Whenever Renata Tebaldi sang in Napoli's Teatro San Carlo, fans would wait for her at the stage door and, as she was about to come out into the street, they would throw flowers on the ground (insert joke re: historically bad trash-collecting Neapolitan habits here) because she was so sublime that they wanted La Signorina to step on a carpet of flowers instead that on the ground and dog pewp.
A few minutes ago, about 45 actually, Juan Diego Florez has finished -- after 5 very generous encores -- his recital at la Scala in Milan under a shower of roses raining down from the palchi and gallerie (a small bouquet thrown from the gallerie has actually accidentally beaned him -- as he was bending down to pick up some roses -- on the back of his head), while screams of "Sublime!", "Fenomeno!", "Bra-vis-si-mo!" "Sei un mito!" kept booming down from the rows of palchi, from the loggione, and from the usually very blasè platea seats, in a prolonged happy standing ovation the kind this "Roman arena" (Roberto Alagna's words) of a theater is usually very, very stingy of.
A Peruvian flag was even exposed from the central loggione the way soccer fans wave flags at the San Siro soccer arena, as someone yelled "Viva Perù".
Our personal favorites, among the many arias, "Troncate i ceppi suoi" from Rossini's Elisabetta, Si spande al sole in faccia from Mozart's "Re Pastore", and obviously "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" from Gluck's Orphée and Bellini's La Ricordanza.
Big props to Maestro Vincenzo Scalera, whose sensitive, beautiful playing made a huge impression on everybody -- and when you're the accompanist for the greatest tenor in the world, one of the alltime greats, and you still make an impression, well, that's a very big accomplishment indeed.
More later, because Opera Chic needs to recover from the sheer beauty of it all.