Other Christmases

1 The room was decorated. There were white table-cloths on the tables. The cutlery was placed, and so were the crackers. The diners took their places. Some had come specially for the lunch. The crackers were pulled, and the hats were worn. In the kitchen, the volunteer cooks set out the dishes of food ready for serving. One placed the vegetables on the plate and then passed the plate so that the turkey could be added. Once complete, the plate was given to a volunteer waiter who placed it in front of a diner. One by one, the diners began to eat the Christmas lunch. A splendid effort. A tribute to generosity at Christmas. Yet there is one reservation to be entered: the plates carried too much food. There had been abundant food, all donated, to cook. There was thus abundant food to serve. And so the plates were piled high with food. Alas, generally speaking, the diners could not cope.

1.1 I wonder if the generous cooks served so much on a plate at their own Christmas dinners, later on that day. At home, perhaps the vegetables were set upon the table, and each took a portion according to preference. In the communal dining room, perhaps there was an inclination to see satisfaction, particularly the diner's satisfaction at Christmas, as being derived from the quantity that could be eaten. 'There you are. Get outside that. It's Christmas'.

2 The two brothers, one 34 the other 28, now live in a first-floor flat, having lived all their lives with their father in a terraced house in a quiet Close. On their father's sudden death, they were required to move. Their joint income of £140 a week is derived from State benefits. In addition, they receive full remission from rent and from council tax. However, the income must then meet all other expenses, including heating and housekeeping. The elder one has been unemployed for the years that I have known him. The younger one receives income support, being certified as unfit to be employed.

2.1 I wonder how they will get on. At present, I visit, as their father was a client. But they have no claim on SSAFA or on other military charities. I can be companionable, but I cannot provide any substantial help. I will visit, of course, over the next month or two.

3 According to the young woman, aged about 26, she had fled from her marital home, with her five-year-old daughter and six-month-old son, in fear of her husband, 22, a soldier. She will soon occupy a flat, one which her father presently rents to tenants. But she will have to organise her life as a single mother, on the assumption that she will not return to her husband. I visited her before Christmas, when I was able to make a small cash gift, one which was well received. I am due to visit her again tomorrow.

Preparing for Parsifal (1)

The emergence of Parsifal
First, a knowledgeable speaker dealt with the emergence of Parsifal and with some of the major themes. Seventeen (or more) years in the making so it seems. Wagner drew upon a poem by Wolfram, a medieval poet, and set the opera in Spain, on the border between the Arab and the Christian worlds. As Tristan is about erotic love, and The Mastersingers is about the love of music, so Parsifal is about compassionate love, about the tale of a blameless fool, Parsifal, who becomes wise through pity. [I will better understand that comment later on.] An opera about sensuality vis-a-vis spirituality.

[The background.
The devout king, Titurel, reeived two wondrous relics from the angels, the Holy Grail and the spear with which Jesus's side pierced. They are kept in the Castle of the Grail. Tinturel founded a Brotherhood of Knights who, miraculously strengthened by the relics, ride out into the world to help those in distress. Klingsor, a knight, sought admission to the brotherhood, but he could not fulfil the law of chastity and so castrated himself in order to kill his lust. Tinturel refused him.

In revenge, Klingsor transformed part of the surounding wilderness into a magic castle and garden. There, he has created bewitching young maidens whose pupose is to seduce the knights, as Klingsor intends to subvert the brotherhood and so possess the Grail.

Amfortas, having taken over as king, saw that the knights were falling into Klingsor's power, and, armed with the sacred spear, he went to do battle with Klingsor. However, he was seduced by a mysterious maiden. Klingsor seized the spear and wounded Amfortas in his side. The wound will not close. Amfortas is in agony.]

[Themes
the conflict between the sacred, the chaste knights, and the profane; the entrapping maidens; that conflict at the higher level of the new, Christian, religion and the old religion; Amfortas's failure to uphold the virtues of the Christian brotherhood, his vulnerability, his wound; how will the flow of blood from the wound be staunched, how will his agony be ended?]

