Opera
- Part 2
The Polenta of the People
History of a mediocre art form...
Know
what 'polenta' is?
I expect you do, if you already have an interest in Italy. And if you're
a Londoner, you've probably eaten it in some trendy Islington restaurant,
or maybe it’s been served up to you at a DP some time in the last
few years. Polenta is dried sweetcorn, ground into a coarse, low-grade
flour, boiled in water and served as a stodgy yellow mass, like gritty
mashed potato. In Italy, it's about the cheapest thing there is, at 75p
for 500 grams, and that’s for the branded packets. In fact, over
here in Chiantishire, it's always been the cheapest thing there is - Polenta
is the food of peasants - Not jolly, ruddy faced, rustic, dancing Modigliani
peasants, but poor, starving, drought and disease-ridden mafia-oppressed
no-hope, don’t-know-where-the-next-meal's-coming-from, eat-your-own-children
real-life Calabrian peasants. The south of Italy has always been poor
and full of such people, and still is, during periods of economic depression
(which is most of the time in the south of Italy, and was pretty much
all of the time up until about 1950) - All they had to eat was polenta,
which they ground themselves, because there was nothing else to eat. They
ate so much of it, to the necessary exclusion of all other beneficial
foodstuffs in their diet, that there was a variety of cancer in the gums
that many died of, specifically caused by eating too much polenta.
Then,
about ten years ago, Gary Rhodes, or Marco Pierre White, or some such
trendy celebrity sacred cow chef, discovered polenta, and served it up
to the chattering classes as an Italian delicacy at about eight quid a
plate.
"Oh dahhling, Mwah!, mwah!, you simply MUST join us at Lucinda's
tonight for dinner, she's an absolute high priestESS of the Mediterranean
platter. George told me she's doing polenta tonight. I absolutely can't
wait!"
And so on...
Well, dudes, opera is musical polenta.
It's music for no-brains. It's cheap and cheerful low-brow entertainment, designed to keep the peasants happy. At one time, before television, back in Italy, it was all they had. That and the circus and the whorehouse. Opera was music-hall in black tie, just the job for those who had graduated from a kind of burlesque slapstick but hadn’t learned to read yet.
Although beginning in late sixteenth century Florence as an experimental dramatic form based on sung Greek tragic drama of the classical period, opera was soon hijacked by the tasteless baroque movement and quickly degenerated into the pretentious overblown style we know today. A capricious con-trick of public entertainment patronized by the corrupt and degenerate ruling classes of 18th century Europe, to make the peasants feel they were getting some recreation of quality from their bosses during their off-hours. (Italian prime minister Berlusconi still does this today – He owns about five TV channels and fills them with 24 hour-a-day rubbish to keep the proles happy). And back in 18th century Europe, the bosses and dukes in turn, together with their wives and lovers and their lover’s friends, enjoyed slumming it with the workers at the opera shows, and so its trendiness grew. It's the old bread and circuses thing. Opera was the ‘Noel's Houseparty’ of musical entertainment.
Opera is melodrama - using extravagant music to illustrate or reinforce dialogue in weak scripts, and to help dim audiences understand what's going on in a character's mind. It is soap opera, not as good as Dallas, worse than Dynasty. Boy meets girl, boy two-times girl, girl murders boy. That's usually the plot. High shoulder-pads de-rigeur. Am I wrong? Do Tarantino or Stoppard have their characters sing to music? No, they have a decently written script instead. Opera was art for the workers, with one important difference - The workers weren't making it! It was simply aspirational pap being forced at them from above by commercial musicians toadying to their feudal patrons. Opera is to music as a Jeffrey Archer novel is to literature. And until the jazz age of the early 20th century, opera, alongside its sister 'arts', the music hall and the circus, was the most dominant form of popular entertainment in the world, particularly in Europe, notably in Italy. But then something wonderful happened - The invention and development of electricity, radio, and sound recording. This led to a new democratizing of musical entertainment, and the subsequent mass-distribution of music via the gramophone record and radio soon drew audiences away from the opera houses - People quickly forgot the rubbish that was opera which had been spoon fed to them for so long, too long. Mankind was at last free from opera. So from the 1920's onwards, opera, having lost its mantle as the great entertainer of the masses, withdrew from the public consciousness, and instead became the sacred preserve of nostalgically backward-looking musical snobs and similar esoterics with their heads up their backsides. Glowering down their noses at Glen Miller and Judy Garland (ie truly innovative musicians and real singers), they protectively snatched opera back from the proles and plebs, as if to give them a slap on the wrist, as much to say - "Opera was always too good for you anyway, you smelly little oiks and coalminers". And so they put opera into cold storage for fifty years, happy that its supply was now restricted, for now it could gain artificial value, like a De Beers diamond, until the 1980's, when a buoyant Western economy could once again support opera as a trendy new art form, an entertainment that, in England for example, could be sold back to the aspirant nouveau-riche Thatcherite masses. Which is ironic, because just cast your mind back for a moment - what was one of the first things Margaret Thatcher wanted to do when she came to power? Right - She wanted to cut back government grants to the arts.
In
1980's Britain, public white elephants like the Royal Opera House couldn't
just cosily tick over any more serving up Arts Council government subsidized
opera to the dwindling band of esoterics anymore. It was sink or swim.
