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Sunday evening . . . unnnnngh
I should be working on PEGASUS.
In the first place, I am very short of sleep. No, no, I was all ready to go to bed at the proper hour last night, erm, early this morning. I was just moving the current bathtub book* from the side of the bath, and muttering to myself as I dried it off**, to the bedside tor, because until I finish PEGASUS I apparently need light frivolity last thing at night: mostly I read homeopathic journals in the bath*** and large insufficiently water-resistant nonfiction tomes in bed. And as I dried and muttered I heard . . . a noise. A buzzing noise. Where the hell, where in all the hells, are all these bloody wasps coming from??
ADRENALINE SPIKE. I didn’t get to bed all that late after this little contretemps, but sleep? Pfft. But the alarm went relentlessly off at getting-up-for-service-ring o’clock this morning. Fortunately my Sunday morning tea is strong enough to make crutches out of: just dump it out of the pot and plane the edges down a bit.
And in the second place, I’m presently watching La Sonnambula on Sky.† Gah. I saw it once, long long long ago at an age so tender and fragile I still wasn’t absolutely sure that I couldn’t live without opera, and while (as I remember it now) Carmen and the Barber of Seville quickly renewed my commitment to the art of musical melodrama and mayhem††, it took me decades to have another go at La Sonnambula†††. It’s a bit like I Puritani only the because-her-lover-has-betrayed-her mad scene happens while she’s sleepwalking. Sic. Everybody wanting an(other) excuse to be snarky about opera falls about‡ over the sleepwalking—I agree that the entire village just happening to be on hand for our heroine to tightrope somnambulantly over a Tyrolean gorge is a trifle implausible, but I would wear the sleepwalking.‡‡ The thing that makes me blow gaskets is why does she want the jerk?‡‡‡ He’s a pathologically possessive loony, and the sooner she lets him marry his old sweetheart—who mysteriously also still wants him§—and marries the Count, who is obviously interested, the better.
However. I have been working on PEGASUS.§§ I haven’t had quite the dazzlingly brilliant and inspired day I had yesterday§§§ but I have crawled back up that 362-degree reverse slope# and am back to clinging to the 22-December-deadline precipice## with teeth and bleeding fingernails. Hope is the thing with feathers, you know? ##
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* Bathtub book is a genre, okay? Some people lie on beaches. I lie in the bath. Mostly, as above, I read stuff that would make me a Better, More Informed Person if I remembered any of it.^ But there are times when I want bathtub books.
^ I’d like to believe that my diabolically bad memory is merely an opportunity for buying lovely colourful notebooks+ to write things down in but I think if I tried to push that one Pollyanna would die of an aneurysm.
+ I love office-supply and stationery stores. Second only to books and chocolate.
** Which is why I only read cheap paperbacks with shiny covers in the bath.
*** With the unfortunate result that my shelves of back issues tend to be . . . crinkly.
† I’m also eating lovely fresh roast chicken. Late.^ The hellhounds get way too much of the chicken in this household. They also believe that anyone doing anything with chicken is doing it for them. And since Dogs That Eat are my favourite things in the entire known universe^^ all the hellhounds have to do is cruise the kitchen doing their poor sad hungry dog imitation and I instantly drop everything and feed them.
^ Yes. The story of my life. Supper, bedtime . . . turning in novels. All late.
^^ Husbands bearing expensive gifts are second.
†† And silliness. Silliness is very important.
††† And then it was Joan Sutherland, and . . . eh. I know I’ve confessed this here before, but Sutherland always sounds like she’s singing Olympia^ to me.
^ Olympia is the mechanical doll that the wet jerk of a hero of Tales of Hoffman falls in love with. Mechanical. Doll.
‡ Britspeak for ‘laughs’. Which phrase always makes me fall about.
‡‡ As I like to keep reminding you, I write fantasy.
‡‡‡ Speaking of wet jerks. Pillock. A family-rated blog forbids me to describe him as he deserves.
§ The family blog thing is also preventing me from making the obvious assumption. In print. And I feel sorry for the ex-sweetheart. She should have him up for breach of promise. And the business with the scarf that she supposedly dropped in the Count’s room . . . please. Hasn’t anyone read Othello/seen Otello?
