Just up the Rhine valley from Bregenz is the quiet, charming little town of Hohenems, huddled against the steep cliffs of the Arlberg Mountains. It has its Schloss, its Graf (Count), its churches, its concerts within the magnificent Schubertiade Festival and, rather surprisingly, it had, once upon a time, its Jewish Quarter with its Synagogue, its school, its poor-house, now commemorated by a very active museum lead by its tousled headed curator, Hanno Loewy. He and I became good friends after we were fortuitously embroiled in a political incident. Across the border in Switzerland, there is a virulent right wing political party which has produced some inflammatory publicity over the years, including an infamous poster which showed veiled women with guns and minarets transforming into rockets. One year our local Vorarlberg right-wingers – the equivalent of Ukip I suppose, but with a share in the ruling conservative-lead local coalition, decided to take a leaf out of the Swiss book, and produced some very offensive posters basically urging foreigners – i.e. Turks in this instance – to go home. Quite by chance, Hanno and I both had press conferences on entirely different topics on the same day, and we both commented on these offensive posters, saying this was not the way to welcome foreigners to an International Festival, I was myself a foreigner etc. The leader of the party rather over-reacted with an offensive speech in which he instructed “the exile Jew” (because he had spent time in America) and “der Brite” (me!) to shut up and stay out of Austrian politics. He was promptly thrown out of the coalition: by chance I had performed the only useful political act of my life!    

Every year Hohenems organises a Festival, the Emsiana, to celebrate the one-time Jewish quarter, and this year I have to deliver the opening speech, touching on the brilliant author Stefan Zweig whose mother’s family came from this community.

          Stefan Zweig was not only an urban intellectual, but an urbane man – a man of the city, a man of subtlety, sophistication and study, whose pointedly analytical stories of obsession are closely akin to Freud’s early case studies in their literary and inventive quality, as well as their psychological perception. Nonetheless, part of his roots lay here in Hohenems, in Vorarlberg, which may seem today the close cousin of urban sophistication, but was surely not in the late 19^th century. One of the things that most certainly separated the Jewish community in Hohenems from the Christian communities that surrounded it was that fact that for so many in the Jewish community Hohenems was merely the springboard from which they ventured out across Europe and beyond, tapping into that astonishing network which sustains the international Jewish community, and is often observed by others with rancour and outright jealousy, - a jealousy that has been a virulent source of prejudice and conspiracy theory.  As Zweig described, his ancestors set out “…from this little town on the Swiss border and were from earliest times spread out across the world. One went to St. Gallen, others to Vienna and Paris, my Grandfather to Italy, my uncle to New York, and these international connections gave them a better polish.” If there is such a thing as genetic memory, Stefan Zweig should have been well prepared for exile: he wasn’t.

He was in fact a delicate man, perhaps even pampered. He described himself as coming from a wealthy family which set great store by its elevated status, and in true haute bourgeois style examined anyone who purported to be a friend of Stefan’s to see if they would pass muster. Their status of bourgeois exclusivity was as important to them as to any other non-Jewish middle class family in Paris, Vienna or Berlin:  “This kind of assumed “nobility” amongst Jewish families both amused and irritated me and my brother. We constantly heard that these people were “suitable” and these people were “unsuitable”. This endless classification seemed to us ridiculous and snobbish, because with all Jewish families it boiled down to the fact that 50 or 100 years before we had all come out of the same ghetto.”

By the time Zweig wrote this, he knew that he could no longer afford to be so detached and ironic about his Jewish heritage, but then it is a bitter irony that it was anti-Semitism that forced many Jews into an unwonted focus on their origins. Jean Améry, the “Philosopher of Auschwitz”, was exasperated by this classification:

 “If being Jewish means sharing religious convictions with other Jews, or cultivating a Jewish National ideal, then I am a hopeless case. I don’t believe in the God of Israel. I know very little about Jewish culture. I see myself as a boy stomping through the snow at Christmas to midnight Mass; I hear my mother exclaiming “Jesus Mary and Joseph!” over little domestic accidents, rather than any Hebrew oaths to God. The image of my father, who I hardly knew, as he remained where the Kaiser had sent him to defend his country, did not conjure up a bearded Jewish sage, but a Tirolean Kaiserjäger in his WW1 uniform. 

