A few thoughts about Opera
While climbing up Kilimanjaro
So what exactly is a Bucket List? I’m thinking about this as I am trudging up the stony path en route to the summit of Kilimanjaro. We are at around 5000 metres above sea level, or 15,000 feet in old money. It is tough, but not unbearable. It is long, however and to keep going, it’s important to have something to mull over for a couple of hours.
Dawn breaking on the roof of Africa
I am doing this trip to the “roof of Africa” with my youngest son Lucien. We’ve been talking about climbing Kili for years. Our trip has been organised by The Bucket List, a travel company which has compiled twenty or so excursions which people often talk about, sometimes for years. Hence, Kilimanjaro, but also Easter Island, Machu Picchu, scuba in the Maldives, etc. There’s more than foreign travel or famous summits, though, which fall under the Bucket List bracket. A close friend of mine said to me recently that a trip to the Royal Opera House was on his Bucket List.
This of course flies in the face of what the Arts Council of England, which funds the Royal Opera House to the tune of £22 million every year, believes. Trips to the opera should not be like a journey to the summit of Kilimanjaro; in other words a life memory which is expensive, deliberate and very much a one-off. They should be a customary experience. Normal. Possibly not weekly, but definitely one which might be managed two or three times a year. People should get used to going to the opera. It should be treated like going to the cinema.
This is one of the reasons why each of our big subsidised companies across the UK (Covent Garden, ENO, Opera North, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera) has a ‘season’ of operas to choose from, since you might like to pick and choose; leaven the balance of Mozart and Puccini with a bit of Britten and maybe stray into Tippett. This is a maxim of the subsidised sector.
Commercial impresarios aren’t too bothered with ‘seasons’. If something is a hit, it stays running in the same theatre for as long as there are punters to buy tickets for it. I give you Les Mis as an example. I went to see it when I was 18. It is still running. All over the world. People go and see it again and again.
However maybe subsidised opera companies, (and I write as a trustee, and supporter, of Opera North, so I do have skin in this game) ought to have a bit more of the Bucket List mentality about them. Make going to the opera a Very Special Activity, not a habit. Perhaps they ought to look, again, at the remarkably successful growth of the Glyndebourne model, where the art form is presented as a very one-off, special occasion rather than a regular outing. You know the format; lovely house with gardens, modestly-sized auditorium, familiar repertoire and a very long interval in which everyone gets slightly tipsy and eats delicious things from Waitrose.
Timings at Grange Park Opera
This summer I was invited to three such festivals, firstly at The Grange in Hampshire, where we saw Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea, then to Glyndebourne for Mozart’s Magic Flute and lastly to Grange Park in Surrey for a hilarious rendition of Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment.
The Magic Flute, at Glyndebourne
Each night was wonderful, and very special, and not just for me. Summer opera festivals are a serious event. People turn up on time. People bring furniture, in terms of tables and chairs. Some bring candles and candlesticks for the table. People dress up. This is A Night At The Opera. Men are in black tie, of course, and women really push the sartorial boat out.
As an example, I give you the queue for the Ladies’ toilets at Glyndebourne. There is nothing quite like the queue for the Ladies’ at Glyndebourne. Standing alongside about thirty women of all ages and sizes, it slowly dawns on you that everyone, including you, is dressed in a ‘gown’. Not a day dress, not a suit, not a cocktail frock, never trousers. A Gown is what you wear to Glyndebourne. This Gown is probably worn to nothing else all year. It is long, usually patterned, and might come with a co-ordinated bag. Flat shoes are allowed, because of the long interval where you picnic with sumptuous comestibles on the beautiful lawn, surrounded by herbaceous borders of the most exquisite form. In terms of dressing up, I think only the Oscars rivals Glyndebourne.
These nights are extremely successful. After reading rave reviews of Glyndebourne’s production of The Merry Widow this year, I tried to get tickets. Every night was totally sold out, which is remarkable. Glyndebourne is not brilliantly close to anywhere, apart from Lewes, and it is expensive. But it is very much a Bucket List event, and not just for the arts cognoscenti.
While wafting around the beautiful walled garden at Grange Park in my Gown, I saw a sort of manifesto up on a huge board, written by the ambitious and extremely active CEO Wasfi Kani. “While national opera companies are massacred,” she states, “it is left to the tsunami of summer opera to prove that the art form we all love is both wanted and needed.”
She might be onto something. (Incidentally, Grange Park also works with children in local schools and has projects in prisons. It’s not just all bow ties and gowns.) Perhaps our centrally funded, subsidised opera companies ought to stop considering this complex, expensive and wonderful art form as an everyday event, and bring a bit of the Bucket List vibe to it. Rather than being anxious about normality, and denim, perhaps the Royal Opera House should encourage gowns, and black tie. It sounds counter-intuitive, but dressing up and making something special honours the event in question. It doesn’t always make it more exclusive and unattainable.