The World of Opera

Good morning to all who read my whinging posts. I have posted nothing for two weeks as I have been suffering with something akin to flu. It may not be flu but in these times when a diagnosis is but a mouse click away, it seems we all have flu. I have sweated and ached but mostly, I have coughed and it's this last bit that is hanging on.

Anyway, I will put aside my concerns about our incompetent governance for a time and comment on a couple of stories I saw in The Guardian yesterday - both very operatic. Not operatic in the sense of overblown and unreal but just about opera. I have always loved opera because I like to hear great singers singing great tunes. But I have never been a great enthusiast for opera houses because they all too often have audiences made up of the pretentious, the sometimes ignorant and too many upper class twits. I suppose this makes me elitist and just as bad as the rest of them. Yesterday's stories were concerned too with elitism. First The Guardian had a report by Tim Ashley about a production in Holland Park Theatre of Janácek's opera Kát'a Kabanová. It was, said Mr Ashley, an opera that has always tended to bring out the best in British opera companies and this particular production was one of the best. Now The Guardian man may be quite accurate in what he says but instantly, I feel at a disadvantage. I know absolutely nothing about Kát'a Kabanová. I have never seen or heard a production and even though there is a recording [in English] from Welsh National Opera, I do not see this opera as a bread and butter offering for getting the best out of opera companies. Reading Mr Ashley I was getting the sort of feelings that I get when I read reviews of the later symphonies of Havergal Brian. I have not yet got to grips with the earlier symphonies of this enthusiastic symphonist and yet I should be well acquainted with the later ones as well. I read Mr Ashley on Janacek but it was all lost in the depths of my ignorance.

The other story on the operatic theme was an obituary on the English operatic bass, Eric Garrett. Perhaps surprisingly, I had heard of Eric Garrett. He spent most of his working life at Covent Garden taking on minor roles in many an operatic production. He sang the Sacristan in Zeffirelli's production of Tosca in 1964, which I saw on one of my few visits to the Royal Opera House. This was the production with Callas and Gobbi that has probably never been bettered. Eric Garrett was a fine bass but was rarely called upon to play leading roles. It was not his voice that was the problem; it was his name. How much better he would have done had he been Giovanni Pastadelore or some other similar obviously, non-English name. But Eric Garrett? He did sing leading roles in opera houses outside the UK. So why was he never good enough for us? In 1988 he had to take on the role of Mustafa in Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers with no notice at all when first one singer was ill and then his replacement could not get to London because of fog. Desperate, the management had to call on Eric Garrett. He was driven from his home to London learning some of the words and music as he travelled and then, after getting stuck in traffic, he ran to Covent Garden and was huge success. There is many a sensitive international artist who could not have even contemplated a similar effort. Did this not tell the management something? They could even have tried to persuade him to change his name.

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