A one-armed Amfortas
I will remember the performer, Falk Struckmann, who is to play Amfortas for his demonstration of the day-to-day tension which can exist between a performer and a director. In the current production, Amfortas is to be reduced to the use of one arm (the other being supported in some way and not available for expressive use). But, said the singer, I want to us both my arms to complement the music and the text. I remember the way he stood up, sang a line, and threw both his hands forwards and upwards.

He developed the point. The performer (the singer, the actor) has a view of the text and of the way to express an understanding of what the text requires. The performer both sings and acts. However, the director too has a view. There can be a tension between the two, a tension which has to be resolved. For this particular performer, the balance of advantage lies with leaving the performer to act as the performer feels. Nowadays, in his view, a concert performance where the performer has control both of voice and of gesture can be more powerful than a staged one.

Kundry
Asked about her sense of the production, she asked ‘Where in the world will you find such a Parsifal?. We have three Wotans on stage and Bernard in the pit’. (According to a piece in The Times, Bernard Haitink, on being asked what was the major requirement for the successful conducting of The Ring, replied ‘Comfortable shoes’.) In her opinion, it was really rare to have such fine singers on stage. She spoke about the clarity of the singing. ‘In Germany, I have never heard such singers where you can understand what they sing’.

She also spoke about the challenge of the part, the challenge of interpreting the part and the technical accomplishment which the part calls for.

It was good, I thought, to hear both performers as they talked about their roles in this production. Of course, I recorded but a small part of what they said. Now, as I key these notes, and with a recent conversation about the event in mind, it strikes me that there should be a ROH blog, one open to the performers as well as the public. I will put this idea to the ROH.

The flower maidens
There they were, all six of them, seated on chairs, under the direction of David Stylus, the voice coach, at the piano. It was Stylus who reminded us that Wagner said ‘Learn the text first, so as to speak it completely, before singing a note’.

As he and the singers worked, I was exposed to the attention which is given to the enunciation.

By the end, I had been introduced to Parsifal. In Stylus’s phrase my imagination had been sufficiently fired to post these notes and to give myself the job of reading the text before the performance. Read the text and thus be prepared to see and how that text is realised on stage.

As I complete these notes, I realise just how slightly they represent all that I heard and saw during the event. A review of the opera, illustrated by musical extracts; two of the performers talked about their roles and, to some extent, about their work in opera; finally, a director (coach) worked with six willing and professional performers – such was the content of the two hours. And yet my notes are as they are, a slight echo of those two hours.

My own feeling is of how much I enjoyed the event. I have been roused to think about Parsifal before the performance, to look at some of the websites, to read some (at least) of the libretto, to think about what is going on in Parsifal. Time spent in preparation is indeed rarely wasted.

Don't go away

No, don't go away. The performance will continue. It may take a little time, but then things do these days. Be assured that the words will continue to flow, about Das Rheingold.

A review of a review

The days since Das Rheingold have passed, and still there is nothing on the blog about it, despite a pageful of notes in a notebook. There's a lot to say about Rheingold, about the gods and the humans, about the initial violation - the theft of the gold from the Rhinemaidens, about the moral decay of the gods, about greed, about betrayal, and, for that matter, about the world up there, about the world here, and about the world down there.

The programme which accompanied the production at the ROH cost £15, a tidy sum for those who had paid just £25 for a ticket to all four operas. So the free cast-lists are the tangible mementoes. A mistake, I feel, as it is in the programme, the £15 one, where we can - or could - expect to find a discussion about the meaning of the operas and about the presentation of the operas.

Instead, I have been left with a review in The Times. There were close to 500 words in the review, along with a star-rating, four out of five. The rating told me that the reviewer thought highly of Das Rheingold. And what about the 500 words, you ask. Well, the first paragraph accounted for 76 words without saying anything about the production. The following 120 words were about John Tomlinson's performance. Those two paragraphs accounted for 40% of the review. The reviewer's opinion of the conductor's and the orchestra's performance accounted for another 120 words. The same number was given to the staging. Thus, along with a couple of sentences about the reviewer's overall opinion, the review.

