Opera is the coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing in the greatest synthesis of art capable of collapsing at the beep of a watch alarm. It is man’s highest creation, his most expansive assertion of artistic supremacy over the inferior beasts and birds of nature who, proficient though they might be with sticks and spittle, can’t perform tricks as staggeringly complex as mounting a three-act declaration of love from a wooden castle.
Foxes don’t sing and leverets are incapable of costume design, so they needn’t bother trying. Armies of termites, though they may impress us with their 20ft-high mud constructions, haven’t a hope in hell of building anything out of wet dirt as architecturally elaborate as a publicly funded opera house, with its dazzling honeycomb of boxes and its awesome web of sturdy crush bars. Have I made myself clear, animals? We’re better than you, so go back to doing what you do best, which is sniffing at bushes.
This is what opera is. It’s the rustle of programmes and clack of glasses cases of several thousand people anticipating grandeur. A few are celebrating their birthday, many are romantically involved with others in the audience, some are dying, several are currently being burgled, five have grit in their eye, one lost her dog to a temporarily out-of-control recovery vehicle that morning, more than you think are currently passing on an unpleasant dietary virus to their neighbour, over a third will find the evening didn’t quite match their expectations.
The conductor. Was knighted five years ago for making terrifying demands on his horn section. Is a single man, dedicated to music and bitterness, secretly nurturing a reputation for shambolic jacket/trouser coordination so it may procure for him that title of “genius” that the newspapers have so far forgotten to award. Has the pervasive breath of claggy mint gums, which he regularly puffs across the violins and cellos, who call him Menthol Mickey in tea bar rehearsal breaks.
He comes on.
The audience now applaud the respect and admiration the orchestra fling at him in his pit. From this underground nerve centre, he bobs his little white ground-levelled head round to smile at the line of eager and disappointingly shod feet he’s playing to in the front-row stalls.
Music. Strange, this, coming from under the stage, and for the first 10 minutes all we’ve got to look at is a heavy curtain with the crest of a crowned unicorn mounting a heron.
But the first notes strike us as lovely and we start giving the experience the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, the burglars jemmy their way in through an upstairs window and start looking for the plasma telly. The rustling in the circle falls to a minimal patter as the music swells.
The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. It lays before us the themes which will dominate the evening’s performance. Wagner’s peculiar chord near the start, pinpointing everything from Isolde’s doomed love for Tristan to Tristan’s annoyance at having his emotions jerked around by somebody’s love soup, crowded on to a little blurt of sound that the programme notes tell us turned the music industry upside down.
The music continues, and Menthol Mickey’s arms form spindly shadows on the front curtain, attaching giant black rotating antlers to the head of the raped heron. This is passionate music now, and the sound from the orchestra slushes and glides around in a slowly blossoming wallow. The audience make last-minute assessments of near neighbours, calculating from the frequency of coughs and the guessed texture of the liquid mix jumbling around inside whether the offenders are having a final clear-out or are digging themselves in for an evening’s phlegmish sabotage.
The music reaches a peak of intensity symbolising Tristan and Isolde being at it like knives, and three rows from the back, inside a small woman, on her upper gums, four from the left, a tooth begins to hurt. The tooth was attended to yesterday, didn’t like the experience and has now decided to give his owner a little nudging reminder of what he can do when he puts his mind to it. His owner makes a mental note to book a further appointment.
The curtain rises as the thieves find the plasma screen and start disconnecting it from the wall. The arrangement of shapes and colours on stage will determine whether an audience smiles at the welcome arrival of an old friend, or frowns in anticipation of an evening blighted by modernism, like a dinner spoiled by a daughter’s art school boyfriend.
This evening falls somewhere in between. Familiar bits of building and rampart are hung in a peculiar combination (one man is upside down) but the settings are shatteringly far from the Cornwall of the original story (the first act takes place in a continental sauna). It’s apparent the audience will have to do some work for their average seat price of £94.
And over there are the soloists, Isolde bound against her will for a forced marriage with an enemy despot while harbouring unrequited love for her father’s killer, and her trusty maid telling her it could be worse. As they sing and towel themselves in the shadows and beautifully lit darknesses of a guarded steam room, it’s clear this evening we’re going to be in the company of an Isolde who is colossal.
Opera can be unkind to the massive. It thrives almost exclusively on prolonged demonstrations of love and captivating beauty, yet has constructed traditions of vocal power and range that demand these love anthems be projected from a big chest. Bulky singers have to fight against the obvious stupidity of the undertaking by producing sounds that transcend girth, and hoping to God the director doesn’t ask them to roll around in an upstage forest glade. Despite some knowledge of the music, despite even a familiarity with the peculiar habits of opera, there is still a detectable, sniffable gas of suspicion wafting across the audience that they have paid to watch a huge bad thing. The evening could go up in flames at any moment.
And yet the music just about banishes that threat. Out of passages only moderately captivating come regular bursts of overwhelming glory that grab concentration, dim pulsing teeth, usher someone away from thoughts of baking, another from planning tomorrow’s elopement, a third from still-felt contempt for his doctor. As the sounds soar and mingle perfectly, the evening makes sense, the stupidity is forgotten and the burglars and the rain and the hundred cars outside and the fight 40 yards across the street, and then someone sneezes, which is when, somewhere in the middle of the second act, in a radical switch to the American midwest, we return to a stage full of big people and papier-mache cacti.
The evening tos and fros between these two states of appreciation. The music constructs an opera of ideal beauty and total tragic conviction, while our eyes apprehend something tiptoeing on the borderline with the abysmal. These two forms occasionally merge in magic moments of believability, when for a brief second the only thing that seems real is an enormous couple singing German laments about fatality while wearing Stetsons and rejoicing in love at a Kansas rodeo.
This magic is dissipated, by the drop of a purse, or the demented half-time rush to the interval bar, leaving Tristan, now kebabbed on a spear, to die in German out of every one’s hearing, slowly fading while tethered to a still-moving mechanical bucking bronco. Once again it’s easy to gaze at watches and flick through programmes, and to take in wider views not only of the stage but of the conductor’s feverishly bouncing head. Focusing wider still, you can see the patchwork of cemented haircuts along the front rows and gaze up to the sides of the building, noticing the boxes from which people view events from a severe angle. You can wonder what the Queen makes of all the performances she is forced to see bent round at 79 degrees, and whether she remembers the evening not for what she saw on stage but who she was staring at across the theatre.
God in Heaven, that music. Though familiar and twisted into cliche through overuse in romantic films and ironic underwear commercials, it suddenly seems shocking, heard for the first time, magnificent, as Tristan lies dead on a 17ft-wide buttercup, and Isolde chats musically about love and dying and movingly sings “oh dear”. And it thrusts and soars up again, and sounds obviously obscene, and dies to a trickle and once again everyone has forgotten everything. But now the applause reinstates normality as the cast bows to Menthol Mickey, and someone hands a basket of flowers to Isolde, and already people are leaving, and the bitter tooth throws another tantrum, and the singers come on just one time too often, and the applause sounds shirty as the theatre empties and the burglars accidentally tip over an ashtray, which deposits stains on their shoes, helping police establish their shoe size, leading to the arrest of one of them and his imprisonment in a cell half a mile away from this building, where he listens to a recorded transmission of this evening’s performance because he likes opera.
- This is an edited extract from Armando Iannucci’s Hear Me Out published on 28 September by Little, Brown. Opera: Passion, Power and Politics is at the V&A, London SW7, from 30 September.
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