They had to actually SELL opera to a wider audience if they were going
to survive. They had to MARKET it. So in the mid eighties, those last
dying dinosaurs in the opera business started up the old hype again, and
sold opera to the new yuppies as a must-have experience. And the hype
worked. Of course, it hurt the dinosaurs at first, to see the plebs rushing
back into their cherished opera halls, but hey, they needed that pleb
money and needed it bad, because a free ride wasn’t coming from the
government subsidies anymore.
Just follow the money, and you'll find your answers to most social phenomena.
Who had heard of Pavarotti before 1985? Pavarotti the opera singer has done no more to enrich the arts than Paul Daniels the magician. Like most opera 'stars', he's looks like nothing more than a spoiled narcissistic bully with a big pair of lungs. But by 1991 he had become a household name in Britain. (though not in my household, you can be sure). But how did this opera revival come about?
Let me offer a possible explanation - a little fantasy of mine that makes more and more sense the longer you think about it –
Jeremy Isaacs was Director General of the Royal Opera House between 1988 and 1996. He was also a TV media mogul with thirty years worth of friends and fingers in all kinds of British broadcasting pies. Early in 1990, when Arts Council grants to the Royal Opera House were at their lowest in five years - Only £19 million of public subsidy was given them, compared to £22 million in 1985, (the poor dears – They were only given £19 million of my taxpayer’s money that year towards maintaining their elitist little art-form. Is there any other civilised country in the world where such a socially abusive absurdity could happen? Well, there was one once actually – In the same year, 1990, the overthrowing of Ceaucescu’s totalitarian Rumanian government began after evangelical Christians inspired a mob to barrack an opera house – Heck, they knew just where to go to find the oppressive weasels in their society, didn’t they?)
Other private grants and donations to the Royal Opera House had also dropped off in 1990, for during the 80’s, traditionally well-heeled Home Counties arts worthies and their loyal yuppy offspring had sunk all their spare cash into the Docklands and the Eurotunnel instead, and still weren’t seeing any dividends. All over London, purse strings were tightening - Nothing to spare for the 'arts', and teh plebs were currently being beguiled by an upsurge in cinema popularity. Bruce Willis in Die Hard was now the hot BIG value ticket for a night out, not some unknown warbler in Die Fleidermaus. So Isaacs, distressed by this and the downward spiral in government funding, looked elsewhere for the cash (and for this I commend him – better that than having the taxman raid the coarse threads of my Philistinian pocket to feed his artistic obsession), yes, Isaacs went to the BBC with a radical, absurd and outrageous, idea, a stunning deal, a vision of cross-cultural profanity of a magnitude we did not witness again until 11.9.2001 when terrorists deranged by Islam flew jetliners into New York’s largest skysrubbishers –
In a similar master stroke, a stab at national if not world domination, Jeremy Isaacs persuaded the British Broadcasting Corporation to use an opera aria as the theme tune for their television coverage of the 1990 Football World Cup. Even if he didn't also write the Beeb a nice fat cheque to help the persuasion along, his masterful idea of fusing opera with football would germinate the seeds of a new highbrow audience for TV soccer coverage, even for football in general. In return, Isaacs could deliver hordes of plebeian new opera fans to the Royal Opera house and to the classical shelves in record shops all over the country. Add Paul Gascoyne’s tears to the melodramatic mix and you had every footie fan in the country humming, or actually singing Turandot within a fortnight.
We hadn’t seen opera married to popular culture like this since Frankie Coppola scored a Vietnam Air Cav raid with Wagner. It scared the hell out of the Slopes. And lemme tell ya, crowds of yer common or garden English soccer fans suddenly singing Turandot scared the hell out of me too. And Pavarotti, with an erstwhile fading career in a minority art-form, suddenly won the lottery, so to speak. But for that, he’d be cleaning toilets in Naples for a living.
Opera and Football – The perfect team. Can you see it now?
Entertainment for the masses. A marriage made in corporate heaven. Not only did you have Arsenal supporters suddenly buying opera CDs, more astoundingly, you also had opera buffs suddenly buying Arsenal tickets. Football became respectable, and the bourgeoisie and Lady Di pretenders put on fixed smiles as they rubbed shoulders with the new riff-raff at Glyndebourne and Kenwood. Who’s slumming it with who now? Does it really matter any more? It’s hard to tell, we’re in John Major’s classless society, a more powerful poison than Tony’s drinkies with Noel and Liam could counter. Opera is now a fluid, marketable, bankable commodity once again, but don’t tell me it’s art. It never was and never will be.
Is there any opera worth listening to? Here and there. But the fact that some skilled musical non-Italian practitioner like Wagner comes along every half century or so and uses the medium to create something worthwhile doesn’t make the art form itself any better. Why, for that matter, I’ve seen some pretty gripping episodes of Coronation Street. I think the last time was in 1965, when Ken Barlow’s first wife electrocuted herself while doing the ironing. She fell wonderfully. (Interestingly, Sir Jeremy Isaccs was also one of the founding fathers of Corrie, who pushed for its development as the first true English soap opera back when he was working cheap as a producer for Granada TV in the late fifties.
So just remember, next time you go to the opera, you’re only being sold some more old soap, and somewhere along the line, some royalties will probably be trickling back into Jeremy Isaacs’ pocket.
Actually, after mulling it over, I‘ve decided I was a little unfair to compare opera with polenta. Opera doesn’t give you cancer. Though it will rot your brain. So wake up, opera fans – You’ve been corned.
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