Five hundred words and the stars. Well, there's not much that can be done with 500 words, so we can't expect much. Richard Morrison did what he was asked to. The reader learns straightaway, from the four starts,that he approved of the production. A reading may then provide one or two observations on the production which catch the eye. 'Think of the gods as dismayed 19th century aristocrats, ...' is one such observation.

However, I should have bought the programme. What the reviewer wrote about the orchestra is beyond me. I can repeat what he said, but I cannot understand it (nor do I become equipped to recognise the feature if it occurs again when I am in the theatre). It is the programme which would have contained the discussions, the reflections, that would have made sense to me.

And still I have not put anything on the blog about my experience of Das Rheingold. Instead, I have cleared my thoughts about a related matter. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am closer to a beginning.

Don

Opera for the masses?

Wagner wanted to bring the inner person outside; something which he believed the Greeks had achieved. A fusion of all art forms - music, poetry, drama, dance, and song culminates in a celebration of life and beyond.

Opera had become trivialised and concentrated on the outer being and art was disintegrating. Entertainment was amusement not exploration of conflict or inner self. A desire to achieve perfection, a commendable aim, but from one so flawed of character? It strikes me that his was a personal quest which he was willing to share with the world.

Wagner's opera is, of course, enduring and even now much discussed. However, by whom. Did he and has he touched the masses. How many attended his Operas when first performed and indeed how many do now? The number of times people are heard to say ' Wagner, oh no, too heavy for me' . Those people are Opera lovers. Opera goers form a tiny percentage of the population. The masses appear to be touched by the likes of Pavarotti singing 'tunes' in a popularist milieu. The inner meaning and self reflection flies way above the heads of the crowd.

Riveting (1)

The weather was just what one would have wished for. There were 12 in the party. The table had been set in the middle of the lawn. All around were other tables, other dinner-suited and -dressed opera-goers. Beyond the ha-ha were the sheep, and the Downs stretched beyond the sheep. The whole setting was, in this writer's view, what people understand by 'Glyndebourne'.

Yet the dominant memory is of the production, the riveting quality of the production. The Passion is something to listen to. The music, the soloists, and the chorus - they are in direct contact with the individual members of the audience. Now the relationship was different. Instead of the two members of the relationship, there were three. The text of the Passion was now the narrative of an opera. The Evangelist sang not to the audience but to the group on the stage who were taking the part of parents who were suffering the deaths of their children. The Evangelist, and others, were now singing directly to that group and we were listening.

And how closely we listened and how closely we watched. The text delivered the story of that famous trial which led to the conviction of the Innocent, to the sentence of death, and to his journey to Calvery and to death. The presentation, remember, was to the group (the bereaved parents) on stage. The Evangelist (who stands for all soloists) at times was amongst the group. I followed the story, I followed the drama, in the same way and to the same effect as I have watched other operatic dramas. I was gripped. So too, it emerged at the table in the middle of the lawn, had been others.

One of the table-group, at Glyndebourne for the first time in some 20 years, associated opera with spectacle. Yet he too acknowledged the power of the drama, of the opera, even though the costumes were grey. Whilst there was no spectacle that the camera would capture, there was no loss of power. That familiar narrative was sung to parents who were in pain. Pain was put to pain. And we, in the auditorium, were privy to the exchange and, with the actors, felt the pain.

Riveting.

Don

'Hurrah! for the best'

One picture tells the whole story. The young man who has gained eight A grades at A level is being held aloft on the shoulders of (strong) companions. He, his achievement, is being celebrated. Elitism, if it is about the celebration, about the encouragement, of outcomes which are confined to a few, to a few indeed, was on display. The other young people in the picture were all cheering. (Yes, yes I know about the taking of pictures for use in newspapers.)

Elitism allows us to label a pattern of behaviour. It is a pattern which celebrates, which encourages high-scoring outcomes. A school or a college may choose to admit only those applicants whose records indicate that they will achieve the expected high-scoring outcomes. Low-scorers should try elsewhere. A bridge club, keen to sustain its position is reputation as a club where the standard of play is high, compared to the competing clubs, will test all applicants.

