Music Magazine – 1996

By Richard E Grant

A black boxed record set with a Technicolor picture of Egyptian slaves amassed between a row of sphinxes, bearing the peculiar title Aida, was the bookend of my parents’ record collection. The colour still was from Cecil B de Mille’s The Ten Commandments. I was eleven, living in Swaziland and learning about the pharaohs and pyramids in 1968, which is what led me to open up the box to listen and see whether the vinyl would reveal the sounds of ancient Egypt.

As I knew not a word of Italian, I had no problem suspending disbelief that this was in fact the accent and music of the Nile. Significantly for me, it was set on the same continent as Swaziland, though thousands of miles north, and remained my only cultural connection, albeit tenuous, to African history. Consequently, vast choruses of Ethiopians in traditional dress belting their lungs out had a contemporary counterpart in the Swazi Raindance ceremony and so were bound to make an impression.

Having never heard an opera before, I found Verdi’s dramatics a revelation. The sleeve notes provided the only clue as to what it might look like in a theatre. Renata Tebaldi’s potently beautiful voice was difficult to reconcile with her photograph, in which she more closely resembled an old boiler than a recently captured Ethiopian princess. Similarly, the picture of Karajan conducting a chorus of casually dressed Caucasians contradicted the picture of the ‘real thing’ on the cover, which was in colour and ‘in costume’. This ambivalence in opera between how people sound and what they look like has persisted for me. It remains the one form of theatre that I have often preferred to imagine than actually to attend.

This pre-teen discovery of Verdi coincided with parental upheaval and subsequent divorce, so the story and music had immediate impact and, in the deluded way of the best artistic encounters, I was convinced that I was the only person to whom all this drama was being addressed. It struck me as uncanny that my parents’ love triangle so closely matched the libretto, though the setting was more ‘Happy Valley’ than ‘Valley of the Kings’. This territorial sense of possession has persisted so much that when some gasbag in the Covent Garden box office queue dismissed Aida as ‘a load of trumped-up spaghetti drama’, I initially felt pity, swiftly followed by Don Corleone-inspired plans to have him garotted and/or wrapped in newspaper and sent home accompanied by dead fish. Opera, undeniably, provokes irrational emotions.

Shortly after, my father decided that a cultural crash-course was necessary after so many years in the ‘bush’. This translated into a six-week European tour, including time in Rome and an invitation to the opera. This was my first such opportunity, the closest being three performances of The Gondoliers at the Swaziland Theatre Club, notable more for seeing the chief of police in tights than the thrust of his vocals.

So off we went. The only seats left were in a box that was almost on top of the stage. The discovery that the opera was Aida and that the overture was being played by a live orchestra was for me a moment of never-to-be-forgotten serendipity. Gwyneth Jones sang the title role and, although she looked older and wider than the ‘beautiful young princess’ described in the programme, the sound that came out of this live human was awesome, as was the sheer scale of everything to be seen. And we could see everything, since our box overlooked the orchestra directly below and was so close to the stage that everything going on in the crowded wings was on view as well. Rather than breaking the scenic illusion, it intensified the whole event. By the time the stage was congested with slaves, dancers, soldiers, horses and a baby elephant, trumpeting the triumphal march, my short-back-and-sides hair was on end. The power of that evening remains a life-changing moment that I never expected to have repeated; a fantastic collision of much and spectacle sung in an exotic tongue of which I never understood a single word. When eventually the two lovers were singing their farewells from within their transparent gauze-swathed tomb, the rest of my family were asleep. Which confounded me.

Kitted out with a couple of marionettes, replete with movable mouths, I subsequently started a puppet collection, built a full-sized theatre in our garage, and devised a show that included a send-up of the final duet, using a cassette tape recorder which my father bought me in Las Palmas, en route to Africa by sea. None of us had ever seen such a machine before, and the microphone made it possible to record loud snoring sounds over the Verdi. I mention this because, even then, opera struck me as such a bizarre form of entertainment, simultaneously capable of being sublime and totally ridiculous.

Midway through drama school, I was given a flight ‘overseas’ for my 21st birthday and spent ten days with a friend in Vienna. We went to the State Opera almost every evening, queuing for standing room for hours. The most extraordinary performance was Zeffirelli’s production of La boheme with Domingo giving it the ‘full Monty’. It was made all the more memorable upon leaving the theatre to discover everywhere knee-deep in snow, mirroring what we had just seen on stage. I had never seen snow in Swaziland.

