For me the moment came when I was sitting in the back of the amphitheatre at Covent Garden as a sixth-former, hearing the late, great Birgit Nilsson sing Wagner. To say I was hooked by Nilsson's commanding, laser-like soprano sound was an understatement. But there was more to that evening than the Nilsson wow factor. After all, I already knew enough about my own emerging taste for Wagner to have badgered my father into getting me a ticket for something I wanted to hear in the flesh. Hearing Nilsson that night, though, felt more than just exciting. It felt like crossing a personal watershed. From that evening I felt that I had really begun to get it about opera. I felt I could trust my own judgment. I felt part of it. And I still do.
Perhaps there was a 16-year-old in the back of the amphitheatre who went through something similar this July on hearing Juan Diego Flórez (below, right) in The Barber of Seville in the same theatre. If so, that would hardly be surprising. It is a long time since I have heard an audience react to a singer with the impassioned enthusiasm that greeted Flórez's performance of the closing rondo in Rossini's opera. It was one of those moments where you sensed early on you were listening to something very remarkable, and in which the singer's confidence drew strength from those listening, before giving it back to his audience again, enhanced and transcending. The applause at the close was astonishingly animated and it seemed it would never stop.
In this respect nothing in Britain can rival the generosity of the BBC Proms in the classical field. The annual Albert Hall season has a far more democratic feel than the classical music offered at other times of the year. The Prom audience vox-pops that the writer and broadcaster Ivan Hewett collected during the 2004 and 2005 Prom seasons (he wrote about them in a chapter in the 2007 book The Proms: A New History) convey this uniqueness with great authenticity. "It's an occasion, isn't it," the Downie daughters of Bridgend told Hewett. "And Dad's enthusiasm has rubbed off on us, we want to learn more."
I looked up Hewett's research afresh after reading a much debated article about the process of initiation into opera. Published this year in the US journal Qualitative Sociology, it has now acquired a cult following among opera fans. In the article, "Becoming a Fan: On the Seductions of Opera," the Connecticut-based Argentine sociologist Claudio Benzecry argues that social class, background and personal taste are less important in explaining why individuals become absorbed in opera than what he describes as "random acts of initiation" in the process of learning to be at one with the music.
Benzecry bases his findings on a study of the Colón opera house in Buenos Aires and of the opera fans who congregate in the upper floors, where the cheapest tickets are available. He interviewed opera-goers over a period of 18 months, and discovered that the key to becoming committed was the way in which potential fans learned how to respond to opera both internally and externally. Fans, he found, want to learn about opera in order to enjoy it and to express their pleasure. They do this by talking to one another about operas, singers and performances, by studying the subject and, crucially, by learning through observation and experience how to display their responses.
If I understand Benzecry correctly he is saying that the important thing about becoming a fan is, first, attendance at a performance and, second and even more important, the opportunity to learn how other fans respond in order to become one of the crowd. Becoming a fan, in other words, is all about harnessing the inclination to experiment with the opportunity to learn enough to feel at ease in the company of other fans. Benzecry's findings ring true to me, and they are echoed in the comments of the Prommers in Hewett's work. Not everyone is going to be a fan of opera or anything else. But no one will ever be a fan unless they have the opportunity to learn.
