Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse

I'm reading through Stephen Coote's 1983 Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, now long out of print and terribly dated. (The title seems quaint.) It's rather a fusty volume, on the whole, but its strategy of including both gay male and lesbian verse in the same anthology pays dividends by acting as an illuminating witness to trends in recent cultural history. Few groups have less in common, in fact, than gay men and lesbians, and the ironies heat up at the end of the 20th century as the sexes go their different ways. As Camille Paglia wrote, absolutely accurately:

Gay male poetry is about energy, adventure, quest, danger, beauty and pleasure amidst secrecy, shame, and pain. Lesbian poetry, in contrast, prefers tender, committed relationships and often burdens itself with moralistic political messages.

(Vamps and Tramps, p. 227)

More of this later. It must be acknowledged that the challenges of producing such a volume as Coote's are fearsome. An anthology of this kind has to aspire to a catholic (pardon the irony) view of homosexuality: it must have the ambition to be simultaneously a diachronic and polyglot collection of spiritual wisdom, erotica, love-poetry, humorous verse, and social commentary. Also the hapless anthologist needs must adopt some stance towards the sterile and tiresome contemporary cultural debates about the supposed social construction of the homosexual. Is the gay individual a specific sub-variety of human being that has remained more or less constant transculturally over millennia? Or, conversely, is the concept of the homosexual something which has only sprung up since the coining of the word in the late 19th century, before which there was homosexual behaviour, but not homosexual persons? The line one takes affects the kind of poems one includes and they way in which they are deployed.

Fortunately, Cootes does not limit himself to self-identified queers or indulge in speculation about the sexuality of figures long-dead, making dubious biographical inferences from culturally-distant poetry. Instead, the volume consists of poems about homosexual life, love and desire, with the odd bit of scabrous anti-gay satire. (Surprising not to see the heterosexual Tony Harrison's ventriloquistic 'The White Queen' in there somewhere, though.) The question also arises of how far the anthologist has a responsibility to intervene in the pinched secessionism of contemporary identity politics, supressing aspects of the historical record which might currently be deemed politically incorrect: I was pleased to see that the spicy, frankly pederastic epigrams of the Greek Anthology, for example, rightly make up a substantial part of the collection. (On a further Greek note, however, Coote has mystifingly chosen an antiquated 17th century translation for the two Idylls of Theocritus which he includes, possibly for copyright reasons; we miss all of Theocritus' sophisticated mixture of freshness and urbanity. Similarly the extract from Homer is taken from Alexander Pope's 1720 translation. You have written a pretty poem, Mr Pope...etc.)

The pre-modern contents of the anthology are excellent. Sappho is well-represented by Mary Barnand's translucent versions, but where is the exquisite fr. 31, φαίνεταί μοι?! This is a poem which has a good claim to being the most famous and influential of all surviving Greek lyrics, as well as being an piercingly acute psychological study of the jealousy and unrequited love germane to homosexual experience. It should be in there, at the front.

The medieval section is excellent: I was delighted to see the late 12th century 'Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene' included. A deliciously naughty mythological debate about the respective merits of homosexual and heterosexual love, the poem is a salutory reminder of the unexpected richness of medieval sexual discourses. As expected, we then segue into Michaelangelo, Marlowe, and Shakespeare's master-mistress: and then on through ribald Rochester and stately old Katherine Phillips, the 'Matchless Orinda', with a couple of tame poems of passionate female friendship, through to Coleridge's lesbian vampire B-movie, 'Christabel', although not enough is quoted to really get a sense of its feverish, underwired-nightie quality. On the way there is a thank-you note in verse from Wordsworth to the famed 'Ladies of Llangollen', models for many a later pair of upper-crust old dykes, saluting them as 'Sisters in love'. (Rather sweetly, they had a lapdog called Sappho.) Here they are:



Like more and more of the book as it heads towards the present, Wordsworth's poem is interesting as a social document but of no aesthetic merit.