I really have nothing as a Jew in common with the Jews: neither language, nor cultural tradition, nor childhood memories. In Austrian Vorarlberg there was a landlord and a butcher who people told me could speak fluent Hebrew. He was my great grandfather, and it must be nearly 100 years since his death. My interest in Jews and Jewishness was, until the catastrophe, so slight that amongst my acquaintances of that time I could hardly say who was Jewish and who not. “

Both men shared this relaxed, even disdainful acknowledgement of their origins, which perhaps explains the innocence of Zweig’s initial engagement with Richard Strauss. When Strauss’s long term, ideal collaborator Hugo von Hoffmansthal died before the premiere of their last collaboration, Arabella, Strauss thought his opera writing career was over. He would never find another librettist. On the other hand, he had to find another librettist because, as he later wrote to Zweig, he knew that he was no longer in the first flush of youth as a composer. He could no longer create dazzling orchestral works like Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. He needed the input, the distraction, the inspiration of a theatrical subject – or so he put it to Zweig in his rather bluff, jolly-Bavarian frankly-not-very-credible way.   

Strauss seemingly liked marriages of opposites. He was famous for his sparring relationship with his wife, who he nonetheless adored. He was the ebullient, vulgar, skat playing counterpart to Hoffmansthal’s etiolated aestheticism. So it was a canny move of the Insel Verlag publisher Anton Kippenberg to put him in touch with another almost pathologically modest and retiring writer, Stefan Zweig. The two met for the first time in 1931, and once Zweig had managed to persuade Strauss out of his idea that what he needed was a raunchy intrigue with a grande dame heroin as a spy or a confidence trickster – one rather regrets the absence of Strauss’s Mata Hari opera – he convinced him that their ideal project was an adaptation of Ben Johnson’s comedy “Die Schweigsame Frau.” (The Silent Woman) Meanwhile, there was a slight delay as both men had other things to finish off, and here you can see that both were in cloud cuckoo land, their heads so far up in the clouds that the crevasse opening up at their feet was invisible.

Zweig was toying with the very last stitch on the very last brocade gilet of his heroine, Marie Antoinette, revelling in the gently erotic downfall of a great Austrian aristocrat, happily transporting himself back into the cocoon of a Hapsburgian past. Not to be outdone, Strauss was busy orchestrating Arabella, one of the slenderest operas about debutante delight, a nostalgic reverie for the lost world of Viennese balls and horse-drawn carriages. When both men came out of this rosy mist, and started work on Johnson’s domestic comedy, they looked up and noticed with some dismay that Hitler had seized power. Strauss was almost oblivious, lost in the delight of composing: “None of my earlier operas was so easy to compose or gave me such light-hearted pleasure.”

Zweig was, to be fair, more realistic and fully expected Strauss to break off work, knowing that a performance would be unthinkable. But Strauss stuck firm, reassuring Zweig in a stream of letters that there would be no problem. At the same time as maintaining this quasi heroic posture, Strauss fell closer and closer into outright collaboration with the Nazis, perhaps imagining this would buy him the ability to defend Zweig, amongst others. However, I doubt that he ever thought as strategically as that. He wanted to defend Bayreuth, so agreed to stand in for Toscanini who had resigned in protest. He wanted to help out the Berlin Philharmonic, so stood in for Bruno Walter, ditto. Placing himself thus inevitably in Goebbels’ net, he then discovered that he had been nominated as President of the Reichsmusikkammer, answerable to Goebbels himself. Zweig appreciated Strauss’s efforts on his behalf as a librettist, but observed his manoeuvres with the Nazi government with his usual laconic objectivity:

“I must admit that at the same time as supporting me, he indulged in activities that were to my eyes less sympathetic – coming ever closer to the powers that be, more and more frequently in direct contact with Hitler, Goebbels and Göring, and even at a time when Furtwängler had publicly refused the position, allowing himself to be nominated as President of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer. This public participation was extremely important to the National Socialists at that moment. Unfortunately for them, all the most important authors and musicians had openly repudiated them, and the few who did support them were unknown outside a very small circle. At such a potentially embarrassing moment to have the most famous German musician publicly on their side was an invaluable asset for Goebbels and Hitler, in purely decorative terms. “

Strauss of course knew exactly what sort of music should be encouraged by an enlightened government, and having been given this post, albeit by an un-enlightened government, immediately set about warning local band leaders to play less Léhar (because Strauss considered him a bad composer!), and, if you please, warning theatres like the Hamburg Staatsoper who played “6 operas by Verdi and Puccini in one week” to play more German music. With an unwitting eye for historical irony, he promoted a Festival of non-atonal music in Vichy, thus pre-ordaining the ultimate shrine of collaborators. 

