The Arts and how they are done - Part One: Opera (How to ruin it and enrage the bourgeoisie)

When the curtain rose on Robert Carsen’s new staging of Handel’s Rinaldo, you could almost hear the audience’s low groan. Oh no, it’s going to be another of these weird productions. Not the lovely colourful escapist fantasy that reading the plot had led one to hope for. No hint of the romantic spectacular adventure in which Tasso’s brave Christian warrior Rinaldo frees the lovely Almirena from the clutches of the sorceress Armida and the Saracen Argante. No eye-candy, no special effects, no gorgeous costumes: instead Gideon Davey has designed a bare-walled schoolroom, and the whole show has gone a bit Hogwarts. 

Rinaldo is transformed into a Harry Potter figure, with a picture of Almirena inside his desk. Armida strips off her black academic gown and mortar-board to reveal herself as a vamping dominatrix; Rinaldo’s boys wear cuirasses over their grey school uniforms. Armida imprisons Almirena in a dormitory, policed by a St Trinian’s-educated girl gang. 

That was the thinking man's unreconstructed music lover, Rupert Christiansen, in the Telegraph. Here's the Guardian making the cardianl point informing my rage-of-the-day, today:

The cliches wouldn't matter so much if the staging didn't so seriously undercut the music. 

You think?

Earlier this year, we had Britten's setting of Shakespeare's Dream, at 'English National' hahaha 'Opera'. Only, we didn't. We had schoolboy savagery ratcheted up into paedophiliac sadism and Lord of the Flies. Nice.

Poor Britten. Poor, poor Britten. The vicarious, armchair thrill of picking over evidence of his (no longer hidden) sexuality in the minutiae of his work goes ever on; and I’ve rarely seen a nastier, more gratuitous example than the new A Midsummer Night’s Dream that opened last night at ENO. Directed by Christopher Alden (who might not care to see his own sexuality paraded with such finger-wagging reproof), it’s more a nightmare than a dream: dark, bleak and desperate. 

That's the Telegraph's Michael White (no relation), another thinking man who declines to bow the knee to the zeitgeist. Yes, there is a fightback in progress against risibly sycophantic, postmodernist critics who shore up the offending directors.

I know many people who no longer go to the opera, put off by the sex and violence which is force-fed to them as they struggle to listen to sublime music and remember the story the composer had in mind. As Frankie Howerd used to say, they get enough sex and violence at home, as do I who have gone from opera-nut to fearful-reader-of-reviews before lashing out £50-120 to get a decent seat.

There was a moment, back there, when I thought, mistakenly, that we’d got past all that nasty adolescent directorial glee in humiliating gifted singers by forcing them to prance about in what the Guardian critic describes as the sort of..

... PVC number that Glyndebourne must have ordered from a very special Soho shop.

This is all in order (allegedly) to ‘reinterpret for our time’ the canonical works of the greatest composers. I suppose that in itself says something pretty unpalatable about 'our time' although I would argue that it says something specific about the opera directors of our time.

Some of them, especially those who knock around with the Brit Art crowd (remember when they were cool, back when Tracey wasn't an almost-Tory?), have never grown up. Some were educated, for want of a better word, by teachers who instilled in them a unwonted self-confidence and the habit, so familiar in the riot-loving community, of in-yer-face assertiveness. Notwithstanding their contempt for what little they seem to know of cultural history, even despite, in some other cases, an expensive education in real schools, they ache to recreate the climate of cultural rejection of the 1960s which (aw) they are too young to know about, having to rely on their lecturers, themselves riddled with nostalgia for a rebellion in which some people they had heard of took part.

These highly-paid autocrats of the opera stage dictate to conductors, musicians, singers, dancers, designers and highly-qualified technicians who all have to bow to their every instruction however insane, if they want the work. Who hires them?  Grant-hungry managements. Whence the grants? Why, quangos run by the Enlightened Ones, of course.

In the columns of the Sundays and on Radio 3, they like to kid themselves (as in the Eye's It's Grim Up North London) as they try to kid us that they aren’t totally embedded in the middle class which they so despise but whose black-tied, posh-frocked browbeaten acclaim feeds their galactic egos. Their egos are further bolstered by the shedloads of money siphoned out of your pocket and into theirs via the Arts Council. You are subscribing to the cost of their NY Meat-Packing District lofts, their exclusive club memberships and club class travel, and their subscriptions to the Staggers, Prospect, the New Yorker and Opera Now.

Meanwhile, the audience is mostly listening with its eyes shut, blanking out the director's 'concept' with its own mental pictures as if with a radio play, desperate to enjoy the glorious music unsullied by the unpalatable onstage guff. They wait (fairly) patiently for the interval when they can get outside the couple of stiffeners necessary to fortify them through the next Act, whispering furtively to each other about the ghastliness of it all and if only this bloody director (another one!) would just let the music speak for itself and not place his fat bloody ego between the them and the composer.

A psychologist friend thinks the worst of these directors are stunted adolescents, still giving the finger to their dads, still half-hoping their mums will burst in to find them wanking in their bedrooms instead of doing their homework.

Speaking of homework… no, life's too short so I won’t start about the mandatory displays of contempt from our entire taxpayer-funded dramatic establishment for the historical, literary and cultural content underpinning the original intentions of the great composers. I mean, they may be good enough songs but FFS, these blokes were working for imperialist patrons and their slave-owning social-climbing rentier hangers-on. Leeches and oppressors. History? Gimme a break. Even the schools have dropped it. And those doorstop tomes by dead white males like Ariosto? Who? Fuck 'em. And now, colleagues, I give you the toast:  'To the honour of Fabius Maximus, Antonio Gramsci and Anthony Crosland, and long life to the Arts Council.'

But I won't go there today. I'll tack it onto another post in the hatchery, the one about the destructive, anti-cultural, anti-social, fascistically anti-English and anti-British legacy of the tax-leaching Tate-ist tendency.

Good afternoon.



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