Opera makes the most memorable TV commercials

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday December 18, 2014

Mazda likes to portray itself as a good corporate citizen, and thanks its many customers by sponsoring the annual Opera in the Bowl concert, as it did last weekend.

Of course in such a popular event the opera needs to be light, short and digestible, with lots of songs that everyone knows - even if they believe they know nothing about opera. So it was that the warm summer night was filled with Opera Australia's orchestra and finest young singers entertaining the crowd with two hours of delightful, er, TV commercials.

I don't think it was deliberate, but more than two-thirds I could remember back to a TV soundtrack. It's just that a great operatic tune is so memorable, and so made for words, that advertisers have always found them irresistible.

So when the orchestra opened with Bizet's Carmen, B&D's Roll-a-Door opened in my mind. Then Carmina Burana by Carl Orff conjured hundreds of men racing across a field chasing a beer.

The great Verdi of course was there with the Anvil Chorus (Yellow Pages), and Nabucco's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves which caused a row in Italy when a bank used it for a TV commercial.

There is a financial reason for this resurgence of opera, far more mundane than its great beauty. Most of our favourite operas were written more than a century ago and so are out of copyright. So although you have to pay the record company or singers - you don't pay hefty original music costs or residuals. So when you can get the world's greatest music for nothing - why not?

And marketers have been filching opera tracks since before the Marx Brothers. They're all snapped up and replayed, fortunately only 30 seconds at a time. So La Donna E Mobile becomes "pasta from Leggo's". Rossini's Figaro becomes Vittoria Coffee and in an earlier commercial Doritos Chips. Pachelbel's Canon takes you to Tasmania, and Wagner's Valkyries fetch the Reflex copy paper.

Cars love the smooth ride of classical music: Debussy's Clair de Lune for Honda Accord, Rachmaninoff's Pictures at an Exhibition is Mitsubishi's Magna. Honda Legend uses the dreamlike atmosphere of Cantaloube's Songs of the Auvergne; Holden Statesman used Mozart's Piano Concerto 21; and for their Calibre, Holst's The Planets. Of course the grouind-shaker of them all was when the Army Reserve blew its trainees through the smoke bombs with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

There is actually give and take in this process - Stanley Kubrick turned Richard Strauss into a hit composer when he ran Also Sprach Zarathustra as the soundtrack for his 2001. It was scarcely known then. And Delibes was yet another obscure, little known 19th century opera composer - there are thousands of them - until his Flower Duet was played through the cabin of a British Airways commercial. It was then that the dust was blown off the volumes of Lakme and it is now in the world's frequent opera repertoire.

I'll bet that a lot of my readers are now surprised to discover they are so familiar with the works of opera and classical symphonies. You may not know the names but the music is right inside you. Maybe you might use this holiday break to explore the world of classics, if you haven't been into it before. You'll be amazed at what you find, and you don't have to buy any products.

Have a very merry Christmas!