The fate of Die Schweigsame Frau is, like the opera itself, of no real interest, except that Strauss’s continuing naiveté ensured that it was surrounded by scandal. Two days before the premiere, he was in the middle of a game of skat when he suddenly asked to see the poster. He discovered that Zweig’s name was omitted. He insisted that it be re-instated. Hitler and Goebbels cancelled their tickets at once. Zweig also wrote to Strauss, withdrawing from future collaboration. Strauss’s reply was explosive, ultimately not so much on grounds of the injustice being meted out to Zweig but, one has to say, more with the sense of outrage at the inordinate inconvenience Strauss was being subjected to. After all, they had at least two more operas on the stocks. Among other indiscretions, Strauss wrote:

“Do you believe that I have ever in any matter allowed myself to be guided by the fact that I am German? Do you believe that Mozart consciously wrote “Aryan music”? …for me the people (Das Volk) exists only in the moment that it becomes an audience. Whether it is made up of Chinese, Upper-Bavarians, New Zealanders or Berliners is all the same to me, so long as the people have paid the full price at the box office…”

Of course it had never occurred to him in his Garmisch ivory tower that the Gestapo was monitoring his mail, even though the letter was addressed to Zweig in England. When an official appeared at his door requiring his resignation as President of the Reichmusikkammer he was pointedly carrying a copy of the offending letter marked with the stamps of several Government offices in Berlin.

Zweig in his usual tolerant and polite way sought to understand Strauss’s motives for getting so close to the fire:

“Strauss’s participation was more deliberate. To his artist’s egoism, which he freely and insouciantly confessed to, every regime was the same. He had served the German Kaiser as Kapellmeister and orchestrated military marches for him, then the Austrian Kaiser as Hofkapellmeister in Vienna and he was equally persona gratissima with the subsequent German and Austrian republics. He also had a pressing reason to get close to the National Socialists because he had, in National Socialist terms, significant blots on his record. His son had married a Jewess, and he was anxious lest his grandson, who he adored above all else, would be barred from university. His new opera was tarnished by me, his earlier operas by the impurity of Hoffmansthal’s Aryan roots, and his publisher was Jewish. All the more important it seemed to him then to protect his back, and he moved quickly to achieve this. He conducted wherever the new authorities wished him to, he composed an Olympic Hymn for them, and simultaneously told me in his astoundingly reckless letters what little pleasure he got out of all these activities. In reality, his artistic ego was only interested in one thing: to keep his works alive and in performance, and above all to ensure the premiere of his new opera which was very close to his heart. “

          Of course Zweig himself also had the option to withdraw his collaboration on Die Schweigsame Frau, but perhaps taking his cue from the title of the work, he demurred with characteristic reticence to place himself in the front line:

“My friends pressured me from all sides to protest publicly against a performance in National Socialist Germany. But firstly, I shy away on principal from such public and sentimental gestures, and secondly it is very much against my inclination to make difficulties for a genius of Richard Strauss’s calibre. Strauss was after all the greatest living composer and 70 years old, he had committed three years to this work, and during this whole time showed towards me the most friendly attitude, correctness and even courage. That is why I chose to remain silent on the side-lines and observe the outcome of events.” 

The outcome was that within two years Zweig was obliged, like so many of his forbears, to pack his bags, in stark contrast to his statement in 1933: “I have the strongest possible disinclination to be an émigré, and would only do so under conditions of the direst necessity.”
           He was cushioned materially by his immense success as an author, and he used this with great generosity to help his fellow émigrés, but he was unmanned in a certain sense by his retiring and depressive character. He went to London where he took up a regular acquaintance with Freud, though I don’t know if Freud ever actually analysed him. Freud must have noticed the similarity between Zweig’s methods as a novelist and his own as an analyst – especially as several of Zweig’s books use the device of a narrator who has heard the story from someone else, almost as if Zweig with his reticence and his decency wanted to avoid responsibility for having imagined the story in the first place.  Even in England, Zweig remained resolutely un-political, preferring to convey his political messages obliquely by focussing on intellectually independent minded men of the past like Erasmus. When war broke out he sought to distance himself from the conflict by emigrating to America.

 However, he went further. Following up an earlier literary tour which had been a huge success, he decided to live in Brazil, and after a reconnaissance trip, wrote an eulogy on that country: “Brazil – the land of the future.” With all that had happened to him, you might have thought that he would have been alert to the fact that the dictator in power in Brazil was himself no angel.  It did not seem to occur to Zweig that he had handed a regime which was itself close to Nazi ideas – the “Estado Novo” of Getulio Vargas – with a perfect propaganda coup. Zweig became, like Strass before him, the naïve and unwitting tool of a Machiavellian political game.

