They're still living

That's Judith's stunned response at the devastating climax of Bartok's hour-long masterpiece Duke Bluebeard's Castle. It has less of an impact if, as in Daniel Kramer's new ENO production (photographed throughout here by Johan Persson), it's obvious from the fifth door onwards that SPOILER ALERT the children who inhabit Bluebeard's basement must have a mother, or mothers. The revelation can only come as an anticlimax, even if musically Edward Gardner's firm conducting of the ENO Orchestra still drives home the pity and the terror. Kramer aims to shock with the final tableau, but for me it would have been a little bit laughable if only the children hadn't still been onstage. As with Keith Warner's use of the child in his skewed Royal Opera Wozzeck, you felt anxious about the long-term mental well being of the younger participants.

Kramer wants to have it both ways, trying to carry on the mythic resonances of the story while restricting Clive Bayley's Bluebeard to a twitching psychopathic Josef Fritzl, a schwarz-Von Trapp who lines up his family just like Christopher Plummer in the film Austrians still haven't taken on board.


I knew what to expect from Agnes Kory's review on the musicalcriticism.com website - quite an honour for a knowledgeable Magyar to flag my programme article as 'exemplary' - so I suppose I was trying to see the good in the concept, prepared as I was for the production's restrictive aspect. As I wrote in the piece, both Bartok and his librettist Bela Balazs harped on their essential loneliness and the difficulty of true understanding between Mars-men and Venus-women. This is no more just a drama about a sick pervert than The Turn of the Screw is just a study in paedophilia. Kramer would have done well to take note of Balazs's words reproduced in the programme: 'Explanation is like an x-ray: it shatters shape and form...True poetry is true seduction'. But how could you begin to be seduced by Bayley's monster?

Still there was no fudging the balance of power which shifts temporarily from still, menacing Bluebeard in the first half to hysterical, aggressive Judith in the second. Kramer drew strong performances from Clive Bayley - much better than usual - and the intense Michaela Martens.


And if you couldn't quite understand why Judith would have fallen in love with such an obvious nutcase in the first place, I guess her attraction might have been the will to understand such extreme psychopathology. With the keys clear embodiments of painful access to Bluebeard's locked up soul, the lake of tears was especially powerful. And yes, I did weep a bit myself and reeled out at the end on jelly legs. But was that because of the innate power of this ambiguous score, which refuses to locate good or evil exclusively in either character, rather than the production's limiting vision? I will say one thing: Kramer clearly listens to the music, reflecting it both in his characters' actions and in the shifting stage pictures, evocatively designed by Giles Cadle.

It was Gardner's idea to pair Bluebeard with its junior by two years, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Bartok touted around the Budapest Opera House during the long-delayed rehearsals for his opera. An inspired twinning: containment versus explosion. Yet director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan came no nearer to the massive implications of Stravinsky's colossus than any other choreographer I've seen (and I'm still desparate to get hold of a copy of Pina Bausch's version, which Stephanie Jordan concluded our Pre-Prom Stravinsky chat with Chris Cook by describing as much the best of all).

Some of the images from Fabulous Beast's invocation of an Irish ritual have stayed with me: the shaman lady, the bloodthirsty dogheads threatening the girls in pretty dresses


the mob's violence first towards the young man


and then towards the quasi-sage


and of course the final sequence of cocks in frocks ushering in the sun.


The trouble is that while I liked the rhythmic stamping, so much jittering, twitching and flailing doesn't quite fill the energy of the music. The ends of both the first part - which would have to be re-named 'humping the earth' - and the second just didn't build. From my limited experience dance, ancient or modern, rarely does. So half the time I was watching Gardner as he drew beautifully full and rounded solos from the ENO woodwind, rising to the snarl of massed brass and some especially virtuosic playing from the tuba. Five stars for enterprise, then, but only three for the dramatic execution.

The dark side had its lighter moments in Bryn's 'Bad Boys' concert. You can read what I thought about this celebration of effortless charisma here in my first Arts Desk review. I've just listened to the CD, which contains exactly what we missed at the core of the RFH performance, Sweeney's terrifying 'Epiphany' - and yes, much to my surprise, Anne Sofie von Otter COULD play Mrs Lovett when Deutsche Grammophon get round to recording the whole thing, which they must. Terfel rises to the challenge of the grand finale by pulling off the feat of Commendatore, Giovanni and Leporello as the statue arrives to drag the rake off to hell.


