One opera, two views

1 Here's the first paragraph from one review;

Well, the weather was better than expected. Sunshine, no rain, with only a gathering evening chill. As for Glyndebourne's opening production of the season: worse, much worse. Just the thought of Danielle de Niese, that magnetic Cleopatra from Giulio Cesare, singing and swaying, was enough for every ticket for the performances of Monteverdi's last opera to be snapped up. But her Poppea is no Cleopatra; she's not fun, not sexy, no creature of infinite variety. Nor is Robert Carsen's production.

2 No doubt, you can guess where that review is leading to. Yes, you're right. Now, read the first paragraph from a different review:

'Without doubt, the sexiest piece ever written,' is how director Robert Carsen described L'Incoronazione di Poppea in a recent interview. His new staging of Monteverdi's masterpiece, however, though at times explicit, could hardly be considered erotica. It is dark, detached stuff, sometimes disturbing, and often confused.

3 People, including reviewers, see different things; sometimes, they see the same things but give different weights to those different things, or aspects. ('Yes, yes, I too noticed that but I dont' think it matters much or, at any rate, that it matters as much as you think it does.') I wonder what this correspondent will see, will emphasise. The first paragraph, remember, sets the direction. Read the first paragraph and receive the thrust of the reviewer's estimation. Look again at that wicked concluding sentence in the first example.

4 And the second? The use of the opening quotation to direct the attention, in this case, perhaps, to heighten the expectation, is a common device. The issue of the sexiness of the piece having been established, the view will either be endorsed or contradicted. If the quotation has heightened the expectation of all those who saw Niese as Cleopatra or who read about her, then the contradiction will be all the more disappointing. And there is the nice distinction, one which readers can be assumed to make, between the explicit and the erotic.

5 So what will be this correspondent's first paragraph. Watch this space.

To the Island

1 Yesterday was Reunion day, the day of the Christmas Island reunion. Once again, I put on my Grapple tie along with a blazer. To the station, to the RAF Club, a place which one chum described as 'home from home'. And so it is. A place where a chap feels at home, you understand. A place where some 40 other chaps, each wearing the Grapple tie, assembled yesterday for the first of the reunions after last year's concluding one.

1.1 Yes, you have read the previous sentence correctly. Last year, the reunion was held on the fiftieth anniversary of the first successful thermo-nuclear test. There was a top table. Lord Carringdon was the guest speaker. An AVM presided, as he had done for years. Fifty years on, though, the reunion was to be the last one of that kind. Yet the small organising committee, without the AVM, organised yesterday's, less formal event.

2 As ever, the event was just a pleasure. We sat at five circular tables in the ballroom. Instead of being served at table, we lined up for a plate of curried meat and things. The conversation was as lively and as reminiscent as ever. One of the chums had visited the Island since last year's reunion: he and his wife and his daughter spent a week there. There was little to do, yet each was tired by about 2100 and slept well until they rose about 0600. A week out of life.

3 I chatted to an elderly man - we're all elderly - who was a navigator on the Canberra, piloted by our AVM as a young man, which sampled the air after the burst. He spoke about the flights, about his time on the Island. Soon after he returned to the UK, he left the RAF and joined a local police force where he remained for 30 years. Yet it was his time on the Island which remained with him. We all have clear recollections of the Island; we remember our time there as a special time. (For those who contracted cancers of one sort of other, time on the Island was bad time.)

4 In my role as the Master Blogger, I spoke about our Grapple Reunion blog. It will be our standard channel of communication. So everyone should join. To those who are hesitant about IT I offered the best of advice, namely, ask your grandson or grand-daughter.

5 And we concluded with an hour-long film (on DVD) of Grapple Zulu, a collection of tests, ground and air, which included the first successful air burst, the event which we celebrated last year. At the end of the hour, there was a round of applause. And everyone was given a copy of the DVD.

6 Look on the Court page of today's Daily Telegraph. Look for Service luncheons.

7 Maytime, springtime, Island time.

The following account was keyed at the end of the first day in Berlin. A week later, the visit to Wansee remains the event which has left the strongest impression. Those people assembled in that building to give authority to, to initiate the final solution to the Jewish question, namely, the murder of the Jews within the German empire. The meeting was of one mind. The review of the scale of the task, the allocation of responsibilities - such matters were agreed. Having done their business, the members had time for a celebratory drink and a companionable lunch. And, in due time, Adolf Eichmann compiled the comprehensive note of the meeting.

28/04/2008.
Schoenfeld airport, a quiet place. A short walk from the aircraft to the airport buildings. Passports, please. A walk just as short to the baggage carosel, already turning. There were the bags. There were our hosts. Yet another short walk to their car. We were on our way from the airport to Kopenick, a district of Berlin which I remember as the setting for the tale of The Captain of Kopenick.

