From Walküre to Tannhäuser on Zoom

 What a spectacular parade of greats we had to visit across 10 Monday afternoons on Die Walküre, which completes my Wagner Ring on Zoom (we started with Siegfried when lockdown meant I couldn't go to Gartmore for my annual course for the Wagner Society of Scotland, moved on to Götterdämmerung, Tristan, Meistersinger and Parsifal before going back to Rheingold). A Siegmund came first (the adorable Jay Hunter Morris, previously welcomed to talk Siegfried and Tristan), then two Sieglindes (Linda Esther Gray and Natalya Romaniw), a Wotan (John Tomlinson, just before we watched the big Act 2 monologue in the Kupfer Bayreuth production, still peerless alongside Chéreau's) and a Brünnhilde (Anne Evans, ditto before the final scene in the same production).  

Natalya's visit was a first. And of course she was a delight, sure of where she's going now but doubtful of the Wagnerian path before Sieglinde came her way (I remember a student from continental Europe who said she was cancelling her Royal Opera visit because Lise Davidsen, expecting twins, had pulled out - I told her the replacement wouldn't be second best). 

Of course the Royal Opera isn't looking too good now, having gone for former Putin supporter Anna Netrebko as Tosca to launch Jakub Hrůša's first season as Music Director in September when it could have highlighted La Romaniw, a Welsh-Ukrainian exponent of the role worldwide. Natalya is in any case singing Tosca for Welsh National Opera, so that's where to see it. I've decided I'll cover the Royal Opera version for The Arts Desk when Aleksandra Kurzak takes over. 

We've now plunged into the Venusberg in the first Zoom class on Tannhäuser, with six more Wednesdays to go. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, who made such an impact as Elsa in Lohengrin at the Royal Opera, is preparing her first Elisabeth for Geneva Opera, and I hope she'll join us. In dealing with the background for the first class, I compared the original 1845 Overture (Klemperer) and the 1860 elision with a big Venusberg ballet for Paris, very much post-Tristan. John Neumeier's choreography for Gotz Friedrich at Bayreuth is very impressive. I have it on DVD, but it's all here on YouTube with English subtitles.

It's still not too late to join, since I can send the first class on video (and indeed you can always get the instalments that way if live attendance is difficult). Details below (click to enlarge).

Opening the shrine, then down into the Rhine

Ten glorious Wednesday afternoons on the Wagner opera that always leaves me feeling whole have flown by, dovelike. I'll confess that musically I can do without the final transfiguration; it doesn't really take us any further, and unless you have a production where Parsifal moves on, feels a bit 'here we go again' in the non-action, too. But tears always come to my eyes in the Good Friday Magic music, whether in the opera or in the concert. It took the visit of John Tomlinson to drive home how beautiful and unusual the words are. The gist is that humans may look to God, but nature looks to humans to treat it kindly. Wagner's ecological thoughts, which permeate the Ring, chime so strongly with us today.

The oboe solo gave me my first big emotion a day or so after the big operation in July - my wonderful students Janet and Ian Szymanski sent me a Jacquie Lawson card which begins right there: total surprise. It starts above at 41m45s in what remains my favourite recording of Parsifal since I undertook to listen to every one from start to finish for BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. Kurt Moll and James King sing, where necessary, with such tenderness. You may well want to listen to the whole act, and indeed the complete recording is up on YouTube - it's otherwise too expensive to buy second-hand as a CD set. 

Our more recent visitors could not have been more generous in their time or human warmth. Linda Esther Gray (two below me in the second from right row vertical-wise pictured above - click on the image to make it bigger) not only went back to the notes she'd taken when working with Reginald Goodall for the Welsh National Opera Parsifal - our loss that she felt it wasn't right to participate in the EMI recording - but also provided fresh tales which don't feature in her autobiography (which she intends to update, and I'm cheering her on, will help where I can). One of my American students asked her about the Dallas Walkure - preserved in not at all bad sound here on YouTube - 

and we got the extraordinary history of a visit to one of the generous wealthy Friends of the Dallas Opera, who greeted her with 'oh gee, it's so good to have you. Pavarotti was here last week and when he went away the poodle was dead.' 'I said to her, what are you talking about? And she said, "well, he didn't come at the beginning, he came about 2 o'clock in the morning, and sat down in a chair, and when he left, the poodle was dead." He thought it was a cushion. This is absolutely true, I've just remembered it...I told the Friends, now what you all need to remember is that my aria in Act One begins "Du bist der Lenz", and at the end of it you've all got to clap. They thought I was being serious - it had in fact got very serious - and the President of the opera house had to stand up and say, "now, Linda has a very strange sense of humour - don't clap" '. It's a treasurable two hours. And of course there was plenty of time for seriousness. Here are a few of us, including Linda, listening to Astrid Varnay and reacting.