§§ And am about to go back to it.
§§§ And for anyone who reads this blog but isn’t on Twitter: http://wondermark.com/ ^
Get with the programme, guys. I especially like: ‘I respect anyone who can’t muster the conformist attitude to write in a straight line.’ Footnotes. Yesssssss. Depraved, degenerate mental processes. Yessssssss.
^ I will try to remember to fix this as soon as it has its own address. Waving your mouse over the individual title doesn’t seem to function the way it does on Days in the Life, and when my One Trick doesn’t work, I have no idea. +
+ Postscript, next day/night: http://wondermark.com/thanksgiving-bloggers/ Nothing to do with me: the Excellence that is Maren posted this on the forum
# I don’t do maths. You know this.
## Not a Tyrolean precipice. And I’m awake. Barely.
## http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/827/
Okay . . . *
. . . We’re on. I’ve heard from my editor; she says it’s still worth a shot at the autumn ’10 list for PEGASUS and how fast do I think I can do the rewrites—? Unh. I won’t actually know till I have. She hasn’t yet given me (or Merrilee) the uber-final, drop dead, drop dead or drop dead, deadline when it has to go into copyediting—if it’s going into copyediting for next autumn—it’ll be November, but November is four weeks long. If it’s the beginning of November I’m in more trouble than if it’s the end of November. But I’m afraid the short form is that I’m back to the rockface with my plastic spoon.** Sorry guys. Trust me, I am not spinning this out just to keep you reading Days in the Life for updates. ***
This however brings up another painful subject. If PEG I comes out next autumn . . . I am going to feel morally obliged at least to try to have PEG II in for autumn ’11 . . . which would mean writing the thing in about ten months.† And this seems to me even less likely than getting PEG I in for my editor to read by 8 October just passed, having not stormed through to the end of the third draft till the middle of September, which was spectacularly unlikely enough. †† I mean, yes, I have some of the first draft written already because it was originally all supposed to be one book . . . but I had quite a bit more of the first draft written when I sat down to finish it as one book a year ago, and see where that’s got me. And even if PEG I slips to spring ’11 . . . I’m still going to be trying to get PEG II out a year later.
It’s not going to be one of my nicer, jollier, more relaxed years, whether the countdown starts now or a few months from now.
And . . . I’m officially about to chop back another day of my frelling overtexted blog entries: probably (ahem) Mondays; I’m going to have to work more hours more evenings. I take a lot more photos ‘for the blog’ than I ever get around to posting†††, for example, and I have an awful lot of funny links I never get round to posting either—the kind I wouldn’t mind seeing again even if I’d already seen them on someone else’s blog. And I hope to continue to torment people into writing me guest blogs. . . .
* * *
* I’m late, mindblown and distracted by the fact I’ve been watching Lucia di Lammermoor all evening. Sky Arts can go for months without showing anything I want to go near with a sharp stick and then they’ll have a little rush of opera—they’ve done this to me before. And I could have recorded it, except this is how I end up with .002% free space on the recording gizmo^ so I thought, never mind, Lucia is very silly, I just like the noise, I’ll watch it. What do I have to do tonight anyway besides a few more pages of PEGASUS, write a blog entry, hack at He Was Despised some more^^ because my voice lesson is tomorrow, practise the frelling Warlock so Oisin won’t snigger at me on Friday, find the homeopathic remedy(ies) that will have hellhounds eating promptly and eagerly every day for the rest of their lives, and distill a clean energy source from junked computers and plastic bags.
