dormouse1953

 I'm supposed to be going to the opera tonight but I've checked the rail enquires website and all the trains to London seem to be running at least half an hour late if not cancelled.  And now it's snowing again.

Now, I remember the big freeze of 1963 and the snow here at the moment seems like hardly anything compared to that, but as the opera is about three hours long, I'm worried that even if I get into London, I might not be able to get home again afterwards.  I think I'll stay in and watch the season finales of both The Librarians and The Orville instead.

Ironically, the opera I was due to see is A Midsummer's Night's Dream.

Overheard in the interval at English National Opera and as reported on Cix.  The opera was Julian Anderson's The Thebans based on the plays by Sophocles and the first act is Oedipus Rex.  "No, that was his wife that died, not his mother."

My family had a large collection of old 78 rpm records, mostly of old popular songs from the thirties and forties - I knew the song Ali Baba's Camel long before the Bonzos recorded it - but one of them, which I knew only as The Jewels of the Madonna, was classical music, although I probably wouldn't have made that distinction at the time.  If it wasn't the first piece of classical music I heard, it was certainly the first piece I obsessed over, listening to it over and over again.  As music is such a large part of my life now, that makes it quite significant in my life.  I can't remember when I first heard it, but I think it was before we moved from London at the very end of 1957, when I was four.

And then, some time in the early sixties, I came home to see the record in pieces.  My sister had dropped it.

Well, at the end of the sixties I discovered Radio 3.  (I often joke that I started listening to classical music in 1968 because popular music was so terrible then.  Getting a pocket radio that got good reception only on Radio 3 may have helped.)  When I was at university in the early seventies I noticed in the Radio 3 listings in the Radio Times the entry "Wolf-Ferrari: Suite from The Jewels of the Madonna".  I still remembered the name and as the piece was being played at a time I could listen - I think it was on the morning concert just before I had to head into the university for my first lecture - I tuned in to see if I recognised it.

I did.  The bit I was fond off was the third of four movements, a serenade.  The record we had was, I think, sides 2 and 3 of a two-disc set.  Multi-disc sets were often set up for use in auto-changers, so you'd put a stack on the spindle and it would play sides 1 to n, turn the stack over and play sides n+1 to 2n.  I never did discover what happened to sides 1 and 4; smashed before I was born, I suspect.

I also had a composer's name to go with the piece, although the musical reference books I had available told me little about him.  Born in Venice in 1876 to a German father and Italian mother, he died in 1948.  I gathered The Jewels of the Madonna was an opera, and the suite was a set of orchestral interludes.

In the seventies and eighties, I started recording works of Radio 3, especially if they were hard to find on disc, and I think in the early eighties I heard the suite again and recorded it, getting to know the piece again.  Finally, I found a CD of the suite, along with music from other operas by Wolf-Ferrari.  I have that CD on my iPod now.

A few months ago I was having a discussion on an opera forum about operatic rarities you'd like to see staged and I mentioned The Jewels of the Madonna.  It's being performed by Holland Park Opera this summer, I was told.  And I went to see it on Saturday night.  Turns out it was the first staging in this country since 1926, which is before my parents were born.  Can't think why, as musically it is a fun piece, but I suppose I'm biased after all these years.  I don't think I've even seen the suite performed in concert.

It's a style of Italian opera called verismo, which means it's all about the common people falling in love and murdering each other, only there isn't actually a murder here.  An orphan girl drives her adoptive brother wild with lust and also comes to the attention of the local crime boss.  The brother, to prove himself, steals the jewels from a statue of the Madonna and then dresses his sister in them and has sex with her.  The crime boss tells him he is now cursed, so he returns the jewels and commits suicide.  I can't help thinking that if my parents knew the plot, they would have been less happy about me listening to it.  The serenade I knew first appears as an actual sung serenade by the crime boss and in this production his henchmen were making rude gestures in the background about their boss's sexual prowess.  (The action was updated to the post-war period, so he turned up riding a Vespa scooter.)

The only downside to the experience is that Holland Park is an open-air theatre in a large tent and there was a huge thunderstorm on Saturday night.  The rain on the roof of the tent drowned out the quiet passages (not that many, as it happened) and there were frequent flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.  Even worse, the percussionist was sitting near the edge of the awning and they had to hold an umbrella over him during the performance, and wipe the xylophone dry during the interval.  And the only loos were portaloos out in the park, so it was a dash in the interval.

Still, after over fifty years, it was a joy to hear and see the whole thing.  I hope some other company takes it up.

Just received a confusing e-mail from Amazon puffing a new release called Verdi: The Complete Works.  Curiously, it says I received it because I bought Stravinsky's complete recordings, not two composers often listed together.

It's confusing, because the e-mail contains the track listings, which is just a list of opening lines, so Disc 1 starts:

1. Overture (Sinfonia) - Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
2. Di Vermiglia, Amabil Luce
3. Son Fra Voi! - Già Parmi Udire Il Fremito
4. Ah! Sgombro È Il Loco Alfin! - Sotto Il Paterno Tetto
5. Oh Patria Terra - Guardami! Sul Mio Ciglio

There is no indication of which opera is on which disc, only one singer listed - Pavarotti - and it gives only ten discs, not enough for a complete Verdi, I would have thought.

Opening the item in Amazon gives slightly more information.  It's actually 75 discs, and a couple of other names are mentioned: Solti and Domingo.  But the track listings are still only for ten discs, no indication of who is singing what opera.  Clearly a case of some sort of automated system trying to do a job it wasn't designed for.

Which I think means, "Wednesday on a Thursday (with Helicopters and Camels).

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I listened to the broadcast of Wagner's Parsifal on Radio 3 last night, a recording of a production put on by English National Opera in March.  I attended the opening night of this revival and saw the production when it was originally staged in London back in 1999.  This was the first time I saw Wagner's last opera, at the end of a decade or so which turned me from a Wagner hater to a dedicated Wagnerphile.

There was a panel at Illustrious this Easter called Has Science Fiction won the Culture Wars, about the pervasiveness of SF tropes in modern culture.  I was reminded of this panel during the introductions to the acts last night.  The setting is a post-apocalyptic landscape, said the announcer and then mentioned the influences of the films The Matrix and Terminator 2.  The Flower Maidens were likened to triffids.  He also described Klingsor, the self-castrated magician who has stolen the spear that wounded Christ, as looking like a Kabuki performer, but when you first see him, sitting behind a metallic circle, I immediately thought of Ming the Merciless sitting at a visiscreen.

The knights of the Grail in the final act are dressed in military greatcoats that make them look like the Thals in the Doctor Who episode The Genesis of the Daleks.

Then there's the Grail itself.  In the first act at the stage floor curves upwards so that a chair in the distance appears to be standing at ninety degrees to the vertical.  You also see a large rock spiralling around in the air.  The Grail must be a black hole.  Actually, there is some indication of this in Wagner's libretto.  As they approach the Grail chamber, Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal "Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit."  "You see, my son, time here becomes space."  This written about thirty years before Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

So, it must be true.  Science Fiction has won the Culture Wars.