Perhaps realising that paradise had also betrayed him, Zweig together with his young wife Lotte committed suicide, lying on a bed clasping their hands. Their suicide note acknowledged his “final duty” to thank the land of Brazil, his home now that “the world of my language has gone under and Europe, my spiritual home, destroyed itself” and ended: “Either the storm must end, or one must end oneself.”

The double suicide was a tragic personal end, for sure, but even here Zweig failed to take into account its devastating political effect. Surely his “last duty” was not to the land of Brazil, but to the deeply distressed German émigré community for whom he was still a beacon of lost civilisation. His personal expression of despair was a devastating blow to the morale of the many, including Thomas Mann, who were anxiously looking for signs of Nazi weakness, and needed to sense the sustaining moral strength of the émigré community.

He had been a man who lived on the edge, looking in, and had known the deepest distaste for barbarity and injustice, but perhaps insufficient anger to give him the motive to survive. Jean Améry however in the post war years continues to write of his “ressentiments” against the now apparently clean and forgiven Germany, comfortably rebuilding its invincible prosperity.  Yet he too knew that anger is a double edged sword: “Anger keeps you young. But if it is accompanied by the sensation of utter helplessness, it leads to a pain which is not the kind of pain you “work through” in the Psychoanalytic sense, but resignation. And resignation makes you old, without a doubt.” 

In the same year that Zweig died, 1942, when a million men died at Stalingrad, when the 19 year-old Zofia Posmych (the author of The Passenger)was arrested on the streets of Cracow and sent to Auschwitz, when Hans and Sophoie Scholl began to write the anti-Nazi leaflets that would lead them to the guillotine, Strauss gave Zweig another little injection of everlasting life by creating an elegant and delicate little conversation piece, a rococo gem on the relationship between words and music which was one of the projects Zweig had originally suggested: Cappriccio. His head still metaphorically in the clouds, Strauss survived into his late 80s, and suffered too the deprivations of war, though in a relative way of course.

When, just after the war, he tried to go to Switzerland to take a cure with Pauline, they were stopped by the occupying French army just beyond Bregenz at the St. Margarethen border, missing one vital document. Having no-where to stay, they were conveniently put up by Prince Friedrich of Saxony at his Schloss, who next day accompanied them to see the impeccably aristocratic French officer (in charge of the largely Senegalese troops – in Vorarlberg!)  - M. le Comte d’Audibert, to whom he presented an autographed score of the Alpine Symphony for the Bibliothéque Nationale which had been presciently stored with the Hämmerle family in Dornbirn.  That did the trick.  Soon the Strausses were in their customary first class carriage.  Améry’s “ressentiments” are all too easy to understand.  

Azu. Mayday 2012.

Last week in Cardiff two of the amazing pianists he have on our staff  completed a play-through on piano of an opera by André Tchaikowsky. Who on earth is that?

In brief, André was born in 1935 in Warsaw as Robert Andrzej Krauthammer. In 1939 he and his family were taken into the Warsaw ghetto, but his Grandmother, a resourceful lady evidently, had other ideas. She bought false papers for herself, his mother and Andrzej, and used for the papers the name of her favourite composer, Tchaikowsky.  André spent the rest of the war hiding in a cupboard in the bedroom of a young pregnant girl who André thought must be the Virgin Mary! Someone certainly prayed for him: he survived.

After the war he continued his training as a pianist and was rapidly recognised as an outstanding virtuoso. André eventually fled Soviet Poland and came to Britain, but despite Rubinstein's energetic encouragement, André never had the temperament for the life of a concert pianist. Increasingly, he longed to compose.

He managed a legendary piano concerto, premiered by Uri Segal and Radu Lupu, some chamber music, but then, gripped by his fascination for Shakespeare, he embarked on an opera, and chose of all subjects, for a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, "The Merchant of Venice."

Quite apart from his all too authentic experience of anti-Semitism, it is a brilliant choice for an opera, mainly because of the way in which the play traverses two vividly opposed worlds, each suggesting a different type of musical expression. Venice is the male world of business and money - the World Trade Centre of its time, a place dominated by hatred, intolerance and material values. Shakespeare wastes no time in telling us that this is a bad place to be human:

“In sooth I know not why I am so sad,

It wearies me, you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it or came by it,

What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn:

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,

That I have much ado to know myself.”

These are the opening lines of the play, and a modern reader has no difficulty in identifying Antonio, the Merchant of the title and the speaker, as a depressive, and one whose tongue does not hesitate to add to the sum of hate in Venice:

Shylock:        You call’d me dog….