John Tom (second from right, secon row down - again, click to enlarge) was equally generous with his time, and voice - he sang a great deal of Gurnemanz's part in Act Three for us. 

His anecdotes included one about being summoned by Barenboim to step in as Gurnemanz in Vienna the day after he'd sung Hans Sachs at the Royal Opera = 'and when Daniel asks, you don't refuse'. At Vienna Airport there was a police car on the runway, lights flashing. They drove to the Opera House with the siren goinga. They arrived at the stage door 20 minutes before curtain-up. He hadn't ever sung Gurnemanz in this Vienna production. It's a role he could still do at 77, but more physically demanding ones with six-week rehearsal periods, obviously not - 'my legs won't let me'.

Another phenomenon, and so generous with his visits: he'll be back to discuss the Rheingold Wotan now that we've started Opera in Depth Mondays in the depths of the river, and we'll see him in the Bayreuth Kupfer production (pictured above), the greatest experience of his life. After the talk, we watched him in Kupfer's Berlin Parsifal, which followed on almost immediately from the last year of that Bayreuth Ring; so meaningful in every line, and moving to tears (pictured below with Waltraud Meier and Poul Elming). 

Other guests are lining up this term: Christopher Purves, who's sung the Rheingold Alberich twice recently, in Zurich and at the Royal Opera (so much to ask him), and, when we move on to Iolanthe, conductor Chris Hopkins and a return visitor, John Savournin, who's promised to gather other singers from Cal McCrystal's funny and beautiful ENO production. 

Mahler Part Two has kicked off, and so far I've asked Catherine Larsen-Maguire, who pulled off a triumph in the Seventh Symphony with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (one of our Arts Desk folk in the north raved about it; rehearsal pictured above by Ryan Buchanan), and Edward Gardner, who has elected to talk about Das Lied von der Erde. Rich times ahead.

To Hades and back with Gluck's Orfeo

If you take Gluck's original 1764 score for Vienna, his Orfeo ed Euridice is one of the shortest and superficially the simplest three-act masterpieces in the repertoire. A major part of the credit should go to librettist Ranieri de Calzabigi, who strips the myth of preliminary trimmings and all but three characters (though the Furies and the Blessed Spirits are major presences). After Handel's Agrippina, which took more time than I'd thought, I wondered if we might be stretching Orfeo at four two-hour Monday classes on my Opera in Depth Course at Pushkin House. Far from it. In the first I was finally able to dig out excerpts from Peri's Euridice (beginning of the Prologue pictured below), the oldest extant opera in the repertoire from the year 1600, and his collaborator Caccini's version premiered shortly afterwards, as well as what you might expect from Monteverdi and a sideways glance at Telemann's multilingual spectacle for Hamburg.

Once embarked on Gluck, it was vital to check the differences between 1764 and the Paris version of 1774 (frontispiece pictured below), which involved substantial additions, only one of which I'd use if I were staging the work - the piercingly beautiful-sad flute solo which became the centrepieces of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, about which Berlioz writes so eloquently in his Treatise on Instrumentation. I'd also, by the way, omit the pointlessly jolly Overture and stop the opera at the end of 'Che farò', reprising the opening chorus with Orfeo's three cries of 'Euridice'. No point in staging the 'lieto fine' or happy end and being ironic it, given that modern taste won't swallow it.

So we zoomed between John Eliot Gardiner's recording of the original version, incisive and buoyant in choral and orchestral terms in a way none of the other five recordings I've been using begins to match,

and the Paris version as recorded in 1956 with Leopold Simoneau in the title role recast for tenor (listening options are now between countertenor, mezzo, contralto, tenor and even baritone, though we didn't go as far as that). Neither includes the aria at the end of Act 1, 'Addio, miei sospiri', which was formerly believed to be a borrowing from a contemporary, but in fact turns out to be Gluck adapting himself, albit a pre-reform self with all the showpiece trimmings. I was thrilled to find it on a recording I'd thought of discarding, the one with Marilyn Horne and Solti conducting. Then I screened the end of Act 1 with Janet Baker in the Glyndebourne production, and that has it too.

