I didn’t have a chance to post this yesterday, so you may very well have heard about it by now, but it seems an oddly appropriate story for Hallowe’en. In fact, it may be the craziest Metropolitan Opera news (from an audience standpoint) since an 82 year-old singing coach deliberately plunged to his death in 1988 during an intermission of a nationally broadcast performance of Verdi’s “Macbeth.”
http://nypost.com/2016/10/29/man-scattering-friends-ashes-during-opera-prompted-met-shutdown/
The scattering of ashes into an orchestra pit is not unprecedented, by the way. Berlioz alleged, in the 1865 edition of his autobiography, that prior to a performance of his “Romeo and Juliet,” which he was about to conduct in Breslau in 1854, a lawyer poured the ashes of his wife into a tuba from a balcony.
The latest incident comes a week after the Catholic Church banned the scattering of ashes, which it decried as “pantheistic or naturalistic or nihilistic.”
Expect heightened security in the future. First we have to take off our shoes at the airport; now we’ll be cavity searched thanks to some nutbone (whom police name as Roger Kaiser, 52, a jeweler from Dallas), who thought he was honoring a friend and even bragged about it beforehand.
The opera may have been “William Tell,” but nobody else did.
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