I don't think we have a word which expresses the opposite of elitism. So let me coin one: commonism. From time to time committee members in a local bridge club extol the friendliness of the club. It so happens that, in one member's view, the emphasis on friendlinss inhibits any attempt to raise the standard of play. We are a friendly club, open to all. Implicit commonism rules. (As a result, the members are less able to play elsewhere then they would be if improvement was sought and celebrated.)

Elitism, the celebration of high-level outcomes - remember those eight A grades, will favour those who can be expected to achieve those outcomes. The lower the expectations which attach to a person the more likely the person must seek a fortune elsewhere. Choissez votre jardin.

The Elites are here

The elites are here, subscribers to the blog. The blog confined to a few, the chosen, the knowing.
How many more can we gather like pelts on our belts? Some naturally require endeavour and some merely being!

Elites and Commons

There are some elites I'd like to join (or have it thought that I am already a member), there are others to which I am indifferent, and there are some from which I recoil. Alas, the elites I'd like to join pay me no heed. No longer can I think of opening the batting for England, scoring a century, and acknowledging the applause with just the slightest lifts of my bat. Neither, I fear, will I be invited to write leaders for The Times.

Instead I must be content with the comforts which are delivered by knowing that it is good to one-eyed when all around don't even have one. Cultivez votre jardin is just a regional way of saying choose your group. Within th group know more than others or perhaps know as much as one or perhaps two, so that the two or three of you can constitute the elite.

And the rest? Why, they are the commons. If an elite is to exist it must have as a necessary adjunct a commonality. The one supposes the other. If there is to be an elite of writers there must be those for whom the challenge of writing is hard to meet. If there is to be an elite which is drawn from all those who bake apple tarts then there must be a group who, for all their efforts, bake less-then-tasty ones.

And so to Glyndebourne (and anywhere else, for that matter). Search for the elite and in so doing find the commons as well. For the moment, suppose that the commons were all those who were not there. (Yes, yes, I know it won't run: there were some not there who would have liked to have been there and there were others, not there also, who would not have liked to attend La Cenerentola but who have attended or will attend other productions.) Look around then at the elite, that is, the people who were there.

An elite, the pick of some bunch or other? It's hard to think so. After all, luck in a ballot will produce a couple or really cheap tickets. The old black suit by itself is hardly the badge of any elite which is worth a second's consideration. There must be some other attribute which marks out those who were there as members of an elite which you or I would wish to join.

So what about the extent to which those at Glyndebourne were knowledgeable about opera. Pass. I have no idea. Of course, I can report the conversations of those in whose company I have attended. But those companies may not be representative. Thus said, by the way, it may be that as much attention has been paid to the food as was paid to the opera.

I can imagine one route into membership of an admirable elite. Ahead of the production of Tristan und Isolde, the candidate listens to th opera, act by act, with the libretto in hand. Music and text - both are studied. (In my case, it would be easier to attend to the text; as a result, I might be confined to associate membership of the elite group.) Than, at Glyndebourne, ahead of the first act, the candidate listens to the overture and talks about it and the first act as a whole. In the long interval, the candidate reviews and then listens to the long exchange between the two lovers. Meanwhile, there might be time for a little food.
A hard route into membership of a worthwhile elite. Take heart, though. There is an alternative. Cultivez votre jardin.

Don

Responding to Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni is a tragic person, his concluding condemnation and death a tragic outcome? I think so. After all, a tragic person is one who comes to a bad end because of some flaw in the person's character. The person, Don Giovanni in this instance, is unable to turn aside from the path to personal destruction, positive traits notwithstanding. Don Giovanni is fluent with words. He sings. He does so to lovely music. But he is mercurial, changing quickly from amiability to anger. He is arbitrary, he is tyrannical, he is insensitive (or just uncaring) to the consequences of his actions.

He suffers from an addiction, an addition to copulation. Whilst we remember him for his quick thinking, his music, his command, we leave the theatre remembering his total commitment to the seduction of women, any women. It is that addition which brings him down. He kills an old man, he tyrannises his servant, he casts aside those whom he has seduced. In the end, the combination of forces, including extra-terrestial ones, require him to repent or to be consumed by the flames.

