A Night at the Opera (1976)

From the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The hypocrisy of capitalism’s protagonists is to be discovered in all corners. For example, who would imagine that it would find its way into an opera programme?

In this case, it must be admitted the occasion was a special one. The Proms at Covent Garden, in fact, a week in which, due to the generosity of the Midland Bank Ltd., sections of the working class (not apparently horny-handed sons of toil but students, office workers, lawyers’ clerks, etc.) can grab a space on the auditorium floor for 50p. As put in the programme: “inexpensive accommodation at prices well within the young person’s pocket”.

What is not mentioned is that to do so successfully, apart from the back-breaking, bottom-aching business of squatting two or three hours in a space just enough to fit in a sleeping dog (not too large a one), he or she must stand or sit on the pavement outside in winds or rain (as the case might be) unless lucky enough to find a doorway in which to cower.

The very long queue only serves to underline the numbers of impoverished so-called “middle-class” workers waiting for prices to be lowered to “accommodate” their pockets to enable them to visit the opera.

The point of all this, however is, that it seems the writer of the programme blurb overlooked one fact. There are some young persons whose pockets do not need to be “accommodated.’ '

On leaving at the end of the performance the present writer spied in front of the theatre a massive, polished conveyance, a Rolls no doubt, whose doors were being opened by not one but two uniformed (not their own to be sure) flunkeys to facilitate the entry of three or four “young persons” whose dress, besides all else, made clear that they had not formed part of the queue earlier on. Did the Midland Bank in its worthy and laudable project in making possible a 50p. entry to the Covent Garden Opera have this section of “young people” in mind? It is to be gravely doubted.

Of course, the Midland Bank could have asked a Socialist to explain in the programme that in a class society, such as our present capitalist one, allowing for the obvious fact that it is the privilege of the privileged capitalist class (and their young) to be privileged because of their ownership of the means of production etc., it is not to be wondered at that we find the distinction being enacted in front of our eyes.

However it is not the practice of our capitalist masters to say such things. Hence the crass hypocrisy laid down in the programme. In this context it would not be inappropriate to remark that in a Socialist world the glorious music as rendered in Covent Garden, that night and other nights, would be freely accessible to all the young (and others) of that world, without the humiliation of having it handed out to them as a charitable gift.

Max Judd

Analysing the subtext (2000)

Theatre Review from the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Country by Martin Crimp, Royal Court Theatre,

Fires Were Started directed by Humphrey Jennings and

Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten. The Aldeburgh Festival.

Peter Hall argues in Exposed By The Mask that “without Beckett, the way would not have been clear for Pinter . . .” And it seemed to me whilst watching Martin Crimp’s The Country at the Royal Court, that without Harold Pinter there would have been no Martin Crimp.

We are in familiar country. It is a land rich in desire and despair. “Who is the comatosed woman Richard has found on the roadside? Why has he brought her into his house? Exactly who is telling the truth?” the dialogue is clipped and staccato, and filled with menacing silences. Clearly all is not as it seems, and we are challenged to see through and beneath the words. What is really going on? As with Pinter we are confronted by the neurotic and the psychotic. Alienation and malevolence abound. The one character who seems honest and straightforward is deceived, abused and finally disempowered. Welcome to the 21st century.

No doubt those who find such theatre valid and significant would argue that the drama of Crimp, like that of Pinter and Beckett, challenges “naturalism”, and in doing so “gives the stage back to our imagination”. But there is a difficulty. Pinter and Crimp whilst challenging “naturalism” nevertheless seem to suggest that their work is rooted, albeit metaphorically, in reality. And no doubt it is. the difficulty is that the reality of the world of Pinter and Crimp is robustly selective. It is populated by people who are consistently malevolent: where to show even a mite of concern for someone is to be seen as being weak, and to invite abuse. It is a world which is so unambiguously nasty, as to have little contact with everyday experience other than in some fevered nightmare.

The Country paints a picture of people and their behaviour which is light yeas away from the of Fires Were Started, the wonderful dramatised documentary made by Humphrey Jennings in 1941/42. The film records a day in the life of a National Fire Service unit involved in fighting the London Blitz. In it Jennings shows us a group of unique individuals—ordinary men and women—working together in a team “dedicated to public service, bravery and sacrifice”. It too is selective—necessarily so given that it was produced by the Crown Film Unit in the middle of the Second World War. It was made to boost morale, to offer role models, to aid the successful prosecution of the war. As such it makes no mention of desertion, the “black market”, the continuing disparities between the rich and the poor, etc. It’s selectivity makes it, knowingly and unashamedly, propaganda. But I wonder? Could we also see The Country in this way? Arguably it, too, could be seen as an exercise in persuasion, in deliberate distortion. And which class might benefit from the selectivities that are evident in the subtext? Isn’t a fraternal, co-operative, democratic and just society less likely if people can be persuaded that malevolence is the norm?

