Fun Insider Secret Onstage At The Metropolitan Opera

(Photo: Jonathan Tichler/MET Opera)

"Another small insider homage could be found on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera this month, in its lavish production of Der Rosenkavalier, by Richard Strauss. In the third act, after the boorish Baron Ochs’s attempted assignation at a tavern goes disastrously and hilariously wrong, he is besieged with bills from the innkeeper and a host of others. Invisible to the audience — whether sitting in the back of the Family Circle or the front of the orchestra — is what the long paper bills thrust at him actually say. In flowing cursive writing, the bills list the cast from the current production’s 1969 premiere, starting with the conductor, Karl Böhm, and naming everyone from Leonie Rysanek, who sang the Marschallin, to Christa Ludwig, who sang Octavian, to Charles Anthony, who was the innkeeper that night (and who sang some 2,928 mostly small roles at the Met during his long career). The tradition of these kinds of in jokes goes back centuries. Mozart’s Don Giovanni has an allusion in the last act to his own Le Nozze di Figaro." [Source]