And then I went and wasted a lot of good global-solution-discovering time finding this new Met Lucia tremendously moving. http://www.scena.org/blog/2009/02/met-in-hd-lucia-di-lammermoor.html I agree with him about the tenor. You wouldn’t know he’d stepped in at the last minute; and that awful final aria poor Edgardo has to sing after Lucia has totally ripped up the scenery in the mad scene he delivers with aplomb and commitment: you feel not for the tenor, but for the character. But I don’t agree with this reviewer at all about Netrebko, and I’m not even a drooling fan. Zaftig? Frelling spare me. I did notice a slight dearth of fancy high notes but I still found the mad scene compelling . . . and sad, which is harder to bring off, because the crucial thing about Lucia is that she’s such a depressing little wet. It’s difficult not to feel that if she’d had a little intestinal fortitude earlier on she wouldn’t have been goaded into sticking a knife (repeatedly) into the husband her ugly-piece-of-work brother has forced on her.^^^ I love the music but the story sucks poisonous toad slime—and a less-than-first-rate performance will leave me thinking too much about its absurdity and feeling too little of all the great washy emotions that opera is so good at. Star crossed lovers! Dying! Whee! Something I would like to see some day is a Lucia who never collapses on the floor and rolls around in despair however. I think it would be possible to play her as merely crushed by circumstance; I think she could stand up to her disgusting brother even as he’s convincing her that her true love has betrayed her; I think she could at least stay on her feet when the priest advises her to submit. I think if Micaela can be played as a woman rather than a fluffy bunny, and the production of Carmen we saw at Glyndebourne last year proves that she can, someone can bring off a Lucia who dies because her entire social structure is stacked against her, not because she has the moral conviction of overcooked spaghetti.
^ I tell myself this is a better system than having two-thirds of the sitting room given over to stacks of dusty videotapes. Ten years ago, when I spent my year and a half on the sofa with acute ME—which is also when Peter bought me the it-was-a-monster-then-but-there-are-much-bigger-now TV we still have—is the one time in my life since TV tape and playback systems were invented+ that I began to catch up on all the stuff I taped.++
+ Do you realise# that when STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL NONSENSE came out, you only saw each episode once? If you were lucky they showed most of that year’s again during summer rerun doldrums. But that’s all. Forever. I was Marked for Life by this experience: it’s another of those things that will keep turning up here, because it’s about How Technology Has Revolutionised Our Lives. I also, later on, spent a lot of time on Greyhound buses going up and down the east coast to small art house theatres showing THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. In hindsight recorders were inevitable. But to a geeky teenager with a seriously bad crush on Mr Spock this was on a par with fantasies like growing up to be someone who got paid for writing stories. That one still stops me cold occasionally. I what?
# I know. Some of you are old too, and remember.
++ It wasn’t worth it.
^^ which after listening to Anna Netrebko is going to be brutal
^^^ Although this leads to one of my favourite pieces of silly-ass operatic behaviour, which is the priest rushing out on stage to describe finding her bending over the body of her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, and brandishing the dagger with which she has just done the deed. What, you didn’t want to interrupt her?
** Actually I went back to it last Tuesday. And let me tell you, if it’s the beginning of November . . . it’s a spring ’11 book.
*** And just by the way, I still don’t know how the hell I got even the unfinished version in by the 8th. Miracles do happen.
† GAAAAAAAAAAH. That sound you hear . . . if I could bring it a little more under control, I too could sing the mad scene from Lucia. With the fancy high notes.
†† But miracles do happen.
††† And for example, if life will stop being so dranglefabbing exciting maybe I’ll finally post the photos of the brown velvet jacket tomorrow which I wore to the handbell wedding on Saturday.
Bowen method for creatures great and small
If I were any tireder the Zombie Police would arrest me on suspicion. Did anything happen on Saturday?* It’s too long ago, I can’t remember. But there was the quarter on Sunday and then yesterday was Glyndebourne*** and today the hellhounds and I went to see my Bowen lady** and Bowen always wipes me out. Uuuunnnnnnh.
I don’t usually take the hellhounds to see Tabitha. I usually go a little early and do something creative on the way like stop at the supermarket and check for offers on champagne, or cruise Waterstones†. But I don’t leave hellhounds in the car; I’m way too paranoid about dog thieves, and as I’ve said here before, young lurchers are very popular. So we went straight there and had a brief Ecstatic! Gambol! on Strange! New! Ground! —you’d think I keep the little frellers locked up in a closet, the way they go on. And then I lifted Darkness back in the car and tottered†† indoors. Tabitha was going to do both of us. And Chaos would, of course, help.