Anyway, here's Horne somewhat later, transposing down a tone and not so agile with the coloratura, but it's good to see a master singer's way with poise and the Italian language (especially in the preceding recit).

The Furies and Elysium scenes, which need to run continuously - and without the Dance of the Furies, taken for Paris wholesale from Gluck's splendid Don Juan ballet, pointless in this context since Orfeo has calmed the tormented creatures - involve some looking forward, especially to Beethoven, who explicitly moulded the dialogue between soloist and gruff strings at the heart of his Fourth Piano Concerto on the first and the 'Scene by the Brook' in the Sixth Symphony on Orfeo's 'Che puro ciel', for me the tone-poem high point of the entire opera. Gluck's original orchestration, with birdsong flute, seems to be so much lovelier than his simplified revision, and Derek Lee Ragin is my favourite interpreter of this heavenly inspiration, so we ought to have the Gardiner recording with the English Baroque Soloists. For some reason, though, that's not embeddable from YouTube, so I'll settle for Anne Sofie von Otter with the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

When Ian Page of Classical Opera and The Mozartists came to talk to us for the third class, he agreed that the original sounds best, but that the revision - where the flute simply exchanges murmuring-brook triplets with the strings, which first appears in the Parma interim version he conducted recently at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - actually works more effectively, balance-wise, live. Ian, polymath extraordinaire, wowed everyone with his range and insights. Within minutes he was talking about how what he thinks of as the tempo giusto for 'Che faro', a faster one than usual, makes it more about passionate loss rather than gentle, consoling elegy, with appropriate adjustments to the reflections marked 'a little slower' (Gluck was very specific, in everything but metronome, about what he wanted here). We then heard Classical Opera's Wigmore recording of the aria with the lustrous Anna Stéphany, and when the following week I compared verses - Lena Belkina (Ian's splendid Orfeo at the QEH), Ferrier, Simoneau, Derek Lee Ragin, Iestyn Davies on the new recording with David Bates's La Nuova Musica - that still came out tops for me. Of course Baker at Glyndebourne is the very model of focused intensity; how she pulls that off at the late Raymond Leppard's incredibly slow speed is little short of miraculous.

Ian's intensive study of hundreds of operas from the mid-18th century informs so much of what he says, and it was surprising to learn that Gluck's first version premiered in Vienna the day before the child-prodigy Mozart visited. Mozart certainly knew and loved this work - viz the parallels between 'Che puro ciel' and Tamino's first use of the Magic Flute, where both heroes lament how the absence of their beloved renders the idyllic scene imperfect. We also discussed, inter alia, dramatic continuity - the Parma version was performed straight through, with no interval and only the shortest of pauses between acts - and supertitling (Ian does his own, to make certain of absolute tie-ins with what's being sung). Here we are as snapped on request by student Andrea Gawn - forgive the shine and the blue tinge, the latter's from the projector/screen, hard to avoid).

We were also, for some reason, talking about Haydn symphonies and how Ian wants to champion the best ones without nicknames. He talked about the musical palindrome in the Minuet and Trio of No. 47, and how mind-blowing it is to get players to render it backwards from the score (as Haydn intended) rather than having it written out. There's a wealth of strangeness and wonder still to explore in the musical world.

Expectations of Iestyn Davies's visit this week were dashed when it turned out that he'd got the day wrong for his return from tour. We'll hold him to coming to see us next term; but I do think we got infinite riches from Ian. In the meantime, went to the Royal Overseas League yesterday for the launch of our beloved Linda Esther Gray's new collaborative volume with tenor Ian Partridge, Thoughts Around Great Singing (there's also a website: www.singingtags.com). Both spoke engagingly of their experiences and the collaboration. I'll report back when I've read the book.

Isoldes at the Frontline

Three came along to my Opera in Depth class at the Frontline Club, head- and heart-devoted this term to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and what amazing times we had.

First there was Linda Esther Gray, one of the greatest Isoldes ever as her studio recording and the live performance on YouTube for Goodall testify. We're now long-term friends, as you can perhaps tell.

Relatively new friends are Dame Anne Evans and Susan Bullock CBE, Annie and Sue as I think they prefer it, who visited yesterday, and a better double act I couldn't imagine. See way down this blog entry for another, slightly more embattled Wagnerian duo-chat at a Birmingham 'Brunch with Brünnhildes'.

