Parterre Box: the queer opera zine that became the most respected blog in the business

Twenty-five years ago, James Jorden began distributing an underground zine in the gents’ at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. But, Joshua Barone finds, it would be a long time before the Met afforded it it any respect

The first issue with ‘La Divina’ Maria Callas on the cover (Photos Parterre Box)

James Jorden was a frustrated, often out-of-work stage director in New York in the early 1990s when a casual hookup gave him the idea for Parterre Box, now the most essential blog in opera.

“I went to his place and we got high,” Jorden recalls. “And when we took a break, we were talking about what we did with our lives.” The guy told Jorden about a friend of his, an architect who began writing about architecture because he wasn’t getting any commissions. Perhaps, he suggested, Jorden could do the same with opera.

Thus was born the irreverent, passionate Parterre Box, which began as that most unlikely of media properties: a queer opera zine. The first issue was published 25 years ago this month and distributed in bathroom stalls at the Metropolitan Opera. Now its writers are credentialed press at the Met.

Jorden couldn’t have predicted that on the night of that hookup, or soon after, when he merely thought of the punk zines he had seen around the East Village. There was, it goes without saying, never one for opera fans.

Not long after, he says, he found himself “goofing around” at home with a short story, some photographs cut from magazines, and a glue stick. He put together a four-page zine and printed it at a copy shop. Maria Callas was on the cover – she’s also tattooed on Jorden’s back, as the Greek demigoddess Medea – and inside were snippets of parody news about divas like Renata Scotto. Other bits imagined an opera about the Long Island teenage temptress Amy Fisher called Cavalleria Suburbiana (this was the Ninties, after all) and made catty comments about “overstudied” singing that bored Jorden.

Parterre Box found its readership haphazardly. Jorden would leave copies at the now-closed Tower Records near the Lincoln Centre, and scatter them in the stalls of the men’s rooms at the Met. He started stuffing them into the schedules and brochures stocked in the Met’s lobby, which aroused the company’s ire.

One night, placing copies just before a performance of Salome, Jorden was caught, security guards took his ticket, and he was told to leave. Apparently there had been a de facto warrant out for him at the Met, and in those days he wasn’t hard to find. All the guards had to do was look for the 40-year-old in cutoff jeans, army boots and a leather jacket with no shirt.

With the online version of Parterre Box, which began in 1996, came the golden age of La Cieca, Jorden’s draggy gossip persona, named for a character in La Gioconda. While ostensibly on the clock at office temp jobs, Jorden would often be updating the website with scoops. The site’s rabid commenters – sometimes hilarious, sometimes vicious – became the bane of many a diva and impresario. (Renée Fleming was a frequent target.)

This eventually meant the demise of Parterre Box in print. But the website flourished, as did a podcast. A coup came in 2009, when the soprano Hildegard Behrens died unexpectedly in Tokyo. A member of the Parterre Box community was there and able to help break the news seven hours before the Associated Press, and a full day before the New York Times.

This was the period when Parterre Box began to settle in as a widely read and respected member of the opera media ecosystem. (Jorden has become more widely read and respected in his own right as the critic of the New York Post, then the New York Observer.) The blog is still pungent, but less bitchy. It has six regular critics in New York, and many more sending dispatches from around the world. At the Met, which long shunned Parterre Box, it now has press seats, just like any other major news outlet.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wrote in an email that his house and the zine have “a symbiotic relationship”.

“If not for the Met, Parterre would have an existential problem,” he added. “There would be nothing to complain about. And if not for Parterre, some of our most outspoken fans would be without an outlet to vent.”

Here are five milestones in Parterre Box’s 25-year history:

1993: The first issue

“I put it out on 3 December 1993, saying this was Maria Callas’s 70th birthday,” Jorden recalls. “And it wasn’t.” Callas was actually born on 2 December, though she preferred to celebrate on 4 December. “So now I’m stuck with the anniversary of Parterre on 3 December, which is nothing.”

Once he printed the debut issue, Jorden took copies to the Met, where he tried handing it out. That, he says, was a “horrible failure”. Then he thought about the bathroom.

“Obviously, the men’s room at the Met is going to have a really high concentration of gay men who are interested in opera,” he says. So at a performance he left some during the first intermission; by the second, they were gone.

1997: An interview with Deborah Voigt

In the mid-Nineties, Jorden was going to a gym near the Met. One day, a man in the locker room introduced himself as part of soprano Deborah Voigt’s publicity team. He offered an interview with her to Parterre Box.

“He said,” Jorden remembers, “You’d be surprised the things Debbie is willing to do. She’s fearless.”

So Jorden, then a fringe member of the opera world, found himself at Voigt’s apartment. “She was wearing a silk blouse and jeans, very ‘diva at home’, ” he says. “She gave me coffee, and we talked and talked and talked.”

This, he says, was a major breakthrough. Only a year earlier, Jorden had been kicked out of the Met; now he was publishing a long interview with one of its leading sopranos.

1998: Renée Fleming is booed at La Scala

When the superstar soprano Renée Fleming sang Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, she was booed in the middle of her final aria. The performance aired on Italian radio, but wasn’t heard anywhere else.

A Parterre Box reader, however, recorded the broadcast on cassette tape and mailed it to Jorden, who then ripped it as a digital file and put it on his website to accompany what became Parterre Box’s first major online news story.

2005: ‘Unnatural Acts of Opera’

Jorden was a podcast pioneer, putting out “Unnatural Acts of Opera” long before the medium took off. He made about 200 episodes over four years. It was the first time the world heard the voice of La Cieca, which Jorden described as “part Mary Boland from ‘The Women’ and part Regina Resnik.”

Eventually he came up with the idea of airing “Mercury Theatre”-like radio plays called “Apocryphal Opera Anecdote Theater of the Air”, in which he would act out famous stories from opera history. But running a podcast takes a lot of time, especially with a day job and website to run. Jorden wound down production after a boyfriend complained, “Can’t we just go to a movie tonight?”

2015: Joining the establishment

On opening night of the Met’s 2015-16 season, Parterre Box was a credentialed member of the media, with press tickets for critic Christopher Corwin to review the new production of Verdi’s “Otello”.

This step, the apotheosis of Parterre Box’s road to legitimacy, was about a year in the making, Jorden says. The blog had been recognised elsewhere, but the Met remained a white whale. Sam Neuman, the company’s press director at the time, took the steps that eventually led to what Jorden called “a total game-changer. It felt like being an adult.”

Gelb was less sentimental: “Parterre’s readership is sufficient to warrant press tickets.”