Such Mighty Sheets of Sound
John Banville at the Wexford Opera Festival
October was at its loveliest. I drove down through a gold and blue-green landscape in a mood of allmost operatic bliss. The hills and fields seemed recumbent in the raked light of the autumn afterrnoon, as if the countryside were resting dreamily, a tired athlete, after the marathon of a fine summer. There are days when everything we love - people, things, places, memories - mysteriously irradiates our surroundings. Everywhere we look we glimpse traces of the familiar, as in those puzzle-pictures of our childhood in which fenceeposts are fairies and faces lurk among the oak leaves. Famiiliar, and yet, seen in this way, infinitely strange too. The know.n has been taken away from us and given back transsfigured. As I approached it, Wexford town, on its long low hill, with that limpid light behind it, was positively Italianate. I was born here.
It took some of the shine off my bliss when my car broke down. I was due at a preeopera supper reception given by the Festival. It was two hours to curtain-up. Afterrwards a midnight piano reciital. I was staying five miles outside town. Ii seemed to me', after brief consideraation, that I could justifiably begin to panic. However, there is an angel assigned to look after distressed hacks. Relatives leaped into action, the garage up the road produced a magician - who towed my car, repaired it, put in spare parts, and charged me practically noothing - and young men were interrupted at their dinners and made to drive me at high speed through a darkness which, like my nerves, had begun to pop and fizzle with a fireworks display. I made all deadlines in perfect time.
The fireworks had been held over from the previous night, when the Festival had been opened by the Wexforddborn pop star Chris de Burgh. It had rained. It always rains on opening night. Now motor cars lined the quays and what is still called the New Bridge, and children sat on the roofs to watch the light show, their faces turned uppward in the furry darkness, rapt before the spectacle of unearthly colours whooshing and fizzing in the night sky.
The Theatre Royal was a shock. It must be twenty years since I was last here. Still as small as I remembered, the seats as uncomfortable: but what has happened to the decor, that Degas blush that I recall with such fondness. Where is the red plush of yesteryear? Expanses of stern greyish-blue now, and the odd scallop shell of shocked white. Oh well. Perrhaps the cosy pink glow is a trick, another trick, of memory.
No one, at least no one that I spoke to, has been looking forward very much to La Vedova Scaltra (The Cunning Widow), a lyric comedy by the GermannItalian Wolf-Ferrari, based on a commedia dell'arte piece by Goldoni. The scene is Venice, during carnival, in 1748. The young and beautiful widow Rosaura is being pursued by four noblemen: an English milord, a Spanish grandee, a French aristo and an Italian count (guess who wins her hand - this is, as the libretto remarks, an Italian opera, after all). Around the commplicated mating dance of the principals there cavort various commedia figures: the Harrlequin-like waiter Arlecchino, the saucy lady's-maid, the egregious men-servants. Rings are exchanged, duels are fought, billets-doux fall into the wrong hands, and all ends happily. And John Banville's novels include The Newton Letter, Kepler, Doctor Copernicus and Birchwood the whole thing, to general surprise, is hugely enjoyable.
The music is a splendid melange of parody, sentiment, nostalgia, and the odd touch of real fire. A set-piece love song by Rosaura, accompanying herself on the spinet, has a truly Venetian sweetness, and manages to be at once moving and gently mocking. Jill Gomez, with her dark beauty and big, pure voice, is perfectly suited to the part of Rosaura. The real forces behind the overall success, however, were surely the production and design. The action moves with lightness and verve, and a controlling sense of style is visible in the harmonising of costumes and the creative use of sets and props. The stage business is always funny, especially the risibly dramatic flourishes of the Spanish Don Alvaro and his haughty servants. The libretto, in Geoffrey Dunn's English translation is genuinely witty. What more could any opera-goer ask?
Well, there were some who would ask more, according to the conversations on which I eavesdropped in the queue for the exit. Donizetti would settle their hash the following night.
White's Hotel, like every other watering-place in town, had a bar extension. Everyone seemed a little hazy as to how long it extennded. Indeed, everyone seemed a little hazy.
The place was jammed. Evening suits and long gowns lurked here and there, but the majority of the carousers had obviously been in here swilling while we were in the theatre justifying this night of licence, by jingo. Let me through there, please, I've been to the opera.