I brought Tabitha out to meet hellhounds because she was going to be twiddling Darkness while I lay inert and hallucinating on her table: part of the Bowen system is that they do something to you and then go away for a minute or several while your body decides what to do with what they’ve done. It tends to put me under almost on contact††† and I lie there having lovely experiences of other realities, periodically illuminated by Tabitha reappearing and doing something else. Today to my back and environs. I really feel I’ve been sufficiently punished for my indiscretion about high heels to the opera almost a month ago and I’m considering suggesting that fair is fair and it’s time Darkness started lifting me into the car occasionally. Today’s other realities were rather more ornamented by sudden starbursts and Catherine wheels of pain than usual.
During my first intermission I heard the front door open and close and then . . . a familiar sounding bark. One single, not-very-alarmed bark. A sort of ‘hmm what have we here’ bark. A second similar after a brief interval. A third after a slightly longer interval almost sounding as if he’d contracted for three and so had to fulfil the commitment. Then silence. I lay there in my semi-coma, semi-thinking okay, this is good, if someone ever did try and steal them, at least Darkness would bark.
Tabitha came back in giggling. Darkness may be the warning system but Chaos is the welcoming party. Hi! Can we play? I’m a really nice armful. Let me show you. –He’s really strong, said Tabitha. Ahem. Yes.‡ Then she did something else to me and I drifted away again. There was no more barking.
Darkness and I barely made a short round for the afternoon hurtle post-Bowen, much to Chaos’ chagrin. But Darkness, who is generally the better eater of the two of them—well, let’s say the less bad eater—has been decreasingly willing to go to the effort of eating the last week or so and is generally just more pulled-in on himself and wary, which is not Darkness’ natural temperament. And he came very nearly bounding out of the dog bed tonight to eat his supper standing up. All his supper. I can’t remember the last time he didn’t lie down first. And then eat three mouthfuls and look put-upon. Of course he’s also immediately showing a distressing desire to play tug-of-war games and I’m having to play the Big Meanie. But . . . progress. Yaay.
* * *
* Besides worrying about Sunday’s quarter peal
** There are thousands of Bowen sites out there now (including a few in ‘about’ on this blog) but here’s an interesting article about a test study: http://www.thebowentechnique.com/content/research.htm
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/24/lelisir-damore-review , although he’s suffering a slight case of critic-itis: L’Elisir is not a scathing portrait of anything, Dulcamara^ is fine, and his sidekick is supposed to be silly. Duh. Lighten up, Tim! —I am interested that the replacement soprano was flown in at the last minute: there was a lot of stage business that she sure got her head (and feet) around in a hurry. I assumed she was an on-site understudy, and had been through rehearsals.^^ Now this is almost funny: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/5901533/Opera-LElisir-damore-at-Glyndebourne-review.html He wants to slam it because it possibly dared try to take L’Elisir seriously. Is it a requirement of being a critic that you’re dyspeptic? Last night’s opera was adorable. Trust me.
^ Last time I saw L’Elisir I wasn’t a homeopath yet. Every time I hear Dulcamara’s name now I start moseying off on the homeopathic remedy. One of the games you play in college is deciding on a remedy for each of your tutors: the choices are not always polite. Last night was a dulcamara-y night too. http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Dulc
^^ At Glyndebourne prices, they ought to be able to afford understudies for the understudies.
Staring at the audience is almost as gratifying as listening to the music, at least for those of us who don’t live like that. There was one incredibly elderly lady we saw at tea, bent almost literally double, tottering along on her cane, wearing an odd sparkly cardie thing that I would buy in a minute in a vintage clothing shop. We decided that she’d sung in the chorus there before the war. The First World War. And has been coming every year since, having given up singing after her fiancé’s wood-canvas-and-baling-twine RFC plane was shot down.+ She is also possibly the Countess Flatfootflooziewithafloyfloy who donates a new production every year: she was certainly well-known to the staff. Peter and I both noticed the startling absence of frilly young things on smug elderly gentlemen’s arms: Peter opined lugubriously that wealthy elderly gentlemen are feeling the economic crunch too and are taking their wives to the opera this year.