Once we get into the 19th century, there are some treasures: Hopkins contributes 'mansexfine', and there is enough Whitman and Dickinson, Tennyson (in mopey 'In Memoriam' mode, of course), Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Housman. Whitman's 'We Two Boys Together Clinging' from Leaves of Grass is the only poem in the book I already had by heart:

We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going—North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying—elbows stretching—fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning—sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming—air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

How I wish I'd had someone on the ball to recite this to at, say, 21, when I could still have referred to myself as a 'boy' without anyone invoking the Trade Descriptions Act at me. Anyway. The socialist visionary and all-round good egg Edward Carpenter gets a look in: sadly, whatever of Whitman's might have rubbed off on Carpenter, poetic talent wasn't part of it; Carpenter's prosy, worthy efforts are doomed for evermore to languish, I fear, upon the lower slopes of Parnassus. Pierre Louÿs' dreadful Chansons de Bilitis, on the other hand, deserve a mention: humid bits of faux-Sappho (passed off upon publication in 1894 as translations of newly-discovered works by a contemporary of the 'Tenth Muse' herself) they have names like 'The Breasts of Mnasidika', which sounds like an episode of Star Trek:

Carefully, with one hand, she opened her tunic
and tendered me her breasts, warm and sweet,
just as one offers the goddess a pair
of living turtle-doves. 'Love them well', she said to me,
'I love them so! They are little darlings,
little children. I busy myself with them
when I am alone. I play with them; I pleasure them.
'I sprinkle them with milk. I powder them with flowers.
I dry them with my fine-spun hair, soft
to their little tips. I caress them and I shiver.
I couch them in soft wool. Since I shall never have a child,
be their nursling, o my love, and since
they are so distant from my mouth, kiss them, sweet, for me.'

It's all a bit too reminiscent of a Pirelli Calendar for me.

The 20th century makes up over a quarter of the book, as it should, but on the whole top-rate stuff is depressingly uncommon. There are noble exceptions: Cocteau, Pasolini, and Genet do brief but sterling service, but the likes of Frank O'Hara and Thom Gunn get scant look-in, and the absence of Langston Hughes is also puzzling. (Thank God, however, that we have been spared any extracts from John Ashbery's interminable Flow Chart, a poem the reading of which feels like spending hours and hours in a resthome with a senile relative because you want to get something in their will.) On the other hand, Olga Broumas (born 1949) has some richly sensual lesbian numbers, of which more would have been good:

Scarlet
liturgies shake our room, amaryllis blooms
in your upper thighs, water lily
on mine, fervent delta

the bed afloat, sheer
linen billowing
in the wind: Nile, Amazon, Mississippi.

(from Leda and Her Swan)

Coote's anthology inexplicably misses out Hart Crane, whose work I find difficult but which I love nevertheless, and includes only an absurd humorous lyric from W. H. Auden, who surely deserved better, loathe him though I do. The absence of the homoerotic Russian acmeist and bisexual Mikhail Kuzmin is also puzzling. Instead we have Alan Ginsberg at his most enrapturedly boring, attempting in 'Please Master' to evoke a good seeing-to, in long punctuation-free lines of toe-curling (b)anality. The single poem from Federico García Lorca--inevitably the 'Ode to Walt Whitman'--underlines the basically anglocentric nature of the volume, though Cavafy, whom I find a very patchy poet, fares better with nine poems included. But where, where are some of Lorca's wonderful Sonetos del Amor Oscuro, which are at once passionate love poems recalling the poetics of the Spanish siglo de oro, and also--perhaps--precisely-coded symbolic accounts of particular sexual acts? Try this:

Gongoran Sonnet in which the Poet Sends a Dove to His Beloved

I send this dove from Tuna to you.
With its endearing eyes and whitest feathers
it spreads love's fire, and also proffers
the Grecian laurel that the flames consume.

Its honest virtue and its supple throat
twice soiled by slime and scalding foam---
its tremors, frost and misty pearls combined---
bespeak the absence of your mouth. But wait,

just run your hands across its purity
and you will know its snowy melody,
as snowflakes swirl about and cloud your beauty.

Such is my heart---by night and through the day
deprived of you it cries pure melancholy,
imprisoned in dark love that will not die.

Ahem. That's phone sex with poems, that.

Anyway--there's plenty of Paglia's moralistic political self-burdening from the lesbian contingent. Judy Grahn's poem 'A History of Lesbianism' concludes, with prosaic stolidity:

The subject of lesbianism
is very ordinary; it's the question
of male domination that makes everybody
angry.

