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On September 23rd, 2016 I found myself near the start of a dreamy vacation with m’lady. We were staying right in the heart of Venice and it was just as wonderful as you would expect, perhaps even wonderfuller.
We had spent our day meandering the gorgeous city. We inquired about train tickets, bought postcards, and just generally swooned around holding hands and walking slowly along the myriad of canals and bridges. We made it back to our room in time to spend an hour getting shut out of Gord Downie tickets online (yes, I regularly hunch over the internet for concert tickets even whilst on vacation – what a trooper huh?) and then we got dressed up in our finest travel-clothes.
We stopped for dinner, our only meal of the day. I didn’t really feel like Italian food but whatcha gonna do? I had lasagna (again) and m’lady had soup (again, again). We shunned wine at dinner in case that was part of m’lady’s malady (she had started the trip on the ill side) and got out of there with plenty of time to get to the Teatro Fenice (Phoenix Theatre).
Yes, we had tickets to the opera, and I was beyond excited.
The Teatro Fenice is the most famous theatre in Italian opera, it was opened in 1792 after the main theatre in town burned down, hence the “Phoenix” name. For a little context: Mozart was still alive when The Teatro Fenice was built (though he never played there).
Unfortunately the name seemed to be looking forward more than backward; the Phoenix burned down in 1836 and then again (this time due to arson) in 1996. It was reopened in 2003 after renovations brought it back to it’s original design and there it sits, courting disaster.
We had tickets for La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, a world-renown opera that was premiered in this very building in 1851 (imagine!). We went up, up, up to the 5th level and found our seats in the amazing, thousand-capacity room. The floor in front of the stage only had about a dozen rows of seats, all the rest of us were in boxes that formed a massive, towering horseshoe facing and embracing the stage.
Our seats were described as “obstructed view” and they definitely were. Being in the second row high up in the steep theatre the orchestra pit was cut off from our vision and the front of the stage was only visible with a crane of our necks. Just before the show started the two seats in front of us were taken up by an older couple who leaned forward and further obstructed our view the whole time. No big deal though, I craned and ducked while m’lady kept her eyes shut for much of the performance and we somehow followed the storyline pretty well.
At the first intermission we stuck to the 5th level and took some pictures. At the second intermission we walked down to the lobby bar for a drink. That’s when I noticed firemen standing in the stairway on every level. I guess the old Phoenix isn’t taking any chances.
In the end we both had a good time but weren’t that impressed with the opera itself. The entire third act was basically the death of Violetta, but c’mon, die already! There was no mystery or surprises in what I found to be a very thin plot. I thought it would have had more oomph, more melody. Matter of fact, I might just write an opera myself sometime, just to see if it’s as easy as I imagine it is. Anyone got a good libretto they’re not using?
After the show we strolled slowly back to the hotel windowshopping along the way and detouring just enough to get a tiny bit lost, which quickly became our favourite Venetian pastime. I’d like to say we were humming Verdi the whole way, but we weren’t.
But we certainly swooned up a storm.
Todd Man Out 