Oh, and the bloke on my other side started talking to me while we were waiting for the second act! I’ve always been someone that people ask directions of, but is my face going all friendly in my old age, and not just harmless? Here I thought my last several operas have been so chatty because I was there alone. Fie.
+ The RAF didn’t come into existence till 1918: I just looked it up. I also have my resident history lesson sitting next to me at the table: Peter’s father flew in the RFC and . . . hey! Peter! Write me a blog entry!
† http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/home.do For you non Brits, it’s boooooooooks. I try to use Waterstones rather than amazon because it’s also a real store where you can go fondle the merchanise.
†† Bent almost double, although I have never sung at Glyndebourne. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that after about ten years of being married to Peter I found I remembered the ’40s well?^
^ I’m 57 this year. You do the maths.
††† I’ve never been hypnotised. I’d be tweeting like a bird before she got her shiny toy out and started waving it at me. I’m so clearly a brilliant subject I keep thinking I should try it some time to go to the dentist. Unfortunately I’m a coward of darkest French’s mustard hue.
‡ One of the other mysteries about last night’s audience was where were all the gym bunnies? Granted the absence of frilly young things, but not everybody present had sung there before WWI. I was talking to Hannah about this today^: doesn’t anybody just, you know, have a life with physical activity in it any more? Bell ringing? Hellhound lifting? Riding dressage on a horse that needs holding together? Not at Glyndebourne last night.
^ Thank the gods (and goddesses) for Hannah in my life for many, many reasons, but near the top of the list the last few years has been this menopause thing. She doesn’t get to eat either, and she has to work like a coal-heaver to stay fit. Since she lives in Manhattan however she has special dispensation to have a personal trainer and still be a normal human being. She sent me a photo of herself recently at the Prix Goncourt or some damn thing with six other editors and a stray dog and barring the dog she was probably twenty years older than any of them: and she was also the only one with arm definition.
Unfrelling Glyndebourne*
I lead such an exciting life.** So today was our third opera at Glyndebourne, http://www.glyndebourne.com/ , which is our annual holiday equivalent in terms of price—since it includes not merely two wallet-bendingly excellent tickets but dinner, half a bottle of champagne*** and a taxi.† And it happens at the end of July to celebrate our end-of-July anniversary, which is when I picked up the eccentric Englishman I knew slightly at the Bangor, Maine airport for a minor weekend of literary dalliance eighteen years ago, looked at him coming through the airport gate and said to myself, Oops. Here is trouble. The rest is history.††
The precise date of that meeting at the airport when the lines of fate wrenched themselves from their moorings and yelled, let’s boogie!, is the 26th, yesterday. When Vicky first suggested the quarter peal for Peter’s OBE on the 26th my first thought was crumbs†††, if we were going to Rusalka I could say no.‡ Three months ago or something—have I told you this already? I’ve told somebody this already—when we were buying the tickets, the end of July choices were Rusalka and L’Elisir d’Amore.‡‡ And Rusalka was even on the 26th. We’ve seen both before. Peter had a slight preference for Rusalka . . . but I decided I couldn’t face that morbid, masochistic and misogynistic fairy tale‡‡‡ on my finding-my-husband anniversary. So we went for L’Elisir d’Amore, which is a comedy, and can be very good fun if it’s done well and you aren’t too blistered about plausibility.§
. . . And I’ve spent the last three months worrying that I’d made a terrible mistake. I’ve been worrying harder since the new Glyndebourne Rusalka opened to tumultuously positive reviews. The L’Elisir is a mere revival, and I haven’t even seen a review, although it opened last week. And then we got there tonight to the news that the lead soprano is ill§§ and we were getting an understudy. Can this evening/marriage be saved.