Not just ordinary: but boring too, and in Grahn's formulation, a bit desolate; she is a poet who descibes 'women-loving-women' with choice lines like--

they made love to each other
as best they knew how

--as though the two chicks going at it were trying to assemble an intransigent piece of furniture or make authentic Chinese food. (It reminds me of Jeanette Winterson's aphorism 'Sex between women is mirror geography', which irresistably brought to mind glacial morraines and the formation of oxbow lakes.) But when the boys are spouting rubbish like James Mitchell's 'Gay Epiphany' ('o Cowper's glands, secreting a slimy substance which functions as a lubricant!'), and Adrienne Rich is growling about 'pornography...science-fiction vampires, / victimized hirelings bending to the lash...', one is greatful for sweaty yet artistically-sophisticated poems like the extract from Edward Lucie-Smith's 'Caravaggio Dying', and for the humour of an anonymous Chaucer parody from 1970:

Ther was also a povre closet queane.
he was ryght olde and somdel balde, I wene,
But whilom had he bene a youth-leadere,
That is to seyn a manner scoutmastere.
His studie was Dan Platoun and Socrate.
For wommens matters yaf he not a fart.
His fantasie was on lyf monastic
With divers choiristerres pederastic.
It werre not, thoucht he, by copulacion
T'encrees and eke to multiplye the nacioun...

So, in all, a worthy volume, and one worth owning: but, twenty five years on and in a less shrill political climate, the time has come for Penguin to be bold and commission a new version. It would be good to see Carol Ann Duffy's work, much of which is of better quality than anything in Coote's final forty pages; and Cathal Ó Searcaigh--the only prominent gay poet writing in Irish--would bring a densely lyrical, controversial and non-anglophone element. (Some attempt to grapple with the immense heritage of Chinese and Japanese poetry on homosexual themes would also be welcome.) Finally, it must be noted that the present volume reads oddly because it was published before the AIDS crisis broke, so that the picture of gay life painted in its last pages, redolent though they are of the orgiastic 70s bathhouse-scene, seems oddly innocent. With sorrow, the modern reader can sense, as it were, Gunn's 1992 'The Man With Night Sweats', waiting to be anthologised, hovering ghostlike just beyond the final pages.

L'Amour de Loin, Kaija Saariaho, ENO

I feel ill-suited to discuss music when there are bloggers out there like my colleague Mark Berry, over at the learned and insanely frequently updated Boulezian, and the composer-arranger Nico Muhly, at his own eponymous and marvellously hip blog.

But what the hell. I've never been backward about coming forward.

I nipped down to the ENO at the London Coliseum yesterday for the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's opera L'Amour de Loin, 'Love from Afar'. Now, possibly there is no more self-indulgent pleasure than going to an artistic event on one's own. (Well, there is: spending the kids' inheritance on amassing a collection of Edwardian pornography; taking a half-bottle of spirits and a box of chocs into the back-row of the cinema; going on a seesaw after the age of thirty---that kind of thing.) But personally, once in a while, I rather like the anonymity of just appearing in work clothes at something, watching, and then disappearing again, just as I enjoy walking round foreign cities on my tod.

That said, being a simple soul with no musical training, I must confess that I still find opera a difficult medium: the penetrating, aggressive loudness of the voices, the complex and sophisticated hybridity of the artform, and the relative rarity of extended passages of simple beauty all tend to mean that I find it heavy going. As an adolescent, I recall that I used to find the sound of operatic singing horrendously ugly, at once shrill and overblown; my opera-obsessed parents, on the other hand, could never understand how I could tolerate the repetition and microtonal melismas of eastern music, or what I think they saw as the iciness of medieval and medieval-inspired music, both of which I love passionately. Well, just as in poetry I find Pauline Stainer's work, with its elusive, neo-medieval flashes, far more beautiful than, say, Pound's hermetic monumentalism, in music my natural tastes are similar: I find the piercing, austere textures of David Lang's recent Little Matchgirl Passion, for example, far more straightforwardly 'beautiful' than the mystifying surfaces of a lot of grand opera, which I just haven't got the critical tools to understand.

Fortunately, we can all expand our natural tastes, and I've grown out of expecting easily-assimilable aural loveliness out of a night out. (Thank God--otherwise I'd be listening to the cardamom-scented sugariness of Lakmé for the rest of my life.) But I still feel on the back foot with music, so you--learned readers--will have to bear with my ignorance.

