Take Me Out to the Opera: In Chicago, a Fan Is a Fan

CHICAGO, April 13 - On Tuesday night, between Acts I and II of "Die Walküre" at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Plácido Domingo was backstage talking about the Chicago Cubs.

"I wish they could have more satisfaction," he said.

The great tenor was speaking from the vortex of a rare cultural confluence. Over the last week, the Cubs opened their home season at Wrigley Field, and the city's Lyric Opera was presenting Richard Wagner's four-opera "Ring des Nibelungen," which meant that two of the world's most fervid fan bases were simultaneously encamped on opposite sides of the Chicago River. (The Cubs left town on Tuesday; the "Ring" concludes on Saturday night.)

As Siegmund, Mr. Domingo was fresh from a standing ovation from the Ringheads, as the most obsessive Wagnerites somewhat sheepishly call themselves.

But as he was preparing to die heroically in the second act, what came to his mind was the night two Octobers ago when an oblivious fan at Wrigley Field interfered with a foul fly ball and cost the Cubs a shot at the World Series, the umpteenth disappointment for a franchise that has not won a championship since 1908. Not even Wagner, Mr. Domingo acknowledged, breaks your heart like the Cubs. "It makes me so sad," said Mr. Domingo, who is actually a Yankee rooter. "It's a much longer journey for them."

Perhaps it's a stretch to insist that a passion for baseball and a passion for opera are related, though the link is documented. For years, after all, Robert Merrill sang the national anthem at Yankee Stadium. But as Mr. Domingo intimated, the link seems most intense in Chicago, where the ache for a baseball victory is palpable (the White Sox are virtually as hapless as the Cubs), where theater, the symphony and the opera are virulent inspirers of local pride, and where a recent newspaper poll asking whether sports or the arts were more thrilling ended in a dead heat.

To wit: Even a superficial examination of the Civic Opera House and Wrigley Field, on the day of a performance/game, turned up overlaps. Displeased, for instance, Ringheads and Cub fans will each turn on their favorites in a heartbeat. Ringheads boo -- though, truth be told, that happened far more frequently at Wrigley over the weekend, where the Cubs blew their home opener with two out in the ninth, than at Lyric, where the reviews have been stirring and the audience close to ecstatic.

Ringheads, like Cub fans, favor special headgear. The Cub hat, with its distinctive red C against a bright blue background, is everywhere in Wrigleyville, the ballpark neighborhood. In the Lyric lobby, many patrons favored horned Valkyrie helmets. (About 200 replicas of them have been sold at the concession stand since late March, along with countless Ringhead mugs.)

And at opera intermissions, well-heeled patrons can be seen sitting on the elegant lobby stairway, eating box lunches -- operatic tailgaters, the equivalent of the beer-and-brat consumers in the bars near Wrigley.

But beyond the superficial, in several days of interviewing at the opera house and the ballpark, it was not difficult to find those eager to wax eloquent on the similarities between opera and baseball fans in general -- and Ringheads and Cub fans in particular.

"They're both nuts," declared the Lyric's general director, William Mason.

And though it's true that you can find more Cub fans at Lyric than Ringheads at Wrigley -- Cub mania is a widespread local affliction, after all -- several of the more ardent out-of-town Ringheads confessed to a Cub affiliation.

Sherwin Sloan, for example, a retired eye surgeon from Los Angeles who is attending his 71st "Ring" cycle since 1975 -- at 15 hours a pop, that means he's spent more time watching the "Ring" than Noah spent on the Ark -- grew up here.

"I used to be quite serious about following them," he said of the Cubs. "But then I discovered Wagner, and I didn't have time."

Jim Becker, a former sportswriter for The Associated Press, said Wagner hadn't quite obscured a passion for the Cubs, but this was only his 59th "Ring." Ensconced along the third-base line on opening day at Wrigley, he recalled that as a boy in Los Angeles in the 1930's, he had become a Cubs fan because the Wrigley family owned the minor league team there, the Los Angeles Angels.

Mr. Becker remembered the day, shortly after Jackie Robinson went to Brooklyn in 1947 and was besieged with racist catcalls, that Pee Wee Reese walked across the diamond and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"It was like the end of "Götterdämmerung,"' said Mr. Becker, who had been in the press box. "It gave you chills."

Many of those interviewed found parallels between Wagner's tortuous plot -- a tale, drawn from German and Scandinavian myths, of gods and men struggling with conflicting demands of love and power -- and the Cubs' improbable and somewhat mythic misadventures.

It was against the Cubs in 1932, for example, that Babe Ruth called his shot. Leon Durham's bungling of a ground ball in the 1984 playoffs, which cost the Cubs a shot at the Series, was as profound an error, to some, as Wotan's promising his sister-in-law as a bride to the giants who built Valhalla. And don't forget the 1964 trade that sent the future Hall of Famer Lou Brock to the Cardinals for the journeyman pitcher Ernie Broglio, the most misguided swap since Siegfried exchanged Brünnhilde for Gutrune.

"The Cubs and the 'Ring' are very similar," said Alan Held, a bass-baritone who grew up in Peoria (albeit as a Cardinals fan) and is Gunther in the "Ring." "Everybody's chasing something they can never have."

And as Carl Grapentine, the host of a morning classical music show on a local radio station, pointed out, "Wotan has been trying to institute his new world order at least since 1876," when the "Ring" was first performed in Bayreuth, Germany. "The Cubs have been trying to win the World Series since 1908."

Mr. Grapentine said that not only had he gone to Lyric several times wearing headphones to check on the Cubs' score, he had also gone to Wrigley wearing headphones to listen to the broadcast of an opera.

In any case, more than one Ringhead called Wrigley Field, the Cubs' rickety stadium, "the Bayreuth of baseball." Mr. Domingo, who said he'd never actually been to Wrigley because he's usually not in Chicago before late October, said he'd love to go. "Maybe I'll sing the national anthem if the Cubs make the playoffs," he said. And one Cubs fan, Jeremy Wiltgen, 31, who had never heard of Bayreuth, nonetheless said both Wrigley and opera made the case for a lost world.

"Wrigley is the kitchen of baseball," Mr. Wiltgen said, thoughtfully sipping a beer as he watched the Cubs tangle with the Milwaukee Brewers. "When you go to somebody's house, you want to be in the kitchen. It's homey, it's nostalgic, it's where it's all going on. This is as close to how baseball used to be as you can get. You can't get any closer. Kids today don't have a clue, because now it's all about TV and big screens and replays and stuff, and you lose that sense of nostalgia. I get the same feeling about opera, that anyone who enjoys that kind of music is dying off."

Many no less feeling but slightly less eloquent fans of both baseball and Wagner spoke rapturously about the ineffable beauty of the game and of the music. There was also another similarity: fans of both are moved by seeing others test themselves against Everest-like challenges.

"The 'Ring' is the ultimate in opera," said Sue Miller, who works in the marriage tribunal at the Archdiocese of Chicago and has a subscription to Lyric and season tickets to the Cubs. Going to see it, she said, was like going to the playoffs.

"The Cubs don't get into post-season play very often," said Ms. Miller, who described herself as "66 going on 45."

"And the first night of the cycle, when the conductor came out, it was really, really exciting in a way that you don't ordinarily experience," she said. "It was like that in the playoffs in 2003. The crowd had that same sense, that they were witnessing something special and wonderful."

The opera and the Cubs are "the two most significant passions in my life," Ms. Miller said, before backtracking slightly. "Well, I do have a family."