Plenty to laugh about, but a bit to regret, in fine entertainment by a tragic genius

There’s some satisfaction in a talented individual receiving some recognition in his lifetime, rather than none at all. Particularly if the talent in question is more like genius. But it has to be sad if that lifetime was short, and mostly consumed generating works that should have won acknowledgement but didn’t, with triumph coming only in its last few weeks.

This is the sad background of The Magic Flute, the first piece that gave Mozart really widespread popular acclaim. Its premiere was on 30 September 1791, and such was its success that it reached 100 performances just over thirteen months later. But Mozart had died nearly a year before, on 5 December 1791, without reaching his 36th birthday, just over two months after the opera opened.

That, however, is the saddest thing about it. Otherwise the opera is an extraordinary piece of almost Monty Pythonesque fun and silliness. We have a fairy tale, complete with beautiful princess who falls in love at first sight (of course) with the dashing prince who sets out to rescue her. As for him, he doesn’t even wait till first sight to fall for her, instead being captured by just looking at her picture.

In parallel, we have a clown in the form of a bird catcher, a loveable rogue and fool, always getting into trouble, whose only aim is to find a woman who can be his mate. Does he find one? Is he going to have to marry the old lady he meets? Or will she turn out to be the gorgeous young woman of his dreams? You’ll not get a spoiler from me, though I will reveal that his name is Papageno and there’s a female character called Papagena.

No spoiler! But this is Papageno and Papagena
from the Welsh National Opera production

They have some pretty good songs, too.

And just who’s the adversary the dashing prince must take on to rescue the princess? Could it be the wicked sorcerer who has abducted her, or is he really the good and generous leader of an order devoted to the pursuit of nature, reason and wisdom? Is her mother really the wretched parent deprived of her child, or is she the wicked Queen of the Night? Is the opera about a rescue from the clutches of a kidnapper, or is it about the triumph of reason over the forces of darkness? Or the conflict of freemasonry (good, for Mozart) against the Catholic Church (not so good)? 

Who knows. It could be any of those things or none of them.

That’s how tense it gets. Imagine. We were on the edges of our seats.

One of the things I particularly like about this opera is that Mozart wrote for actual, real people. Individuals. His friend whose company would put it on in his own theatre, who wrote the libretto and was the first Papageno. The rest of the cast, made up in part of actors who could sing a bit, for whom Mozart had the orchestra playing the tune so they could sing along to it; singers for whom he had the orchestra playing a true accompaniment while they found the tune themselves; and some outstanding singers for whom Mozart wrote devilishly difficult bits, including what’s generally thought of as the hardest aria for any soprano (written for his sister-in-law).

Queen of the Night, in the Welsh National Opera production

And, boy, is that aria by the Queen of the Night extraordinary to hear.

So we had a great evening when we went to see the Welsh National Opera perform The Magic Flute at Milton Keynes theatre. Even the set was good, all pale blue sky with fluffy white clouds, which reminded us of a Magritte painting – an impression made all the stronger when we saw the male singers in bowlers.

Magritte Bowler-clad men and fluffy skies

Male singers in the Welsh National Opera production of
The Magic Flute

The voices were excellent, the whole performance well-paced and wittily staged. A great way to spend a few hours.

I only wish Mozart could have seen a little more of his great success.

Diane Lockhart: a touch of fantasy for a magical evening

When majesty strikes life, and at the same time fantasy invades reality, surely we have all the ingredients for a magical evening?

I wrote on Saturday about heading to St Martin’s in the Fields church, for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, partly in expiation of a broken promise to my son. It was an outstanding evening. 

We’d bought our tickets early and were at the front of the Church, barely out of arm’s reach of the soloists, so we had them singing more or less straight into our faces. That description may not sound particularly attractive, but the experience was inspiring, mesmerising.

And then in the interval, several of us popped down to the café for a drink. Well, you have to really: how many other places can you have a coffee under the pillared arches of a church crypt?

That’s when I practically walked into Diane Lockhart of the celebrated Chicago law firm, Lockhart Gardner.

Diane Lockhart, much as she looked in the crypt of
St Martin in the Fields on Saturday

Now let’s be absolutely clear. I’m fully aware that Lockhart Gardner is a fictional firm in The Good Wife which is, after all, merely a soap, however ingeniously constructed. However, I would maintain to all comers that the woman sitting on her own, looking perhaps even a little solitary, sipping her coffee at a table near the entrance, was not Christine Baranski, who plays Diane Lockhart in the series, but Lockhart herself.

Why, she had Lockhart’s clothes, Lockhart’s makeup, even Lockhart’s poise and elegance. She was Lockhart.

I had to check, of course.

‘Did you see?’ I asked Danielle when I caught up with her, ‘by the door? Diane Lockhart?’

‘I thought it must be her,’ she answered.

‘It definitely was,’ said the young woman at the next table, and when her companion asked, to my astonishment, ‘who?’ she explained ‘Tanya from Mamma Mia.’

