Disaster: Tenor breaks his back in Puccini fall
mainWe’re used to sopranos missing the mattress in Tosca, but this sounds like incompetence verging on criminal negligence.
Marco Voleri, playing the emperor, was sitting on the throne in Turandot at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago when part of the stage collapsed. He fell a distance of six feet, fracturing his spine. Rushed to hospital, he will undergo surgery in the coming days.
Marco said: ‘The collapse was so sudden that there was nothing I could do to avoid falling; I felt the ground disappearing from under my feet.’
More here from Gramilano.
This is eerily similar to the collapse of part of the stage during a performance of Otello by the Opera de Paris in Seville in 1992. Then one chorus member was killed and several injured. The Spanish alleged the French technical staff had ignored warnings about the weight of the platform. Not sure how it all ended up.