Bluebeard’s Castle at La Fenice, Venice, completed my whistle-stop historical catch-up. All of which was later reported in forsenic detail to my mentors, Bunny Barnes and Tom Bayley in Mbabane, who between them were responsible for my introduction to music and theatre, and offered endless support, inspiration and strong opinions. When I was 14, Bunny had decided that it was time I was introduced to Puccini, so she cooked a large apfelstrudel, closed her drawing room curtains and plonked the first disc of Madam Butterfly onto the hi-fi.

What we were about to experience, she announced, was the aural equivalent of eating a vastly rich fruitcake at a single sitting, and therefore something had to be indulged in, with judicious infrequency. Hence the strudel. ‘And if you think the plot is improbable, just look at the track record of the American Peace Corps floating about the countryside, fathering tots and promising their young Swazi concubines a visa to the USA, never to be heard of or seen again, when they depart.’

The romantics of Verdi and Co, were selectively dished up whilst Wagner was put on ice, ‘till such time as you are thoroughly pre-cooked in the 19th century classics. Until then, what’s next is an astringent interim smorgasbord of Mozart.’ Cosi fan tutte was first up and, upon leaving Swaziland for University in 1976, the farewell quarter sung by the parting lovers provided the soundtrack that racked my heart and head. But not before I had put my ears to the wall of Wagner.

Bunny suggested ‘diving right in at the deep end’ with Tristan and Isolde, but said she was only prepared ‘to sit through the overture, before having to evacuate the room, as the music is so erotically charged I cannot hold myself responsible or cope with close proximity to another human being, once its power is unleashed, for fear of spontaneous combustion.’ She was in her fifties at the time, and as she had known me since birth and taught me to play the piano, I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.

Being in a high old hormonal upheaval myself, I instantly scoured the libretto for scenes of salaciousness, but never having been in a love triangle before, my first reaction to the score was more ‘Bermuda’ bewilderment – the sexuality disappearing in thin ears. It would be some years before my experience of unrequited or thwarted love went deeper than a brief fixation upon a Scandinavian blonde who could only speak five words of English, rendering her as unreachable as Rapunzel. Hardly in Tristan’s league, though subsequent batterings have deepened my appreciation and understanding of this epic.

However, I have found that the tempo of Mozart most resembles the speed of thought and emotion experienced in ordinary life, whereas every time I have endured watching Wagner, slow-motion tending toward paralysis seems to afflict the performers. And my eyelids. With the result that I have retreated to buying CDs rather than tickets. In my late teens, obsessed with Mahler, and having read about his legendary conducting of Wagner in Vienna, I was disappointed to discover that he avoided composing any opera himself, causing my mentors to offer up Richard Strauss, as the ‘closest and next best thing’. Birgit Nilsson giving Elektra was deemed ‘the last gasp of the true Romantic Movement, before “Cacophany and Co.” took over’.

This ad-hoc education competed with acne, platform shoes, Ziggy Stardust, Elton John, A-levels, Deep Purple, Paul Simon and stints in amateur theatre club productions of Camelot and A funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum before I drove 12,000 miles south to Cape Town University to the strains of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. In freshers’ week, I went to see Norma, which fulfilled every pre-conceived cliché about opera at its most laughable – gargantuan settings, presumably in an attempt to downsize the vast girth of the soprano, and a Lautrec-legged tenor stomping about in Nose-wear. I overheard a man during one of the intervals remark that ‘that woman ought to get one of those Callas-type tape-worms installed’.

Since those early experiences, I have increasingly become peripatetic about opera-going, concluding that when it’s good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, ye gad’s it’s too expensive to even have a cackle about. And yet…..in its very artificiality, expense and extravagance, it is capable of expressing love or loss with greater power than words can muster. Hence, I assume this is why two thousand people in dinner jackets and Dior can boo as one, or jump to their collective feet and scream ‘bravo!’. Likewise, a hundred thousand people in a football field can be quelled by three tenors singing hundred-year-old love songs. Bunny’s wisdom was this: ‘See and hear everything, for so long as you live you will never hear or see everything there is.’