Antonio:        I am as like to call thee so again,

                        To spit on thee again….

Those who seek love rather than hate, leave: Lorenzo elopes with Jessica, Shylock's daughter, and Bassanio borrows Antonio’s money to go away to woo Portia, thereby unwittingly putting Antonio at Shylock's mercy.

By contrast Belmont, the residence of Portia, is a place of women, love and music. And the strange device of the caskets which her wooers must correctly choose in order to gain her hand carries an unmistakeable message. The winner, Bassanio, chooses the lead casket, not the gold or silver. The element of monetary value which is the primary measure of value in Venice is here worthless.

André seizes the musical possibilities of these contrasted milieus with astonishing assurance, as if this were his 5th opera. The two Venice acts are dark and violent. Belmont is given music of exquisite lyricism, coloured with references to Renaissance music-making, and he is also able to do humour, especially in the two very wittily composed pantomimes for the ridiculous suitors from Arragon and Morocco.

André's style could loosely be described as post Bergian - but tonal, or perhaps more often bi-tonal. It is less dense than Berg, and frequently explores a really tender lyricism and eloquence. There is witty and lively music for the chorus, and the big moments - Portia's "Mercy" speech, the love duet of Rebecca and Lorenzo, (“In such a night…” – the text Berlioz purloined for Dido and Aeneas returned to its rightful context!) and the horrifyingly tragic debacle of Shylock are all composed with total assurance - the latter's lonely exit from the court- room climaxing with a superbly imagined operatic moment when Shylock opens the doors and is greeted by a shattering cry of "Jew" from the chorus.

The two great roles of the piece, Shylock and Portia, go through dramatic developments which André also seizes on in their music. Shylock, despite the violence and villainy of his language, gradually becomes a tragic figure, condemned to a horrifying, lonely exit. Portia brings female reason and compassion to Venice, but then she too is changed by her disguise as a man, and is in some sense contaminated by Venice and its mores. As the trial progresses and she feels Shylock increasingly at her mercy, she by turn becomes as ruthless as he, driving him out to the ultimate humiliation: conversion to the Christian faith. (Though for Shakespeare’s audience this would have been seen as giving him a chance for redemption.)

At this moment of supreme power, the women Portia and Nerissa pull off the intrigue of the rings, forcing Bassanio and Gratiano to surrender as payment for their legal services the rings with which they had pledged their love in Belmont. This may seem like a trivial and unfair trick, after the high drama of Shylock’s humiliation, but in fact it adds another dimension to the romance of Belmont, teased out with delightful lyricism in the Epilogue. After all, the men do not give up their wives’ rings for trivial purposes, but in recompense for the saving of Antonio’s life. The intrigue is perhaps a symbol for the tolerance and understanding necessary for a true marriage of minds and bodies. It gives depth and reality to the idyll of Belmont, and the hope that having put their love through this test, the two couples will survive and prosper in marriage. 

I must be careful not to call it a masterpiece as we learnt from the Passenger that nothing irritates the critics more than being told what to think, but it is an enormously important addition to that small group of operas written in English, and another valuable Shakespearian work - much finer and more subtle for instance than Reiman's rather noisy Lear.

We will do the world stage premiere in Bregenz in 2013, and of course I hope that it will then not only go to Warsaw, but also have its British premiere in Cardiff, perhaps in the course of the 2016 Shakespeare anniversary.

There is one little personal aspect to this story which demands the German word which so often comes up around Jewish themes: "Wiedergutmachung" - making good again - reparation I suppose would be our term. I have in fact heard the opera once before, or at least part of it, played by André himself! This was very shortly after I arrived at ENO, a private performance for Lord Harewood and a small committee of people including myself and Mark Elder. I have no memory of it, but that certainly has more to do with the circumstances than the quality of the work. Mark remembers that Andrej's piano playing was incredible. But now I have read Andrej's diary, with the depressive’s intoxicated anticipation beforehand, and equally pole-axed despair on receiving the note from Lord Harewood that explained that ENO could not find room to perform it. Not long after, André discovered that he had stomach cancer.

Mention of André's depression reminds me that there is another very touching personal angle: the depressed Antonio is a very personal and sensitive self portrait of André himself - a depressive homo-sexual (it is written for a counter-tenor) who is the one left poignantly alone (just as Shylock is of course) once everyone has happily paired off beneath the idyllic night-sky of Belmont.

