Opera in Depth Summer 2024: the human comedy

Dante's Divina Commedia was Puccini's model for the trajectory of his most comprehensive masterpiece, even if the subject-matter is quite different for the most part. You can, of course, take Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi separately, or put the individual operas alongside other one-acters, but it's reassuring to see the trilogy most often presented these days as the composer intended (and no, IMO it is NOT acceptable to reverse the orders of the convent drama and the Florentine comedy). 

The beauty of it is that each is a supreme masterpiece of timing and atmosphere on its own terms.  Each makes use of finely observed vignettes in the first third of the drama before the screw begins to turn. There is something hellish about the barge couple's existence in Il tabarro, but it's offset by an almost Debussyan impressionism and gently comic vignettes. Puccini surely drew some of the details of cloistered life from meeting with his sister in her monastic community. And the better I know my Dante - THE big revelation of recent years since the free course with Alessandro Scafi and John Took at the Warburg Institute - the more pleasure I can take from the passing references to so many Dantean names and places in Schicchi, even though its source is a mere line and a bit in Inferno.

Then each opera packs its punch (and never more so than in Richard Jones' Royal Opera production - we'll be referring to the above regularly). Suor Angelica is the most heartbreaking, on a level with Madama Butterfly; Gianni Schicchi is laugh-out-loud funny tinged with youthful romantic love. It will always be a desert island opera for me since it was on an Edinburgh Fringe week of performing it with the Rehearsal Orchestra that my so far 35-year-old relationship with other half, later civil partner and husband, began. 

I'm hoping the infinitely generous and warm Ermonela Jaho can be persuaded to join us after her unforgettable visit to the Butterfly course (when we also had two hours of Antonio Pappano, but I guess he's even busier now. Just got a proof copy of his autobiography and there's wisdom on every page). Meanwhile, here's the flyer for the forthcoming term with full details of how to join - click to enlarge.

For the last four Mondays I can't wait to revisit John Adams's Nixon in China - for me, the best opera of the last 40 years, though there are comic rivals to Schicchi in Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest and Alice's Adventures Under Ground). One plus since the last time is that other productions have appeared since Peter Sellars' initial hit toured the world (partner and I saw its UK premiere in the Edinburgh Festival at the aformentioned time). To return to operas I'd studied in live classes is never to repeat; I don't look at the old notes. Picture below by Ken Howard from the Met staging of the Sellars production.

How fresh and wondrous we all found Salome and Carmen this past term.  The most rainbow-hued of Strauss's operatic scores is surely also his most perfectly structured. And seeing it a week after the last class in Bruno Ravella's so richly-layered Irish National Opera production in Dublin was a wonder (image below by Patricio Cassinoni for INO). 

Hpw delighted I am that it will be appearing on the superlative free OperaVision website (YouTube connected) later this month, with Ravella's unsurpassably well-cast Garsington Ariadne auf Naxos). How lucky we were, too, with tie visit of Bruno and conductor Fergus Sheil just before the production opened.

Bizet's instrumental and harmonic felicities in Carmen seem limitless: surely this has to be the opera to take a newcomer to if the performances nail it. And I don't think we'll ever see or hear surpassed the duo of Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna in Richard Eyre's Metropolitan Opera production*. 

I used scenes from other productions, but no central relationship goes to the edge in its visceral quality as this one does. I've previously state that the DVD of Glyndebourne's Janáček Jenůfa should be the first port of call for anyone who comes to opera from the world of theatre; for the perfect mix of aria, duet and ensemble form with high drama, the 2010 Met Carmen should be the one.

*UPDATE: Damiano Michieletto's new Royal Opera production comes nowhere near, alas, or certainly not with its first cast, marvellous though Aighul Akhmetshina is. And of course I wanted it to succeed, but the review has to tell the truth.

31 today

Meaning the he-I, only partly revealed in the above photograph in the grounds of the modern-art-rich Gunton Arms, North Norfolk, where we had a superb lunch to celebrate a birthday early last month in the middle of the equally flavoursome Southrepps Music Festival. We may have between us two feet in the grave, but I don't really buy in to Webster's cynicism. Anyway, the stunt is a good substitute for the fact that The Other won't allow full-frontals or facials other than this one (wedding photo 2015) on the blog.

Since 1988 we've been civilly partnered and married, to celebrate our rights, but our relationship began in Edinburgh while we were there performing Puccini's Gianni Schicchi on the Fringe with City Opera and the Rehearsal Orchestra. Edinburgh was, is and I hope always will be my city of love - unrequited over four years as a student (what pain that was), redeemed another four years later.

'Our' opera is either Schicchi or Nixon in China, the UK premiere of which we went to see around that time, other backgrounds being a visit to see university friend Eleanor Zeal's play that year, The Tainted Honey of the Homicidal Bees, based on the Greek myth of Erysichthon (Eric in her version), which won her another fringe first, after which we had J's sadly now erstwhile friend the Houri dancing up the stairs of the Annandale Street flat where I was lodging bawling 'I'm in love with a wonderful guy', and the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, where a pledge was made. The above programme was signed by the great man some years later, when I got to interview him in a pre-performance event before he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a Barbican concert of his music.

