The programme is out, and every opera performance at this year's Edinburgh International Festival is in German and a minimum of three hours long. I do not object in principle to opera in German, indeed I was hoping for some more concert Wagner, following the excellent Siegfried of a few years ago that I see I didn't post about.*

I was not hoping for Tannhäuser. Nor was I hoping for The Magic Flute nor The Threepenny Opera. Wait, I forgot, there is also Bluebeard's Castle, sung in English! It's a reimagined version sung in English about living with dementia.

Dad and I felt that if it must be drama, we'd prefer Trojan Women in Korean. At least it would be different, and under three hours. Unfortunately, both that and some other concerts are on a weekend I was not planning to be there.

Anyway, some looking at the calendar may be required. It's not just that I was rather thinking it would be good to have He Who Drowned the World to read on the way home, but the World Athletics Championships is on, which it would be fun to watch with my parents. Oh yes, plus fitting around the trains from Oxford, for which there are lots of closures due to alterations to the station. That will be interesting...

*We booked for Götterdämmerung in 2020, guess what happened.

About 10 days ago a university friend with a shared interest in opera sent me a link on Facebook consisting of the words "Looks relevant to your interests" and a link to a friend of hers tweet that Amazon had a special offer on a Frederica von Stade CD compilation for £4.75. Reader, I bought it and now I finally have a CD recording of her singing Non so piu and not simply a VHS.

It's nice to think that my teenage self may have been terribly wrong on some subjects*, but was thoroughly right on others, and fun sometimes to think of new things that I've found since as something that I would have loved had I known they existed (or they actually existed) when I was fifteen. Which is why I spent a bit of time this weekend listening to my new CD and doing watercolour exercises** from a recently-acquired book, Painting Landscapes from Your Imagination, to learn some proper techniques for all those Tolkien-esque mountains I used to spend hours on. It's a terrific book that I only wish I'd known about in 1996. My purple sky about Minas Tirith/Rivendell/with dragons in it will be a higher quality purple sky!

*Especially every single time my mother had a different opinion on clothes to me. In my defence, it was the early 90s.

**The great thing about art is that much of it can be done sitting down. Even better, watercolour needs to dry so what would normally be a slightly frustrating wait becomes a useful break.

Though first, a low ( hoisting of the black and yellow flag.  )

Whoever manages to be up to date with everything that they might watch on TV/the internet? I certainly don't. And coronavirus is only making it worse, because a whole rack of art and media companies are making material available for free online. So here's a few I'll be availing myself of. I can access all of these in the UK, but some may not be available outside it.

Norway's state media 24 hour Maine Coon kitten cam: https://www.nrk.no/alltidsammen/ Talk about lifting the national mood! You can stream cats all day and night. (During the day there seems to be great Norwegian sports highlights* at the weekend, radio in the week, but you can click on "Alltid katt")

Previously mentioned in this space, Opera North's amazing semi-staged Ring Cycle was my introduction to Wagner: https://www.operanorth.co.uk/the-ring-cycle/

The National Theatre will be streaming a play a week starting on 2nd April with One Man, Two Guv'nors, which I'm especially delighted about because I missed it in the theatre, and then in the cinema twice (last time in September - I had a ticket, but was ill...) https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/at-home I'm also looking forward to Twelfth Night at the end of April.

OperaVision is an existing programme of free opera from mostly European opera houses. Everything from Glyndebourne to modern Icelandic/Danish opera (no, I haven't watch that one yet)@ https://operavision.eu/en

There's an awful lot on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I suppose it is time for me to watch Fleabag. Meanwhile I might revist the 90s with channel 4 vampire series Ultraviolet: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/ultraviolet/on-demand and Leeds set legal drama North Square https://www.channel4.com/programmes/north-square starring a youthful Rupert Penry-Jones and Helen McCrory.

*Insert obvious joke here.

...Diana Damrau did it better. Though perhaps Australia's "Zero Gravity" is the Before of which 'Der Hölle Rache' is the After. Anyway, here it is.

The annual Welsh National Opera sojourn in Oxford moves about a bit. From last year's end of November, which I didn't make it to due to the Joy of Labyrinthitis, it moved forward to this week. To which I can't make it to Saturday's War and Peace due to being in Scotland, but did get myself a ticket last night to La Traviata, which I haven't seen in years.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening - I was going to say 'enjoyable rather than exhillerating', which sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, which wouldn't be fair. It's just that the last thing I was Siegfried and I think that Wagner might have spoiled me. It was a good production (David McVicar) of a classic piece, which I had never actually seen done lavishly before. Well-sung, well-acted*, and a fab matador dance, I would have liked a little more sharpness of dramatic tone at times, whereas it went for the more purely romantic drama. Also, I like my Germonts terribly anguished from Act 2, not just the end. What made the evening for me was Act 3, which really concentrated the emotional and dramatic weight to portray a character in the process of dying, not just waiting to sing her last line.