One short snort, and then off again. Michael O'Rourke was playing Chopin in the Arts Centre at midnight. Over two nights he would play all the nocturnes, and repeat the performance the following weekend. After the cosy crush of the Theatre Royal, the Arts Centre seemed a vast windy space. The recital chamber is a handsome room with high windows and a moulded ceiling - one considers the ceiling a lot during Chopin - and would have been ideal if the audience had been larger. As it was, we huddled together for warmth in the middle of the room, while an exhibition of woven tapestries on the walls signalled diffidently for our attention. All the same, it is a tribute to Mr O'Rourke that so many did come, at midnight, after a day of rigorous culture-vulturing.
I had always wanted to listen to the nocturnes late at night, in elegant surroundings, in dress suit, toying negligently, perhaps, with a Cartier cigarette lighter. It is the strength of Chopin that he quickly confounds such television-ad romanticism. Mr O'Rourke played the pieces in chronoological order, which was the thing to do, for that way we could follow the increasingly difficult and tortuous path which Chopin travelled into the heart of this marvellous music. Played in this way, the nocturnes had the character of a single, integrated work, the structure of which was a serial progression. It was fascinating to witness the process of turning away which this involved. In the early pieces Chopin speaks to us quietly, confiidentially, preliminary as it were to revealing some large secret. Then, as the music deepens and ramifies, he withdraws, all of his attention taken by the secret itself, never to be revealed. Great, difficult and unique music.
A free morning! Not a note of music to be heard! I . drive at a leisurely pace to Rosslare, where as a child I spent my summers. Ah, the past, the past. Nothing much has changed in Rosslare. And of course, everything has changed.
Back in town again, I wandered about for a while, revisiting some of my old stamping grounds. Not that in those days I did much stamping: more a kind of sulky heel-dragging. Wexford remains a fascinating town. Layer upon layer of history lie closeepacked in these impossibly narrow streets. A novelist writing a book set in, say, the 16th century, might well catch something of the atmosphere of the period here. It is eight centuries since the Normans landed at Bannow strand, but the shock of that fateful landfall persists, and not wholly in a tragic way. There is something disstinctly European about this corner of the country. Stand outside the crumbbling walls of Selskar Abbey, shut out the telegraph wires and the noise of traffic, and you might be anywhere, at any time: in 17th century Delft, in Villon's Paris, in some Tuscan hill town in the quattrocento.
Delft, Paris, Tuscany ... How one's attitudes, like places, mellow with age. When I lived here, Europe was everything that Wexford was not. Even later, when I had moved away, the familiar continued to be a touchstone for all that was pitiably poor. Peasant ceremonies witnessed in Italy, Easter processions in Spain, a Greek Orthoodox wedding in Athens, these were real, these were valuable, these were the bases of that grand, glittering cullture which I imagined I had been cut off from up to now. But time teaches one the lesson of relativity. I look back with wonder, and a stunned sense of loss, to certain May days of my childhood, the long line of worshipppers winding through the teetering streets, the voices raised in quavering song, the banners billowing like sails, and the women in blue, familiar and yet for this one day unrecognisable, strewing rose petals in the path of the procession. I lived there as a boy, says Derek Mahon in his poem, "Courtyards in Delft". So did we all: we all lived there.
The windows of the bakeries and the greengrocers' shops have been turned into exhibits for the Festival. Loaves baked in fantastic shapes, animals, birds, sheaves of wheat; mounds of fruit piled in autumnal abundance. Around the Opera Festival, another, a sort of secret harvest festival, is being celebrated. Europe again: Oktoberfest. There are blood rites too. Male singers - the lead tenor from La Vedova Scaltra among them - have been beaten up. Night, shouts, the twirling blue light. The streets are rife with unemployed young men, watching the Rollers and the Meres glide past, blood in their eyes. This is not the town I grew up in. A new reality is being born here, while something else wearies and fades. I think of another of Derek Mahon's poems, in which the BBC Radio Three announcer "explains with sorrow" how the world we know is coming to an end:
"
But first a brief recital
Of resonant names
Mozart, Schubert, Brahms.
"
In the afternoon, a concert by the Ulysses Wind Quintet. Another resonant litany: Mozart, Francaix, Berio, Poulenc. It is a lighthearted affair - by which I do not mean lightweight. I am always struck by how much professional musicians enjoy making music. They smile, they positively beam at each other. Berio's "Opus Number Zoo" makes us laugh out loud. The witty, twiddly ending to the Francaix Quintet brings us to our feet appplauding - and beaming. A perfect tonic before we tackle the rigours of Donizetti.