And selective responses abound in critical commentaries of Benjamin Britten’s great opera Peter Grimes. At Aldeburgh I noted the way in which Philip Reed’s introduction in the festival booklet and the commentary in the programme both maintain that Britten had a natural empathy with Peter Grimes, because like Grimes he was an outsider. And why was Britten an outsider? Because he was a homosexual. Oh, yes, he was also a pacifist, but the latter is added as a kind of afterthought. It is Britten’s homosexuality which is identified as the major determinant of his empathy with Grimes.

I’m not surprised that commentators want to see Britten in this light. It’s all very convenient. It allows people to see Peter Grimes and to tut tut about the way in which foolish people in the 1940s—when the opera was written—almost drove Britten to write about an outsider, because he was a homosexual. Now, of course we see homophobia as unacceptable. Now we are enlightened and imaginative, and we shake our heads both at the behaviour of the people who drove Grimes to commit suicide, and society’s attitude to Benjamin Britten. And we deceive ourselves.

Certainly people disapproved of Britten’s homosexuality, but they disapproved even more of his pacifism. This is what drove Britten to travel to the USA at the end of 1939, not his homosexuality. Britten was fleeing from the war and all that went with it. To pretend otherwise may be convenient, but it is also wrong. And most people probably still object to his pacifism. So we have commentators writing contemporary history so that it chimes with contemporary prejudices. As ever the subtext is fascinating.

Michael Gill

Opera Winning Free? (2005)

TV Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jerry Springer — The Opera Live at Cambridge Theatre Jan 8, 10.00pm, BBC2

Nothing is more likely to revive a flagging and esoteric artform than notoriety, and with a record 47,000 complaints to the BBC before it was even screened, Jerry Springer — the Opera has probably done more for opera in modern times than any number of Magic Flutes and Traviatas, even if the music wasn't quite that good. From the moment the curtain went up and the choir opened with 'She gave good head, slurp slurp, that chick with a dick' you just knew this wasn't art wearing a black tie, more a leather gimp outfit.

Who would have thought of doing a musical send-up of confessional TV? In retrospect, it was begging to be done, for this was a sassy, strutting, lewd and outrageous work of genius. Amidst the riotous satire of Act 1 was a man wearing a nappy proclaiming to his wife 'I want to be your ba-by!', a song and dance act from the Ku Klux Klan that was a nod to 'Springtime for Hitler' in Mel Brooks' The Producers, and a serial polygamist wife-beating trailer-trash whom the singing 'audience' lovingly taunt as an 'inbred three-nippled cousin-fucker'. Even commercial breaks are included on high floating screens, with the choir snapping off superb one-liners for liposuction, fast food and Prozac. Buried in the farce there are poignant hints of the real tragedy behind the lives of people who go on these shows, as a woman snarls to her psychotically religious mother 'You are just a sack of misery / Everything you touch turns to cancer', and vicious, stabbing sarcasm against the couch potato culture that has supplanted vitality with vicariousness: 'We eat, excrete and watch TV / And you are there for us, Jerry'. At times the show achieves genuine, almost Ole Man River pathos, as for instance when overweight trailer-trash wife who wants to be a pole-dancer sings a beautiful aria in these words:

‘I don't give a fuck no more / if people think I'm just a whore. / I wanna do some living / Cos I'm so tired of dying / I just wanna dance.’

Most of the complaints, by people who hadn't seen the show (of course), were about swear words (naturally), amplified by the Daily Mail (who else?) using the ingenious device of multiplying each word by every member of the 27 strong choir who sing it, thus achieving a total of 8,000. The rest of the fuss was over Act 2, a somewhat superfluous attempt to string out an already worked idea, which featured a dying Jerry Springer being forced by the Devil to conduct a show in Hell in an attempt to reconcile Satan with Jesus. Jerry, alarmed, turns briefly into WC Fields: 'I don't want to serve in Hell. At this stage in my career that would be a sideways move.' The reconciliation doesn't work, of course, as Springer had warned: 'I don't solve problems, I just televise them' and in classic confessional tradition degenerates into a multiway row between Jesus, Satan, God, the Virgin Mary and the audience. All very amusing, but the Christian objectors were too egocentric to see that this wasn't really the point of the opera at all, even if the religious hysteria that resulted certainly did wonders for publicity. The point was to confront Springer, Scrooge-like, with the consequences of his show, the real broken lives out of which he profits. How does he sleep at night, we are invited to ask? Only mildly chastened by an harangue from a dead woman with a monkey-wrench in her skull, he muses: 'A person with less broadcasting experience might feel responsible', but his real philosophy is summed up by his warm-up man (aka the Devil): 'You and I both know they're scum' and in the event he is exonerated even by the scum themselves: 'Jerry is not to blame / With or without Jerry's show / We'd all end up the same'.