The idyllic night sky over the Bodensee will give us the right atmosphere to experience this astonishing work for the first time in 2013. The fact that it is a Wiedergutmachung is a luxury: there would be no point in doing that if the piece was not important and utterly convincing. I am thrilled that we are discovering another valuable piece of operatic literature.

A posy for the New Year’s lunch table, Janus faced: snowdrops and roses simultaneously fresh from the garden – symbols of a confused planet?

At the turning of the year, I remember with intense affection and admiration one of the very few public figures who one may unstintingly admire: Vaclav Havel. Against a mighty and brutal Empire he attacked only with words, words that exposed the truth and denounced the lies of Soviet culture. Truth is an elusive attribute. One particularly self-deluded colleague of mine pronounced himself recently as a “fanatic for the truth” – little realising that this was in itself a great lie. Truth is many sided, but fanaticism one eyed: the two cannot co-exist side by side.

One phrase of Havel’s I particularly admired: “The resistance of the type-writer” and it got me into a great deal of trouble. When I directed Verdi’s Macbeth in Zürich, I made Banquo become a dissident, horrified by the tyrannical development of his friend Macbeth. When he entered for his aria with his son, Fléance, the son carried a typewriter which he hid in the floor, and then proceeded to pin up typewritten “Samizdat” posters about the “missing” people, murdered by Macbeth’s regime. Banquo sings: “Watch your step, and we shall escape from this darkness.” All very logical, I thought.

At the end of the opera when Fléance reappears, having escaped Macbeth’s murderers by fleeing to England, he carries the typewriter in honour of his murdered father, and the chorus at this point are called “Bards” –one of Verdi’s few concessions to what little was known of Scottish history in Risorgimento Italy.

When the production went to San Fancisco, the stalls exploded with rancour about “that Goddamn typewriter” – “What the hell did it mean?”   

Strangely enough, the answer lay right under their noses. In the Napa valley there is a famous Winery run by a Swiss patron, Hess, which includes part of his extensive and very impressive modern art collection. When you emerge from the lift taking you up from the taste of wine to the art of good taste, the first thing you see is an early twentieth century typewriter with real flames bursting out of it. The artist explains that he thereby honours his grandfather, a journalist who was a notable campaigner for workers’ rights and democracy in South America. Voilà! Being somewhat unnerved by the intemperate conservatism of the San Franciso opera public I asked someone at the bar what had become of all those radical gay 1960s advocates of a new culture. “They all got married!” came the answer.

Havel managed the trappings of presidency and power with an admirable blend of irony and panache. After all, he was an artist, a playwright. Not many people with such serious artistic qualities have risen to high political office. Verdi was briefly a member of the Italian parliament, and his name was famously the acronym for the establishment of the Piedmontese monarchy: Vittorio Emanuele, Re D’Italia. Paderewski, the virtuoso pianist and composer was premiere of Poland. Churchill’s decent amateur painting skills seem slender by comparison, not to mention Ronald Reagan’s 2^nd rate acting career. Havel indulged his theatrical flair by ordering hilarious chocolate soldier uniforms for the Palace Guard at the famous castle from the man who costumed the film Amadeus, and beefy new rock tunes for the guard to march to. He was one of those rare men who can exploit but not be overwhelmed by their high office. Chapeau!

Havel's Chocolate Soldier!

This morning saw the first major announcement of my artistic plan for WNO covering the next two seasons, perhaps marking the end of my honey moon, filled with the delightful activity of making plans on paper although, to be fair, they have all been scrupulously budgeted as well. It’s not just fond fantasy!

It’s an ambitious programme, reflecting my view that the Arts do not thrive in survival mode. All culture is in some way the expression of a surplus – despite all the romantic tales of frozen garrets, not much culture was created by subsistence economies. And however dire the economic language, it’s important to realise that we are still a wealthy society dealing with surmountable economic problems. In that context, if culture gives up on its fundamental mission to surprise, stimulate, and provoke and instead masquerades as a safety blanket offering reassuring tea and sympathy, it is doomed. Culture is expensive: no-one wants to spend a fortune on a blanket.

Nonetheless, the budgets still have to be balanced, so I was brought up short by a provocative article from Norman Lebrecht in Standpoint: “Just say no to state funding”. Norman likes to fly a kite, and apparently flew this particularly gung ho idea for the benefit of the suffering attendees at the Dutch Classical Music Meeting, who were trying to digest the fact that the new right wing government in Holland has just said “No!” to them, rather than giving them the chance to commit financial suicide first. Norman works hard at being optimistic, suggesting that surviving on their own without state support, and therefore without state interference, would be liberating. Most of the positive examples he gives are small ensembles or individual musicians who can market themselves on the web, and who may, who knows, have a paper round on the side to pay for the coffee. This is a recipe more difficult to envisage in the case of WNO, rooted as it is in two superb collectives – chorus and orchestra - entities less suited to such self-help measures.

