From the fourth tier, the stage is a small, bright box far below. The singers are figures. What you see instead is the whole house: the red velvet, the gilded balconies, two thousand people leaning forward at the same moment.
We bought the cheapest seats on the morning of the performance and climbed the stairs with students, pensioners and a few visitors who had read the same advice. Nobody up there was dressed for the occasion. Everybody was listening.
The sound, against all logic, is magnificent. It rises. By the second act we had stopped looking at the stage altogether and were watching the conductor's hands, and the faces in the boxes below, catching every phrase a fraction of a second after us.