Yes. It was brilliant. It was exactly what I at least wanted: gorgeously sung—the tenor was to die for and the understudy still stole the show—and cleverly staged with a good set that made sense§§§ and lots of very sharply played, well timed business. It was charming. It was delightful. I loved it. I can’t even think of anything to carp about.¤ And while when it’s this good it looks easy, both the main roles are actually a bit tricky to bring off: Adina is another of these heartless flirt types and her conversion may come as a ‘miser leans against wall and becomes generous’ moment; Nemerino is a gullible nincompoop and what sensible woman would want him? But they can be made appealing, and these singing actors did so, with the help of their cast, orchestra and director. Big yaays all around. Big sigh of relief from a certain spiffily dressed¤¤ American in the audience sitting next to a brand-new OBE in a black velvet jacket.
* * *
* My mods have actually started a thread in the mods-blogmom-and-hellgoddess zone discussing the number of times lately that ‘frell’ has appeared in my post titles. Very funny, guys! Ha ha ha ha ha very ——– funny!
** And tomorrow I have to get up at what passes in my case for the crack of dawn, because my semi-detached neighbour’s New Boiler Man is coming to rip the ugly shiny totally eye catching and out of place VENT out of the wall and BRICK IT OVER and I need to be awake^ to let him in. This is going to be worth even getting up early for. Not only is the vent ugly and eye catching etc it stinks. It’s one of these things that when you buy an old house you look at something—like your neighbour’s heating vent sticking into your garden—and think, how did that happen? Why didn’t my cottage’s previous owner say ‘vent your horrible boiler in your own garden’?
Now if only I could do something about the tacky and hideous shed roof that sticks up over the top of my wall from the next garden over toward the church. We’re all in a ‘conservation area’ so theoretically you aren’t allowed to put up eyesores, but this is only a serious eyesore to me and I’m sure if I went round and complained they’d say ‘bite me’. I’m still considering planting one of the tree-eater roses and flinging several times fifty foot of thorny stem onto said roof. That would be a much more desirable view from my office window.
^ And presentable. Which is to say dressed. Well, covered. I hope articulate isn’t required.
*** Of course
† Not only on account of the champagne, but it does play a part.
†† Including the 3rd of January following which is our wedding anniversary. We celebrate both.
††† No not frell! Crumbs!
‡ This is of course spurious. Vicky would merely have rescheduled. But it was still a nasty shock.
‡‡ The Fairy Queen is also playing, but Peter won’t sit through early twiddly operas like Handel and Purcell. I like Handel and Purcell operas.
‡‡‡ Dvorak is a funny old bloke. I tend to love folk music and fancy composed music derived from or inspired by folk music, which is no doubt why I like a lot of Dvorak’s stuff. But he sure went for the yucky: poor old Rusalka becomes a vengeful death spirit, luring humans to drown, because her human prince betrayed her, sort of, and the first one she gets to bump off is said prince himself, who either hadn’t betrayed her or didn’t mean to, and would rather die in her arms than live without her. Then how about the tone poems based on other Czech fairy tales: the Noonday Witch, in which the mother inadvertently smothers her baby to death, or the Water Goblin where he kidnaps and rapes a human girl and then kills her baby by bashing its head against her mother’s door when she manages to escape him long enough to run home. The Golden Spinning Wheel at least has a happy ending if you don’t mind a spot of murder and mutilation along the way. What is the matter with this guy?
§ If you’re going to get into opera, you really must shake your strong attachment to narrative credibility. This is Peter’s great stumbling block as the husband of an opera nut. He can’t.
§§ Peter was figuring out the probability, based on size of theatre against size of population, that somebody in the audience was coming down with swine flu. I suggested that the indisposed soprano had it which meant that the entire cast had been exposed, which meant. . . .
§§§§ Yes, all right, within the above bounds of lack of narrative credibility. But there were no snake pits like the cross-dressing Cabaret-escapee pub owner in the Peter Grimes I just saw at the ENO. And as far as narrative credibility goes . . . L’Elisir makes no less sense than the average Hollywood romcom, and more than a good many. Boy yearns after girl. Girl couldn’t care less till she thinks she’s lost him. Boy comes into huge sum of money and could have any girl. But he doesn’t want any other girl. Happy ending. One of the things I like about L’Elisir, in my tedious feminist way, is that Adina is the one with money and power, and she buys Nemerino’s commission back . . . and yet it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this may have emasculated him. It just means she loves him.
