Technologically flows the Rhine

Yesterday in Malvern we watched Rheingold. There were some glitches, the prompt was audible, but there wasn’t a single duff voice and Alberich was definitive. Yet when the performers took their bows half the Malvern audience clapped and half didn’t. Why? Because although the performance was live it originated at the Met in New York. I for one felt foolish clapping a cinema screen.

Technology was rampant. The high definition TV link meant I was able to admire Wotan’s (ie, Bryn Terfel’s) orthodontics and, had I wanted, his uvula. Despite heavy make-up Freia had an indifferent complexion. The sound was gigantic.

But the most impressive technology was on the stage. There a 45-ton device consisting of a hundred connected and manipulatable planks, affectionately referred to as The Machine, allowed scenes to be changed remotely. The plank edges could be made to ripple, to create staircases and to form precipitate underwater cliffs down which the Rhinemaidens (not without trepidation) disported themselves on wires, flicking their feet flippers and blowing heat-generated bubbles.

Ingenious and monstrous The Machine allowed performers to be positioned for high drama but wasn’t without drawbacks. Loge emerged, wire-supported, walking backwards up a 75 deg incline. He never looked happy. The Rhinemaidens, later occupying geometry impossible to interpret visually, had to take great care that their wires – made more obvious by HD TV - weren’t tangled. On the other hand Fasolt, killed by brother Fafner on a horizontal part of the stage, slid eerily into oblivion as the stage was slowly inclined.

We’re down for Lucia di Lammermoor in March and Walküre in May but will add Nixon in China and Capriccio. All by the Met and all with stratospheric casts.

A musical morsel

I don’t care for Verdi’s operas, for anything by Khachaturian (especially the Sabre Dance), for Bizet’s Carmen or for le tout Berlioz. But none of my blind spots are interesting since I am a musical ignoramus. What’s fascinating is when someone who knows music says “I don’t like…”

Julia did music at uni and limbers up regularly at the piano. Months ago I tried to get her to blog about music but she refused. With an apprehensive Mrs BB at my side when we were in Prague, I asked Julia why. Seems she has friends who are professional musicians and fears their critical reaction. I sighed, said it was a terrible waste, suggested she was denying her elitism – all the usual journalistic ploys.

But Julia is not a natural refuser. She pondered then let slip a morsel – about Mozart yet. In playing string quartets (You didn’t imagine she was limited to the keyboard, did you?) she’d noticed WAM’s cello writing wasn’t up to much. Bingo! We both agreed this was a price he’d had to pay for ennobling so many soprano roles in his operas. With Beethoven things are the other way round; his sublime quartets were paid for by an inability to come to terms with the human voice, except in the Prisoners’ Chorus.

An important discovery not otherwise available to an ignoramus. Retired fifteen years now, I still have this urge to pry. Mrs BB hates it when I do. I tell her it will be harder next time.

PRAGUE PERSIFLAGE. Lunch on periphery of Old Town: half a duck, red cabbage, potato dumplings – Czk 205 (say £7). No need for dinner but somehow I forced it down.

This one didn't work well

After taking advantage of a legal loophole in the British motorcycle licence (with a three-wheel Bond minicar – an aluminium shoe-box with a 200 cc engine - followed by a Heinkel bubblecar, also a three-wheeler) it was time for a proper car with four wheels. The Austin Cambridge I bought in 1962 was not proper in any sense and that wretched vehicle enrages me every time I recall it.

Today’s drivers are happily unaware of their synchromesh gearboxes which ensure noiseless gear changes. Technically the Cambridge had synchromesh but it was accepted that this simply disappeared from first gear within a year: “They all do that,” was the supine excuse. To avoid crunching the cogs one learnt a macho procedure called double-declutching afterwards boasting about it in pubs.

But that wasn’t the only fault. The car was four or five years old which meant its crude pushrod engine was probably a prewar design. Certainly the lubrication system was close to total loss. Something weird happened to the cream paint-job which turned a dull matt, traced with ineradicable crazing. The squab broke away from the driver’s seat and the strut linking the top of a rear shock-absorber detached itself on a holiday in Scotland.

In an era of rotten UK cars this was as bad as any, typical of the hopelessness of British Motor Corporation which became British Leyland which became Rover which disappeared like first-gear synchromesh. Only the Mini, now made by BMW, survives. I am not a nationalist nor, lord love us, a patriot but I am susceptible to the country’s failings. The Austin Cambridge depressed me then as it depresses me now. In the above picture someone is happily driving a restored Cambridge. I hope he doesn’t see it as a “classic”.

The lily, gingerbread and us

Turner’s Folkestone From The Sea. The church is on the clifftop

St Mary and St Eanswythe, rain and wind
October 1, 1960

A golden day but let’s forsake fool’s gold
And go in search of useful tolerance.
For there’s no credit, dear, in growing old
And worshipping a doubtful permanence.
Instead we’ll build a fire of cliché sticks,
Burn cards of happiness and humdrum verse,
Distrust old facile “love” since reason mocks
An easy word to hide a lie or curse.
Let’s dwell on anger - pardoned on the wing,
A hand outstretched to aid a swollen knee
A joke that shares more than a wedding ring
A glass of wine that seals complicity.
Spare symbols, mantras, ill-used sentiment
Just say, do, listen, to our hearts’ content

CLICK HERE for audio (and health warning). Sorry about login, download, etc. A direct link costs $10/month.

You don't know him but he's a giant

I sing of one of my heros, but only Sir Hugh will catch the echo. Walter Bonatti (still alive) is one of the hardest and certainly the greatest pioneer of long classic rock routes typically near Mont Blanc. Let’s talk Le Grand Capucin (left), let’s talk West Face of the Dru (right). Being Italian he favoured the direttissima way, straight up, ignoring comforting gulleys and easier ridges. Often these 3000 ft faces involved as many as five bivouacs, dangling from a piton with his feet over the abyss while Alpine night tried to turn his blood to stone. He writes vividly and includes important technical detail. Extracts of his greatest climbs, in a new translation, appear in The Mountains of My Life. My feeble tribute.