Norman is cynical about the obligations that State funding imposes on the Arts; I am not. He sneers at engagement with schools, prisons, hospitals, society in general whereas I see this as a robust way to interact with the society which we serve, though like him, I suspect, I could do without some of the politically correct box ticking on buzzwords like “diversity”. Anyway, with the WNO MAX programme in full swing WNO is a standard setter in this area – something to shout about rather than seek liberation from.   

He is nearer to the mark when he talks about those two lethal topics, accessibility and elitism. I agree with him that the arts are elitist, in the sense that they embody unique perceptions by exceptional individuals communicated by means of the highest levels of technical skill and quality. But just because the product is an elite object does not mean that the audience or the venue has to be elitist – far from it. We can accept that the arts are not to everyone’s taste, but still desire that, for those who wish, they are accessible. This means, as he says, both very high and very low prices. Those who can pay more for the best should do so, and those who cannot pay more should not be denied access to a fundamental pillar of society’s civilisation. This area is a problem for WNO: we are fundamentally under-priced, but we are not based in the wealthiest corner of Britain. Over the next years we will need to be clever to resolve this dilemma.

But it is surely naïve of him to suggest that the artist freed of state interference and obligation would be “allowed to choose what they perform no matter how abstruse, without regard to social relevance”. The evidence from places where such “freedom” exists is of overwhelming artistic conservatism. The arts in the US do of course benefit from significant State Subsidy – only the method of distributing what would otherwise be tax revenues lies in the discretion of the tax payer rather than a centralised government agency like the Arts Council, but this system of tethering the arts in America to popular taste leads not to freedom but to excessive, stultifying caution. I don’t apologise if this sounds like an argument for top down decision making. The arts are about the idealism and leadership of individuals. To choose an example close to Norman’s heart: Mahler did not become a popular composer by popular request. We were taught to like him by ambitious and pioneering conductors like Bernstein.

But rather than argue against Norman’s “Cultural Spring” liberation theory, in which the Arts cast off their State subsidised chains and joyously frolic in the nudity of self-financing, it is more productive to rehearse why cash strapped governments should continue to offer the shackles of State finance to the Arts.

Here I am an unreconstructed, antediluvian pre-Thatcherite idealist believer in the concept of Society. Society is the pact between human beings to create communal governance which offers security and the rule of law and…something more. Society with an economic surplus - which still includes us! – recognizes a fundamental need to celebrate that which is beyond the necessary. That is the definition of civilisation: the acknowledgement of values beyond material necessity. The acknowledgement and celebration of these non-material values in public art and architecture is one of the cornerstones of the communal belief that we as a Society are about more than mere survival. We have, collectively, through our history fought for and won that status and we are entitled to it. Those who don’t want it are condemned to wait for the barbarians: they may not be here yet, but given a vacuum of will, they will come.

WNO does not intend to offer such a vacuum. We are offering a rich cultural programme of much needed food for the mind and for the soul: essential materials to help anyone not merely survive but master the prevailing winds.

"Off the stage and onto the streets" chanted the Occupy Wall Street protesters outside the premiere of the opera "Kommilitonen!" at the Juilliard School in New York last month. The impetus for this slogan was that the subject of Kommilitonen is student activism - a deliberately provocative decision when Peter Maxwell Davies and I wrote the piece in 2008 because, as we said then, there wasn't any. Now there is, and it cant happen very often that an opera text is taken up and chanted by demonstrators on the street right after the curtain comes down. I have to admit that Max and I were grinning from ear to ear at this unexpected compliment courtesy of the Zeitgeist!

In fact I have had two occasions recently to observe the slogan "off the stage and onto the streets" in reverse - rare occasions on which the reality behind a piece of theatre emerges live in front of the audience. One was after the revival of The Passenger at ENO when Zofia Posmych, the author of the original novel came out onto the stage to a standing ovation. As one of the dwindling number of living Auschwitz survivors, such was her right. The very beautiful final scene of the opera shows the character who mostly embodies Posmych sitting by the side of a river remembering her fellow inmates. As is appropriate for the very intelligent dramaturgy of this opera, it is not clear whether this is a real river, the river of life or the Styx, the river of death. The opera is not so sentimental as to assume that she survived, but when the real person emerged, we knew the answer: the singer met her likeness, the author met HER likeness - life and art briefly touched.