L'Amour de Loin tells what would be a great love-story if the lovers actually met for more than five minutes. There are only three characters: two 'lovers', the (historical) medieval French prince and troubadour, Jaufré Rudel, and a French Countess in exile in Tripoli---plus an ambiguously-motivated Pilgrim who brings about their 'love from afar', crisscrossing the sea to tell the one about the other. The theme is what was known to medieval Irish literateurs, incidentally, as sercc écmaise, 'love of one absent', the lineaments of which Welsh afficionados will recognise in the story of Culhwch, in which the young hero falls in love with the beautiful Olwen merely by hearing her name. Our troubadour and courtly lover Jaufré Rudel imagines an ideal lover far across the sea, dedicating songs and poems to her; he learns from the mysterious Pilgrim that such a woman, the Countess, indeed exists, 'fair without the arrogance of beauty, noble without the arrogance of nobility, devout without the arrogance of piety.' Meanwhile, the Pilgrim returns to the Countess, and tells her of the far-off poet in her homeland who sings of her beauty with heartbroken passion, though he has never seen her. In the second half of the opera, Jaufré travels across the Mediterranean to meet his idealised love, who experiences passionate anxiety about her own worthiness of such a rarefied devotion: 'I, troubadour, am only beautiful when reflected in your words', sings the Countess Clémence, 'The songs you sing caress me more than a kiss.' As the Guardian's critic noted, 'When Jaufré arrives, he is close to death, and the couple have just the time to declare their love for each other before he expires, leaving Clémence to mourn what she has lost, or possibly never had.' Questions of idealised love, obsession, of worthiness and unworthiness flicker around Amin Maalouf's libretto, dismayingly prosaic in English translation.

Saariaho's densely-woven music with its iridescent orchestral shimmers and pastelly chiaroscuro was rather wonderful. 'Ting!' went the ?glockenspiel, fluddleluddleluddle went the harp, as the strings and off-stage chorus evoked shifting patterns of light. It all sounded rather like the northern lights look: waves of delicate, evanescent colours, all slowly blurring and fading, never holding one form. Daniele Finzi Pasca's staging tried to harness the same kind of effect with great undulations of coloured silk: as the opera got started, a huge billow of blue-grey semi-transparent fabric was fluttered down over the stalls and pulled to the back of the stage---which would have given a marvellous impression of subaqueous light and ungraspable, spectral delicacy if it hadn't awkwardly snagged on a light-fitting and audibly ripped.

Pasca, whose background is in 'new wave' circus dance, faced down the problem of having only three characters by tripling everyone, so that Jaufré, Clémence and the Pilgrim each have two separate 'souls', who drift around the place in the form of dancers and acrobats. (I'm not sure this was exploited to the full, as it was often merely confusing: periodically, Clémence's second soul ran on and off dressed as a bride, like Catherine Tate in search of a Doctor Who Christmas special.) There was a distinct whiff of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in all this silky floating and fluttering. Have a look:



You can see something of the elaborateness of the sets and of the languid orientalism that suffused---a very Saariaho word, that---the production; all this gold, soft red and black laquer made me feel that I'd got trapped in the packaging of a gigantic, theatre-sized bottle of Yves Saint Laurent's Opium. The costumes were rather lovely: Jaufré's yellow house-coat was suitably princely, and I can only describe Clémence's robes as 'Eleanor of Aquitaine-on-a-state-visit-to-Taiwan' (vous imaginez!), with a slight whiff of Sibylla in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven:



But the poor Pilgrim was less successful in this department: clad in silver and faded forest-green velvet, and with long pig-tails, s/he looked like a cut-price Galadriel. Further, the double-souls gimmick was unwisely extended by the use of puppetry: at the beginning of each act, an ingratiating young couple, clad at one point in sou'westers, wandered onto the stage wheeling what appeared to be a leather Victorian bathing contraption. This turned out to be a kind of shadow-puppet booth, inside which they mimed portentously. Since, alas, this improbable device was the size of your average domestic telly, it was impossible to see what was going on from any distance, still less from the Upper Circle where I was sat. This inexplicable bit of dramaturgy left me very puzzled: at the beginning of Act IV, for instance, why show a storm at sea using two actors, a bathchair on wheels, and a backlit sheet of greaseproof, when the very next scene represents the same storm on stage with wonderful theatrical effectiveness?! Meh.

