Saints and sinners

Amadeus was Mozart’s middle name, which he liked in its French version, Amedee, and preferred to Wolfgang. It is the title of a famous play by Peter Shaffer, later triumphantly filmed by Milos Forman, and of a Deutsche Grammophon DVD of operatic excerpts, starting with the sight of Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the overture to Don Giovanni  but thereafter degenerating into something of a ragbag.

Amadeus has been the title, moreover, of many a Mozart essay and the occasional  book. You cannot escape from it, any more than from a box of Mozart chocolates, but was it Mozart’s fault?

In the case of the 1984 film, it would undoubtedly be the falsest of accusations. Despite the statement on the front of the DVD version  that “everything you heard is true,” the film is known for its inaccuracy, and the “director’s cut” - not an abbreviation but a twenty-minute extension  - has not improved matters, though this  is the version now most readily available on Amazon.

The sight of an open-mouthed Mozart exuberantly conducting The Seraglio - though in fact he would have directed it more modestly from  the keyboard - may or may not be an irritation  but it is certainly a trivialising element.  Films, however, are films, and in order to make an impact - as this one does - they can be, as we say, economical with the truth.    

Yet watching Amadeus  again, and re-encountering all its extravagances,  as I did the other day,  I thought that it continues to make at least one  valid point. The dialogue may be embarrassingly Americansed. The personalities of Mozart and Salieri, and their relationship, may be distorted. “Known truths” may seem less and less trustworthy - not least because, since the film was first issued, the truth about Mozart has been increasingly clarified.

But one fact, on which Peter Shaffer’s original play depended, is still important, which is that great artists are not always as nice as they seem. Though Shaffer and Forman  dressed up their biography  in a mantle of glossiness, signifying that too much dramatisation  was not nearly enough, their point  was nevertheless  worth making.

The basic premise, on the one hand, was that Salieri, Vienna’s distinguished court composer and Mozart’s senior rival, was not a great composer but believed  his inspiration came from God, whereas, on the other,  the raffish Mozart was a self-centred, foul-mouthed, lascivious, whinnying little squirt who happened to be the genius Salieri was not.

But the contrast,  while  vividly portrayed, fails to convince.  The religious Salieri, much respected in his day, was hardly as bad as he is made to seem. Nor, for that matter, was the irksomely irreverent, spendthrift   young Mozart, whose fate was a pauper’s grave - a recommended form of burial at the time, as we now know.

So the premise, in this case, is a falsely cinematic one, something we can regard as a theatrical fuss about nothing.

Yet it does, as we have to admit, make a good and very credible  story, as it has always done, right down to the composing of the unfinished Requiem,  and it certainly resulted in a   celebrated - surely over0celebrated -  film, winner of forty awards.    Seeing it again, I liked it even less.  What mattered, however,  was the music, and we did hear quite a lot of it, more cherishable than ever, in spite of its dramatised  surroundings.

Applied to someone else - Wagner if we must name him but there are plenty of other contenders - the premise could be more satisfactorily made to stick, reminding us that great composers are not necessarily saints.
20 May 2016

Better or worse?

With four new main-stage events, four concert performances, and a Mozart revival, a Mozart revival, Scottish Opera’s forthcoming season harks back just enough to whet the appetite and bring back memories of the company’s brave ambitions in the early 1960s.

The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.

A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.

Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.

A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.

A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of  Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.

The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.

So, better or worse?  Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016

Wine choice: Verdicchio

Verdicchio is a safe, basic white from the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, buyable in most British supermarkets for around £6.99 or  £7.99, and all the better if the label calls it Classico or Superiore.  

It comes usually, but not necessarily, in an inviting amphora-shaped bottle.  Its flavour, slightly astringent, is pleasant and thoroughly Italian. It is the sort of wine - the very  taste  of Italy - you grab, as I do, when I am shopping  speedily in Sainsbury, Tesco, or Morrison’s (whosewine shelves are often more interesting than they are reputed to be).

But Waitrose sells, apart from its standard Verdicchio, a posher one called Monacesca, which customarily costs £10.99 but which, for the moment, has dropped to the basic £7.99. It is the sort of Verdiccio I recognise from meals in Pesaro (Rossini’s birthplace) or Urbino, up in the hills above the sea. The flavour is typically mineral, but more subtle and worth, perhaps, the extra expenditure when it is at full price.  

There are other, even dearer versions of Verdiccio, well worth exploring when you are on the northern Adriatic, or what is known as the Marche.  They are an ideal match for pasta with clams and other seafood dishes, and restaurants can usually serve at least one of these. 

