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