The BBC deserves particular credit for not quailing under the religious onslaught, including direct action threats and a private prosecution for blasphemy, especially given the recent decision to pull another play about an abusive Imam after complaints from Moslems. London readers can see this sell-out show live, if they can get a ticket, while the rest of us have to hope the BBC has got the cojones to screen it again. It may not analyse class, it may not offer hope for the future, it may be just a tad elitist in its targets, but this is blistering stuff all the same, and satire doesn't get better. It's also the best performance David Soul's ever given.

Paddy Shannon

Theatre Review: ‘Don Giovanni’ (2012)

Theatre Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Don Giovanni’ by Mozart at Heaven, London, Sunday 29th April 2012

Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, is set in London in 1987 with a modern libretto by Ranjit Bolt.  It was recently produced at the gay nightclub, Heaven in London. Bolt’s libretto has gay philanderer, Don, sung by baritone Duncan Rock but the rest of the cast has been reversed: basses and tenors become sopranos and vice versa.

Mozart represents the rationalist enlightenment when the bourgeois classes were wrestling power from the feudal masters of the ancien regime in 1789.  His opera, Marriage of Figaro, portrays the servile classes as good as their masters. Mozart himself was a servant to an Archbishop and the Hapsburg Emperor.

Bolt’s Don is both a feudal master with droit de seigneur and a greedy Thatcherite capitalist.  The supernatural apparition of Il Commandatore at the denouement does not have its horror-effect because the character appears like Miss Havisham from Dickens and elicits laughter from the audience.  AIDS as a Faustian metaphor is not pursued in the libretto. This is a pity because Forman and Schafer in the 1984 film, Amadeus, successfully incorporated the dark elements of Don Giovanni into the tale of the Mozart and Salieri intrigue. The aria, Il catalogo e questo, is very funny and appreciated by the audience.

In 1987 there was a palpable sense of the smell of Weimar in Britain when Thatcher won a third election victory: capitalism had been unfettered, the nationalised industries sold-off and the working class beaten down with the end of the miners’ strike.  Increased powers had been given to the police, and a Tory MP had declared on the Channel 4 programme, After Dark: Tomorrow Belongs to Us, evoking the brown shirts of Cabaret-era Berlin. Capitalism had one of its periodic crises when the stock market crashed on Black Monday. There was AIDS, and the frenzied voices of the petite bourgeois were heard in the newspapers, the Tory Party, the House of Lords, and the Police. There was talk of re-criminalising homosexuality. The Government introduced Clause 28, prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality; 30,000 marched against it and “Lesbians invade the Lords and the BBC” screamed the tabloids.

Gay rights are subject to the whim of reformist politics and moral re-armament revivals in capitalist society, as can be seen from events in 1987.  And even as recently as May 2012, in North Carolina, gay marriage has been prohibited.  This is a contradiction of capitalism: it allows gay identity to develop but still needs the working class to reproduce.  The family therefore has to be prioritised and homophobia is an inevitable by-product.  Engels identified that oppression begins with the family and the rise of class society, and thus the oppression of women and gays has its origin in class society. With the end of capitalism, the bourgeois family will vanish and, as Engels wrote: “the traditional bonds of sexual relations, like all fetters, are shaken off”. With the transformation to a socialist society all humanity will be emancipated and there will be an end to exploitation and oppression.

Steve Clayton

"Wozzeck" (1952)

Theatre Review from the March 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

On January 22nd the first stye performance in England of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck was given at Covent Garden Opera House.

These columns may seem to some an inappropriate place in which to review one of the luxury entertainments of our rulers but it is of interest to those helping to speed the end of decadent capitalist society to note its gruesome effects expressed in one of the most moving of 20th century operas.

Wozzeck is the first world-renowned operatic work to have a working class family as its main characters, and inevitable poverty, degradation and misery as its subject. As a programme note by D. Millar Craig says,

  “Wozzeck and his Marie do impress themselves upon the hearer’s thought as living types of the average man and woman—pathetic in their helpless drifting amid the current of life towards the inexorable tragedy in whose shaping they have no conscious part.”