As for the Welsh, well, how do they do it? Let's just name a top list of Margaret Price, Dame Gwyneth, Bryn and their seemingly immortal counterparts in the world of popular entertainment, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. To end on a lighter note, yes, the latter two are still very much living and delivering the goods. I saw Shirl on the telly the other night; what vivacity, what a trouper! To think that in my childhood my parents would always turn down the sound on the TV whenever she came on, and laugh at her gesticulations. Here she has the stage to herself for 'I Am What I Am', still on my mind after John Barrowman's towering performance last week, before our hero comes on to join her.



Better still is this collaboration between Tom and Bryn. 'Green, green grass OF home', please, poster, but otherwise, I've no complaints.

Bugles sang

What else could it be, on Remembrance Day? And this clip from 1993 is fraught, for me, with sadness for the gap I still feel Slava has left behind him. The late Richard Hickox is there too, conducting the LSO chamber ensemble. It also reminds me that Bryn was a natural from the start. Whatever circus lies in store with his 'Bad Boys' concert tonight at the Royal Festival Hall, my first assignment for what I genuinely believe to be a responsible, highly professional new online arrival in the shape of The Arts Desk, this proves Terfel has always been one of the great singers of this, indeed any age.

As for the War Requiem, I won't be hearing it live this year. Any performance has to be remarkable; last year's with Pappano and Royal Opera forces in the Albert Hall fitted the bill and quenched my thirst for the foreseeable future (by strange coincidence, there in that entry is a photo of another great musician we've lost, Sir Edward Downes). I can't believe I used, in my arrogant adolescence, to be sniffy about Britten's public face in the piece. Even just as a textural juxtaposition of Latin mass and Wilfred Owen poems, minus the music, it would have been a valid statement. As it stands, I can only echo Shostakovich's repeated assertion that this was one of the monuments of the 20th century, comparable only to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (which Shostakovich held in pride of place).

My admirable colleague Jonathan Swain compared recordings of the War Requiem on last Saturday's Building a Library. This link is a fridge note to myself that I have to catch it before it disappears from the 'Listen Again' facility in three days' time, and so should you. Of course I do know which version Jonathan chose, and although I'm sure he has sufficient integrity not to have regarded it as a foregone conclusion, how could it have been otherwise?

So, to conclude, the only possible 'One ever hangs', complete with very sensitive montage. Love the voice or hate it, you have to give Pears the palm for that final 'Dona nobis pacem'. Vishnevskaya told me this single phrase was the epitome of great artistry for her.

You who are girt with ice

By strange serendipity, I was pedalling around town on my way to round off my six City Lit classes on Turandot, with Liu's final 'Tu che di gel sei cinta' very much on my mind. And here was the wall of ice melting away in Belgrave Square just outside the German ambassador's residence. I hereby copyright my own production of Turandot, which will feature exactly that - a wall of ice which steadily dissolves throughout the evening. Whether or not I'll set it in divided Berlin and include a Chinese restaurant remains to be seen. But I do think another wall will be ominously under construction as the impossible lovers celebrate their final victory.


I imagined that most of this symbolic gesture would be mere water on the street by the time I was able to get there. But no, there on a helpfully chilly November day some of it still splendidly remained. A dead ringer for the irrepressible Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers accosted his fellow cyclist: 'good, innit?' Somewhat surprised to be addressed, I rather patronisingly asked sonny if he knew what it was for. 'Well, I sees the German flag opposite and that notice, so I puts two and two together'. He'd come across it on the way to school, 'when there was lots more', and had come back specially. And he wanted to see what would be left tomorrow (that is, today). Rather more fun company, I think, than hanging around with diplomats earlier in the day.


Diplomats were out in force for the Hungarian Cultural Centre's 10th anniversary celebrations the previous evening. Elbows every side of me entering the beautiful room at the back of the Vaudeville Theatre in Covent Garden reminded me of the saying that if you go through a revolving door in front of a Hungarian, the Hungarian will always come out first.