Linda's talk was very emotional; she didn't mind  my playing excerpts from the Goodall recording but inevitably it stirred up deep feelings, and you know from every phrase she says that this is a woman who can't be anything other than she is, a total giver. I'll save the insights until I can reproduce them in her own words from the recording I made of most of that session - a good two hours' talking with a fun photosession at the end.

The plan with Anne and Sue was that they should arrive for lunch - always excellent at the Frontline Club, since the owner stocks it with food from his huge estate in Norfolk - and then talk for an hour and a quarter, after which I could finish Act 3 by going through the last of Tristan's huge monologues with examples all around it and on to the Liebestod (which in fact we got earlier in the shape of Anne's very beautiful performance with Tony Pappano, conducting his first Tristan at the Monnaie). It was clear, though, that not only were the two ladies totally relaxed with my adorable, engaging and loyal students, but that there was no end to what they had to say. Looks as if I'm alarming or boring them here; can only assure you that wasn't the case.

So we heard about the generosity of Anne's coaching Sue as Isolde - SB remembering chapter and verse about what helped her - and their joint memories of Reginald Goodall, complementing Linda's several weeks earlier. About the directors who know the music and can demonstrate it on the piano - David Alden and Richard Jones - and those who arrive at the first rehearsal 'and you hear the spine of the score crack' (ie it's only just been opened). Or the ones who just use a CD booklet; expectations ran high for a Ring at Bayreuth from a distinguished director, who disappointed by doing just that and bringing nothing fresh to it.

To complement Anne's Liebestod, I also played Sue's 'Träume' from the Wesendonck Lieder, on a recital disc I rated very highly for the BBC Music Magazine; such clarity in the text, such marvellous dramatic pauses - Reggie's wisdom, though Malcolm Martineau must also be praised for his part in that. Frida Leider came out tops for her long-term youthfulness and bel canto approach; Margaret Price's peerless recording was also cited, and the advice she gave both singers (a modest woman, she ascribed her success there to Carlos Kleiber). We also, ahem, discussed the problems with the ENO Tristan that's just finished, and what an Isolde needs to do to get through the part and deliver the great Liebestod at the end that everyone's been waiting for.

It also became abundantly clear: these two great ladies should be running ENO. Then Mark Wigglesworth, having achieved a quadruple whammy of musically amazing productions this season, could come back and - how about this? - the Artistic Directorship be shared between David Lan of the Young Vic and Richard Jones (because I didn't think for a minute that Richard would want to do it on his own). Most important, perhaps, they would revive ENO's role as a training ground for young British-based singers, as they both were when they learned their trade there. It seems to me that the flood of talent from the music colleges has never been greater, but how many of these singers are appearing there? Whereas, you just look at the Garsington Idomeneo and see what a difference sensible thinking and wise casting can make.

Not going to happen? Well, as with Brexit, we can dream, can't we?

So, I owe the students a precis of what I would have talked about re the last 20 minutes of the opera in our tenth and final class. But what we did watch was the Tristan fantasia sequence from the best film I've ever seen about the dedication of a great performer, Humoresque (1947).

John Garfield is talented, hard-working violinist Paul Boray, his hands and his sounds represented superbly by Isaac Stern. Joan Crawford strikes a rare note of truth as the married society woman who starts out by thinking of a musician as a plaything, then falls deeply in love but can't share her man with his music.

There are some wonderful moments in the score by Franz Waxman, not least to accompany a giddying New York montage which must owe something to Eisenstein, but the climax of the film - and I don't think there's a spoiler here, as we start in 'the present' with the violinist distraught by his loss - is the suicide of Crawford's character while we hear a kitsch-brilliant arrangement of music from the Act Two love scene and the Liebestod arranged for violin, piano (Oscar Levant, brilliant throughout - I've just bought a second-hand copy of one of his autobiographies) and orchestra.

We get ten whole minutes of music accompanied by telling details in Jean Negulesco's direction like the man on the beach throwing a stick for his dog as Crawford's Helen Wright wanders distractedly, distressedly past and finally into the waves and under the water (whereupon the soundtrack goes temporarily blurred as well).  Here's the trailer, which inevitably accentuates the melodrama and underplays the wise, wisecracking commentary of Levant's character - who comes off very well in the screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold - but does give you a sense of the musical lushness; sounds like Waxman stitched together some of the themes especially here.