Along the way, the road ran alongside a railway; beyond the railway was the other carriageway; beyond that was the cycle path. No helmets, I noticed. Woods on both sides of the road; the trees were in leaf, but there was a sense of uncultivated woods. Not quite higgledypiggley woods, but tending that way. In Kopenick, some of the buildings were old, that is, perhaps 1920s, or earlier. Others were later, perhaps post-1945, built perhaps in the early days of the GDR. And the informal decoration (otherwise known as grafitti) was evident; indeed, it was unmissable.

A well-built house, with a cellar and an attic. A garden, a patio, and an uncertain legal status. The owners, the hosts, paid a monthly rent to someone whom they have never met. Years ago, in the days of the GDR, gthe rent had been paid to a government body. The Wall came down; the GDR ceased to exist as a state; the rent was not paid for some time; there were instances of pre-GDR owners claiming and taking possession of what they said were their properties. When the present occupants were told of a claim on their property by a putative owner who, they were told, was not interested in occupation but in rent, they did not contest the claim. Instead, they paid, and have continued to pay, the rent.

Neither of the tenants, our hosts, speaks English; my companion is bi-lingual; I do not speak German. I am at ease. The conversation flows between the three; occasionally, I am mentioned, or I am told what has been said. Most of the time, as we sit, talk, and eat on the patio, I am able to sit quietly under the large sun-shade. I am excused from the claims of conversation; I can look as if I am following the conversation or I can attend to my own thoughts.

The discussion about the afternoon’s activity is resolved, eventually. When asked, through my companionable intermediary, for my preferences, I mentioned Potsdam and Wansee, the place where the infamous conference was held in January 1942, with Heinrich Heydrich in the chair. A long way, I gather; a journey from one side of Berlin to the other. Re-think. And think again. Wansee it will be. To the station. An all-day ticket on the overground railway costs about £5. Off we jolly well go.

The fifteen-minute ride from Kopenick to the interchange station in the city provides sufficient time to register the extent, the pervasiveness, of the informal decoration. No flat surface along the railway is spared. The activities of our decorators, within Southern Region, are much less extensive. Particularly eye-catching was the injunction, in the largest of capital letters, to . Comforting, I thought. Imitation, as you know, is flattering. Yet more woods, yet again the absence of cultivated land on either side of the railway. Instead, the sense again that the estate, the railway estate, calls for a general tidying-up, a general cleansing.

We achieved the simple change; the second train will take us through the centre to the south-west, to Wansee lake. Recently-constructed or recently–improved stations; stations in need of improvement; the constancy of the informal decoration. Yet more woods. And Wansee. A station that was built, perhaps, about 100 years ago, a station which, like others, could do with decoration of the formal kind.

A short bus-ride, using our railway all-day tickets, to the large house where Heydrich and the others met on 20 January 1942 to register their commitments, and that of the military and civil bodies whom they represented, to a joint endeavour to settle the Jewish question once and for all. The resources of the state were to be available in a co-ordinated way to achieve the extermination of the Jews from the Reich and from the occupied territories, particularly the Eastern territories and Russia.

The notice at the gate said that admission to the exhibition was free, but the gate was locked. The bell was pressed. We pushed the gate open. And we walked to the onetime large house which overlooked the lake and which, in 1942, was part of the SS estate. The ground-floor rooms are now given over to the documents, the translations, the explanatory texts, in German and English, to the photographs and texts which tell the story of anti-Semitism in Germany, to the consequences for the Jews of the appointment of Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933, to the conference, and its results.

The familiar story, the familiar events; reminders of people and events; the presentation of additional material. Some six million people were murdered. It was industrial murder. The killing-camps had to be built. The people had to be collected and sent to the camps, from those distant parts, by rail. The railway stock had to be allocated; the costs of the transportation had to be assessed and paid by one of the departments of state to the Reichsbahn. The gas chambers had to be designed; the blue-prints had to be approved, at on-site meetings, no doubt; the killing-chambers had to be installed, and tested, no doubt. The names of those who were transported had to be recorded, so that the state would know they no longer existed. A big job.

The exhibition at Wansee, in the very rooms, overlooking the lake, reminds us of this big job. The resources of the state were allocated to the elimination, the murder, of millions of people. And the silent, documentary exhibition at Wansee, including the copies of the minutes, of the notes. tells us about the meeting at which the murder, on an industrial scale, was accepted, without demur. The meeting was followed by drinks and by a pleasant meal. After all, it had been a productive meeting. Much had been achieved. There was cause for a celebratory drink.

I have been to the place where the conference was held. I can see it as I key; I have been in the rooms. And as I key I recall the advertisement in a recent Times about the killing of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915. It is the official Turkish position to deny a massacre, to deny Turkish responsibility for the undeniable deaths. The advertisement called for a world-wide recognition that the events di constitute a massacre, even a holocaust. But there is strong opposition, not just from the Turkish government, but from others who seek to confine that term to what happened in Europe from 1942 to 1944/45. The holocaust, not an holocaust.