Though to be honest one of the best moments was my realisation towards the end of Act 2 that I was at the theatre and still fully awake despite having come straight to the theatre from work. I had deliberately held off buying my ticket until the preceding day in order to only go if I didn't have freshers' flu, and the no-congestion evening was great. It is so much easier to appreciate the performance when you're not rubbing your eyes every five minutes.

Have Angela Gheorghiu and Leo Nucci as broadcast on TV in my formative years.



*The internet tells me that tenor Kang Wang is about 30 and he looked significantly younger, which is a great help to characterization by having Alfredo be a callow youth overwhelmed by emotion and not dealing with it well, rather than suddenly being unpleasant in the second half of act 2.

Or in this case, cosmonauts.*

Why? I really don't get it. There you are, a middle-aged Russian General singing about how your life has been transformed by your new wife, whom you adore, but instead of listening with rapt attention and anguished grief at the one who got away** Bo Skovhus is, quite understandably, staring at the random cosmonaut mannequins on the revolving stage. Given the random ballet dancers, people with sickles and red T-shirts, and vaguely Empire line clad women who are presumably meant to be in a Tolstoy novel, I think that they are meant to be some sort of representatives of Russian culture, but why?

Anyway, it is here:



*Rants about random opera astronauts of the past are here.

**Or rather, the one he didn't care about until she was with someone else, which appears to be the story of Onegin's love life.

There is a crucial difference between Brexit and the plot of Götterdämmerung: though both have the leaders involved throwing their hands in the air and sitting doing nothing but wait until the house burns down around them, while elsewhere a bunch of people make some staggeringly stupid decisions despite the consequences surely being obvious from the start, the characters in the latter were actually gods, as opposed to just being bitter about membership of a school club. Also, a great redemption is definitely not spreading throughout this particular world as a result of their downfall. However George Osborne was present at both.*

Despite 6 hours** of Wagner feeling like a dubious decision 24 hours in advance, it turned out to be brilliant on the day. Indeed as the end approached I felt that 6 hours was far too short and it needed at least an additional hour. Nor was I alone in thinking so, judging by the comments from audience members near me at the end, and the general riveted silence.

It was a concert performance, being the only way Opera North can afford to do something like the Ring, but it felt as if nothing was lost thereby. Big screens at the back provided surtitles (good ones, thank goodness, no faux archaism. Whatever is lost in not distinguishing between du and Sie is more than gained in not sounding stupid when read in English in performance) and a degree of setting, of riverbank or water, wooden walls of a Dark Ages hall, fiery rock etc, with the aid of some coloured lighting. It doesn't sound much, but it really worked. No singer actually vaulting onto horseback and riding into the flames*** could have been more dramatic than a woman in evening dress standing in front of the orchestra in yellowing light, voice soaring seemingly effortlessly above it. And what an orchestra! I didn't manage an on-stage count, but as an estimate combined with a conservative reading of the programme**** I'd go for about a hundred (and I've just found confirmation - 101!). The orchestra of Opera North is always one of its strengths and this occasion was no exception, they were in magnificent form.

Wagner has a reputation of being hard-core opera. On the train in I was regretting that I hadn't had time to go carefully over leitmotifs etc in order to educate myself sufficiently to appreciate it. Reader, this is rubbish. Bad Wagner is probably incomprehensible torture on grounds of length alone, but good Wagner isn't hard at all. It's wonderful music that while I'm sure it greatly rewards study is very accessible without it and the leitmotifs leap up waving and shouting notice me! Alternatively, possibly I am simply well-trained in the School of Opera North, which has long interwoven Box Office certainties with more inventive repertoire. After all, Wozzeck is not only challenging and allows you to distinguish yourself as a company, it's pretty cheap to do. Back to Götterdämmerung. The plot is perhaps not one of its strength. Wotan doesn't turn up, and we get the new family to move into Eastenders (as the preliminary talk put it, very accurately). Hagen's***** Evil Plot depends entirely on his victims all being complete idiots. Fortunately for him, this is opera, and indeed mythology. It doesn't have to make sense in order to work. Hagen was sung by Mats Almgren looking like an evil thug in a Scandinavian detective drama - the more things change, the more things stay the same - and my favourite along with Kelly Cae Hogan as Brünnhilde.

A wonderful presentation of a wonderful work. I am converted, as you can tell! I wish I might have seen it all, I'm immensely glad I saw this.

Have some music:



*This would explain why each act started 5 mins late, if he was being ushered to his seat in the dark. Perhaps he might have borrowed the rather lovely guide dog I spotted stretched out on the carpet in the bar in the second interval. It's fair to say that Goldie, alone of all the beings I saw there, did not look wholly appreciative and wore a definite air of 'how long, oh lord, how long?'

**To be precise, 4 hours 40 mins of music, the rest intervals. That makes the first act equal in length to Tosca (2 hours), and the whole thing half as long again as an uncut Figaro.

***Now I need to check if that's every been done with (i) actual soprano, (ii) actual horse, (iii) actual flames. Checked! Though the examples mentioned don't specify flames...

