Typical Saturday night

Key: Sacred Love's clothed, Profane Love's ready for action

On Saturday for the first time we saw Wagner's opera Tannhäuser streamed from the New York Met. It's about sacred and profane love (pictured above).

Tannhäuser dallies with Venus (voluptuous, thus profane love) and, for no good reason, chooses to return home. In a singing competition T boasts about the rumpy-pumpy he's been enjoying, shocking the community and his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth (devout, therefore sacred love) who sort of forgives him. To redeem himself T pilgrims to Rome to be absolved by the Pope. Returning home T meets Wolfram, a mate before he became a metal (aka tungsten), and says he mentioned his penances to the Pope, adding he still has profane yearnings. Politely the Pope tells T to defecate in his hat. Elisabeth sort of dies and by dying absolves T. T then dies and the opera ends with a stunning chorus of:

The grace of God is granted to the penitent;
now he enters into the bliss of heaven.

It's far better than the plot suggests, much of the music is quite, quite beautiful, and there's genuine drama. But what about its premise?

Profane love we know about, teenagers get up to it too early in life. Sacred love, it seems, only happens above the waistline and was the going thing in Tannhäuser’s home town near Wartburg Castle, Germany. Amazingly the town didn't depopulate and die in the Middle Ages, but this may happen shortly, given its most important industry is car-making. That's German car-making.

Still about cars and even more amazing, Wartburg Castle gave its name to a terrible two-stroke car made in what used to be East Germany. Not a car to generate any love – sacred or profane – in me. Stay with Tone Deaf, it’s educational but in a populist way.

Been off the radar, I fear

Tis the year of the quiet RR. Well, not quite the year, perhaps a fortnight, perhaps three weeks.

I'd been neglecting Second Hand, just adding in a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty words at a time: the equivalent of driving at 28 mph with the handbrake on. Dabbling and - worst of all - forgetting what I'd previously written. The cure was to download SH to the Kindle and read it as it brushed shoulders with the collected verses of WB Yeats, Anna Of The Five Towns and Our Man In Havana.

A bit like giving myself an enema. An intellectual invasion. The shoddiness leaped out and 58,000-plus words quickly lost a thousand words.

Seamlessly this act of cauterisation (See, I'm mixing my metaphors) eased into the beginning of our local film festival, Borderlines. I'd booked twenty-three movies over thirteen days: of which five days involved two movies and three days involved three movies. Plus travelling to remote places. We'll be seeing Philomena at Ledbury, Gloria at Ross-on-Wye and Le Week-End at (a geographical collector's item) Bosbury Parish Hall.

Already seen: Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (tightly constructed; Cate Blanchett's Oscar well deserved), All is Lost (Robert Redford the sole actor, less than 100 words dialogue, techno-triumph), La Belle et La Bete (Cocteau's 1944 whimsy; imaginative; not my backyard), Jeune et Jolie ("Only the French could get away with this" - The Guardian), After Life (Japanese; superb; words fail me), Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Vallait le voyage - to Leominster)

The only duffer: Borodin’s opera Prince Igor from the New York Met. Gorgeous Russian singing but inanimate story, knee-jerk “advanced” direction. We left at first intermission. Luckily Borodin had a day job as a chemist

Nose doesn't blow it

Although I've never seen Shostakovich's opera The Nose before it's difficult to imagine better direction than yesterday's live NY Met transmission in a Hereford cinema. This bitter, uproarious Gogol satire has a simple theme: man wakes up, his nose lost, pursues it through a Russian city as it  follows its own aspirations - to become a flaneur, a member of high society, praying in a cathedral. "Not a likely story" self-mocks the chorus but by then  I found myself thinking: "I'm not so sure..."

Mostly the nose is a silhouetted larger-than-life shape attached to a dancer's body projected on to a screen. Its movements are persuasive, eloquent and touching. Initially the music is hard to take (I nodded off frequently) but then it matches the pell-mell action and could easily be Mozart, Well, almost. Better than Tosca or, God forbid, Downton Abbey.

