The lights dim, and a hush falls over the audience. A trumpet fanfare pierces the silence; suddenly a spotlight beam, crossing the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera, illuminates the figure of a young man in a high priest's robe: Matthew Diller '81. A tenor aria fills the air; the audience stirs, and is moved to rousing applause. Diller turns to the audience, strides downstage, and then exits to the roar of the crowd--followed by high priests number two through twelve. From the wings, he watches the tenor take his bow.

With over a hundred performances to his credit, Matthew Diller has graced the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera with such immortals as Beverly Sills, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price and Placido Domingo. He has known the great and the near-great, and also the not-so-great. Yes, Diller is one of that special corps of performers so essential to every opera--the extras. For what would the French revolution be without an angry peasant mob? Who will hold back the crowd in Boris Godounov when it surges to crown him king? For that Matter, who will do the surging? The extras, the unsung--and unsinging--mainstays of any operatic performance. And Harvard junior Matthew Diller, for five years as an extra himself, saw it all. This is his story.

Q: Mr. Diller, how did you get your start in the Metropolitan Opera?

A: There's really a very simple way of getting into the Met as an extra: to find out the name of the assistant stage manager, who does the hiring, and to call him up and ask him.

Q: Aren't there any other requirements such as musical ability, familiarity with the opera, or previous acting experience?

A: They need males above a certain height, that's about it, actually. Timing has a lot to do with it, because if they're beginning a production which needs a lot of people, it's possible they'll just take you over the phone.

Q: What inspired you? Were you an opera enthusiast?

A: At the time I was not so keen on opera--I was 14 or 15 years old. It was a family plot, actually. The idea was to get as many people in the Diller family into the Metropolitan Opera as possible. I was the only one they took.

One Sings, The Other Doesn't

Q: If an extra never gets to sing or speak, what are you principal activities on stage?

A: Because most of the roles are servants and soldiers--certainly 60 per cent of the roles--a lot of it is just standing on stage for 25 minutes or a half hour without moving. Because servants or soldiers tend to be rather stiff and withdrawn, standing still is crucially important. And half an hour is long. In the last scene of [Wagner's] Lohengrin we had to stand with an 18-foot pike for half an hour, supposedly not moving--in full armor! It was boiling hot because they make the costumes look real--they don't make them to suit the climate. And you had to use both hands to keep the pike from falling over, because it was very heavy and really 18 feet--the real length of a pike. It was sheer torture.

Q: Besides standing still, what are the other attributes of a good extra?

A: The ability to stand still for tremendous periods of time is among the most important, actually. Also at some point, the ability to take cues from a variety of sources. If you're standing on stage for 20 minutes, and at one point, you have to make a move, there are several ways you can tell. You can know visually--something happens. You can tell vocally--somebody sings something and you move. The harder ones to take are musical: the orchestra plays something and you move on that.

Q: Do any roles require real acting?

A: At some point, the ability to look natural on stage matters. Obviously in the 75-people range it doesn't matter at all, but when you get down to four or five extras onstage with two principals, it becomes quite important. Some extras will take it very seriously. I was more of the school which did not consider it a great art and took it much more casually. But when I was soldier number 14 in the first act of [Saint-Saens'] Samson and Delilah, that did take some acting.