Now as he has his last meal and is assailed by his enemies, he has to choose. And so do we. We have to choose between a regret that he refuse to repent and a sympathy for his resistance. Hurrah for the last-ditcher. And what of Don Giovanni himself. To what extent is a his choice a calm, considered one; to what extent is he driven to hell because of a realisation that a life of repentence will be a life without consummation and thus a life which will not be worth living. Hell on earh or life in a hell in the company of women who have fallen and who will thus be available to a satyr.



Think too about the scale of his predations. In Spain, 'one thousand and three', in Italy 640, in Germany 230, and in France and Turkey 290 - a total of of over 2100. Now of course we don't know how long he's been rapacious, afflicted. And we an remember that, in the castle amongst the wedding party, he alerts Leparello to the possibility, perhaps the likelihood, of ten - ten - additions to his list.

But there little in the way of self-awareness. The tragic hero realises the personal weakness and the conclusion to which it will lead. Don Giovanni exhibits no such awareness. His indifference to the feelings of others, be they women, servants, or old men, is total. Cursed by an addiction and by the means, material as well as physical, to feed the addiction, he follows the path to perdition. The direction, the invitation to repent, uttered in however sonorous a voice, must be meaningless. Such an addiction calls for expurgation by fire.

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

Thinking about the Taliban

Whoever they are or whatever they represent, I know little about . Of course, I hear or read about the entity more-or-less every day; yet the way the term is used, on one of the BBC’s news pages today, for instance, assumes that I know about ‘the Taliban’ or at least know sufficient about them (or it) to make sense of the rest of the article.

Let me set out what I do recall. At one time, the Taliban (whoever they were or are) were the good guys. They were the white hats whilst the Russian invaders were the black hats. If I recall correctly, the white hats won the war (with assistance, I seem to remember) from external sources, captured Kabul, and formed a government.

From then on, things went awry. The Taliban government governed in a way which turned them into black hats. NATO military forces expelled the Taliban government from Kabul. A different government is now in place there as the result of an election.

I can see the holes in the story, but that the story as I recall it. Not for the first time, foreign affairs, even when they include the deployment of British forces, take up less of the memory than domestic affairs.

I ought to know more about these Taliban forces; I ought to know more about the purposes of the war which is being fought between those forces and the British and other NATO ones. There are well-nigh daily accounts of engagements between the two forces.

I want to know something about the known or assumed purposes of these Taliban forces. I also want to know the composition of these forces. Suppose that the bulk of the Taliban forces are Afghans (that is, people who were born or lived in Afghanistan) then the NATO forces are taking one side in an intra-national dispute. If the Taliban forces draw their soldiers from tribes which inhabit the territories close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then the dispute may be an international one.

War, as ever, is diplomacy which is conducted by other means. Wars are fought because one side seeks a settlement which, it is believed, will not be available by non-warlike means. So what are the NAT)O (British) political purposes, the achievement of which is to be accomplished by war.

It seems to me to be too easy, much too easy, to answer with the one word ‘Terrorism’. There may indeed be connexions between the Taliban forces (whoever they are) and the purposes of international organisations who seek to achieve these purposes by large-scale criminal destruction. However, if there are connexions, they must be exposed. Assertion alone is not enough.

A peace may be a Carthagenian one or it may be a negotiated one. Which settlement is NATO (and the UK) seeking?

Fidelio - the domestic and the public

The quartet in Act 1 is one of the joys of the opera. A father, his daughter, the young man he hopes will marry his daughter, the other young man who wishes to marry the daughter - each sings about the hopes for the future. The quartet is intimate. Everyone in the audience empathises.

And yet how incongruous it is, the private expressions being voiced in a jail where the daily work of three of the four is that of jailer and of the fourth to get on with the ironing and the other domestic chores. There are at home in the jail. And the challenge to the designer is to present this homeliness within the jail.

Rocco has a job and gets on with it. He has a daughter whom he loves and for whom he has found a husband, a young man who may make his way in the prison service. Marzelline is dutiful, knows her own mind, and has come to love the young stranger (about whom they know nothing). Jacquino, he too has a steady job. And he seeks a wife to complete his life.