SILENT JAWS The Montalban Sicilian cop series, available in a two-hour chunk on Saturday evenings, has never reached the popularity of its Scandinavian predecessors like The Killing but has its moments. Commissario Montalban prefers not to talk during his lavish fish lunches, drives a Fiat Punto, and many Sicilians, it seems, live in palazzi. The sun shines a lot. Escapist.

GASTRONOMIC TIP Scatter dried onion flakes on tuna paté, preferably smeared on Polish bread.

WIP Second Hand (43,277 words)
FROM THE fourteenth floor the south-western suburbs were a worn carpet. At first glance an impressive expanse but in the end just an area, lacking any natural or architectural identity. The city twelve miles away was a hazy blur on the horizon.

He noticed her staring and said, amused, “Monarch of all I survey. But not much of a kingdom, not much of a king. More a district manager.”

He was young but then they were all young.

Getting drunk on Onegin

Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin is a gift for those who like showing off.

Care to guess how you pronounce the title? I'll put you out of your misery - it's Oy-gainie O-nyay-gin. That last g is hard, as in garage, not as in martini (dry).

Until last year I'd never seen (heard?) the opera and was unfamiliar with its origins - a long poem by a poet with the least poetic of surnames: Pushkin. Now I've seen it thrice and I'm an expert.

A quite modern plot. A clever-clogs whose arrogance causes him to kill his best friend and whose love for a woman leads to agonies which will last for eternity. Nobody gets cut up and put in a bag.

Avoid the Solti/Covent Garden DVD. It is A FILM. Which means the soloists (some no doubt portly) only lend their voices; their visible bodies are replaced by dashing and handsome young people who dub the sound-track. Very strange. Off-putting in fact.

We also saw versions by Glyndebourne and, very recently, the Met. The former was also strange. A moving aria about an older man's love for his young wife appeared after the final action instead of before. Imagine Mercutio getting stabbed after R&J lie lifeless. As Americans say (it's a form of words I envy): go figure.

Hot tip: Soprano should always be Russian.

WIP Second Hand. (41,568 words)
(Francine's mother said) “Mrs Trotter said he was always nervy – whatever that means. Finally he had a nervous breakdown. Couldn’t stand the pressures of working in the hospital. They’d seen it coming for ages. Six months’ sick leave and he’s recovered. Sort of, says Mrs Trotter. What’s he going to do for a living? Acted as a locum at a medical centre and found even that too much of a strain. Finally found the perfect job.”
....
“A company that makes prosthetics for amputees...” 

It's not Sesame Sreet, you know

It was the interval. VR asked what kind of ice cream; I said vanilla. I was surprised it was still light. I felt I'd been locked up for ages. Time enough for a head transplant, or a body transplant to my existing head.

I dug into my ice and asked, "What about Peritonitis...?"

"His name's Pirithous."

"Pirithous, then. When he...?"

"He's already dead. He doesn't appear."

"But the summary...?"

VR said kindly, "Pirithous isn't part of the Theseus myth. The composer added him in."

I was making a fool of myself. I decided to forget the two dozen sailors who waved their legs in the hornpipe - immediately after the stepmother announced she was in love with her stepson and he turned her down. She looked disenchanted; the sailors looked jolly.

A film clip explained why. The set designer said the sailors were there to halt the narrative. They certainly did.

As I drove home VR asked, "In the first scene, the one in the giant open fridge. With the 10 ft broccoli floret and the monster tube of passata, partially squeezed."

I nodded cautiously.

"Is the fridge closed for the second scene?"

I was able to confirm it was.

As we watched TV news I reflected. Rameau died in 1764, fourteen years after Bach. Yet the B-Minor Mass is more fun than R's Hippolyte et Aricie. A slow learner, Rameau. Me too.

WIP Hand Signals.
“Ah, but is passion admirable?”
(Francine) smiled. “You wouldn't be Martin Ibanez without it.”
“And do you care for Martin Ibanez?”
“I enjoy his company.”
“Just that?”
She paused slightly. “I enjoy his body.”
“Measure that enjoyment.”
“I don't care to. Measuring - the idea's horrid.”

Modern and eloquent

Edmund Wilson, now dead, was at one time America's best-known literary critic. He ended up fat, bald-headed, bad-tempered and given to suicidal raids on the refrigerator. Nevertheless he wrote one of the greatest appreciations of Joyce's Ulysses in the simplest of English (and, boy, how that helps).