And, golly, had they pulled a star. Tamas Vasary at 76 is still very much a live wire. Who needs the frosty objectivity of a Brendel when a player like this can whirl you through Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy and make exhilarating sense of it all? He always likes to talk, apparently, and most of us were more than happy to listen to his animated discourse


especially since he would zoom to the piano with extraordinary abruptness and plunge straight into the 'Moonlight', the 'Wanderer', two iridescent Debussy preludes and a dizzyingly authentic Kodaly Dances of Marosszek (did Hungary's second composer ever write a dull piece?) Vasary played for Kodaly, he told us, and all the master said at the end was 'Servus', as he shook his hand. Our Austrian friends felt sure this meant 'welcome, you're one of us'.

I thought it was gracious of him to play on a Broadwood piano with one very faulty A flat, and to curtail his talking and even, for heaven's sake, his second encore for the eating and drinking. The food came second to the company, so I'll do a quick Tatleresque photo run. Here on the right is Mrs. Vasary, the distinguished Hungarian ballerina Henriett Tunyogi, with the adorable director of the French Institute and EUNIC Chairman Laurence Auer.


I see from an article by Jann Parry that Henriett has even danced to her husband's performance of the Beethoven 'Hammerklavier' Sonata. She's obviously first class, as leading dance critic Parry tells us. Now, here's vivacious Ildiko Takacs, the director of the HCC


and last, but by no means least, those great impresarios Lilian and Victor Hochhauser flanking the lady who was instrumental in setting up the HCC ten years ago, former number one Hungarian newsreader Katalin Bogyay.


I was especially delighted to greet the Hochhausers as I'd seen their daughter Shari Greenberg only a week earlier in Jerusalem. Shari and I became friendly through e-correspondence over my articles for the Bolshoy and Mariinsky programmes (those editors who make a personable effort to show their approval are very few and far between). She and her husband David took us to a lecture-recital at the Jerusalem Music Centre delivered by son Yoel and his fellow members of the Carmel Quartet. Here are Yoel, violinists Rachel Ringelstein and Lia Raikhlin and cellist Tami Waterman.


Yoel's narrative connected Mozart and Verdi through the once-thorny issue of opera versus chamber music. The spirited performances underlined beautifully how each composer comes up with a finale of total genius: arguably Mozart's best and quirkiest set of variations in the Allegretto non troppo of the D minor Quartet, K421, and Verdi's determination, in his less consistent quartet, to show what he can do technically as well as tunefully in his concluding Scherzo-Fuga. Yoel has just left with his family to live in the States, but will be back in Jerusalem with the Carmels for another pairing, of Haydn and Bartok, on 21 December.

One wall is down, another grows

On this day of celebration for Berlin and the world, it might seem curmudgeonly to raise the indignities of another wall. I can only say that I came back from Jerusalem infinitely more pessimistic about the possibility of any steps forward in the middle east peace process, and infinitely angrier (forgive me, my good Israeli friends) about the denial of basic human rights to Palestinians. Rory, our host, reminded me of the words in Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, which all too often seem to have been forgotten:

The state of Israel....will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.

Well, I know that Hamas and other extremists have made it very difficult. Many Palestinians, according to those who wish them nothing but the best, are truculent and resentful even with their helpers. But how do you justify a wall that cuts off a farmer's land from his home, a playground from its school? Why are the Palestinian villages so wretchedly poor and subject to loss of vital supplies, including water, at any time? Juliette drove us around one of them at dusk, overlooking part of the wall


which is clearly visible from the Mount of Olives.


We didn't get to Bethlehem, where the wall is most obvious (it was a choice between that and Masada). So we didn't see the now-famous Banksy murals which play amusingly on freedom and repression. The most familiar image is of a child being floated aloft by a bunch of balloons. And Pavel Ryszawa put this photo on wikimedia, for which thanks.


The nearest I got was this wall in Mane Yehuda. The meaning of Tenniel's White Rabbit is unclear to me - late for what? But it's certainly striking.


Walls and divisions confront you everywhere in Jerusalem. It's odd to think that you are regularly zigzagging a now invisible green line, a very different proposition to the one in Nicosia. Tellingly, the compound which lodged thousands of jammed-together Russian pilgrims in the 19th century now houses political prisoners.