Once we leave the domestic scene, we do not return to it. We are taken from the domestic to the public, to the unjust imprisonment of political prisoners, to the unjust treatment of one special prisoner, and to the personification of oppression. Rocco, for all that he releases the prisoners for a brief time in the light, is a willing collaborator. Fidelio opposes. The events in the darkest of the dungeons, followed by the finale, send us out to the street with the triumph of the light over darkness. The opera could have been called Resurrection.

And the quartet? They will work out their own domestic concerns in their own way.

Don

British military forces in Afghanistan

The excellent, remember, is the enemy of the good. For weeks I have been seeking the opportunity to draft a considered exposition of my thoughts about the British contribution to the war in Afghanistan. So far the opportunity has not arisen; alternatively, there have been opportunities, but I have chosen instead to do something else. So I determine: let the good be sufficient. If this first piece requires a continuation, so be it.

It was the public debate in London last February which prompted me to think about the matter. So far as I can recall, there have been British forces in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan for three, may more, years. But I have thought about other things. Now I am about to engage for the first time with the matter.

The case against the continuation of a British component in the NATO deployment in Afghanistan was opened by a fluent, well-organised major-general (Winchester, Balliol, National Defence College, Islamabad) who had no doubt that the NATO mission in Afghanistan was bound to fail. I relished the coherence of his exposition. Substance aside, the presentation, in my view, was the best one of the six we heard.

He was focused and damaging. In his view, there was no clear aim; there was no agreement on the strategy. There were insufficient resources for the task (which I take it is the subjugation of military forces hostile to the presence of NATO forces in the country). There was no clear chain of command. And the necessary political commitment to the military operations within NATO was lacking.

Such was the general’s contribution to the debate. At the time of hearing, and ahead of hearing anyone else, I would have liked to have heard him present the case again. (What I should do, I guess, is to seek the oral or written record of the debate.) My recollection of his presence and delivery, along with my written notes of what he said, impressed me. Others who spoke have left little or no mark. He did leave one.

Later I listened to the air commodore who had been seconded to the High Commission in Kabul. He reminded us of some relevant generalities. The people in Afghanistan are illiterate. Loyalties are tribal. Practices which we regard as corrupt are endemic. It is with these generalities in mind that we must view the challenge of cultural reconstruction as well as the physical.

So we can wonder what will constitute success. If the physical reconstruction could proceed unhindered then, in ten years time or so, Afghanistan might have reached the present condition of Bangladesh. The improvement of Afghanistan will take a long time. That is, the physical improvement will take a long time.

The cultural improvement, or development, will take longer. If there is to be schooling for all, then not only must the schools be built in distant parts but they must be staffed by teachers who are committed to the new ways. If those new ways are to be supported by the parents and other adults, then those others also must be willing to tolerate, if not to adopt, the western approaches.

Here the cultural and the military intertwine. Suppressing the hostile military forces is not an end in itself. The military subjugation of a territory is a means towards an end, the end being a political accommodation. So we need to think about the people with whom we will be negotiating the political settlement. Whoever they will be, the must be the people who will command the loyalty of those for whom they speak. Maybe they will be Afghans, as we understand the term, who constitute the present military opposition. It seems sensible to suppose they will be. If it is sensible to think in terms of a commanding tribal loyalty, then the hostile forces in Hellman province, or any province, may be Afghans who, unlike the Afghans in the north, are resisting a hostile invasion in much the same way as other Afghans have resisted other hostile invasions, including the Russian.

There will be more to say about this matter. For the moment, as I move to conclude this first chapter, I want to return to the warfare between the British forces and the military forces which oppose them (in Hellman province and maybe elsewhere). I know little of these battles, even though I have read that they are akin to the battles of the Korean war or even of the First World War. Those comparisons suggest, to my mind, trenches, close encounters, artillery exchanges, and so on, battles, that is, with a well-organised, well-equipped army.

Yet as someone who reads The Times and similar papers and who listens to news on the radio I read or hear little about these battles. I hear of British casualties and sense that they are few in relation to the purported scale of the battles. I hear about British estimates of the other side’s casualties, but I hear nothing about prisoners (and nothing of prisoners of war). Compared with the news of the war in Iraq and with the news of the insurgency over the years, the news from the front line in Afghanistan is scant.

