Martina Arroyo’s payment standoff at the opera in Rome | Opera

Martina Arroyo (Obituary, 25 October) was an instigator of an interesting evening at Rome’s opera house in June 1974. She was singing Elisabetta in a revival of Luchino Visconti’s well regarded 1965 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo and, together with Grace Bumbry, who sang Eboli, led a standoff with the theatre’s management over payment.

A usual practice in those years was for payment to be made during an interval, but this had been missed in the first interval and was not forthcoming in the second. As a 25-minute interval extended well past the half-hour, the audience’s impatience gave rise to shouts of “Buffoni!”, “Buffoni!”.

This caused members of the orchestra to return to the pit and announce that they were not clowns and that they, and the chorus, who had not been paid for May, would continue the opera without the soloists. Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian-American opera composer who was in the audience, helped negotiate a settlement.

Cigarette in hand, Thomas Schippers, the conductor, had spent much of a 70-minute interval pacing nervously along a corridor behind the first tier of boxes. Yet when he set the orchestra playing the melancholic introduction to Act Four and Cesare Siepi began singing Ella giammai m’ amò it was as though nothing untoward had happened.

David Lane

Rome, Italy