If you'd like to catch more Wagner chat, I'll be in conversation with Stuart Skelton, on recent evidence the best living Tristan, at a Wagner Society event on 21 July. Details here. Before that, I'm offering some Proms-related classes in what I hope will be a mini summer school next week, starting on Tuesday 19 July. Next season's Opera in Depth course is more or less planned if not carved in stone: Don Giovanni (five or six weeks), The Nose (two or three weeks) and Le Grand Macabre (two weeks) in the autumn term; Der Rosenkavalier (six weeks) and The Snow Maiden (four weeks) in the spring term; and Otello (five weeks) and Pelléas et Mélisande (five weeks) in the summer term. If you're interested, email me at: david.nice@usa.net

Finally, we are getting some bitter laughs about our looking-glass land at the moment from the likes of Frankie Boyle, John Crace and Marina Hyde, but for sheer pleasure this treatment of Cameron's farewell ditty comes tops. I noted in sending the link to anyone who might not have seen it - gone viral, apparently - that Cameron hums the tritone, used among other things by Wagner for Fafner-as-dragon and as a dreaded putative 'Stalin subtext' in Shostakovich and Prokofiev (they knew, at any rate, when to use it).

Into Wagner's realm of night

The end of the above scene in ENO's Anish Kapoor-designed Tristan and Isolde, as photographed (like other images from the production) by Catherine Ashmore, is where we've reached in Class Five of this term's Opera in Depth course at the ever welcoming Frontline Club. Brangäne has extinguished the torch and we're ready to send the lovers into each other's arms this coming Monday with Albert Coates' frenetic 1929 excerpt featuring Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior. Let the Liebesnacht begin!

It's daunting to realised that one could spend at least three times ten weeks on this fathomless and perhaps unfathomable masterpiece. I spent two hours alone last week on the opening scene of Act Two so we'd better get a move on. We also have two visits coming up - the first from Linda Esther Gray, the second from Sue Bullock and (hurrah, just confirmed) Anne Evans.

Having never previously listened to the Goodall studio recording in detail, I hadn't quite appreciated how it's his finest Wagner, for me at least: in Tristan, and possibly (just) Parsifal, I can take slow tempi so long as the music always burns (which it did for Goodall; alas, Ed Gardner doesn't get away with the extremes at ENO - Isolde's Act One narrative is the first of several places where the tension drains away).

And, yes, I know and love her as a friend, but I think I can be objective enough to say that Linda (pictured below in the Welsh National Opera production) is one of the three Isoldes to whom I constantly return for the music examples - the other two being Margaret Price (who of course never performed the role on stage) and Birgit Nilsson. Flagstad? Too weak on the Beecham recording, too matriarchal for Furtwängler;  I must get hold of the Reiner.

It's unfathomable that the Goodall studio Tristan, only once released on CD in mid-price format, has stayed out of the catalogues so long. This is for me the greatest love duet of them all, and how it burns towards the crisis. Ah, some will say, but you need to have heard the live performance sung in English. I did, at a time when I was too young to appreciate what I was getting, but now there's another chance: amazingly, someone has put up a Radio 3 broadcast of one of the ENO performances I must have seen on YouTube. It's Remedios* rather than Mitchinson, a seriously underrated tenor, but that's no drawback. Maybe you will have listened to it before I have a chance.

Other glories include Stokowski's music-minus-three Liebesnacht (with bits of Act Three thrown in for good measure), strings portamento-ing like crazy but the freedom and rubato just magnificent.

As for the ENO production, well, read what I thought about it on The Arts Desk: a mixed bag, as anticipated, but with a magnificent performances from Stuart Skelton (the best Tristan I've seen on stage - I missed Vickers, of course). He's amazing, as he must be, in Act Three, the best staged of the three with an incredible video-projection effect of dark blood streaming back and forth between the vulva-like bit of rock and the pyjamaed old Tristan.

Equally fine are Karen Cargill (Brangäne, just possibly an Isolde in the making despite being a mezzo, but she must sing Berlioz's Dido first) and Matthew Rose (sorry, Peter, he really is very, very good - not better than you, just different - and Kramer's production gives him a hard job). Kapoor's second and third act designs work hard to combine with Kramer's visions, though the costumes are a bad mismatch. I'm waiting to see an opera production this year that has anything like the coherence of Ivo van Hove's Kings of War or the riveting Huppert/Warlikowski Phaedra(s) which knocked me for six at the Barbican last night. If everything in the ENO Tristan had joined up with Kapoor's theatrically workable (just) vision pictured below, it might have come somewhere close.