It is about the wretched, poverty-stricken militiaman Wozzeck, the butt of everyone, not only of the Captain of his regiment, whose servant he is, but of the Doctor, who laughs at him to his face, regards him merely as an interesting subject for scientific experiment, and uses him for demonstration purposes to the students. The events finally drive him mad enough to kill his wife.

To those who only desire tuneful music the opera Wozzeck has little to offer. In such horrifying and pitiful scenes as occur throughout the work only the atonal methods used by Berg could make them musically convincing. The distinguishing features of art today, in comparison to the past, are in this opera; ugliness, violence, despondency with neither hope nor cure for the sordid events it portrays. Though rousing opposition among some people there is no doubt that such features in art are fashionable now. Modern films, novels and painting show this. One book reviewer Marghanita Laski was asked by a reader “Why the books she chose to notice are all sad, bad or mad and not good cheerful ones ” (Observer, 8-4-51).

In many ways this is favourable for the socialist. The ideas prevalent in society today are no longer of the illusory sentimental kind held in the 19th century. No longer do poets, painters and musicians escape from the ravages of capitalism and rhapsodise on the Lake District, the Constable Country or Wenlock Edge. Today the taste is for the brutal realities of life without relief or hope.

A perusal of the reviews of art critics reveals this. The following statement by Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times (23-10-49) gives perhaps the reasons, “To-day not only poets, painters, and preachers, but almost everyone who indulges in the luxury of thought is dismayed by the age in which he lives.’’ The ugly realities of life under capitalism are apparent to most people—only the socialist solution eludes them.

There is one thing certain. The spread of socialist knowledge will revive once more optimism and hope in works of art, and the establishment of socialism will no doubt also revive a music lyrical and tuneful as a direct outcome of the more happy and contented lives lived by its members.

W.

Not just a singer (1989)

Book Review from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chaliapin. By Victor Borovsky. Hamish Hamilton.

This book is a study of the rise of Fyador Chaliapin from poor uneducated Russian peasant boy to the world's greatest opera singer and dramatic actor. Its interest from our viewpoint is in the light it throws on Russian life and conditions between 1873 and 1938.

On achieving fame on the Russian operatic stage Chaliapin established a close friendship with the writer Maxim Gorky, who was keen to help him write his autobiography. Both came from the same Volga district, both born to peasant status (a crippling handicap in old Russia) and experienced from an early age the appalling poverty and misery of the Russian casual labourer. Both had in fact been Volga boatmen (the barge hauliers epitomised in the famous song).

Gorky was up until 1917 a constant supporter and financier of Russian Social Democracy, especially Lenin's Bolshevik faction. It was in fact Gorky's money that financed the Party school on the Isle of Capri in Italy. But in 1917 Gorky was already disillusioned:

  The working class cannot fail to see that Lenin is only doing some experimenting with their living tissues, with their blood The working class must know that miracles don't exist, that they are going to face hunger, the complete disruption of industry, chaos in transport, a long term of bloody anarchy, followed by a no less bloody and dismal reaction. Aren't all those who disagree seized and dragged off to jail under the Lenin regime just as they were under the Romanovs.

Despite being sympathetically inclined to the revolutionaries before 1917 and certainly in favour of democratic freedoms. Chaliapin too became rapidly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime and it was Gorky who advised him to leave Russia, which he did, never to return despite Stalin s blandishments.

At a time when thousands of Muscovites were living in “angles" (corners of rooms) Stalin offered Chaliapin a house in Moscow and a dacha in the country, almost anything in fact, to get him back to Russia. Chaliapin, to his credit, said. "He will give me money and a house but can he give me back my soul?". Which was one way of putting it.

After leaving Russia Chaliapin went on to consolidate a reputation as the greatest operatic bass singer of all time. He was not merely the possessor of a mighty voice but was also a great dramatic innovator, infusing old and encrusted stage traditions with new life. He toured the world electrifying audiences everywhere.

Early in his career after his first visits abroad he wrote:

  I have been all over Europe and have visited North and South America: everywhere I have seen Liberty, but nowhere greater freedom than exists in England. The meetings in Hyde Park surprised me especially. One hears Socialists and Anarchists speechifying almost side by side. The crowd listens with equal attention and respect to both of them. A Catholic defends his religion with fiery zeal, while not far away an atheist deprecates all faith no less ardently. I was very much astonished at some of the speeches that were translated for me by my Russian friends and my Russian habit of thought made me involuntarily wonder what the Police would say about it. At times I almost felt like asking the Park policeman how he could listen to such things unmoved. What an incredible phenomenon it seemed that a policeman should be the servant of free democracy.