Tanya? Mamma Mia? What a load of nonsense. Lockhart’s a lawyer, not an actor. What an earth would she be doing in some Mediterranean romp of a musical?

Naturally, because I’m terribly proud of my English aloofness and dignity, I didn’t approach Ms Lockhart and introduce myself. On the other hand, as I’m just as imbued with English curiosity, I did hang around the edges of the group who, accompanying the Mamma Mia woman, threw dignity to the winds and asked her for autographs. She confirmed the identification and looked pleased at the attention or, more likely, fed up to the back teeth with the attention but professional enough to pretend she was pleased.

For my part, I was delighted to see her there. Things have been a bit tough in the Good Wife recently. A lot of tension. Between some of my favourite characters. A nasty conflict, and since I’m fond of them all, I’m not sure who I really want to see coming out on top.

Lockhart’s earning quite enough (as I expect Baranski is) to be able to pop over to London from time to time for a little R&R. Must be doing her good, particularly since the Mozart Requiem was rather fine. Balm to her soul, I’d say.

The only worry was that I couldn’t see her husband anywhere. I’m sure hardly anyone needs telling, but he’s Kurt McVeigh (ably represented by Gary Cole), a ballistics expert, NRA supporter and general firearm nut. The liberal Lockhart (friend of Hillary Clinton) has nothing in common with him politically, but the warmth of their feelings made a marriage between them ultimately inevitable. Given the stress she’s facing, she must need his support more than ever.

Still, I saw her again outside the Church, after the Concert, clearly waiting for someone. McVeigh strikes me as not the kind of man who would be particularly drawn to Mozart, so he may have spent a couple of hours in more congenial company, perhaps with some fine representatives of the British huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set. It seemed likely that he would turn up shortly to whisk her off somewhere they could wrap up the night in style.

I hope so, anyway.

At any rate, I was delighted she was there. The majesty of the music had injected magic into the evening. Her presence had provided fantasy.

For that, I owe her my heartfelt thanks.

A promise made is a debt unpaid

Debts, it’s frequently asserted, are there to be paid.

The French say that ‘good accounts make good friends.’ Polonius, in Hamlet, warns his son ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, which isn’t quite the same thing: while Shakespeare clearly feels debts are not to be carried, he only suggests not incurring them in the first place, which isn’t a lot of use if you already have.

No one sums it up better than Robert Service, who has little claim to be taken seriously as a poet in spite, or perhaps because, of having written one of the world’s finest comic poems, The Cremation of Sam McGee. It includes the sonorous sentiment:

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code

I know what he means.

Fifteen years ago I suggested to my son Michael, then in his mid teens, to take him to a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. The third person due to join us was a German friend of ours, Alenka. She would, I suspect, herself be the first to admit that her life isn’t unduly marked by anything one might call order or structure. She tends rather to create an atmosphere around her that is redolent of the sixties, wherever she goes.

In one respect, however, Germany has influenced her far more than hippiedom. She has, in spades, the German respect for punctuality. I remember a boss telling me with some annoyance, long before I’d learned the lesson, that the only way to turn up to appointments on time, is to set out to be early. That was our friend Alenka through and through.

So she was at our place to collect me for the concert at a ridiculously early hour, or so it seemed to me, accustomed as I was to turn up for such events just a minute or two before applauding the musicians as they trooped in. Alenka was more the ‘sit quietly in your place and make small talk for twenty minutes’ kind of person.

Michael wasn’t home when she showed up. Since he hadn’t expressed any particular enthusiasm for joining us, I decided to set out with Alenka alone at the moment when waiting had tried her impatience to breaking point – still, in my view, far earlier than necessary.

Alas, on my return after a fine performance of what remains one of my favourite pieces, I found Michael more than a little put out at having been left behind.

‘You went off without me. You knew I was coming.’

Well, I hadn’t been sure, and I’d felt pressurised by Alenka... but in reality, no excuses helped me feel any better. I’d gone without him, though he’d wanted to come, and he was disappointed. All the guilt a parent can feel towards a child he’s let down invaded me. I wonder if there are any parents out there who haven’t suffered the same gnawing feeling?

And from that date, it’s never left me. But this year, back in September, I went to a concert in London at St Martin in the Fields (remember the nursery rhyme? You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin's?). It was a glorious baroque setting in which to listen to glorious baroque music. My heart particularly leaped when I saw that a performance of Mozart’s Requiem was planned for 9 November. 

St Martin's: just the place for Baroque music.
And not bad even for classical

The ensemble may not have been the best I’d ever heard, but surely no one can completely cock up the Requiem, can they? I mean, the music’s just majestic enough to carry the performers with it, however limited their talents. This lot weren’t untalented, it was just that they left me unconvinced they were entirely outstanding. In any case, this was an opportunity not to be missed.

So the very next day I was on the line to Michael in Madrid, where he now lives.

‘Book a ticket for that weekend,’ I suggested.

‘Out on the Thursday, back on the Monday? Will that do?’ he promptly responded.

The day has now come. We have the tickets. Michael’s in the house. Alenka’s not around to disrupt proceedings with her chronological puritanism.