All that remains to be added is that it's cheap journalism to claim that on this production rests ENO's future, as I've seen colleagues who should know better write and say. The artists have nothing to prove - they've already won three awards this season and turned in superlative performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Force of Destiny (which has just won a Sky award, though on account of Bieito's very messy production I'd have given it to Tcherniakov's Shostakovich) and The Magic Flute this season. And if Kramer comes over as having lots of good ideas and not yet the wherewithal to connect them, that has little to do with how good an Artistic Director he'll be. In conversation with Tom Service on Radio 3's Music Matters, he came across as a little OTT in his 'I'm so passionate about...'s, but again, with strong observations in among the apparent gush. Let's give him a chance, and see if he can undo the ills and banish the strange aversion to fundraising of the Pollock regime so far.

By way of peaceful coda, here's Linda at the Glyndebourne lake the other weekend. She came with me to a well sung but production-wise not very funny Barber of Seville (I'm pinning higher hopes on the forthcoming Béatrice et Bénédict). We felt the same about it. Very pleased to have met the very promising and affable new Artistic Director, Sebastian F Schwarz, who showed up at the press drinks - full marks for that - and had the benefit of Linda's wisdom. I hope by now he's listened to the Goodall recording, as he said he was going to do, and been amazed.

*14/6 Update - I only learned from Linda this morning that Alberto Remedios died on Sunday. Tomorrow's ENO performance is being dedicated to him. Just listening (rather than listening and watching, which I did a fair bit - great Walter in Meistersinger) makes me realise what a golden sound it was, and very youthful.

Deep opera at the Frontline

25 years of loyal service and, until recently, happy collegiality at the City Literary Institute are now to be followed by something partly different, partly the same. When relations with my line manager from Visual Arts (go figure, it's a long and unedifying story) went sour, and in the bigger picture the institution betrayed its socialistic ideals by axing or severely cutting back on core courses for the deaf and unemployed, I decided enough was enough (chapter and verse in the now-open letter at the foot of the post). The prospective stress of next year wasn't an option, and so I searched around for alternative venues to teach an opera course along similar (but not, to avoid any accusations of poaching, the same) lines.

The venue I fell instantly in love with isn't cheap to hire, but it has a lecture room/theatre on the top floor which includes my vital requirements - a big screen for DVDs and an excellent sound system. The Frontline Club in Norfolk Place, several minutes' walk from Paddington station - website here, with details of the course to go on there soon - was warmly recommended by a wonderful woman at whose behest I gave a series of private lectures earlier this year, Wendy Steavenson (she and her husband David live opposite).

Earlier this summer I went to see the facilities for myself, and had quite a frisson as I sat waiting in the handsome club room, half-overhearing the other occupant on the phone about Damascus and Istanbul, and browsing through a gritty book of Syrian images just donated by the photographer, a club member.  The Frontline was set up with a very serious purpose, as a charity to help the families of those reporters who'd lost their lives in the cause of telling the truth about war zones. It's full of interesting memorabilia and clean, handsome design.

So from 6 October I'll be running a course I've called Opera in Depth, and a year dubbed War and Peace: the nature of the venue drove me back for the planned first term to a work which isn't being performed in London this season, but which should provoke plenty of interesting questions about Russia in the 19th century, the 1940s and now: Prokofiev's flawed but most encyclopedic masterpiece, Voina i Mir to the Russians. I didn't see the livescreening of Graham Vick's second production for the Mariinsky Theatre - I was there before and during the first back in 1991, when I first met and of course then very much warmed to an inspirational Valery Gergiev, shame on him now - but I hope it will be available to see. It looks very different from the oak-tree-dominated vision of 23 years ago, not to mention the more classically handsome Konchalovsky production which followed that ten years later.

Second term will be devoted entirely to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, since Richard Jones will be rethinking his original Welsh National Opera production, featuring Bryn Terfel's role debut as a Sachs to match Norman Bailey, for ENO, and the summer will feature a new one for me in terms of lecturing, Rossini's Guillaume Tell. Normally there would be six operas a year, but these are all epics which need time. Below: the fabulous collage drop-cloth lit during the Prelude for Jones's view of Meistersinger as embracing the full breadth of German, or Germanic, culture to the present day. How many creative or recreative artists can you name?

