

Ships and boats bob up all over the place. There’s the ill-fated Achille Lauro, hijacked by the PLO, in John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer; the Flying Dutchman’s mysterious vessel, sailed by a ghostly crew of dead men under blood-red sails; there’s Peter Grimes’s fishing boat; and the floating world of HMS Indomitable, with its rigid demarcation lines between Captain Vere, his officers, and Billy Budd and the other sailors below decks.