I don’t know whether the performance is going to be brilliant or just passable. Either way, the setting will be breathtaking. And several friends are joining us, so the ingredients for a good evening will all be there. And, above all, I’ll keep a promise made, discharge a debt unpaid. 

A great weight will be lifted from my heart 15 years after it first settled there.

Multiculturalism: a crass Prime Minister refuted by events and a fine pianist

To have an incompetent as Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune, but to have a crass incompetent looks more like carelessness.

‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream,’ claimed David Cameron back in February 2011, in a speech in Munich.

It may have been merely crass to make such speech in Munich, of all places, which gave the supreme mono-culturalist Hitler his early power base. The Woolwich attack against a British soldier last week has also shown it to be deeply misguided: Hazel Blears pointed out, in reaction to that attack, that it had been shortsighted to emasculate the ‘Prevent’ programme, which she had led in the previous government, and which aimed to channel local money into moderate organisations, to turn young people away from extremism.

And when did Cameron announce the plan to ‘review’ (read ‘cut to the bone’) the Prevent programme? Why, in his Munich speech.

In any case, why is multiculturalism receiving such a bad press? It is often one of the most powerful source of riches in a society. For instance, I have a superb recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas on in the background as I type this, and it’s hard to imagine a more striking illustration of the benefits of multiculturalism.

Back in the 1630s, the new rulers of Japan, just emerged from a terrible century of civil war, decided that peace required rigid controls. As well as severe internal measures, they decided to allow no further contact with the outside world: nobody would go out, nobody would be allowed in. Even Japanese nationals then abroad would be refused the right to return home.

As an exercise in mono-culturalism, this attempt at seclusion could hardly be exceeded.

In reality, small exceptions were made to these draconian measures. After all, political power’s important, but trade provides life’s luxuries, and if you have political power, luxuries are pretty much a necessity. So the Shogunate allowed limited trade with China, Korea and even with Europe.

The Portuguese had built good (commercial) relations with Japan, but missionaries had come in their wake and made some inroads into local communities. Worshippers of the Prince of Peace can sometimes become seriously troublesome, and the Japanese decided they’d had enough of the Portuguese; from 1641 onwards, they only allowed European trade with the Dutch, and only through an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour.

The trading post on Dejima island:
sole point of contact with Western culture in Japan for over two centuries

The Dutch were Protestant, which probably made the Japanese think they’d be less trouble: they hadn’t met some of the more far-out sects of our days, in the United States, say, or Northern Ireland.

The relative seclusion of Japan lasted for nearly two and a half centuries. And what centuries they were in Europe: this was the time of Galileo and Huyghens, of Newton and Lavoisier, of Fermat and Linnaeus and Gauss. A time for the blossoming of enquiry and discovery.

The Japanese have exactly the same hunger for understanding and knowledge as anyone else. So on board the Dutch ships that arrived at Dejima island in Nagasaki Bay, there were books, books, books.

Japanese intellectuals painstakingly translated these works, sometimes word for word, so that they could share in the great awakening taking place in the West.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the West forced Japan to open its doors. Force was used at first, but the Japanese leaped at the opportunities it created. The nation quickly became a world power, a huge trading centre, with political institutions modelled on Western lines, with great centres of learning in which the world’s knowledge was taught, with – and this would end in tears in the middle of the next century – great military power too, capable of inflicting a crushing defeat on the Russian navy in 1905, just 37 years after the end of the Shogunate.

In the middle of all this, Japan took up Western music as well, and learned to excel in it. Have you seen the Japanese film Departures? If not, track it down and watch it now. The central theme is the deeply traditional practice of preparing bodies for the coffin, a preparation carried out with great art and love; but the protagonist of the film is a young cellist and in an early scene we see his orchestra performing Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

Such are the deep roots that Western music has put down in Japanese culture.

I found that surprising when I first learned of it, but I also found it moving. So it was poignant to hear the Japanese pianist, Mitsuko Uchida, talking to the BBC nearly twenty years ago about her joy at being able to record the Mozart sonatas in their entirety. I could feel, even in a radio interview, all the love she felt for this great music, a love reflecting an understanding and sensitivity far beyond my powers, although in theory this was my culture and not hers.

Mitusko Uchida: born in Japan, she's made Western music her own

That’s multi-culturalism, and what a powerful source of good it is. Uchida has, since then, given it still stronger expression, taking out British nationality and becoming, indeed, a Dame Commander of the British Empire. I have my doubts about those titles and honours, but I’m unambivalent in my delight that she received one.

So I sit back and enjoy Uchida’s extraordinary, light but powerful, sensitive but humorous, rendering of some of the greatest music the West has produced. And I wonder at Cameron’s crass words against multi-culturalism.

We need to remind ourselves of those men of secluded Japan who struggled through works from an alien culture, whose contents they knew they somehow had to penetrate. And how the the seeds they sowed blossomed in work like Uchida's.

What is there to reprove, and not to admire, in their multi-cultural efforts?