The Smart Set

It's quite amazing the different audiences the various Live From the Met (NY Metropolitan) operas attract. If I were a sociologist I'd have a field day in Aldeburgh. You get coachloads of music lovers bussed in from all the outlying villages for the lighter stuff, some Verdi, for example, anything by Puccini, or Rossini. They shuffle a bit in their seats when the music stops being light and frothy. They're not keen on overtures - nothing to look at except the conductor. Some of them have bags of sweets and boxes of chocolates, which does not please their more hardline neighbours, for there will be many of them too. The trippers are so happy to be watching an opera which is not too highbrow, and they laugh a lot and are jolly but don't get the musical jokes. The afficianados titter before the surtitles go up - they've seen them all before, many times. If there were CDs of operatic arias sung by Andrea Boccelli, or Katherine Jenkins for sale in the foyer, the coach would be packed with them on the journey home. They might all sing a catchy tune they remember, Sempre Libera from La Traviata perhaps.

For Mozart you get all sorts too, but it's mostly serious music lovers. They already have the CDs of all of Mozart's operas, perhaps more than one copy of each one recorded from a different opera house. They love music, really love it, and they arrive from the same outlying villages but in pairs or foursomes, never en masse. Some of them might even have brought the score which they discreetly follow with the aid of a tiny, non-distracting torch. When you chat to them in the interval the discussion ranges over the production of Flute you saw at Covent Garden in 1994 with Kiri on roller skates, or the time Angela Gheorghiu so memorably sang Figaro with Roberto Alagna at Glyndebourne, must have been 2007 was it, just before they announced their engagement and set the operatic world on fire?

But for a Wagner opera? Oh the difference. These people are the real operatic McCoy. They will sit through hour after hour of the richest, fullest, most heavenly, most glorious music ever written, their faces rapt, their bodies still. They don't usually attend an opera unless it's in an opera house. If they want to see something at the Met they fly to New York for it. But this opportunity to share such a first class musical experience on their doorstep (up to 20 miles away or so) they seize gratefully. They know there will be no rustling of sweet wrappers, no fidgeting, no coughing even - as at Snape most people would rather have a seizure than let that bark out. They have no qualms about sitting still for a two and a half hour-long third act of Die Meistersinger as they did last night. The interval discussions tend to be technical, uber-serious music lovers as they are, though once after the first act of Parsifal the woman behind me commented disparagingly on the plastic chairs on stage as I was recovering from a two-hour-long swoon. Not only do they have all the CDs of all Wagner operas, they have the records as well, carefully replaced in their immaculate covers after each airing. At least one of the recordings of each will have been made at Bayreuth. And at midnight they return to The Old Vicarage, Moat Farm, The Hall, their beautiful timber-framed or Georgian homes in some lovely village, their spirits soaring, their senses tingling, their souls at peace. That's what Wagner does for you.