Culture

I’m still trying to get on with the blasted novel, over which I have been procrastinating for several years now. Though there are occasional exhilarating hours when it proceeds apace, there are others when I sit at my desk, drinking cold coffee and smoking roll-ups, when I conclude that, on balance and all things considered, I’d rather slash my wrists than try to write another bloody word. Never believe anyone who says they love writing. It’s mostly horrible. After 30 years on the job, I still think I’m going to be found out with every review I write, still feel the terror of what was once the blank piece of paper and is now the blank computer screen. And with a novel, the horrors are multiplied a hundredfold.

More than a year since its re-emergence from oblivion, Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia keeps eliciting thunderous ovations. Not surprisingly, one might add. The restored three-acter is not just a shimmering tribute to Ashton’s genius; it is sheer fun, too. Indeed, ‘fun’ more than ‘artistic pleasure’ is what should be expected, for Sylvia is not one of those monoliths of ballet culture we normally attend in religious awe and contemplation. Originally created in 1876 in Paris, the work mirrored the crisis that underscored French choreography at that time. Little had survived of the golden epoch of the French Romantic ballet, and French theatre dance of the post Franco–Prussian war period suffered greatly from a sterile regurgitation of trite formulae.

In my view, and I think that of a fair proportion of opera goers, Madam Butterfly occupies a unique position in Puccini’s oeuvre. None of his other operas can seriously be entertained for tragic status, but Butterfly can and should be. Because its idiom is instantly recognisable, it is easy to assimilate it to the other works, perhaps above all to La Bohème. And then the inevitable invocation of sex, sadism and sentimentality happens, and the elements that make Butterfly a tragic masterpiece get overlooked, or sneered at. With a little attention, however, its amused denigrators might note that, though Butterfly is one of Puccini’s ‘little women’, she is much more than that.

Michael Tippett’s first opera The Midsummer Marriage is so great that one can afford to admit that it isn’t perfect. He tries to do too many things in it, and so despite its considerable length — three full hours of music in the Royal Opera’s revival of the 1996 production — there is a sense at the end both that it is almost indigestibly rich but also that there are inconsequentialities, even inadvertencies, as with an exciting conversationalist who starts up so many lines of thought that he has to drop some of them. Even so, it is such an invigorating and uplifting work, especially when one thinks of its context in history and in operatic history, that the first reaction should be gratitude.

Ten strangers having a black-tie dinner in an airport lounge. That’s the opening tableau of And Then There Were None. The airport lounge turns out to be a posh house on a tiny island to which the guests have been invited by an absent puppet-master named U.N. Owen. Speaking from a pre-recorded LP, the mysterious host accuses each diner of having committed a murder. Naturally, they deny the allegations. It’s not exactly a frisky opening. Ten charges, ten rebuttals. The play silts up in a stream of explanatory jabber. Then the bumpings-off start. A chortling fool drops dead in a pool of jam. The maid is throttled during an afternoon catnap. A white-haired booby gets Trotskied with a pick-axe.

English Touring Opera began its autumn tour, as usual, at the Hackney Empire, a place I haven’t been to before, and shall hesitate about going to again, not so much because of the tropical temperature inside as the rigours of getting there and back into the centre of London. It was good to see it so crowded, and to see ETO’s very fine performance of Alcina greeted with such enthusiasm. The company’s repertoire and touring plans are becoming ever more ambitious, and it is indicative, too, of the astonishing growth in appreciation of Handel’s greatness that so demanding a production as this can be taken to Lincoln, Ulverston, even Cambridge.