ODD AND CLEAR Our local library in the community centre is guarded by a new CCTV system. Unlike the fuzzy clips on TV news these are in colour and as sharp as a Hasselblad viewfinder. A centre manager offers a testimonial: “You see strange things around the centre at night.”

ADD NOT SUBTRACT Helped Mrs BB in an act of faith by planting bulbs that will emerge as flowers in the Spring. My sole reward is I’m always surprised when this happens. “Make holes 2 – 3 in. deep so that the bulbs are covered,” she says. This proves quite difficult but not for Mrs BB. She achieves the requisite depth by merely adding a layer of compost. The difference between a garden expert and a garden innocent.

ILLUSION Planted bulbs must be watered – even I know this. I switch the hose to Fierce Jet to fill the watering can. This may not do the job any quicker than the spray setting but it sounds as if it does. A drumming violence.

And all the rest is just talk

Conversation is rare and I travel afar – to The Blogger’s Retreat and beyond – to search it out. But what am I searching for? Well, for a start, conversation avoids the obvious. Material topics are allowed but abstract ones are better. Shared humour is essential. Both those taking part must know something the other does not. Conversation is distant from argument. It nurtures the unexpected. It may contain but not massage an ego. It should not depend on a good education. The participants must practice allusion. Conversation is basically good-humoured. It can go on for hours.

You know you’re having a good one when, after three pints of beer, you’re bursting for the loo but cannot bear to break off. Conversationt is rare, as I said. It is evanescent though it may survive in hurried – usually inadequate - notes. It represents the more or less selfless entwining of two spirits and can briefly convince you that mankind is worthwhile.

SCAN-DALOUS My reaction to the recent beatification of Cardinal Newman is best summarised by the German throwaway: Es ist mir einerlei, the basis of Rhett Butler’s valediction to Scarlett. But before Newman became a Roman Candle he was CofE and wrote a hymn, Praise to the Holiest in the Height. He was thought to be an intellectual - the nose proclaims it - so how come the lines (inexplicably absent from my Songs of Praise):

Unharmed upon the eternal rock
The eternal city stands

don’t scan? I speak as a debutante versifier, toiling in the vineyards, looking for light. And don’t give me “th’eternal” as an excuse.

A moral query and a small milestone

Talking to my neighbour Andy about the Battle of Britain I found he was a WW2 planes nut. As I am. He lent me treasured books on the subject, saying I’d be astonished by their prices. - two cost 15 shillings each, £0.75 these days. But it was their narrow-margin pages and occasionally indistinct pix that evoked those distant days; even in 1961 publishers were mean with paper. I’ve raised this subject before. Is it legitimate to idolise engines of destruction? Andy says if you lived through the war as a child (I did, he didn’t), fearing oblivion and buoyed up by very clever British propaganda perhaps it’s understandable if not forgivable.

Did you know what was the fastest piston-engine plane ever produced in the UK? The Supermarine Spiteful, of course.

ENDLICH Following Plutarch’s Homeric 1700-word final assessment the novel, Gorgon Times, is finished. It is possibly an unpopular story, but I wanted to tell it and I enjoyed every moment, even the endless revisions. The greatest pleasure came from details, even page-long scenes, which popped up unforeseen as if there were some delightful conspiracy between my conscious and subconscious mind. It is the best novel I’ve written which doesn’t of course mean it’s any good. Plutarch has been very kind (“driven as much by sentiment as moral sense” which made me proud) and others, presently reading the MS, may give me a hint or two.

One strange experience. Revising it for the nty-nth time I came upon a deliberately emotional scene near the end and my throat tightened – BB the author manipulating BB the reader! Jilly Cooper, not one of my touchstone authors, says the same thing happened to her. I should add she was reading her most recent novel, not mine.

Cobblestones from the Czech Republic

LOST IMAGES The half-a-dozen photos I took in Prague with my mobile phone appear to be irretrievable (hence improvisation above). Damn technology. The only shot I miss occurred in a restaurant where I ordered Grandmother’s Leek and Potato Soup in a Bread Bowl. And that’s how it came – soup contained in a hollowed-out disc-shaped loaf. Was I supposed to eat the loaf as well? The waiter shrugged dismissively.

MEMORIALS? In Paris and London history caught up long ago; in Prague it’s still being written. At the city’s Museum of Communism a film prefaces the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Slightly older versions of the youths being cracked on the head by the security forces (“Don’t hit women,” one of them shouts) are to be seen on today’s streets, free if not gilded with life’s luxuries. On those same streets magnificent fin de siècle terraces are interspersed with dirigiste egg-boxes imposed by the then Soviet masters. Should they be torn down or left as mementoes of the country’s second imprisonment after the Nazis?

NOT IN THE ROOM Our hotel is called Design Hotel Elephant. And why not? But I’d like to rearrange the words.

TITANIA’S DRINK Sitting in a rapaciously priced Old Town bar waiting for the clock tower to reveal its wonders (disappointing – the homunculi don’t emerge) we order Rose Drink (0.1 l of rose (not rosé) wine, strawberries, mint, rose petals, water) because it costs a mere £0.75. “A nice summer drink,” says Mrs BB. She’s right.

A TOUR AVOIDED From the same bar I see a tourist office decorated externally with large gilt words apparently alluding to the events of 1989: DILIGENTIA – DIGNITATIS – MEMORES – OPTIMA INTENTI. The last two worry me. Aren’t they paving stones on the road to Hell?