This is… a lot
“The tenor leaves the scene to assault a member of the audience”
“The singer Corelli climbed up to the third row of boxes and seized the throat of a man who wanted to clap only for the (mezzo)soprano”
They wrote that he even tried to draw his stage sword…
Amazing
@muchadoabout here it is!
Tenor runs off the stage to assault a member of the audience
Singer Corelli went up to the third tier of balconies and seized a man by the throat because he wanted to applaud only the soprano
Naples, February 13th. Tonight, during the intermission of the opera Il trovatore performed in Teatro San Carlo, tenor Franco Corelli assaulted a member of the audience after having gone inside his box on the third tier of balconies. This unusual episode occured right after the the curtain fell on the second act of the opera, in which the main event on stage is the double tale of Azucena, played by Fedora Barbieri. While Azucena and Manrico, played by tenor Corelli, were standing on the proscenium thanking the audience, the man showed his admiration for the mezzosoprano, shouting “For her alone!”
As soon as the applause died down, Corelli rushed though the door which divides the stage from the first tier of balconies, ran up the stais leasding to the third tier, broke down the door with a shoulder push and entered the box where the man, named Improta, was sitting. The tenor seized him by the throat, while the stage technicians, who ran after him, tried to hold him back. Corelli freed himself and unseathed his sword, the one that Azucena gave to him so that he could plunge it up to its hilt in his rival’s, the wicked Di Luna, heart.
in the meantime other people arrived on scene and prevented the worst from happening, dragging away the quick-tempered Manrico, who once again shouted obscure words of threat to the man. In the meantime the rest of the audience was growing impatient; between the first and the second act there is no intermission and the people were waiting with the lights off for the opera to resume. The curtain was raised again after a fifteen minutes delay.
