With Wagner’s anniversary year in full swing, Der Spiegel published a long article by Dirk Kurbjuweit on the sensitivities caused by Wagner’s association with Hitler’s politics, which they helpfully translated into English. It made for a fascinating read, focused as it was on the strong emotions felt by people on both sides of the argument.
On a first visit to Bayreuth, there are some things that one expects, of course: the beautiful opera house set in its park high on a hill above the city, the unique acoustic of its sunken, invisible orchestra pit, the cream of elegant German society in the grounds, wall to wall Wagner in the bookshops and names of buildings and streets. But there are also some surprises.
Since childhood, my three most enduring passions have been music, skiing and food. So when the organiser of Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, Thierry Scherz, asked me to spend a few days reviewing the festival - three nights of concerts with top class performers, dining with the artists in the uber-posh Gstaad Palace and two days of skiing in some of the loveliest scenery in Switzerland, it was, to misquote Hamlet, an invitation devoutly to be wished. OK, there was a fair chunk of writing to do, but how much better could life get?
So that's it, folks, for an epic year of opera-going. I've been to 42 operas (44 if you count Il Trittico as three), all but five of them in London, and looking through the list makes me realise what a fabulous variety of opera we have access to in London.
Gale Martin writes the well-loved opera blog Operatoonity, as well as writing opera reviews for Bachtrack. Her first novel, Don Juan in Hankey is a rapid-fire comedy set largely in an opera house and incorporating various bits of Don Giovanni. I had a lot of fun reading a pre-release copy, so here are some questions that I put to Gale:
It was great to hear nice things being said about the Cultural Olympiad on Radio 4 a few minutes ago. But I was quite taken aback by a comment from Michael Berkeley. While broadly supportive of the whole initiative, Berkeley felt that it hadn't been started soon enough, his example being that two and a half years wasn't anywhere near long enough to commission a full length opera from a young British composer.
As will have been obvious if you read these pages, we've been strong supporters of Met Player: I've written various editorials items about them and we've had a commercial relationship (recently expired) whereby we show their listings.
Take a swift forty minute train ride from Brussels and you arrive in the East Flanders city of Gent. You're firmly in Dutch speaking territory here, and Gent has much of the feel of Amsterdam: tall terraced houses with assorted gables fringing a network of canals. Bicycles abound: the first sight that greets you at the station is a cycle park with thousands of bikes, stretching as far as the eye can see.
Yesterday's The Times contained a long piece by Rory Bremner on the subject of his forthcoming translation of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. I'm a great admirer of Rory: he's extremely funny as well as being right on the nail in his observation of politics and all sorts of other things (US readers: he's a brilliant impressionist, stand-up comedian and political satirist who's had his own TV shows here for years). But his approach to translating nineteenth century opera gave me pause for thought:
Noto is a hill town some 30 km south of Syracuse. While most towns in the environs show a strong Greek influence - the magnificent cathedral in Syracuse itself is a converted temple to Athene - Noto was flattened by an earthquake in 1693 and completely rebuilt, so it's considered one of the great places of baroque architecture in Sicily.
For an opera lover, the highlight of a visit to Palermo is the giant Teatro Massimo, in its day the third largest opera house in Europe (after the Palais Garnier in Paris and the Staatsoper in Vienna). It's an imposing building fronted by Grecian columns in the local yellow sandstone, set in a square named after Giuseppe Verdi, overlooked by a large bust of the old master sporting a fine moustache and looking rather cheerful.
Ahead of going to the Royal Opera House tonight to see Massenet's Cendrillon, I thought I'd take the trouble to read Massenet's original source, the version published in the 1698 collection of fairy tales by Charles Perrault (if you're interested in looking at original sources like this, by the way, Project Gutenberg is a wonderful thing).