So the Waitrose bargain is worth sampling while it lasts. And, if you are in Italy itself, Pesaro is a delightful seaside spot, home of a fine Rossini festival and a lovely university, to which  people cycle, as well as a fashionable resort. 
15 May 2016

The name is Rachel Cusk

I have rather liked reading about an English novelist who is disdained in Britain but gives delight abroad, who has been compared (favourably) with Virginia Woolf, who admires DH Lawrence,who has written a book about childbirth that has prompted people to hiss at her from car windows, and who briefly joined a women’s reading group whose members she insulted before rapidly resigning.

She is Rachel Cusk, whose books I have been reading, and greatly enjoying, for some time, while knowing that it is an pleasure many other readers would disapprove of. But I appreciate her detachment, her powers of observation, her keen-edged sense of humour, her vocabulary, her command of figures of speech (even if she is conspicuously prone to overuse, however skilfully, the words “as though”).

I think her novels - including her latest, entitled Outline, about the narrator’s literary adventures in Athens and the people she encounters there  - unfold with fascinating precision and with a brilliant, if deliberately subdued, sense of surprise.

Best of all, perhaps, I have savoured her solitary travel book, describing a three-month trip to Italy with her husband and two young daughters, for its pointed responsiveness to whatever she sees and experiences, whether it is high Italian art or basic Italian food.

Yet, when Faber first published it, this book had to be pulped - for which she had to share the cost  - because it invaded the privacy of someone she met on her journey and he lodged a complaint about what she said about him (writers, I understand, have to be increasingly wary of this possible predicament, if someone claims he can be recognised by a perhaps indiscreet comment).

By good luck, having bought Cusk’s The Last Supper as soon as it came out, I have been able to read both the original and the reissued versions of the book, so have managed to work out, I think,  how she caused offence, though the reasons, to my eyes, would seem somewhat trivial, though admittedly perhaps riskily outspoken.

Nevertheless the episode has endeared her to me rather than the reverse. Yet Britain’s star  newspaper interviewer, talking to her afterwards  in The Guardian, complained that the book was “slackly written,” a verdict with-which I would wholly disagree.

But Cusk is now inevitably a controversial figure, who can arouse fury through what seems like  a mere handful of words. I shall continue reading her with pleasure until the day comes when I, too, am unforgivingly enraged by her. Somehow I do not see that happening.
13 May 2016

Wedding Interlude

The receding of the snow a week ago coincided with a family wedding, which took place on a cool but sunny day in the Fife fishing village of Anstruther.  Scott, third son of my wife’s cousin Meg, was marrying Isla in the local town hall, a charming building and an appropriate setting for such an event.

Though weddings are not usually a feature of this blog, the music at the ceremony included Peter Maxwell Davies’s touching little piano piece, Farewell to Stromness, a more northern fishing port, performed during the signing of the register. Davies, whose recent death has been much on my mind, composed it in 1980 for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, where he lived in a bothy near the Old Man of Hoy, and where it formed an interlude in the Yellow Cake Revue which he wrote for Eleanor Bron (with himself on that occasion as pianist).

The cabaret was a characteristically political attack on Orkney’s new-fangled interest in uranium mining, a big issue at the time, against which Davies led a vigorous campaign - yellow cake was a pejorative nickname for uranium ore.  But Farewell to Stromness (Orkney’s second largest township which lay close to the projected uranium site) did not reflect the ferocity of his opposition. It was a quiet and wistful keyboard meditation with a recurring, gently prodding Scotch snap rhythm, musically more to the point than the jollity of his  famous Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, the orchestral showpiece he wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose success was dependent on its bagpipe climax.

But the bagpipes, it seems to me, have never been a particularly Orcadian instrument - fiddle music is more relevant to the place -  and the piano piece, though serving as background music, was more appropriate to last week’s wedding in Anstruther than the rollicking Orkney Wedding with Sunrise would have been.

It was good to hear the music  again and to know that, though the Yellow Cake Revue, like Orkney’s uranium plan, is in the past, the eloquent simplicity of Farewell to Stromness lives on.
8 May 2016

The Ustinov Version

In response to my thoughts last week on The Magic Flute - with the evidence of three DVD productions showing how not to stage it - my old friend John Duffus has drawn my attention to a fourth version, in the hope that it might interest me.  It can be seen, complete and at no cost, on You Tube, and, though it looks rather the worse for wear, it is good enough to oust many performances that have recently come my way.