There were several haunting moments: most effective was the scene in Act II in which the Pilgrim describes Jaufré's devotion to the horrified, then deeply moved Countess: s/he sings a few fragments of one of the Prince's songs of enraptured devotion. Saariaho has clearly gone to work on the techniques of troubadour music, and these brief, hauntingly lovely minutes were, for me, the highlight of the opera, which really doesn't say very much, other than that I, a medievalist, am unsurprisingly more moved by medieval music than by wafty sub-Debussy. Though more gestured towards than embodied, these fragments of Jaufré's song were reminiscent of the following:



So it went on: as noted above, in the final two acts, Jaufré and the Countess finally meet, but Jaufré is dying, apparently ennervated by nerves and sea-sickness. This was poorly staged: a few seconds after the dying troubadour is wheeled on stage, Clémence, standing two feet away, asks where he is. It was a totally unnecessary panto-moment: for all Pasca's fondness for limber callisthenics, his direction of the actual singers was horribly static. Weirdly, he seems to think in tableaux rather than the four dimensions necessary for a good director.

By this time, I was growing restive in my perch: Jaufré and Clémence sing a bit, confessing their undying love, until Jaufré, well, dies---in triplicate, natch---and is removed on his bier via a kind of aerial three-point-turn. She has it out with God for taking her lover, and in a fit of pique becomes a druid. (Well, a nun, apparently, but I'm sure I've seen the massed, white-robed, hooded heavies of the final scene at Stonehenge before.) The three Jaufrés reappear from above, this time in a vaguely trinitarian guise, and bob up and down softly. Clémence's last words on stage--a prayer---are ambiguous: is God now her 'love from afar', or has the brief experience of transcendent human love become a kind of Platonic mystic initiation for her? The possibility is left open, which renders everything that has gone before subject to a kind of uncomfortable retrospective allegorisation. The idea is an arresting one, of course: interestingly, John Tavener did something similar with Laila, his 2005 score for the ballet AMU, in which the mystic-allegory side of the story is explicit. An enraptured poet Majnun, in love with a girl called Laila, seeks for her over deserts and oceans, internalising her more and more as a spiritual ideal, until, in the end, he finds her. 'Who are you?' he says to the puzzled girl, 'I don't recognise you.' 'I am your Laila', says the girl. 'No, no, my Laila is inside me', says Majnun, 'I don't know who you are.' I imagine the name of the girl is a Sufi pun: Laila = La ilaha (illa Allah), thus representing the unmanifest, unknowable and ineffable essence of God.

L'Amour de Loin was a curious night, all told; several very good ingredients somewhow all added up to something which felt rather inconsequential. The singing was lovely throughout: the three principles were more than fine, especially Joan Rodgers as Clémence. But the problem is that there just isn't enough in the opera: the plot is so slender it barely keeps one's attention. If only someone had slipped the richly-talented Saariaho a copy of Gore Vidal's novella The Search for a King, which has similar troubadour elements and is also a tale of devotion and anguished love from afar: it tells how Richard the Lionheart, kidnapped and held to ransom after the Third Crusade, was found by his faithful troubadour Blondel de Neel. A Saariaho opera on a richer theme would truly have been worth seeing.


* * *

Here's a piece on a related theme by Saariaho: Lonh (i.e. Loin in Occitan, I expect), which shows the medieval influences on her work clearly. One can quite see why, as a composer, she is fond of Dawn Upshaw's voice: Upshaw played Clémence in the premiere of L'Amour de Loin. Much of Lonh is reminiscent of Upshaw's recent recording of Osvaldo Golijov's exquisitely beautiful song-cycle Ayre.

Nazir-Ali

It's one of the paradoxes about the C of E that even non-believers like myself feel they can pass judgement on its priests and bishops, and that still we have something invested in our national church. I like the big Anglo-Catholic parishes with incense and Tallis; I like gothic cathedrals with their canons and queer old deans; and in particular I like the limpid, subaqueous light on the white-washed walls of empty rural churches, smelling of floor-polish and stale flower-water, hanging in the air like centuries of piety. It's nice to have somewhere to go and do my brass-rubbings, you see.

On which note, I was sorry to see that old +Nazir-Ali of Rochester, like a fallen elephant slowly expiring in the grassy savannah, has emitted another of his feeble trumpetings. The daft old nancy's latest call for homosexuals to 'repent and change' (deftly analysed over at Lathophobic Aphasia) provokes in me a profound state of meh. What's the old dear like?!

