One very special night at the opera must surely have been February 24th, 1988. That night Pavarotti received 165 curtain calls for his Opera performance in the Donizetti’s opera “L’elisir d’amore“ at the Deutsche Opera Berlin, which remains an unbreakable world record for curtain calls until today. Pavarotti was applauded for 1 hour and 7 minutes!
However, there was longer applause. On July 30, 1991, when Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello was on show in Vienna, Pavarotti’s tenor “rival” Plácido Domingo portrayed the title role and yielded a standing ovation that lasted for an incredible 1 hour and 20 minutes. “Thunderous clapping echoed around the Vienna Staatsoper on the warm summer evening of July 31, 1991, for one hour and 20 minutes, setting a record for the world’s longest operatic applause ever. The audience, who had just revealed in a performance of a lifetime by Placido Domingo in Othello, responded by rising to their feet and clapping through encore after encore — 101 curtain calls to be exact.”
On Christmas Eve in 1910, Luisa Tetrazzini, the biggest opera star of the Golden Age of Opera, sang in the streets of San Francisco for 250,000 people attending. It was four years since San Francisco had been severely damaged by the disastrous earthquake and fire. There were no microphones in those days, so the police halted all traffic in the area on the evening of the concert and cars were forbidden in the city centre. A platform was built for an Opera orchestra and 50-person chorus.
Tetrazzini sang for a half hour. She started with “The Last Rose of Summer”, and her voice carried along the streets of San Francisco. Samuel Dickson, who attended the concert, wrote “If you closed your eyes you would have thought yourself alone in the world with that beautiful voice. I was two blocks away, and every note was crystal clear, every word distinct.” In the end, she sang “Auld Lang Syne” and the huge crowd, nearly all of them survivors of the 1906 disaster, joined her as a magnificent chorus.
Courtsey:- https://www.operabase.com/festivals/en