Friends who were recently together back in 1988, my hosts in Annandale Street, are separated now but on good terms, and their lovely children are still partly ours (at least in my mind, anyway; we put in many intensive days of work entertaining them on visits to Scotland): Alexander first, chronologically, among godchildren, Kitty nominally J's goddaughter now.  Mother Julie has this heartstopping view of Arthur's Seat, complete with figures on top, from her kitchen window,

while Christopher still lives on the other side of this amazing valley in Broughton, between Peebles and Biggar in the borders, where we went for the first time in some years after our Edinburgh sojourn this year.

'Our' boy, Alexander, is now a hard-working twentysomething who's just bought his first modest property in Biggar with girfriend Kirsty. I hope he won't mind being the only face up for close inspection here, unconsciously but hilariously reflecting darling dog Lily's head-up with the ball at our picnic by Stobo Reservoir on our glorious four-hour walk from Broughton along the Buchan Way.

And here is said dog acting as substitute for the one I want, along with a garden, to complete our more or less contented life, outwardly ruffled at the moment by what happens to J's work should the European Commission Representation in London finally close on 31 October (but I'm still hopeful that it won't, probably a little more so after the first public response to democracy under threat this past week). We're both heading out of the confluence of the Tweed and Biggar Water on a gloriously warm weekend.

And here, continuing the tradition of anonymity for J, are my more feline companion and I heart-shadowing at Kew on Sunday

with blissful Mediterranean pine and sky directly above.

UPDATE: our evening should really have been dinner for two, but how could I miss Gardiner's Berlioz at the Proms?

I blush to say I applied relentless pressure on J, who hates the Albert Hall audiences but loves good singing and all-round excellence in opera, and he got both, having amusingly pointed out that our anniversary night subject was, in real life but not in Berlioz's romantic portrait, a brawling bugger who constantly faced arrest for both the stabbing and the sodomy. Anyway, a more joyous occasion couldn't be imagined.

It was a giant bottle of champagne to Haitink's farewell concert last night, a wine of very rich vintage.

You can read about both concerts (five stars, natch) on The Arts Desk: Benvenuto Cellini here and the Vienna Phil special here. With thanks to the doyen of action photographers, Chris Christodoulou, for the photos. 

The people are the heroes now

How could old production-rocker Peter Sellars not recall in interview that line of Alice Goodman's breathtakingly poetic libretto for John Adams when Nixon in China was screened worldwide the day after the fall of Mubarak? In fact the Met re-staging of an operatic masterpiece was even more vital for the history and the lessons of revolutions, violent or peaceful. By the way, I wasn't at the talked-up 'premiere of the year', Turnage's Anna Nicole, last night. I'll see it next week, and I expect it to be at the very least extremely well sung, played and staged (by Richard Jones the only genius of the theatre); but on previous form I can't imagine that Turnage, excellent when at his fitful best, hits the heights of Adams, who's given us the only core-repertoire grand opera of the past two decades*.

Nixon's ambiguous, often metaphysical dimensions show us that the euphoria of the moment always yields to a more complex aftermath. After the adrenalin charged 'gambe's/cheers and the salute to Washington's birthday of the big summit dinner between Americans and Chinese that cold February of 1972 (picture by Ken Howard for the Met)


come the private idealism of Pat - still, I think, the greatest soprano scene of the late 20th century, so affectingly done by Janis Kelly - and the reign of terror of Madame Mao. And the last act comes to seem like the opera's greatest achievement in its polyphonic interaction of the five private individuals, wondering 'how much of what we did was good?'

Those questions still resound in Egypt, of course, and resonate for Libya, Iran, Bahrain, the list goes on. What we can continue to do, for the moment, is marvel at the predominance of goodwill, how an educated middle class informed how well motivated were the crowds in Tahrir Square, how amazing that the young took charge and went around tidying up the streets and cleaning the anti-Mubarak slogans off statues once they'd got their way. The pride and optimism are incredible, whatever's still to come. I recommend an excellent programme I just heard on the BBC World Service, covered, as it should be, by a highly articulate Arabic reporter, Magdi Abdelhadi. All this, too, is possible: maybe we need the language-ignorant BBC reporters on the spot for the crisis, but afterwards, why not give the people closest to their people a voice?


The Trafalgar Square photos come by presumed courtesy of Amnesty UK, who shared them with us its supporters. I asked to use a couple here, but as I still haven't had a reply after three days, I'll take that as a yes and add any further credits if so requested. Anyway, Amnesty and human rights organisations worldwide should be feeling good about all this**. I felt that optimism at the end of last year, which I was amazed to see written off as a quiet one when WikiLeaks, for better and for worse, took charge and students here promised more protests. And much as I resist all pressures to tweet and to go on Facebook, I see their phenomenal influence where it counts, too. Interesting times indeed, and mostly in a good way.

*Not quite incidentally, the best and most detailed essay I've read on Nixon in China is to be found on Daniel Stephen Johnson's blog.

**20/2 As they must be, and I certainly am, reading about one promising volte-face in oppression-threatened Hungary: the Budapest Metropolitan Court's overturning of a police veto on extending a gay rights march in June. I read the articles of the European Union rulings with especial interest, and hope that sort of thing will be enshrined in law in Egypt and other countries soon.