Opera Singer Hospitalized for Scenery Ingestion

Operatic sensation Graziella Balduccini-Jones was rushed to a local hospital late Thursday night after becoming ill during a performance at the Munich Opera Festival. A festival spokesperson declined to provide further details, but sources close to the festival reported that the beloved soprano was taken ill midway through a performance of Verdi's Aida, in which she was singing the title role, after eating part of the sets. She finished the performance but collapsed during the curtain calls and was taken to the hospital, where she is said to be in stable condition.

"I've been waiting for this to happen for years," said the American mezzo Ashley Duncan, a friend of Balduccini-Jones. "I keep telling Graziella, stop chewing the scenery, because one of these days you're going to swallow something, but does she listen?" Duncan explained, however, that the diva does not have an eating disorder. "She never does anything like this outside the opera house, except once she bit a piece out of a piano during a song recital. It's not a food issue, it's just that she gets so caught up in the drama that she starts gnawing on bits of the sets and props. Once she chewed up her whole fan in Tosca and stuck it on the bottom of Scarpia's seat. When he pulled up his chair to write out the safe-conduct for Tosca and Mario, his hand went right into the middle of it. I thought he was going to stab her instead of the other way around."

Balduccini-Jones, a charismatic singer with a powerful but limpidly beautiful voice, is immensely popular but also controversial. Fans adore her instantly recognizable sound and the emotional truth of her acting, but detractors complain that she is a lazy singer who doesn't bother to fully master her challenging repertoire and instead coasts on her glamorous looks and gimmicky acting. "I'm not at all surprised that this happened, frankly," said the Icelandic tenor Ketill Hallgeirsson, who famously refused to work with Balduccini-Jones ever again after a production of Puccini's La bohème at the La Fenice opera house in Venice in 2007. "Every production I was in with her, the sets would be in tatters after opening night. When we were in Bohème, she chewed up the table and spit it out, and then climbed halfway up the wall to get the paper moon in the window and put it in her mouth. I was trying to sing my aria, and everybody was watching her antics. I hope this is a wake-up call for her."

An administrator at New York's Metropolitan Opera, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that Balduccini-Jones's scenery chewing has been an issue there. "Ever wonder why we always schedule her for the first three performances and then bring in the second cast? That's all we can afford to give her, even though she sells out the house for every performance. It's especially bad when she's singing the title role in [Puccini's] Madama Butterfly. We decided not to hire her for the current production [by Anthony Minghella] because we use a puppet to represent Butterfly's infant son. We're afraid of the reaction from our subscribers if they see the heroine onstage eating her child."

For her loyal fans, however, Balduccini-Jones can do no wrong. "No other singer has ever moved me like Graziella," enthused Joseph Pines, a social studies teacher from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who was present at Thursday night's performance. "The Graziella haters will be out in full force, but they just can't deal with the totality of the Graziella experience. She gives 120 percent every time. She insisted on finishing the performance on Thursday even though she was terribly ill, because she wouldn't let her fans down. I'm praying she makes a full recovery."

It is unclear which part of the scenery caused the diva's illness, but attendees at the final performance of Aida on Saturday evening (in which the English soprano Leslie Smith sang the title role) reported that the Nile river in Act 3 had a "patched-together" look.