¤ . . . Yes I can. But it’s not worth it.
¤¤ If flat-heeled
La Traviata
I’m coming back on the train* from having seen Renee Fleming in La Traviata at the Royal Opera House. Beam.
It was also pretty fabulous.**
This was my coup. I have spent my opera going career fairly consistently missing the big names in the big titles–I mean the big names in the big titles I want to see.*** I missed Bryn Terfel in the Flying Dutchman a few months ago†, merely the latest in my catalogue of shame. And I should have missed Fleming in La Trav, only I heard someone on Radio Three mention it a month or so ago†† and I went WHAT?, and signed on immediately to check the web site, knowing it had been sold out since last century. And it was. Except–very like Norma–for one seat near the front in the (ahem) first circle, which means you’re sitting at a 90% angle to the stage, which gives the whole thing added drama as well as an excellent view of the orchestra pit.††† So I fell on it with little cries of glee and . . . the system threw me out mid-purchase, wouldn’t let me back in again, but the seat had disappeared.‡ It took a phone call to a real human being to prod it back out of the shadows again and get a rope around its neck.
The Fleming La Trav has been getting amazing reviews, with reviewers falling over themselves to heap sublime adjectives on Fleming’s unusual take on the heroine. Opera is not known for bothering with verisimilitude; if they’ve got the voice, they’re given the part, and never mind that they’re 40 years old and zaftig playing a 20 year old dying of consumption.‡‡ But Fleming, who is slender and elegant, is not 20, and she chose to play it as a grown-up. I was willing to go with this–I’m willing to go with almost anything that involves Fleming singing–but I’d give it a more mixed report. I always want to like Violetta, and I didn’t like the Violetta of the first act: she’s a very accomplished flirt, and completely heartless, and with mannerisms both vocal and physical that border on the eccentric. Some of the former were so extreme I thought oh, great, she’s having an off night–and my righthand neighbour said he thought some of them were not voluntary. But with her and the hero’s first duet I began to hear the Fleming I know and revere–and the tenor, just by the way, was a revelation. His name is Joseph Calleja and I will be looking for him after this. Not only does he have timbre to die for but he has the far more elusive quality of empathy. Alfredo is the most thankless role: spoilt, self-absorbed, tantrum-throwing little git: I’ve never seen a sympathetic Alfredo, and I would have said it wasn’t possible. It is possible: I saw one tonight.
The high point for me–the other thing, besides the sympathetic Alfredo, that I will be boring people to death about in future–was the first scene of the second act, when Alfredo’s dad pitches up to tell Violetta that her liaison with his son is Ruining the Family, especially Alfredo’s little sister’s chances of marrying a Nice Boy. And tells her briskly to give Alfredo up. We can argue about the plot some other day–La Trav may be my favourite opera; it’s been in the top three my entire life–but I offer no defense of the plot, which is about a woman being repeatedly and cumulatively victimised by men.‡‡‡ For some reason this scene often plays rather well, given a good Papa Germont, and we had an excellent Papa Germont (Thomas Hampson). He was excellent enough to stand up against Fleming, who was . . . I don’t know, words fail me, and I’ve already used ‘revelatory’ on the tenor . . . transcendent. It was an Act II scene i for the ages.
Unfortunately I had the same problem with the last act that I always have with the last act, which is that people dying of consumption are not that lively. Nor that beautiful. Fleming looked worse in the previous scene, when she’s gone back to her evil ways and is partying hard: she’s wearing a black dress§ that makes her look positively haggard, and I was thinking, oh, now that’s interesting . . . and was therefore even less ready for her to be frolicking around the stage–with lipstick and all her hair–in the final act. She did a better invalid’s totter in the first act. I saw a La Trav not all that long ago where Violetta spends the last act in bed, where she belongs, and the critics were complaining that it made the drama too static. Well, no. You’ve got Annina§§ bustling around, and the doctor, and a festival outside, which in a lot of productions (including this one) casts dancing shadows on the walls–I’d call it good dramatic tension, myself, the contrast with the almost motionless,§§§ dying figure in the bed. It’s then that much more pathetic and agonising when she tries to drag herself upright when Alfredo comes rushing in.¤
But it’s usually played as it was here, with Violetta looking the very picture of health till she collapses at Alfredo’s feet.¤¤ But it was all divinely sung, and I will put up with a lot of nonsense about tuberculosis for singing of this calibre–for this spectacular reminder that there’s a reason why old war horses become old war horses: because they work. La Traviata is a magnificent piece of theatre. I missed Gheorghiu, I missed Netrebko . . . but I didn’t miss Fleming.