****No need for ten anvil-players in this one, but I've never seen so many French horns (apparently some of them are 'Wagner tubas', which he invented because he needed an extra instrument...)

***** I first came across Hagen in my German GCSE textbook, which had a really good cartoon sequence of the Nibelunglied. We didn't read that bit, which tells you everything you need to know about the approach my high school took to engaging pupils in foreign languages.

To be precise, in Helsinki. If I were the sort of person who obsesses about things in an organised way, I would be spending a long weekend in Helsinki this spring in order to see German vampires in Finnish, and the Finnish National Opera's original production of The Phantom of the Opera.

I was thinking en route to Cotswold Outdoors this morning* while listening to the music of Love Never Dies and trying not to listen to the words**, that it's good thing that I had no internet access in my teenage years or I would have embarrassing teenage PotO fic hanging round me neck, but then I remembered that I did in fact write a piece of PotO fic. In French. In graphic novel form. I've probably still got it somewhere. I was rather proud of it and showed my French teacher, who photocopied it for the class (good) and pointed out that French doesn't use 's for the possessive (less good).

Anyway, for those who wonder what Phantom looks like when not produced by Cameron Mackintosh, here it is. I can't help feeling that the Phantom looks rather like Bryn Terfel as a lank-haired Scarpia.



Of course, the best Finnish version of PotO remains Nightwish...



Not taking up a last-minute Nightwish concert opportunity because I had a cold remains one of the less-good decisions of my life, in that they broke up shortly afterwards.

*Socks, sock liners, and an impulse-purchase laundry bag. Yes, I could make some, but I haven't done so far...

** I have mentioned their direness before, but really they are so, so bad. There is some terrific music, but the book does a "Ron the Death Eater" on Raoul, and the lyrics are unspeakable. Beneath a Moonless Sky is so bad that you'd probably do better to pick a PotO fic at random off FFN and set it to music. I think the only way I could face seeing it live would be in Japanese and prepared to close my eyes when necessary.

I am back at work after being on holiday (Scotland, family). I left with a cold, I have come back with a new cold. In the meantime I have had a very nice, if busy time. The downside of my immediate family all being in one place is that I not only can see all of them in one visit, I have to, something intensified by Middle Sister’s being on maternity leave, which makes of a lot of scheduling and I didn’t manage to see (or even contact) friends that I would have liked to. Clearly I just need to spend more time on holiday.

But I did see the Edinburgh Zoo pandas. Pandas plural! As female!panda is possibly pregnant (panda pregnancy involves delayed implantation and general unknowingness ), visitors must book viewing slots (no additional cost) in advance, can no longer see inside the dens, and female!panda is spending most of her time in the off-limits indoor bit. The website, cashiers, keepers, and everyone involved with the pandas spends a lot of time telling you that there is no panda guarantee. So Mum and I walked in for our viewing slot, the first one of the day, to find female!panda walking outside, though admittedly going back inside, and male!panda eating in full view, after which he slept in full view. To be honest, pandas are more exciting for what they represent than what they are, but it was still nice to see them as I’ve never seen one before, and I felt pretty lucky. More active were the usual gibbons, chimps, penguins etc. with rhinos providing good value through immense farts and sexual excitement*. I didn’t bother attempting to see the Scottish wildcat as I suspected it would take hours of careful staring and I had limited time to see the animals I particularly wanted to before the nephew-with-toddler-attention-span arrived.

A rather more obvious pregnancy was that of Sylvia Schwartz who had been parachuted in to play Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro , and who was presumably free at short notice because of the fact that she was very clearly about 6-7 months pregnant. Which it turns out can be incorporated surprisingly easily into the plot by strategically raised eyebrows at mentions of her modesty/virginity, leaving the audience to marvel at the singer’s apparently unaffected voice and breath control and ability to dash about and hide behind random bits of furniture/musical instruments. Being Figaro it was of course marvellous, being outside London and semi-staged I got to sit in the stalls, and now I need to book to see the ROH version in the autumn from somewhere behind a pillar in the Gods. Plus Carmen, because I want to see a traditional Carmen and I don’t care whether it is boring as hell in terms of innovative production, because every time someone does an innovative one, it seems to be crap. I now want to write Figaro: the murder mystery.

Otherwise I have walked on a beach, seen more glasshouses than you could throw a bag of stones at, enjoyed England winning the Ashes, and had other people cook for me (but participated in some washing up). My diary is 10 days behind. Maybe next time I get a break I’ll manage to do some reading and writing.

*Ten year-old boy: What’s THAT?
Older brother: What do you THINK?
TYOB: *thinks* YUCK, that’s disgusting!

(1) This is a rather charming little Wimseyfic vignette, a missing scene set directly after the end of Strong Poison: Aftershock, Mary and Peter (there should be more fic with Mary in).

(2) Every morning at the mine you could see him arrive... My father is prone to sing the first verse of this. If only he could remember more of it - or the internet had existed in my younger years.


(3) Not so random, a short and lovely extract from The Merry Widow.