Of course we shouldn't forget the greatest justification of the state, represented by these walls of files in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names.


I'd like especially to remember my dear late friend Trude Winik, who in 1977 registered on the Pages of Testimony her mother Hedwig, brother Josef and sister Elisabeth, deported from Vienna to Minsk on 6 May 1942 and murdered in Treblinka.

I didn't see, in the two all-too-short hours we spent there, any record of the established zionists' harsh attitude to the Jews who flocked there after the liberation of the camps; apparently they looked down on them scornfully as 'soapies'. What the museum does splendidly celebrate, which takes one out of the morass so much misery might induce, is the triumph of the individual, both in the filmed stories of survivors - the Imperial War Museum is good on this too, as I discovered taking godson Alexander round when he was 11 - and the countless non-Jewish organisations and families who helped. Even in Poland, whose shocking percentage of deported Jews compared to every other country I'd never taken on board, a group achieved the salvation of thousands. And there was a splendid section on the Jewish men and women who joined the doughty Ukrainian and Russian partisans. One, incidentally, is the mother of a friend of our friends in Jerusalem. Since those years living in the forests, she refuses to go near a mushroom.

Anyway, the site is impressively designed, and no-one visiting Jerusalem should fail to devote as much time as possible to it.


Now I'm off to Belgrave Square to see the melting wall of ice.

Chaz and Ben

Lord Britten would surely have forgiven Sir Charles all his past innuendoes and applauded his magnificent return to the fold if he could have seen the nearly-84-year old tearing into his most concentrated masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, in the Coliseum revival of David McVicar's English National/Mariinsky Opera production. It prompted me to look back at what Mackerras had to say about his chequered career with the Britten establishment when I interviewed him for Gramophone in 1992 during the Gloriana sessions (and, yes, they were still amusing themselves in the control room with the notorious 'young boys...bottoms' text to the horn tune of the Serenade).

The great man, seen above in the first of several production photos by Clive Barda, returns from enforced time out to endorse Claudio Arrau's assertion that old age brings with it not the expected serenity but renewed intensity. The feral cannonades of the jungle drums beneath the Governess's coach-rocking journey to Bly, the shrill edge of the church bells and the sensual clamour of the night ensemble all bore that out. And the players must surely have been responding to Sir Charles's meticulous ear in their many nuanced solos.

Problems remain with the production, and looking back on what I wrote when I first saw it two years ago, they're much the same: the interfering scene-shifters/servants who ruin the stillness of the climactic interlude in Act One, the boards which creak under Quint's all too mortal feet, the over large spaces to fill - with panels that reminded my companion Edwina of bistro windows - and the unsubtle underlining of the children's unambiguous involvement with the 'ghosts'. I worried that Nazan Fikret, now surely in her late teens, would be too much the Infant Phenomenon as Flora, but her intense performance is still riveting even in the later, Linda Blair moments.


Only the males are slightly under par: Hugh Beckwith, the second Miles, remains too stiff and of course it's hard for a treble to project into the Coli vasts, while Michael Colvin's energetic Quint is too much the Quasimodoish Hammer horror and far from the seductive Andalusian serenader Britten surely had in mind at times.

Britten's taxing vocal battles/duets between powerful women mean that both Ann Murray and Cheryl Barker challenge Rebecca Evans's more dreamily lyrical Governess to rise to their searing levels. Evans floats lines with Mozartian perfection and acts the lady's nervous collapses very well indeed


but doesn't convey any innate neurosis in her voice and on this occasion didn't move me in the final scene (though other folk I respect were in tears at the end). I'd love to see what the lustrous Barker might make of the sinning-or-sinned-against dilemma; and isn't it time to welcome the ever-waxing Sue Gritton, who's just been wowing Cheryl's compatriots down under as Ellen Orford, to the role? Neil Armfield's village-hall Grimes looks fascinating.



Our friends in Sydney have been obsessing on this show, and it would seem with good cause. Read the polyphony of praise in the 'scrapbook' of Prima la musica (with thanks to Sarah Noble for alerting me to the Gritton gold nugget above).

Now, it's time for In the Cage, and I don't mean another of great Henry's short stories (good, by the way, to see another James lover come out of the closet in John Adams's surprising blog).