And now, having successfully arrived at home some time mid paragraph above, I have to go boil a lot of water for a bath. The plumber comes tomorrow.¤¤¤
* * *
* With my laptop in my . . . lap. There are no tables in this train. What is the world coming to? I thought ten years ago that all trains would have outlets and internet connections by now^ . . . and here I am on a train with no tables? What’s next? The return of the horse and buggy? . . . I could go for that.
^ This is a little like thinking thirty years ago that the Women Who Do Things struggle in literature was going to be a thing of the past by now. Obviously my predictive faculty is defective.
** Glyndebourne had better be on its toes the end of the month.
*** It will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this blog that I have a fairly cranky list of good and bad singers. I think Renata Scotto, for example, would have made an excellent tea lady.
† And am missing him in Tosca now, goddammit.
†† It is one of those inexplicable laws of the snob class media that they don’t tell you about shows that are going to sell out until they have sold out. The latest Lloyd Webber is advertised for years in advance. Bryn Terfel in the Flying Dutchman you hear about on opening night.
††† Where the conductor was waving at the singers during the bits when the orchestra was quiet. I consider this an impertinence. I said this to my right-hand neighbour who thought it was very funny. His wife said, rather scandalised, that’s his job. Hmm. Well.
And there’s this to be said for going alone to things: I’ve never met so many chatty Brits in my life. I had a long conversation with one of my neighbours at Norma, and I had long conversations with not only both sets of neighbours at La Trav^ but both taxi drivers.^^ The problem with your neighbours at the opera is that they will probably know a good deal about opera, because barring a few upper class twits who go because One Does, you don’t spend good-seat money on something you don’t like a lot. Also opera is a nerd magnet: the trainspotter mentality is alive and well in opera audiences around the world. I have the attitude but I don’t have the memory. So I embark on conversations with my neighbours in some trepidation. Although I could be unlucky, chances are I can hold my own with taxi drivers.
^ The fellow on my left was obviously doing a Peter. He was there because his wife was an opera nut. I almost said ‘I have one of you at home’ and decided this could be misinterpreted.
^^ The thing I’m not drivelling on about is that the ME turned around and bit me again this morning. I was out hurtling hellhounds and quite suddenly, as often happens, between one stride and the next, I wanted to lie down and not move for several days. I compromised. I took taxis both ways between Waterloo and the ROH.
‡ Bring back the horse and buggy.
‡‡ This dates back to the very first Trav, in which Violetta was a billowing lump . . . who could put it over. It failed anyway: the bourgeoisie were too freaked out at having a whore as heroine.
‡‡‡ It gets a little more interesting when you know that Verdi lived with an ex-courtesan and was ostracised for it.
§ And flourishing a dark grey handkerchief. Ugh. Fire that designer.
§§ And here’s a pettest pet peeve: Halfway through the last act or so Violetta tells Annina to take half her remaining money and give it to the poor. What about Annina, you dumb schmuck? What about your faithful maid who has followed you into poverty and exile, and who is about to be out of a job when you piss on out of this life?? Never mind giving Alfredo your portrait in a locket to give to his future bride^: tell him to look after your maid.
^ Ewwwwwwww
§§§ With his dad. They can now afford to forgive her for breathing, because she’s not going to for very much longer.
¤ They want tips on how you behave when you’re too feeble to move, ask anyone with ME.
¤¤ I don’t know if she slipped, or he missed his grab, or what, but as dying falls go, this was not a good one.
¤¤¤ And Computer Men. My email is bust again. . . .