And there is no news of what is happening in the northern, peaceful territories. No interviews, no photographs of NATOsoldiers as they build roads or schools. No news.

After all the years of engagement, I know little about military or political events in Afghanistan. I sense that the reach of the present government does not extend beyond Kabul. I have no idea what political settlement is being sought. I have no sense of the people with whom the political settlement is to be reached.

So when I am asked to support the continued engagement of British military forces in Afghanistan I must refuse my consent with the words ‘You have not told me enough about the purposes of the present engagement and the likelihood of its success’.

Don

A Tartan Macbeth

Macbeth and Banquo appeared in kilts, old kharki battledress, and unbadged caps. Still, it didn't seem to matters as the witches - three sets of them - were living in three parked caravans. Lady McBeth, you ask? Svelte. Looked like the Roumanian dictator's wife. And poor old Duncan walked into a potting shed, there to be done to death. The settings, the costumes - both were a distraction for this member of the audience. The drama had to fight its way out.
An opera to listen to.

I put a comment such as this one on the Glyndebourne message board. So far, there has been no subsequent one about the production.

Derek, the world waits for your comment about P et M.

Don

The Big Bike Ride

What a fine day it was. The weather was close to ideal for cycling. There was a good atmosphere at the start, in the grounds of Tonbridge Castle. And so we began the 100-mile bike ride. We rode towards the north, that is towards the North Downs (and Ups). My companion was cycling steadily, though there was scope for a little increase in speed on this initial stretch.

We spent the first hours going north. At last, we reached the river Medway. Upnor castle. We continued, up and down. At one time, we were cycling along the esplanade at Rochester, by the river.

And so we continued to the lunch stop, 50 miles from the beginning. My companion was tired and was intent on retiring from the ride. However, some food, some encouragement, and the realisation that rescue would still require a ride of about 15 miles to Tonbridge, on her own, prompted her to continue. At the next refreshment stop, there was further encouragement. There was also the recogntion that the event was a bike ride, that what mattered was completion (and not the time that was taken).

We cycled on. Soon after 1930 we cycled into Tonbridge castle again. One hundred miles. A medal, congratulations, and a goodie bag.

Ride accomplished. Looking forward to next year's one.

Don
#

New forms

Yet more about P 'n M. The singing. No choruses. No melodies, no constantly-recurring musical phrases which act as a signature for the opera. Instead, each aria is sung slowly, as if each note is attached to a syllable. More Parsifal than Meistersingers. These slow songs from the members of the court - Melisande ? - contribute to the sense of the stultified court.

Don

Two exhibitions

A year ago, I posted the following blog. Having just re-read it, I thought it deserved to be published afresh. Here it is.

About once a month, two of us have a day in London. Buildings, plays, art galleries, walks, rides on the river. That sort of thing. A day - well, half a day - in London. The usual meeting-place is the Royal Academy, and so it was yesterday.

Neither of us had heard of Jacob van Ruisdael, a Dutch landscape painter, but his name has registered with us now. We were entranced by his landscapes. At first, what we saw we expected to see. There was an order about the land he showed. Neat hedges, orderly towns, a developed land. The surprises came when we were taken to the natural landscapes. A castle, a Gewrman one, sited on the top of a hill, a hill that was stood higher above the land in the picture than it did on the ground. The painter's imagination was at work. Amongst the Dutch, and the nearly-Dutch landscapes, was a painting of a highland stream (which could have been a Highland stream). Brown rocks, rushing waters, tree trunks about to be carried away. A wild, highland place. It was labelled Norway but, so we heard, van Ruisdael had never been to the country. The imagination was at work.

Seascapes too, and people. In one, the wind is blowing strongly. You can see it in the clouds, in the waves, and in the sailing boat, with its red sails, that is leaning periliously. A sand spit juts from the shore. It's narrow, so the waves will rush across it. No place for people. Yet, look closely, and notice the person near the end of the spit with a pram. A pram. Two other people walk side-by-side back to the shore as if they were walking along a promenade on a spring day. The power of the picture lies in the elements, the sea, the wind, the clouds. The people? As in some of the other ones, they are adjuncts. There can be an awkwardness about them. They are add-ons, and in some pictures that's what we heard they had been. They had been added on.