I'm going to make an odd comparison, but I do think that Britten's opera would have fitted far better in the relatively intimate space of the Playhouse Theatre where a reduced-scale but pretty perfect Cage aux folles is currently playing (production photos of the Cagelles and John Barrowman by Catherine Ashmore). And the other thing to say is that I not only laughed myself silly but shed a few more tears at Thursday's performance than I had the night before (and don't get me wrong, Britten's shocker can reduce me to pulp).


This was in no small measure due to the show-stopping heft of John Barrowman's 'I Am What I Am' and feelgood 'The Best of Times'. But I must reveal my ignorance and say how the whole, iron-fist-in-lurex-glove event took me by surprise. I either never knew, or had forgotten, that the songs were by Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! and Mame fame; but the penny was already dropping when one of the first act numbers reminded me of that hit song from Mack and Mabel so irresistibly sung by Bernadette Peters.

And, yes, the old-fashioned sweetness coats a show about gay togetherness, alternative families and acceptance of all sorts which hit the French cinema in, can I believe it, the late 1970s and took on a new lease of life when the great Harvey Fierstein wrote the book for the musical. There's an excellent article in the programme by Michael Coveney in which Fierstein tells us how he 'fought to cast homosexuals in the roles - if you stand up and sing "I Am What I Am" without feeling your sexuality and your persecution right down to your painted toenails it's never going to be quite the same thing'.

It would be fair to say that the lovely Barrowman, such a great role model even if he is gifted with an unusually pretty face and such fine teeth, does feel it down to his 'painted toenails', that Simon Burke as his loving keeper is just as good and touching, that the rest of the cast sing, camp and act their socks off. Here are Burke's Georges and Barrowman's Albin trying to play it straight for the son's girlfriend's family, with Syrus Lowe's maid/miniMozart Jacob incapable of doing so.


Anyway it all ends, as the Broadway show never could, with a passionate, tender kiss. So what's most extraordinary of all is that some members of my mother's village coven, several of whom have hitherto behaved more like the genteel vomiting ladies in Little Britain, can't get enough of this and keep going back. She's in for a treat when she sees it for the first time next week.

Because nothing can live in it

The Governess's succinct explanation in Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and her charge Flora's stilling, harp-flecked invocation of the Dead Sea which prompts it, ran over and over in my head as we plunged to the lowest point on earth. Any illusion that we were more or less alone in this wilderness was shattered as we entered the nearly-full underground car park at the Masada National Park headquarters. At first full sighting, though, the last stronghold of the Jewish army against the Romans in AD 73 remained impressive.


There are two approaches to this cliffhanger: from the west, where the Romans' siege ramp can still be clearly seen, and from the east. Having started on the wrong route, which gave us an unexpected glimpse of an ibex, we took the latter option, shunning the hordes waiting for the cable car and heading up Wadi Masada for the Snake Path.


The path has its name, according to the historian Josephus's celebrated and romanticised account of the siege, 'because of its narrowness and constant windings; it is broken as it rounds the projecting cliffs and often turns back on itself, then lengthening out again a little at a time, manages to make some trifling advance. Walking along it is like balancing on a tight-rope. The least slip means death; for on either side yawns an abyss so terrifying that it could make the boldest tremble'*.

Well, I doubt if Josephus ever went to Masada, for even given the present securing, stepping and broadening of the path, it can't ever have been that scary and the ascent takes about three quarters of an hour. It does give spectacular views over the salt pans and the Dead Sea.


On the way up we encountered a large party of Israeli youth descending - nothing remarkable about that except that all, including the youngest who looked about 12, were carrying machine guns. Masada has entered the national mythology as the place where the inhabitants committed mass Waco-type suicide rather than surrender to slavery. In this it's thought that Josephus embroidered for the sake of a cracking good rhetorical speech, but like so much else in the distant past, it's now taken as the solemn truth and the oath of allegiance is frequently sworn at the top.

Whatever the historical reality, Herod's palace and fortifications on the top are mighty impressive.


In the south there's the largest of the cisterns which kept the community well watered


while the western palace has a couple of colourful mosaics.


There's also a columbarium for the pigeons which kept Herod's folk well fed.