Dating from 1971, not necessarily a good time for Magic Flutes, it was clearly a success in its day and there is no problem in seeing why. One of the highlights of the Hamburg State Opera repertoire when the great Rolf Liebermann was the company’s intendant, it reminds us how fast Hamburg recovered from the fire-bombing it received during the Second World War. Emerging like a phoenix (as was said at the time) from the chaos, the company brought six productions to the 1952 Edinburgh Festival, including a valiant Fidelio with Martha Modl, a sterling presentation of Hindemith’s little-known Mathis der Maler, a vanguard Der Freischutz in abstract decor, a Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier the like of which had not been seen in Britain for years, and - last but not least - a merry Magic Flute conducted by the young Georg Solti with the black-voiced  Gottlob Frick as Sarastro amd Horst Gunter and his family portraying Papageno, Papagena, and their children (born and growing up by the end of the performance).

Though the city was not yet fully rebuilt, the opera company was alive and  kicking. A decade or so later, as The Scotsman’s music critic, I saw a handsome production of Verdi’s Nabucco there, performed in German but with the title-role (thanks to the resourcefulness with which Hamburg faced last-minute casting problems) sung in Italian by an Italian baritone. It was good enough to stick in the memory.

But the Magic Flute filmed by You Tube in 1971 was not the idyllc Solti one. By then it had been replaced by another, staged by Peter Ustinov at a time when he was getting into opera and had already staged Massenet’s Don Quixote, a work that suited him admirably, in Paris. On the evidence of the You Tube film, however, his Hamburg Flute contained little of the whimsicality that was to surface a few years later in his Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh Festival, where an eighteenth-century Sherlock Holmes, complete with magnifying glass, tried to discover what happened to Giovanni at the end of the supper scene.

Ustinov’s Magic Flute, though comic, was straightforward and admirable in a way that few Flutes now tend to be. His Papageno was the Puckish young American baritone William Workman. His Sarastro was the noble Hans Sotin, splendidly secure and serene.  Edith Mathis was the predictably sweet and sparkling Pamina, Nicolai Gedda the heroic, but lyrically heroic, Tamino, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the  quietly eloquent Sprecher. Star-casting indeed, showing what sort of performers Rolf Liebermann liked to have at his disposal.  The Three Boys (real choirboys) descended by hot-air balloon - nowadays common enough practice but then a touch of Ustinov originality.

Only the Dutch soprano Christine Deutecom - though she would soon be an impressive Amelia in Verdi’s Masked Ball  for Scottish Opera -  seemed dowdily miscast as the Queen of Night. Horst Stein was the thoroughly alert, adept conductor.

It was a performance that lost none of its impetus as it progressed. Today its flaw lies in the fact that the film involved transferring it from opera house to TV studio and in the obvious lip-synchronisation of the singers.

But the fact that it costs nothing to watch does make some amends for this, and for the murky photography.
5 May 2016

To view the Hamburg Magic Flute key in Magic Flute Ustinov Hamburg 1971 to You Tube.

Wine choice: Gewurztraminer

The best-loved Alsace white is a wine with one drawback: for most people it costs a little too much for everyday drinking.

Apart from that, however, Gewurztraminer is a wine the sight of whose label is always welcome. Its taste of lychees makes it more easily identifiable than almost any other white , yet this is not a shortcoming unless the only Gewurz you have access to is bad Gewurz, which is possible if unlikely, rather than good.

But bad Gewurz is usually a cheap version of the real thing - perhaps from eastern Europe or somewhere in the New World, though the latter source can be very pleasant in its own right and certainly worth buying for a pound or two less than than the real thing if you find one you can trust (think New Zealand).

But the real thing is really what matters, and it always comes from Alsace and will cost you £10 or more a bottle.  Even at that price it is not quite invariably delectable. It can be a bit aggressive - or, to put it another way, over-lycheed - a little too sweet (a problem that goes with Alsace wine) and lacking in the back taste that makes it the special wine it is.

That can happen, which is what prevents me from buying it as often as I would like.  But Waitrose for the moment (alas a very brief moment) has reduced its standard and excellent Gewurztraminer from £9.99 to £7.99, at which price you can buy the 2015 vintage for a week or two. Produced by the reliable Cave de Turckheim, it is an enjoyably floral springtime drink, not over-assertive, a delight to sip before dinner and a joy with something lightly spicy to eat.

Though many people like to drink Gewurztraminer with a Chinese meal, make sure that it is a good Chinese meal and not a humdrum takeaway. Waitrose do other Gewurztraminers also, at prices up to £14.99. If you are feeling flush, try one of these. But this one does very nicely, so drink it at its currently inviting price while you can.
3 May 2016