Keep the elemental and the imaginative in mind as you join us in The Gothic Imagination at Tate Ancient, our name for what others call Tate Britain. This exhibition is about the realisation of what we see and imagine in the dead of night. The pictures express the dark side. Fuesli is the name we now know. He painted The Nightmare, the painting that catches the eye on the advertisements for the exhibition. The young woman, n a muslin-like nightdress, lies asleep on a bed, uncovered by bedclothes. On her stomach sit an incubus, a mis-formed of the dark imagination. The creature is looking at us, and we do not know what the looks portends. A horse has pushed its head through the opening of what appears to be a tent. The eyes are white balls. Painted and shown to acclaim in the 1780s (I recall). Other pictures express equally unsettling images from the night-time imagination.

But what stunning exhibitions they were. How good to have the opportunity to see them, to see them in company so that there can be a discussion, a reflection. How good to be able to visit two such exhibitions in one day in London. And to roam around on buses. There's not just a lot to be said for London. There is everything.

Worth re-posting? I think so.

Don

Pelleas and Melisande, again

Another thought about the opera. Nothing much happens. Boy meets girl by a pool (though the girl has thrown or dropped a crown into the pool, so perhaps there must be something special about the girl). Boy marries girl, still not knowing much about her. Girl and boy's brother meet and fall in love. Later, boy suspects girl of infidelity. Surprises them. Kill brother. Regrets. Everyone regrets. Just an everyday story of muddled love.

The characters come with little or nothing in the way of biography, or baggage. Melisande is evidently lively, unconstrained: the red dress tells us that. She enters the constrained, sylised routines of the court. The competition for her will press against the courtly constraints. We soon gather, from costuming, and from movement, that the members of the court contain their passions.

The long-haired, red-dressed Melisande is the agent of change, all unwittingly. By the end of the opera, the boy is sufficiently roused to kill his brother and publicity to regret what he has done.

Derek, what do you think?

Don

Looking ahead to a Big Bike Ride

A big one? Well, it will be for me: 160k (100m) circular ride round some of the flatter parts of Kent - along the Medway - and, for a certainty, up and down some of the hillier parts. The ride has been entitled The Castles Ride, as it will begin at Tonbridge castle, and take in Upnor, Rochester, Leeds, Sissinghurst, and probably other, castles.

A tour of Castles in Kent. A passing tour, that is. No time to stop, you know; the steady pedalling must not be interrupted.

Tomorrow, there will be an account of The Bike Ride, Looking Back.

Don

The white and the red

In last night's production of Pelleas et Melisande at the ROH, the members of the court, including Pelleas, were dressed alike in a Pierrot costume. And they walked slowly, almost like puppets. Meanwhile, Melisande wore a long red dress, and the tresses of her hair fell upon her back. It wasn't hard to compare the stiffness of the court with the free movement of the young woman, a young woman who, when first met, was looking in a pool for a crown, who spoke nothing of her story and of whom her husband, six months, after marriage, knew as little then as he knew when first he met her. One feature of the production.

An unusual pleasure

It's not often that I am almost the youngest member of a group. In recent years, I have had that pleasure once a year, and so it has been this year. Earlier in the week, I attended what will be the last of the formal (top table, distinguished guest) Grapple re-unions.

Grapple? The name given to the testing of thermo-nuclear weapons at Christmas Island, an island in the Pacific south of Hawaii.. ( Yes, I know: you found Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean but not in the Pacific. No, the island hasn't moved. The name has been changed to Kiribati.)

The first successful test took place on 15 May 1957, 50 years ago. We - the Grapplers - marked the occasion by our re-union in the Royal Air Force Club, by a 'bombe' for dessert, and by a rich cake on which was drawn an outline of the Island.

We talked about the Island. We looked at a display. We watched a film (and put our names down for the CD). We listened to our master telling us what a good job we had done, what an extraordinarily good time we had done. And we accepted the compliments of our guest, Lord Carrington.

Just a good, companionable time.