Nowadays one still sees the occasional pigeon, but the most vocal and fearless inhabitants are these birds, some kind of starling but with an attractive orange stripe to mark them apart as a special desert breed.


It was bucketing in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; we had instead a dramatic dust storm. So the views on the descent were even more dramatic


with the distant salt pans glowing in shafts of sunlight against the black.


A dip in the Dead Sea after this proved irresistible. We drove past En Gedi, which hostess Juliette assures me is like a Black Sea resort in the communist era, and on to a still surprisingly busy Mineral Beach. Couldn't get near the mud bath for raucous Americans


but floated somewhat uneasily in the lethal cocktail (no swimming or splashing permitted). It's not a new sensation for me - I'd also bobbed in the soapy waters of Lake Van - and J paraphrased Dr Johnson by declaring 'worth doing, but not worth going to do'. Masada, however, was a different story. The desert scene haunts me still.

*Thanks to Shari Greenberg for so generously presenting me with the Penguin Classics translation on our last day in Jerusalem.

VinCEEro? VinceRO!

The accepted custom on the money note of 'Nessun dorma' is to hold on to that top B for as long as you can. Franco Corelli (poutingly gorgeous above, in his Calafian Astrakhan) does, of course, and in extending my Monday 'Opera in Focus' class survey to see and/or hear more on YouTube, I found Alessandro Valente clinging to it so long that he drops off what ought to be the full bar of top A on the final 'ro'. What Puccini asks for is an accent on a quaver's worth of B, while the orchestra makes a poco allargando, so that the stress falls where the word demands, on the last syllable.

Is this mere pedantry? Well, not exactly. Puccini tended to mark every detail in the score, so if he'd wanted the B to be so heroically held, he'd have put a tenuto above it. And as one of my students enthusiastically observed, 'vinceRO!' sounds so much more determined and, well, natural. She only had the opportunity to hear it because I finally found a tenor who does exactly what's in the score - Aureliano Pertile, who made his Scala debut in 1918 so could have sung at the Turandot premiere but didn't (I wonder why not, since he was Toscanini's favourite tenor. By the way, Caruso never could have sung 'Nessun dorma' for the simple reason that he'd been dead for five years by the time of the first performance). I take the liberty of liberating Aureliano's amiable image from the earlier Turandot entry to give him the palm here.


What of Pertile's 'Nessun dorma' as a whole? Well, he tends to sing sharp in his virile excitement - always better than flat, don't you think? - but there's never any doubt that he can make the killer lines, starting ''Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me' and all around Es, F sharps and Gs, a hellish tessitura.

My resident heldentenor explained to me how lighter voices like Gigli and Bjorling have trouble with these phrases, and how even the heavier ones have to clamp down in order to get to the end without cracking. In the class, we heard Bjorling, heroic but uniformly forte, followed by Heppner as baby tenor, so sensitive to the atmosphere at the start but very careful with the killer passage. Then we moved on to Charles Kullmann, singing in German with no trouble at all at any point (the class's favourite; Charles Craig, whom I later dug out on an old LP, is almost as good). Pertile's what-Puccini-wanted demo came between splendid heroics on the top B from Joseph Schmidt - who sings 'vinhairo' to get it - Corelli and, of course, Pavarotti, who remains a golden example of how to deal with the passaggio.

Sadly, while he set a splendid stadium example, he gave rise to an outrageous band of pygmies either crooning at a lower pitch (Russell Watson) or wowing the crowds with a far from solid attempt at real tenorism (Paul Potts, whom I've only just watched - needless to say he dominates 'Nessun dorma' on YouTube). On the other hand, an old bird of boundless charisma can get away with replacing Pav and doing her own thing. Do stay with Aretha beyond the mangled Italian of the first phrases, and if you have an open mind you should enjoy her.



Let's end, though, with another tenor who was so much the real thing but tends to be overlooked because of his popular bent, Mario Lanza. This badly lip-synched extravaganza from the 1956 film Serenade, with flashbacks featuring the ladies in the drama, Joan Fontaine and Sara Montiel, sounds good to me, a bit more robust than the feted 1948 Hollywood Bowl version.