But for once this isn't a Ulysses rant. Soon after the end of WW2 Wilson, on a visit to London, describes in his diary (a huge entertainment in its own right) his own bad temper and his dislike of poncy, inadequate, broken-down England. He speaks gloomily and apprehensively about a new opera he is about to see. And then, because honesty was always his bag, he describes his surprise and delight in what he experienced. That opera was Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

As always, the usual caveat. This is not a recommendation, I don't do those. Just a few observations following our first encounter - shockingly late in the day - with the work last night.

PG is a modern opera, still. At their best modern operas are able to treat subtler, more realistic themes than the classics; the price you pay is modern music. PG concerns itself with the outsider versus society: a fisherman whose erratic behaviour (and worse) puts him at odds with the people in the port where he lives. VR admitted she was almost as apprehensive as old Wilson. Both of us watched in complete silence and afterwards she said: "Parts of that were beautiful." Quite true because of (not despite) the screechy violins.

No point in saying more. Other than that the major soprano role is called Ellen Orford. God, how I envy Britten that name.

Trust me, I'm an opera nut

Modernists got a shellacking this week in a BBC4 three-part series on twentieth century posh music. John Adams, himself a practitioner, said he could never "love" late Schoenberg. And the consensus on Webern, never confuse him with Weber, seemed he was off his trolley.

Yet Stravinsky's music which caused riots in Paris in 1913 later figured in Walt Disney's movie, Fantasia, presumably aimed at children.

Most people who hum along with Lark Ascending and drum their fingers to Rondo à la Turca just don't give a damn. And unless there's some natural curiosity what I write here will be meaningless.

My prescription for those willing to close their eyes, pinch their nose and wince at the taste is to forget non-vocal music and try opera. Two in particular which we’ve just seen.

Srauss's Salomé, based on Oscar Wilde's play, is erotic, as in "a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such, an insistent sexual impulse." The story could be summarised thus: sexual whimsy, sexual frustration, seduction, sado-masochism, and finally sadism. It's simple, short, gripping and echoes the turmoil in your reproductive system. There’s a famous dissonant chord which some wimp described as "the most sickening in all opera". You won't come away dwelling on tonal ambiguities and polytonality, though there are lots of both.

Hogarth's engravings tell you what to expect from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. The libretto is by Auden and Kallman so if you're watching a DVD, as we were, enable the sub-titles. It's more reflective than Salomé and remarkable for the way your sympathies are enlisted as insanity and death claim a far from sympathetic character. Again, the music simply pulls you along. Not ancient, not modern, just music. The sets at Glyndebourne are by Hockney and they’re witty.

Older is not necessarily better

Chez Robinson, exchanging presents at this time of year has again been ditched in favour of an eye-watering sum shared and spent on DVD operas. But it's clear this practice will not stretch much further. The "wanteds" were acquired long ago, now we're into slightly more speculative choices and one fell rather heavily at the first fence last night.

The 2012 starters were: Orfeo (Monteverdi), Peter Grimes (Britten), Lulu (Berg), The Rake's Progress (Stravinsky), The Flying Dutchmen (Wagner), The Dream of Gerontius (Not an opera, of course; Elgar). Plus, left over from 2011: Salomé (Strauss, R).

We'd have saved money buying online but we like to support Outback our local CD/DVD store and this led to a little foolishness on my part. In phoning in my list I provided the names of the works only. "I'm not going to patronise you by adding the names of the composers," I said. Which is why we ended up with Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) rather than the more famous Gluck's (1762).

Wow, what a difference 155 years makes. Monteverdi's Orfeo dates back almost to the dawn of operatic time, has hardly no action, is based on limited-dynamics accompaniment, and demands lengthy prodigies from the tenor who sings Orfeo. Old Claudio does his best to make memorable arias but the melodic limitations inevitably result in some samey-ness.

Which is a shame, as VR pointed out. Because in a later opera, The Coronation Of Poppea, Monteverdi ends it with one of the simplest and most memorable love duets of all time. Which I'm ashamed to say I did not know. It's called Pur ti miro and I've just played it a thousand times. If you don't know it please click, I beg of you