The horse beats me to the stage door by a short nose. Known as Tiz, it’s an opera specialist who comes up from Norfolk for 10 a.m. rehearsal and is driven back home each night. Tiz is on call right through the Fidelio rehearsals — unlike, as Sir Antonio Pappano points out, the star tenor who does not show up for the first act.
This is a fairly sore point, and I wait until late in our conversation to probe it. There has been a media hoo-hah about Fidelio tickets going to ROH friends, leaving hardly any for the general public. Pappano, the quiet man of opera, suddenly shoots up an octave.
‘That’s not particularly true,’ he cries. ‘In October, we released several hundred tickets. They were snapped up. We couldn’t sell Fidelio for love nor money the last time we did it. I don’t understand. Is it because of Jonas Kaufmann? Really?? He doesn’t sing until the second act.
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