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).

Elgar the European

No doubt those Little Britainers who want to batten down the hatches against Europe will be using ‘Nimrod’ or Pomp and Circumstance yet again as the background to their frothing diatribes. Which makes me mad because no composer was more of a true European, or for that matter a true citizen of the world, than Edward Elgar (and I’m talking not of his conservative outer life but his musical world-within-world). He may have suffused his scores with the essence of Worcestershire/Herefordshire woods, hills and rivers, but that hardly amounts to callow nationalism, and it's one of the reasons I love him so deeply.

Forgive me if I repeat myself, but ‘Nimrod’ is a classic example of misrepresentation. It’s actually the portrait of an Anglicized German, A J Jaeger (pictured below), and has its roots in a summer evening conversation Elgar held with his beloved publisher friend about Beethoven’s slow movements. The result is, of course, based on the Adagio cantabile of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata. So, music about a German based on a German. The stout and steaky tune seconds in to the first Pomp and Circumstance March? Listen to the 'Cortège de Bacchus' from Delibes’s Sylvia, a movement cited by Elgar in a different context, and you’ll hear where the rhythmic idea comes from, note for note (though not pitch for pitch). Bizet and Massenet are other strong influences.

Elgar’s phenomenal orchestration came partly from his many trips to Germany to see Wagner’s operas. There Richard Strauss hailed him, after a performance of The Dream of Gerontius, as ‘the first English progressivist’. His love of Italy follows Strauss’s example in the ‘concert overture’ (essentially tone-poem) In the South, and surfaces elsewhere when least expected. During the First World War, he didn’t so much thump a narrowly patriotic tub as show his musical solidarity with Poland and Belgium. 

More than anything, Elgar is truly international and a world-class composer, as my City Lit students agreed when we looked at the First Symphony and went to hear Andrew Litton's outstanding interpretation of it with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican. Unfortunately my effusions over Cockaigne the following week - I was amazed to find it has no less than eight memorable themes - were undermined by the bizarre performance of it, which I heard on the Radio: the aptly named Long Yu dragged every slow passage out to an eternity. Inside information told me that the interpretation clocked in at 2m40s longer than the longest previous BBC performance (they keep records of timings, helpfully). 

Which for a 15-minute piece is absurd, of course. Elgar as conductor or Boult will put you right. Boult's Cockaigne was twinned on the original LP with the most opulent recording of the Second Symphony (though it was Boult's classic 1944 recording that I chose on Radio 3's Building a Library).

Anyway, I hope I can enlarge on some of the international and/or European aspects when I join Anthony Payne and Dr Heather Wiebe in a Royal Philharmonic Society discussion before Saturday’s performance of Gerontius.  It’s dauntingly titled  The Edwardian Era: Empire, Society and Culture, and as I can’t contribute too much to that, I’ll be hoping to sound the trumpet for Elgar as part of a wider musical movement. Also hoping to catch James MacMillan’s earlier talk exploring ‘what role faith and mysticism have in artistic vision’.

All the above is loosely connected with Cameron’s long-awaited speech today. To paraphrase a friend of a friend, what it comes down to is a case of one foot forward, two feet back, half a foot forward again: a) the European Union is OK; b) no it’s not, they all have to dance to our tune and if they don’t we’re not playing; and c) actually we’d better play after all. In a muddled message that will generate years of uncertainty, the upshot is that he renegotiates terms to get some of the UK's powers back, and then asks the British people whether they like that or not. That doesn’t account for what happens if, as seems likely, he fails to get what he wants from the other EU countries.

At least the pro-Europeans are beginning to get their voices heard in the surrounding kerfuffle. It’s high time someone of eloquence spelled out the advantages of Europe to counter all the falsehoods in the Mail and the Torygraph (apparently the press office at the European Commission sends correction after correction to the papers, but they never listen – not even the Guardian, which for some reason is giving the appalling Farage houseroom as a funny guy).

So – cue lots of facts and links – let’s try and set the record straight. If this first fact were spelled out, people might begin to think differently. It’s this: that the size of the administration is NOT bloated, as most people believe. The entire staff of all EU institutions, agencies and other bodies totals 55, 000. The Commission on its own employs 32,000 people – smaller than the staff of Birmingham City Council.

Are EU civil servants overpaid? Hardly. According to one source, ‘comparative studies confirm that the remuneration package…is similar to what is offered by other international organisations that employ expatriate staff. In fact, for many job profiles the EU civil service offers the lowest entry-level salaries amongst international organisations’.

What has the EU/EEC ever done for us? Please read this dazzling list in a letter from Simon Sweeney to The Guardian. That should do the trick. And the TUC is in no doubt of what our government’s up to here. At an Executive Committee Meeting on 15 January it declared that ‘the Government wants to take away the rights working people have gained over the last thirty years from the European Union. Social Europe has provided working people with more equality, more protection from redundancy, more information about what's happening at their workplace, as well as a shorter working week and paid holidays. The Government wants to take that away from working people, and make them work longer hours for less pay’. It goes on to point out the obvious, that Cameron’s ‘dithering’ will play havoc with our economic interests.

If you’re still with me, the full facts of EU policy can be found here (economic benefits), here (social and employment policy) and here (working time directive). Unfortunately I'm probably preaching to the converted, but it's good to have chapter and verse in hand. Now we need a really charismatic apostle to go out and fight the good fight to halt the re-feudalisation of blinkered Blighty: a recommendation also made by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski in his Blenheim Palace speech last year, full of further strong arguments from a man who might have been expected to be a Eurosceptic.

Finally, a reconciliatory footnote. 50 years ago this Tuesday de Gaulle and Adenauer joined their countries' hands together again by signing the Elysée Treaty. The BBC put up a lovely little piece about a song that encapsulated a respect regained: 'Göttingen', French chanteuse Barbara's hymn to the German university town she adored (and which I came to love at first sight two Junes ago). The sound version of the song in French there (Barbara also recorded it in German) is the best, but here's a filmed performance to complement it.