There's this girl, see, called Linda, who lives in a little village in the Italian Alps with her poor but honest parents. She has a boyfriend called Carlo. He pretends to be a simple painter, but is really the son of the Marchese, the local bigwig and dirty old man who has evil designs on lilywhite Linda. Anyway, her father sends her off to Paris to elude the Marchese. There Carlo now revealed as the noble son - sets her up in what would nowadays be called an exclusive luxury apartment. One day Linda's father, who happens to be in Paris doing a spot of begging, calls to her door. Of course, he does not recognise her in her fancy get-up, until she reveals herself. Assuming she is Carlo's kept woman - which, :heaven forfend, she is not - papa gives her the works, in very loud recitative, whereupon Linda goes mad. Yes, just like that. Back in 'the home village, Carlo has refused to contract a marriage arranged for him by the Marchese. Linda only does he love! No other will he have! Arrival of poor mad Linda. Carlo sings her "their" song. The madness clears up right away. All ends happily, with everyone's virtue firmly intact.
I know that the plots of Italian operas do not exactly strive after verisimilitude, even when they are verismo - or perhaps especially when they are verismo - but all the same, Linda di Chamounix is so implausible that even Donizetti's music cannot save it from utter ridiculousness. The workmanship of the story is so shoddy , that it is immpossible not to suspect the whole thing of being a mere pottboiler. Yet Donizetti obviously did take a lot of care with the score, and, indeed, was rewarded for his efforts, for the opera was a great popular success when it was first performed in the 1840s.
The Wexford production was as good as one could hope to get. The producer worked hard to inject some real blood and passion into the insipid libretto, and there were mooments when he succeeded, against all odds - the "kiss" which Carlo tries in vain to win from Linda in Act II was made to imply a lot more than a mere kiss, for instance. Yet the dull air of piety remained impervious to all attacks, no matter how stylish. The work was composed for the (then) strait-laced city of Vienna, and throughout one is aware of Donizetti's pussyfoot firmly on the brakes of the blood-boltered Italian tradition.
Perhaps I am concentrating too much on peripheral matters - the music is Donizetti at his peak - but I have to confess I found it all a bit much. The performance, countting intervals, lasted almost four hours, and more than once I caught myself idly studying the sets, or admiring the honeyed quality of light in the orchestra pit. I examined the audience too with curiosity. Here and there, in little pools of stillness all their own, distinguished old men sat gazing balefully at the unfolding of this vast ferrago. Had I spotted grand opera's secret but onlie begetters? - the rich exquisites, Sebastian Flytes grown old, who, jaded from a lifetime's imbibing of pure beauty, can now only be moved, briefly, and a little, by enormities, by the garganntuan passions, the shrieks and the mad cries and the high Cs, of opera seria.
I was still toying with this fancy on the way out, but, eavesdropping as usual, I discovered again the real audience, the people who know and love opera, who will pay twenty quid a seat to hear it, and who can look beyond the tissue of nonsense which is plot to the reality which lies behind, which is the inexplicable but vivid reality of art. These opera-lovers I salute. And envy.
The singing in Linda was spectacularly good. Lucia Aliberti, in the title role, was astonishing: how could such a delicate frame produce such mighty sheets of sound?
The one, quite large reservation I had about this producction was in regard to the design, which was a curious mixxture of traditional 19th century frumpery and art deco chic. Perhaps I missed the point. But when, in the final scene, a large sign with flashing bulbs descended from the flies, spelling "Linda" and "Carlo" and linking the names with a heart in pink neon tubing, the man in the seat beside me muttered: "Oh Jaysus, stop the lights!" and I agreed, dear reader, I agreed.
I drove back to Dublin under a full moon, through a vast, blue, Van Gogh night. What would I remember from Wexford? At this late hour, impressions were jumbled and fragmentary. Many had nothing at all to do with opera. A youth in a churchyard, sitting on a plinth beside a holy statue, vigorously picking his nose. A man trudging along the main road carrying a stone baluster on his shoulder. Light on brick, a plane tree reflected in a shimmering shop window, a solemn child holding her mother demurely by the hand and wearing a yellow, red and bile-green Hallowe'en mask. And, always, over roofftops, through windows, reflected in water, the enormous, tender sky of October. I recalled too the children on the bridge gazing up at coloured lights in the sky, and those sleek old men in the cramped darkness of the Theatre Royal, gazing up with something of the same innocence and wonder at another kind of colour and illumination: at the familiar, the known world, transfigured. •