Treena arguing with Dominic, who’s just said that being gay is perhaps not normal:

“Being normal is what men have created in order to not have to try harder.”

I love Stravinsky. I love Auden (in patches). I love the theatre of Robert LePage and I love the music of Tom Adès, and indeed Tom Adès himself almost to infatuation.

So, by rights, I should haved LOVED the Rake’s Progress at the Royal Opera House last night. Music by Stravinsky, libretto by Auden, directed by LePage and conducted by Adès.

It’s a strange work in many ways. Stravinsky’s only full-length opera and written at the very end of his neo-classical period before he embraced serialism, it is decades away from the aural adrenalin of Le Sacre or Petruschka. In many ways it’s a real artefact of its time – the early 50s in America. It’s what I like to call the “eau-de-nil” period – the time of hessian and kidney-shaped dressing tables and Tretchikoff’s Green Lady.

Stravinsky approached Auden and his boyfriend Chester Kallman to write the libretto based on Hogarth’s picture series about the moral collapse of the profligate Tom Rakewell and they came up with a tableau-based script heavily influenced by Brecht.

Brecht cast a long shadow in American theatre in the 50s. Even though he’d pretty much given up writing, concentrating on building up the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in East Berlin, Brecht’s plays from the war years were increasingly performed and his theory of ‘epic theatre’ was ubiquitous in playmaking of the period. In Los Angeles where Stravinsky was living at the time, Brecht’s name was less appreciated since he testified quite openly to the Committee of UnAmerican Activities in the late 40s before disappearing from Hollywood back to Berlin. But his influence is apparent on the set pieces of the opera’s libretto and in the emotional distancing created by the classically-framed text and the classical-styled music.

(Interestingly, Le Histoire du Soldat, Stravinsky’s other most Brechtian work was actually written in 1918, years before Brecht and Weill’s Dreigroschen Opera. So in a way, Brecht is Stravinskoid. Vera Stegman has an interesting article on this.)

The music is restrained. Modelled throughout on the formal aria-recitive of 18th Century opera, it only balances lightly on the edge of modernity and yet is totally modern.

Interestingly, Lepage-Ades emphasize this emotional frugality perhaps a bit too much. Ades’ conducting (while fascinating) is so precise and crisp that it misses the sonorous largesse that Stravinsky himself gives the score (there’s a great Metropolitan opera recording from 1953). And Lepage’s dazzling theatrical wit struggles with the glacial pace of the action. Having seen so much of his stuff which rattles along like fireworks, it’s odd to see his visual imagery hang so immobile, for so long.

As always the Royal Opera House chorus (my musical betes-noires) manage to spoil any neo-classical restraint with their awful hammy gang-show presence. (Oh, how I long for Robert Wilson to rule them like marionettes.) But Sally Matthews as Anne Trulove manages to soar above the layers of restrain and bring some much needed heart to it all.

I thought that some of that heartlessness was structural – built in by Stravinsky and Auden to the Brechtian machine of the opera – but listening to the Stravinsky recording from the Fifties again, I realise that Igor, like Bertolt, was always breaking his own rules.

look! How natty I can post direct from my iPhone. All I need to know now is how to send pictures here.

And I notice – excitedly – that Wordpress are coming up with just nattiest of plugins to do just that…
Hurry, hurry, WP.

Coming down the rain in the road in the drizzly July rain, Dave was coming the opposite way with his brother. He capered around in front of me, gleefully informing me that they were off to town to buy rose petals. Nothing else. Skipped off.

I don’t recall ever capering or skipping. Certainly not in July rain.

Which set me to thinking about natural levels of energy.

I would love to have an increase in natural energy across the board. To feel pepped up in the morning and afternoon, curling down towards sleep in the evening. I reckon it could all be lifted about 15% without any detrimental effects.

But I think I can safely say that that isn’t going to happen. My natural energy levels are about where they are now – a few percent above sluggish. I know that because I went almost 6 years without any stimulants – no crash-and-burn caffeine, no booze, no sugary snacks – and it made no difference. Pretty much the same as now.

Unless waves of positive sparkling are more mental than bodily. I definitely feel cheerier now than I did 6 years ago. I sometimes wander if childhood and genes makes us “sleepers” or “doers”: people who incline to the blankness and rest of sleep and shy away from active engagement in the world (a category that I firmly belong to) or those who hate sleeping and would happily stay up all night doing stuff – sometimes to a frantic level. Too much snoozing or wired to the point of burnout. Those would be the poles. I suppose we’re all somewhere in between.

When I younger – perhaps 11 or 12 – I had mildly autistic fascination for composers and books on music. I was encyclopedic in my knowledge about composers and their famous works – with a special bent towards 20th century musicians.

What was odd was that I hadn’t actually heard much of their music. My parents weren’t really into music that much. But I was fascinated by their names, by their iconic pictures and by the snippets of their scores that featured in books. The beginning of L’Après-Midi d’un Faun. The famous pounding of The Rite of Spring. They looked so beautiful and exciting.

It was an almost totally pictorial. textual romance, I probably would have been scared to death by Le Marteau sans Maitre if I’d actually heard it but the score! the beautiful notes like secret codes frozen into the paper.

It was pretty redundant knowledge. No one in Lee-on-the-Solent shared my fascination with these things. It would be another 2 or 3 years before I could get a record-lending library card from Gosport Library and borrow LP and chunky boxsets from their very eclectic classical music shelves. (All the Britten operas, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge!). And then I would tape them into my Sony Walkman and listen to Turangalila on my cycle ride to school. By that time I was listening to the Beatles and Talking Heads too. Monteverdi Vespers on the way to school. The Queen is Dead on the way back.

The autistic love of the pictures came back to me last week, when my Mum and Dad gave me a box of music books they’d saved from the Church Fete. There was a Encyclopedia of Music that I remember from those days. I loved the photos. They’re so iconic. Schoenberg: so odd with his pop-eyed stare. I’ve never seen any other pictures of Debussy apart from this one with the watery eyes and faun-beard.
And best of all – Rossini: lipless and laughing, sitting back after all those operas to a life of tournedos and port.