I now have enough students to run the course and cover the costs of the venue, but I'd welcome more (the space seats up to 100). I've kept the rates to City Lit standard last year - £180 per term, which works out at £9 an hour - and the day, Monday afternoon, with a slight shift in time, owing to the Frontline's schedule, to run from 2.30 to 4.30pm. You can buy drinks at the bar and bring them in, and the restaurant on the ground floor is excellent. If you fancy any or all of the terms, or simply want to know more, I'm going to do that taboo thing of giving my email here: contact me at david.nice@usa.net. I can also send a pdf flyer with more details.

One shame is that the 'Inside the BBC Symphony Orchestra' course has bitten the dust, at least temporarily. What I want to do there is run six classes over the year linked to the works I was most looking forward to talking about, the Nielsen symphonies, with contemporary Sibelius for comparison. Student numbers depending, these will be at the church around the corner, St Andrew's Fulham Fields, which has a lecture space upstairs for rent much cheaper than the Frontline (here, of course, I wouldn't need the screen). More details likewise on request.

It saddens me, of course, to say farewell to the City Lit, which initially brought me together with The One (we met at City Lit Opera  28 years ago, singing in Act One of Bohème - he as Colline, I as Schaunard - and our relationship first flourished when we went up to Edinburgh to perform Gianni Schicchi on the fringe: thank you, godfather Giacomo). Several years later, thanks to Ma(rgaret) Gibbs, who ran the opera group, I came into the orbit of the wonderful music department: how I loved working with the three successive heads, Graham Owen, Moira Hayward (where are you, Moira?) and Janet Obi-Keller, who was effectively driven out by the changes. Julia Williams was, and is, the best and most dependable co-ordinator I've ever worked with.

I've been privileged to be able to invite great musicians to both classes. I count Richard Jones as such since he was an accomplished jazz pianist for many years (in effect still is). He came twice, first to talk about Meistersinger between the production and the Prom, and then last year to discuss Gloriana. Both these events I recorded, but for private use; I need to transcribe them. He's very funny and an accomplished, light-of-hand tease. We laughed a lot and on each visit I gave him a gift for giving of his time: initially Journeying Boy, the diaries of the young Benjamin Britten, and at the time of Gloriana, tongue in cheek , the kitschy Britten and Pears cufflinks issued for the centenary. ' I don't suppose you wear such things', I said. 'I will now', he replied. Here he is looking at them in some bewilderment.

More recently we had the generous and easy Mark Wigglesworth come to talk about conducting Parsifal.

Again, too many revelations and perceptions to summarise - a full transcript is needed - but it was also a happy occasion. I like Mark so much and I hope the feeling is mutual. If the troll known as 'AndrewandJoshua' is still lurking, here's a gift of Bad English Teeth (mine, not MW's) for him/her.

The book I gave Mark was the most painfully truthful autobiography I've ever read, Behind Closed Curtains by the great Isolde of the 1980s (and, I think, one of the best of all time), Linda Esther Gray. Linda has become a good friend since moulding the diplo-mate as a Heldentenor; we love her very much. She, too, visited the class twice. I might have used this shot before - haven't looked back - but here we are at the end of term class meal, to which of course she was invited.

While I'm on the subject, a gallery of some of the many wonderful and modest players of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who've visited the Tuesday evening class seems in order. Sadly I didn't take snaps of visiting composers Mark-Anthony Turnage and Judith Weir (whose visit I missed owing to illness), but many of the orchestral musicians are here. First, the only one of the four quartets I photographed - others were two sets of violas and the Merchant Quartet. The Helikon Quartet have had to put their playing on hold due to the great news that Rachel Samuel and Graham Bradshaw, to the right, got together (married? I hesitate to assume) and had a child. To the left are Patrick Wastnage and Nikos Zarb, who've visited on other occasions too.

Other string combinations were a duo, Mark Sheridan and Donald Walker with his lion-headed double bass

and a trio who gave us such rich programmes (Martinů, Dohnányi, Mozart): Anna Smith (whose grin I love in the Arts Desk photo of Elektra between Goerke's heroine and Felicity Palmer as a manically triumphant Clytemnestra), Kate Read and Michael Atkinson.

Not pictured, but no less treasured among other string players are brilliant youngster Peter Mallinson, Celia Waterhouse and Danny Meyer, who introduced me to Igudesman and Joo (don't miss their Barbican appearance on Monday week); among brass players, several visits from horn doyen Chris Larkin and trumpeter Martin Hurrell, who could have an alternative career as a standup comedian and who has often come with his lovely partner Liz Burley, the BBCSO's consummate resident pianist and celesta player; among wind, shakuhachi and flute exponent Richard Stagg, my oboe hero Richard Simpson and a wind trio of young clarinettist James Burke, Alison Teale whose cor anglais solos have been so melting a part of the concert scene and long-serving bassoonist Graham Sheen. The ones I can show you are erstwhile contrabassoon principal Clare Glenister*

and our most recent visitor Katherine Lacy, who played amazing rep on several clarinets including the solo movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (here she's holding the bass variety in the company of the most delightful if small class - half aren't present in the pic - I've ever had the pleasure to teach. Two, by the way, are budding composers).