I suppose, searching in my heart for any thread of compassion (ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པ་དྨེ་ཧཱུྃ།), +Nazi-Rally's had a difficult life: uncomfortably transcultured on several levels, promoted well beyond his intellectual capacity but still disappointed that the Holy Spirit inexplicably didn't see fit to nudge Tony Blair in the direction of making him Archbishop of Canterbury---well, bless my soul! Making a personal combo out of the self-aggrandising pomposity of institutional Christianity and the rigid charmlessness of Islam, our very own Mullah-lite really is a gloomy, narrow little mopsie.

I feel very sorry--in the sense of having wholly genuine compassionate empathy--for anyone who really feels they have to struggle on with this kind of thing. I can't think of a worse Purgatory in life than feeling genuinely called to confess the risen Christ in the environs of such as Nazir-Ali.

Rabbitheart

Florence and the Machine: Rabbit heart (Raise It Up). I absolutely love this--yet another example of how Kate Bush has been the single most influential female British artist of the last thirty years.

Giulio Cesare

Ah, my very favourite weekend of the year. Each year since I was about twenty, my incredibly kind and lovely parents have taken me to Glyndebourne. Initially a bit reluctant, I went with ill-grace, faintly uncomfortable with the blatant upper middle-classness of it: and I was instantly, utterly hooked, totally, head-over-heels, besottedly in love.

For readers in the US who might not be familiar with the concept, Glyndebourne is the oldest and best of a small number of 'country-house opera' venues in the UK: you show up in the afternoon to some idyllic rural location with its fine old manor house and attached theatre, and get to see a professional operatic production. In the long interval, you sit on the lawn and have a picnic, in the early evening light. There are several of these places: Garsington near Oxford is the most famous after Glyndebourne, and one has even been founded in the Loire valley by some British ex-pats. But Glyndebourne itself is just in a different league compared to the others: the house itself is an exquisite Jacobean place with wonderful gardens stretching down to the sheep-nibbled South Downs, and the new auditorium (erected a decade or so ago in a single year) seats 1200. As Jeanette Winterson--a great fan--wrote:

The music began in 1934, when a rather shy John Christie met a rather sparkling Audrey Mildmay, an opera singer. They fell in love, and as Christie happened to have a stately home, he offered it as a love-gift to his wife. They would start an opera house together, get a few Members to subscribe, and the rest, as they say, is music history.

It is a place of pure joy. I realised when I way leaning over the balcony on Friday night, in black tie, watching the light settle on the chalk escarpment wending down to Lewes, that this experience, this place, the unique thing that happens here, makes me more happy that just about anything else in the world. It is beautiful on so many different levels: a beautiful setting, beautiful music, beautiful picnic food made by my Mum, good friendship, and my much-loved family.

It is both difficult and easy to get a ticket. Tickets for non-members are in short supply, but there are a significant number of standing places for an astoundingly cheap price (around a tenner, comparable to the price of a night at the cinema) and subsidised seats for the under thirties. (Bugger.) But the waiting list for membership closed when it reached twenty years. My own parents went on the waiting list in, I think, the early eighties, when the estimated wait was four years; four years later, it stood at seven. Their rescue came when the new auditorium was built, nearly doubling the number of seats available. It should be mentioned too that Glyndebourne receives no public funding: that's it, no public funding. It is a private venture run for love, and not beholden to Arts Council bigwigs. This gives it tremendous artistic freedom and a license for exceptional creativity.

So far, I've seen Così fan tutte, La Nozze di Figaro, The Magic Flute, Otello, Albert Herring, The Turn of the Screw, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Otello again, and then, this year, a revival of David McVicar's 2005 production of Handel's Giulio Cesare. (I've also seen Glyndebourne Touring Opera productions of Tosca, Carmen and Eugene Onegin, but unfortunately I was on such strong antidepressants during the latter two that I dozed off, and left in the interval.)*

One of the nicest things about it is the general unspoken civility of it all. Everyone behaves beautifully; here are over a thousand people in close proximity, every night for the whole of the summer, and yet no one shouts, answers their mobile during their picnic, gets drunk, vomits, or starts a fight. Unlike in almost every public space up and down Britain, there is no need for signs asking you to take your litter home with you, or notices imploring you not to spit on or physically assault the staff. The assembled visitors are not assumed to be be pullulating bundles of infantile, barely-controlled affect sorely in need of an ASBO. To quote Winterson again:

I think about Glyndebourne the way I do about wild salmon, which will have the purists reaching for the rifle, but what I mean to say is that it is special and it is seasonal, and it costs a bit more than the farmed stuff, but it is the real thing.