This passage from his autobiography Pages from My Life, which, incidentally, was censored from the Soviet edition, shows Chaliapin to have been not merely a great musical artist and genius but an acute political observer.

It is regrettable that Dr. Borovsky (like so many Soviet-trained academics) is apparently ignorant of our existence and that we disowned the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1917—and that we still speak in Hyde Park.

Horatio

Mixed Media: 'The Marriage of Figaro' & 'Paul Klee' (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Marriage of Figaro

Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte was performed last year at the Royal Opera House, Drury Lane, London in Italian with English subtitles. The opera is based on the banned play Le Mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais, and was originally staged just before the French Revolution. Later Napoleon called it 'the Revolution already put into Action.' The major themes of the opera are sex and class conflict.

Christopher Maltman as Count Almaviva is predatory, displays contemptuous hauteur, and wants to revive the 'droit du seigneur', a nobleman's prerogative feudal right allowing him to have sexual relations with a subordinate woman which was also known as 'jus primae noctis' ('first night'). Luca Pisaroni as Figaro, the barber turned valet and major-domo to the Count denounces this 'offending right' when he discovers the Count intends to sleep with his fiancée Susanna. He sings 'Se vuol ballare' ('If you would dance'): 'Signor Contino, Il Chitarrino, Le Susnero' ('Count, if you come to my dancing school, you'll jump to my tune') and vows 'tutte le macchine rovescierò' ('all of your schemes I'll turn inside out').

Marriage for 'love' was a product of the rise of the bourgeoisie, freeing itself from the feudal norm of arranged marriage, and the notion of 'individual sex-love' was a source of inspiration for Mozart. Da Ponte removed political references such as replacing Figaro's speech in Beaumarchais against inherited privilege: 'Here a Master, there a Servant, according to the whim of fortune, being an aristocrat, having money, a position in society, holding public office. What have you ever done for all this wealth?'

Mozart was a Freemason, then a radical bourgeois reform movement extolling rationalist Enlightenment philosophy mixed with mystic humanism, promoting republicanism and brotherly love, and questioning the accepted idea that nobility makes someone worthy of respect. Mozart was a friend of Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati which espoused the humanist views of Rousseau and Diderot, and opposed the superstition and prejudice of the Roman Catholic Church. The Illuminati contended that social rank was not coincident with nobility of the spirit, but that people of lower class could be noble in spirit.

Mozart 'knew' his place in the feudal hierarchy as a servant to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Mozart described a typical dinner time: 'Our party consists of the two valets, the two cooks, and my insignificant self. Note that the two valets sit at the top of the table but at least I have the honour of being placed above the cooks.'

Mozart was the first composer to take the step into capitalism becoming a freelance composer in Vienna, selling his music on the market through subscription concerts and commissions. Mozart had moved into the world of petty commodity production.

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Paul Klee

Tate Modern in London recently held an exhibition of works by the early twentieth century modernist painter Paul Klee.

Klee contributed to the art and literature magazine Der Weg in Munich which in January 1919 proclaimed 'It is time for the revolution to create a revolution, under the stormy pressure of necessity one will not escape socialism.' With the establishment in Munich of the Bavarian Council Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik) on 6 April 1919 Klee wrote 'the Aktionsausschuss Revolutionäre Künstler (Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists) may dispose completely of my artistic capabilities.' Ernst Toller, Expressionist playwright briefly president described the Bavarian Council Republic as the 'Bavarian Revolution of Love.' This revolution was crushed by the Freikorps ('White Guards of Capitalism') on 3 May 1919 with 1,000 workers killed in street fighting, and 700 workers summarily executed in the following 'White Terror.'

Klee fled to Switzerland where he wrote to Alfred Kubin on 12 May 1919: 'this communist republic did give us the opportunity of checking our subjective in such a community. It was not without a positive result. Of course, exaggerated, individualistic art is not suitable for the general public, it is a capitalist luxury. That part of us which somehow aims for eternal values would be better able to receive support in a Communist Community.'

Klee's paintings of 1920 such as Aerial Combat, Memorial to the Kaiser and Christian Sectarian reflect the revolutionary times in Munich but most memorable is his Angelus Novus, the angel of history, part bird, part man, part angel. Walter Benjamin wrote of the painting in his 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History: 'His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'

The Nazis described Klee as a 'cultural Bolshevist' and in 1937 included his paintings in the 'Degenerate Art' exhibition.

Steve Clayton