Last but not least came Sioned Williams, one of the world's great harpists and also the most sincere and compelling of speakers. I've already written about her most recent visit here, and rather than repeat the images, here's another of composer Paul Patterson with Sioned trying to persuade husband Ali, her 'tecchie' for the evening, to come in to the picture. Don't miss Sioned's Southbank recital on 14 October of works she's commissioned for her big birthday. She's offered to come and talk about it/play a bit after the event at St Andrew's. If I can get the numbers for it, this could open the door to more player visits.

Those are the happy memories, as are all the classes and the countless students who have become good friends, among the departed, Trude Winik, Martin Zam, Elaine Bromwich and Naomi Weaver. The writing was on the wall about the changed City Lit when I wanted to have tributes to Elaine and Martin on the website to show what adult education was all about, and was told this would be 'sending out the wrong message to students'. Nothing has been too much trouble in honour of them and their kind (and yes, I've had a few pains, but they've always been a very small minority).

The grim note is something you don't have to bother with, but should you have the patience to read on, just for the record this is what I wrote as a letter of resignation. I see no reason why it shouldn't be public knowledge. I got a curt 'thank you for your service' reply from the offending tutor, and nothing from any of the other City Lit staff I ccd, including the principal and the acting head of music. The final death-blow to the likelihood of returning came this week when I found out from another tutor that in mid-August the music appreciation courses had  returned to their rightful home - and nobody told me. The new opera course is a done deal, but I could have reinstated the BBCSO course as I said I'd have been willing to do under these very circumstances. Too bad. Anyway, here's the resignation letter.

After 25 years, 23 of them in very happy harmony with the administration of the music department, I have come to the painful decision to leave the City Lit. In the past two months especially I have found the situation unpleasant and stressful with what from my perspective feels like bureaucratic bullying.

There is no point itemizing here why I feel I have been so badly treated. I have already responded in detail to several emails from you which in my opinion were unacceptable; if anyone ccd wishes for further chapter and verse, I am happy to provide them. Those earlier responses, like many others when I had a criticism to make in return for what I felt were unjust conclusions, were ignored – one of them not only by you, but also by your own line managers. 

It was never satisfactorily explained why the incredibly popular music appreciation courses were moved from the Music Department, where they so obviously belong, to Visual Arts. The whole thing began with a falsehood, demonstrable in the email exchanges: you claimed the superlative Head of Music, Janet Obi-Keller, needed help with the burden of the courses she was dealing with, while she strenuously fought against the change. The way she was pushed out of the City Lit, whoever may have been responsible, was a disgrace.

In my opinion these courses need to be returned to the Music Department as soon as possible, in which case I would certainly consider teaching at the City Lit again. As it is, our email correspondence has escalated from being a cause of irritation to an untenable feeling of anger on my part – hence the belated decision to withdraw.

The latest wrangle began over what I perceived as mishandling of the blurb I sent for the opera courses. What you, or the City Lit admin, came up with - composers' names, not the titles of the operas - was indeed 'nonsense' as it made no sense. But you objected to my tone.

The last straw for me was the e-mail you sent on 23 June listing points which you expected me to abide by were I to teach next academic year. There were reasonable as well as unreasonable expectations, but even the former were insulting. What do my years of service and the glowing reports of the majority of students mean if not that I am already carrying out what you expect on the quality front?

You need to treat lecturers with decades of experience more respectfully. As I wrote before, we should be working together, not as inflexible boss and humble employee.

Perhaps you should pay more attention to what the students think. Mine were very emotional yesterday when I told them I would not be returning; two were even in tears. Students' voices in general have not been sufficiently heard in the current unhappy situation. It's time to shift the focus.

Yours very regretfully,

David Nice

*From one of the many supportive emails sent by BBCSO players, I learned that Clare has just complete her UCLA Scandinavian studies (BA in Norwegian) and is writing a Nordic crime novel. And now the good news is that she's joining the Nielsen/Sibelius classes I've set up at the church round the corner - as a student..