If life is about heightened moments, and living well when we can, then Glyndebourne is an essential part of life.

I would not want to be without it. Opera is the fusion of drama, language, instrument and voice. It is high pleasure, in that it is a little bit demanding, and high altitude, in that it is human beings at their most intense.

Opera demands enormous skill from everyone involved, and what it asks from the audience is innocence and concentration. We can be critical, but we mustn’t be cynical. We can be reserved, but not lazy. Like the Buddhists say, ‘Be Here Now.’

Opera is a Be Here Now situation, and Glyndebourne lends itself to the wrap-around moment, partly because it is so absurdly serious – a place in the middle of nowhere that starts singing mid-afternoon, and suggests that you come. And a place that asks you to give over your whole day to this spectacle. Even if you think you HATE opera, Glyndebourne is the perfect antidote to fit-it-in frenzy. Everyone relaxes, everyone begins to open up to beauty of the place, and of course to the music.



Giulio Cesare itself was astounding. I'm not that familiar with Handel, but I'd made the effort to listen to the opera several times before seeing it. The plot centres on the annexation of Egypt by Rome, as the Civil War between Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar plays itself out in Alexandria, and Caesar begins his affair with Cleopatra. So far, so historical: but the plot also involves all sorts of improbable goings-on, including disguises and a shipwreck. In McVicar's acclaimed production, the setting had been lusciously updated to the 19th century, with Egypt as a kind of Saidian nightmare East, a cunning fusion of the Ottoman Empire and the Raj, complete with men in fezzes and Bollywood dancing. The Romans became British redcoats in pith helmets. The sumptuous, knowing orientalism of it all was quite perfect.

The set was a very flexible, clever work of forced perspective. Over sandy coloured floorboards, a series of columns retreated towards the back of the stage on both sides, angled in in such a way as to make the stage look both much deeper and much bigger than it actually is. In the 'Roman' scenes, this lent the set a spacious feeling of imperial grandeur; in the 'Egyptian' scenes, everything was swagged in curtains of lushly coloured silk--indigo, deep emerald, shocking pink--and festooned with Moroccan lanterns, giving it a kind of Rajastani intensity of exotic colour. At the back of the stage, the sea was visible: this was done with a trio of rotating, glittering horizontal screws like long pieces of fusilli pasta. If you look at this aria--Pompey's son Sesto swearing revenge on Tolomeo, Cleopatra's wicked brother and his father's murderer--you can see how utterly convincing this looked (I kept thinking of Ruth Padel's line, 'a shine-and-shadow-boxing sea'):



The lighting was perfect: much of the time, the sea was bathed in completely convincing sunlight, but I caught my breath halfway through, when the screen at the back of the set was suddenly raised to reveal a realistic night sky--Orion was rising from the waves beneath a orangey full moon, making the 'waves' look eerily phosphorescent. It was both deeply stylized and wonderfully naturalistic.

The singing was perfection. Especially good was Sarah Connolly, a mezzo, as Caesar, which is one of those parts originally written for a castrato that are now sung by countertenors or as breeches parts. Connolly's performance was a perfect illustration that opera is, at its best, a complex and synthetic artform, which relies on a rare fusion of acting skills and musical talent in its performers. The days of some twenty stone woman in her late fifties planting herself foursquare on the stage and pretending to be a tubercular teenage girl are long gone, at least at Glyndebourne. Astoundingly for a mother of two, Connolly managed to look rather like another Caesar, Ciaran Hinds in HBO's series Rome, and, as she swaggered around the stage in boots and a greatcoat, with breasts well bound-down, she entirely convinced as a middle-aged man and the ruler of the known world. Watch the sexual tension in this clip, in which Cleopatra (who has hitherto passed herself off as a girl called Lydia in order to get close to Caesar) lets slip that she is, in fact, herself:



You'll notice that Cleopatra herself is completely and utterly jaw-droppingly GORGEOUS. The 29-year-old American soprano Danielle de Niese played her with coruscatingly sensual sex-appeal and an insouciant, liquid physicality that was a joy to watch. Here she is in a candid shot:



