The black tie and champagne cliché is wrong, says Robert Thicknesse. After 300 years of suspicion, we are no longer ‘the land without music’
A decade after Luciano Pavarotti’s death, the remaining Two Tenors, Placido Domingo and José Carreras, will give a concert in his memory in Verona, on 6th September. This September, too, the V&A launches a grandiose operatic exhibition, together with the Royal Opera House.
All this comes 27 years after Britain oficially fell in love with opera. In 1990, every street in the land echoed to Puccini, when the BBC made Pavarotti’s rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’, from Turandot, the theme tune for its coverage of the World Cup, being held in Italy. So opera has triumphantly entered the British cultural mainstream!
Or has it? Sure, everyone in the country can hum a bar or two of Puccini’s ditty, and traffic jams snooze peacefully to Classic FM. But opera remains the most divisive of art forms, its audience routinely vilified as gormless plutocrats.
This is an old story in Britain. In the 18th century, when Handel was producing Italian opera for the London aristocracy, it was derided by Samuel Johnson as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’. For Alexander Pope, it was a foreign ‘harlot form’. Hogarth made fun of its effete, non-English posturings.
Italian romantic opera of the 19th century – Donizetti, Verdi and co – fell foul of the adherents of ‘proper music’. Fans of the German tradition of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, they considered Italian romanticism meretricious and musically worthless; an attitude that persists in many quarters.
And opera continues to get it in the neck from all sides: rarefied, exclusive, intimidating, pretentious – or middlebrow pap, dressed up in glitz and velvet and swallowing up disproportionate amounts of public subsidy.
The opera establishment is terrifically bad at countering these criticisms. Its comebacks are generally peevish and snobby – as when the outgoing director of the Royal Opera, Kasper Holten, opined that maybe the British, having learned to enjoy fine food and wine, would one day evolve to appreciate opera too.
And the opera world is uniquely inept at its own PR. As far as the media in general is concerned, opera takes place exclusively at two venues, Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, where tickets will set you back several hundred quid, and tiaras and black tie, champagne and foie gras, snobbery and in-bred speech impediments, are de rigueur.
It’s rubbish, of course. Ninety per cent of opera-lovers get their pleasures at other places: the regional, state- supported houses, such as Opera North and Welsh National Opera; touring out ts like English Touring Opera; and jovially inclusive summer spots akin to Opera Holland Park, which cost far less than watching Adele or Premier League football. Nobody dresses up, and a decent proportion of the audience appear to be there for the music and the show rather than any social kudos.
It is true that the only really ourishing operatic sector (see Richard Osborne’s piece in this Oldie’s Arts section) is the expensive country-house variety, Glyndebourne and its little siblings.
Their existence does owe a lot to the moneybags audience from the nancial sector – even though, as Richard rightly points out, the productions often have extremely high standards.
Britain’s contribution to operatic culture has been marginal since the days of Handel, whose London debut in 1711 is celebrated in the V&A show.
Attempts to establish an ‘English opera’ tradition have always foundered on suspicions of its foreignness and pretension. Somerset Maugham described it as entertainment for people who don’t like music.
Italy, Germany and France have dozens of opera houses funded by state and local government, because it is a native art there – as theatre is here. For us, it was always imported. England was derided a century ago as ‘the land without music’ – Das Land Ohne Musik – by Oscar Schmitz, a German critic.
Now the playing eld is rather more level. Thanks to a combination of rolling landscape, temperate summers and a local taste for diluting art with lengthy, alcohol-heavy picnics, the southern quarter of England has created a very particular way of enjoying music at idyllic spots such as Glyndebourne, Garsington and Iford. A new one popped up this year, as Grange Park rather rancorously became two organisations 40 miles apart, with the original in Hampshire, and the breakaway version in Surrey. Both instantly found a decent audience.
This is our unique contribution to opera, and it has transcended its caricature. Certainly, you will nd braying and expensive snoozing at Glyndebourne et al – but also some of the highest standards of performing arts in Britain.
Naturally, it’s expensive. But, with dozens in the chorus and the orchestra, high-charging stars, scenery, lights, stagehands, directors and conductors to pay for, it can look good value at a time when a three-hander play in the West End can set you back a hundred quid or more.
Opera, created as a divertissement for European princelings, revels in luxury and resists attempts to make it too demotic. Britain, for that reason, will no doubt continue to have a bipolar relationship with it. But after many centuries, we have certainly created a way of enjoying opera we can call our own, and it’s booming as never before.