Having found out a little more about Serenade - not least that the gay character played by Vincent Price originally appeared in the novel as the singer's first love-interest - I'm curious to see the whole thing. Apparently the Otello Act 3 Monologue is a high point of Lanza's career.

When we dead awaken...

...it'll be a mighty squeeze in the cleft which Zechariah prophesied will open up in Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. Which is why the Jewish graves are so hugger-mugger on the slopes, offering instant fast track to resurrection for Robert Maxwell, of all people, among others. If I've collated correctly, the city's glorious Dome of the Rock, never to be seen at close quarters by the majority of Israelis, will of course be swept away and the third temple at last re-established on the spot.

Unfortunately, it's not just the lunatic fringe which takes this literally - even if I doubt whether many Israelis share the ultra-orthodox interest in genetically engineering a red heifer without a single white hair as one prerequisite for the great day. Nor are many willing to wait on God's will. In the mid 1980s a group consisting of Knesset members, estate agents and lawyers calculated the placing of dynamite at each of the Dome's eight corner pillars. Arrested only just in time, they got off lightly for a plot which, if successful, would have triggered an Armageddon of regional if not global proportions; none of the organisers served more than four years in prison. One told the courts very matter of factly how the third temple would descend from the skies the minute the Dome was reduced to rubble.

Jerusalem is an always stimulating, sometimes oppressive place to be even for a week. As its finest poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote,

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It's hard to breathe.

Paradoxically, I found myself breathing most freely on Temple Mount, Haram es-Sharif, the Muslims' 'noble sanctuary' and the site of the first and second Jewish temples which were razed to the ground, leaving only Herod's massive base. Against its western wall Israelis come to bewail the temples' destruction at their most sacred place.


It was a bit of a fairground when we visited, sundry bar mitzvah ceremonies proceeding with much guying, dancing from the men and ululating and sweet-throwing from the women behind the barrier.


Having undergone one queue, we came out and joined another at the only one of the Haram's gates currently open to non-Muslims in the day's two brief windows of opportunity (we took the 12.30-1.30 slot). Security was especially tight owing to recent protests - in the midst of one of which a journalist friend of our hosts had her jaw broken by a stone - but once beyond the wooden ramp and the mercifully dormant riot shields


we did indeed seem to enter a kind of paradise in which the crowds quickly dispersed. The centrepiece is of course the late 7th century octagonal Dome, not a prayer hall - that function is served by the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south - but a shrine to house the putative rock on which Abraham determined to sacrifice his son (Isaac in the Old Testament, Ishmael in the Koran).


Its lower walls of white veined marble and upper tiers of glazed tiles, originally commissioned by Suleyman the Magnificent to replace the original mosaics, exist in perfect harmony with its perfect proportions beneath the dome itself, now of anodized aluminium rather than gold.


Yet what brings tears to the eyes is not so much the building, the interior of which is currently closed to non-Muslims, as its place at the heart of the most breathtakingly beautiful man-made terrace I've seen. For sheer spaciousness and light-filled splendour it even outstrips the centre of Isfahan and the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus. It's also in such marked contrast to the Crusader gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though that offers weird fascinations of its own (of which more anon). Approached by eight flights of stairs surmounted by elegant archways or qanats, the sanctuary contains other more gem-like buildings, among them the Dome of the Spirits,


the Dome of the Ascension marking the culmination of Mohammed's night journey which makes this the third most sacred Muslim site


and the exquisitely decorated Dome of the Chain, its purpose unclear (though it may have been a small-scale prototype for the main building).


On a lower level near the Sabila Gate is the Fountain of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbey


which we admired briefly before being summoned at deadline time, and ushered out into the bustle of the Old City.

So not for the first time I feel a bit like the protagonist of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, wondering at the beauty of these great artistic creations but troubled by their genesis and their fragility under the present situation. The following morning I found myself boiling over with anger reading the description in Amos Elon's superb Jerusalem: City of Mirrors about the attempts to destroy such a masterpiece. But you could also see where that frustration came from; after all, events which happened centuries ago seem to be yesterday's grievances in Jerusalem. The simple fact is that no community here lives at peace with its neighbour. There are many more incredible stories and symbols of religious hairsplitting which I'll try and find time for. And I guess I'd better address the tricky question of Jerusalem today. But that's enough for now.