De Niese is one of a new breed of opera singers for whom the voice--while top-notch--is part of a package of skills including the ability to act and move on stage. The choreography of the opera was obviously punishing; that de Niese could dance in a variety of styles from Broadway umbrella-twirling to Bollywood kitsch whilst negotiating Handel's fiendish coloratura is a great statement about her still-developing talents. In the clip below, she is in vampy Chicago-mode (note the louche comedy when she parks her umbrella in the jar containing Pompey's ashes, and later drops her fag in it):



And here she is in eastern mode, telling her foppish slimeball brother (crudely) to piss off, because she's going to be the ruler of Egypt, and he can forget it:



De Niese's voice is good: not as good as Connolly's, but it is the combination of her talents that makes her so wonderful to watch. (Compare this 70s/80s (?) version of the same aria sung by Valerie Masterson, who has an exquiste--and more precise--voice, but how stiff and staid her performance seems in comparison to de Neise's!) Here are Connolly and de Niese in the climactic love duet:



All the Egyptian characters were given good bits of gyration to get down to: Cleopatra's hysterically camp little henchman and Gay Best Friend Niseno was given a little wiggle-scene of his own. I think this might actually be the gayest thing I've ever clapped eyes on (note his little Arabian melisma inserted into the score at 2.25 and following):



Anyway, this was a simply extraordinary production: I haven't got the energy or time to praise every aspect that so richly deserves the praising, but the dignity and piercing sorrow of the music for Cornelia (Pompey's widow) and Sesto (Pompey's son) must be mentioned. Patricia Bardon sang Cornelia with a heart-piercing sense of grief and wretchedness, which contrasted piquantly with the froth of other scenes in the opera; the French mezzo Stéphanie d'Oustrac shone as the impulsive and increasingly traumatised Sesto, who lapses into psychosis in the final 'happy ending' scene.

So if any of all this appeals even slightly, BEG, BORROW or STEAL in order to get a ticket some time. If you can't, Giulio Cesare (the original 2005 production with most of the same cast) is available on DVD here.

* * *

*I thought at the time that I was appallingly depressed. In fact, I was just down in the dumps, lonely, and chronically sleep-deprived: I was living in college accommodation on a side-street off Oxford's busiest shopping thoroughfare, and was being woken by shouting drunks and lorries roughly every half-hour, all night, every night. I nearly went insane.



(I lived above the sign on the right.)

Susheela Raman

'What Silence Said'--the wonderfully talented Susheela Raman's song about--I presume--an ex-lover who took his (or her) own life.

What Silence Said

Paris cafe,
our last rendez-vous
rain swept backwards,
cooped in windows...

Our shrunken heads
reading signs and lips
one last dance
--broken steps--
before your eclipse...

Was there thunder in your ears?
Mine were full of sand
not hearing
what your silence said...

If I turn around,
your mouth open, no sound
your eyes screaming--
retreating into
blackness...

A day too late
your news found me
at home.
Mind bubbling up,
angry water
refusing stone.

Then in revenge
I felt life
surge in my veins,
a hunger
you would
never taste again...

Did you lose your faith in love,
did you lose your faith in human feeling?
Silence...
Did you lose you trust in truth,
did your heart have no route to healing,

like I lost you?

You left your lovers
close behind
but twisted it up
in time

you crossed the line
it's all we have
they're still entwined
then--
nothing

just the emptiness you carved
your spine a lonely blade
in space
...to the end, a dancer...

beautiful face
begins to fade

thank you
for being my friend

beautiful face
begins to fade...

Ye Voice of Ye Bushe. And ye Fisshe also.

St Anthony preaching to the fishes, which are presumably more worried about asphyxiation than the Gospel. I don't imagine the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand went down especially well either.

* * *

As I was trotting back to my office after lunch today, I was addressed in a deep and resonant Jamaican accent by a Buddleia: 'Dey shal al be new creatures in Christ Jesus!!!' I was about to fall to my knees marvelling at this miraculous display of piety from the vegetable kingdom, when I realised that one of the gardeners had left her portable radio hidden behind a bush.

A sermon from a flowering shrub would not, however, be the weirdest form of preaching ever done in Cambridge. For that, we have to turn to 1627's Vox Piscis, or The Book-Fish, contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish in Cambridge market, on Midsummer Eve last. The story is described here.