THE ELIXIR OF LOVE
Alove potion with an alcoholic kick, a small-town ice-cream-truck driver, and a set with a turn-of-the-lastcentury gazebo at centre stage: Vancouver Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (L’elisir d’amore) has all the elements of a light romantic comedy to cure whatever January blues have set in. It’s a delicious helping of bel canto singing, with an extra scoop of farce-happy opera buffa.
As rising young Canadian tenor Andrew Haji puts it: “Yay! No one dies! It’s so much fun when I get drunk and I get to prance around the stage.”
Haji is speaking to the Straight at Vancouver Opera’s East Side headquarters, joined by celebrated Chinese-born soprano Ying Fang. In the opera, his humble ice-cream man, Nemorino, pines for her headstrong Adina, a well-read farm owner who is planning to marry the cocky soldier Belcore (Brett Polegato). A peddler’s magical elixir of love, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the local wine, may be Nemorino’s only answer.
Haji played the role in a recent Canadian Opera Company production. (The same whimsical pre–first World War sets are coming here.) And he knows all too well that the trick to The Elixir of Love is making it look easy. That’s because it’s not. He and his costar agree it’s as demanding as they come.
“It is a marathon from beginning to end,” he says matter-of-factly. “Bel canto is a very athletic singing, with a lot of runs, a lot of long passages, and a lot of finales that go on and on and on.”
And like a marathon runner, Haji has to have endurance, especially with his showpiece, “Una furtiva lagrima”—one of the most famous tenor arias of all time—sitting as it does in the second act.
“You really have to be right on at the beginning and keep the energy throughout,” stresses the London, Ontario–born tenor. “So it really is about pacing. If you give 100 percent at the start you won’t make it till the end.”
Haji adds that, even given those demands, this production—directed by Brenna Corner, after James Robinson’s COC creation—is especially physical.
“We have to do fights,” he says. “When I get enlisted to the army they put me through a little boot camp with jumping jacks and pushups.” And yes, he’s sometimes singing at the same time.
With her bel canto (“beautiful singing”) coloratura and high-flying vocal lines, Fang doesn’t get it any easier. “Adina is on-stage all the time and my big aria is at the very end,” she explains. “Bel canto is really showing off all the technique of the voice and the beauty of the voice.”
She adds the roles in The Elixir of Love are deceptively complex, too. “It’s tricky with Adina: if you overdo it and just reject Nemorino, the audience won’t like you,” she says with a smile, explaining she has to show the subtle push and pull her strong, independent character has toward the lovesick ice-cream salesman. “In this production, she’s not rejecting him, but doesn’t know really how to deal with him.” Adina, she says, is discovering what love is.
As entertaining as their romantic struggle is to watch, it’s just as fun to consider what brought these two rising opera singers together on-stage from opposite sides of the globe. Born in Ningbo, in southeastern China, Fang had parents who always encouraged her to study music, putting her into piano at an early age. “I wasn’t really into it,” she says. “But in primary school my teacher noticed that I could sing beautifully as a little kid.” She encouraged her to apply to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music for high school. And that set off an incredible journey: from there, after she was heard in a master class by visitors from the Juilliard School, she was brought to New York City. Later, her sparkling voice won her a place in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.
Haji’s journey was a little less direct. For reasons that seem to escape him now, he went straight into computer science at the University of Waterloo after he graduated from high school. “After two years, I decided that really wasn’t for me,” he says, citing the long hours of math. “I had been singing my whole life, just in choirs, and never considered it as a career.” But as he reconsidered what to do with his life, an old high-school music teacher suggested he pursue singing. He successfully auditioned for the music program at the University of Toronto. Years later, he got into the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio young-artists program.
It’s been an exciting, fast rise for both hard-working singers. And with many well-praised performances under their belts, they both consider The Elixir of Love a great first opera for people to see. Or just an opera to give you a lift—while they do the heavy lifting.
“Sometimes you need to go to the opera and smile,” says Haji.
Vancouver Opera presents The Elixir of Love at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Sunday (January 21), and on January 25 and 27.