The previous evening, miraculously, the same procedure - in some ways even more extraordinary. The Feelgood Theatre Company from Manchester was at the Riverside Studios with a play about slavery adapted from an autobiographical book "Slave". You are probably thinking Wilberforce and the 19th century, but no, this is a contemporary story. Mende was a child when she was snatched from her African tribal village by Arab raiders, and was sold into slavery with an Arab family in Khartoum. After 7 years of ruthless training, which included the systematic eradication of her native culture, Mende was thought to be sufficiently subjugated to be sent, still under strict conditions of slavery, to work for her mistress's sister married to a Sudanese diplomat in London. She remained working under conditions of slavery in London until a chance contact with the outside world gave her the courage to escape - a daunting prospect for someone with no European language and a history of enforced dependence.

Caroline Clegg, the director of this ambitious theatre company which specialises in site specific work, had devised a telling theatre piece recounting Mende's ordeal and evoking the excruciating loneliness of her slave existence in contrast to the lively collective culture of her tribe, at the end of which Mende herself came onto the stage to participate in a post performance discussion of the contemporary issue of slavery, which turns out to be vastly more prevalent than you or I might assume. Indeed in that very same week it came out that a group of mentally disadvantaged men were being held and exploited in conditions of slavery in Bedfordshire, for heaven's sake. 

Mende has built a "normal life" for herself in London, but remains in close touch with her village for which she is raising money to build a school. In case the sentiments of Christmas have pricked your conscience in the direction of charity, then this is the kind of small scale, personally focussed project to which one can give without fearing that the money will end up in the pockets of either gun runners or politicians, let alone slave owners. Visit her website at:

http://www.mendenazer.org/en/home

and have a wonderful Christmas!

Watching John Fulljames’s excellent production of Weill’s Street Scene for The Opera Group at the Young Vic, I couldn’t help thinking how helpful it would be for the “accessible opera” mission if there were more operas about ordinary life. You might think that opera, being a rather extraordinary art form, has not much to say about ordinary life, but you would be wrong! Mozart didn’t think so, for instance. Both Figaro and Cosi are definitely about people that are recognisably like us, even if wealthier than most of us - Don Giovanni much less so: that work hovers uncomfortably between reality and myth in a way that makes it almost unrealisable in a satisfactory way. The ordinariness of the first part of Fidelio is a brilliant context in which to set its greater message to humanity.

The easy going humanity of the Enlightenment did not last long into the 19^th century with its taste for grander heroics, but La Traviata caused a stir because it was set in contemporary clothes, though the extravagant milieu of the 19^th century Parisian courtesan hardly registers with us today as “ordinary” even if the characters are searingly human. Puccini frequently used “low-life” locations – Rudolfo’s attic, Cio-cio San’s fragile little house, Minnie’s Wild West bar – but the overpowering sheen of the music glamorises and romanticises  all these humble places well beyond the ordinary  – that is just an observation, not a criticism! Berg, writing his “low-life” opera, Wozzeck, certainly does not glamorise, but this epic cry of protest against the inhumanity of poverty has a formalistic rigour that lifts it way out of its ostensible milieu.

Weill does something very different in Street Scene – he comes at the subject of ordinary life from the inside, and teases out the tragedies that dog the downtrodden “women and their dishes”, the angry men clutching at their alcohol, the young women permanently on the edge of being abused or exploited. He does so partly by using vernacular music – jazz, blues, street music, earning him the disdain of intellectuals like Adorno, but giving him access to ordinary lives through their own genres. It is an eclectic collage, but done with great mastery, restraint, and touching empathy for these fragile and imperfect humans. Of course, the aspiration to reflect this “banality” in the ennobling guise of an “opera” – albeit a “Broadway Opera” as he called it, was very much part of the idealist intellectual world of American socialism so brutally cut off by McCarthy and his progrom. Weill’s membership of the Group Theatre and the Playwrights Company introduced him to a wide range of artists and collaborators who chimed with his vision of a popular political theatre, giving rise to works like his anti-war musical, Johnny Johnson and his attack on racism in South Africa – clearly a veiled reference to America’s own unsolved racial issues at the time – “Lost in the Stars”.

 This network of collaborative expertise is partly an explanation for the extremely high quality of the book for Street Scene by Elmer Rice, with lyrics to match by the black “Harlem” poet Langston Hughes. The dramaturgical problems of solving a work that interweaves such a wide range of personal lives – effectively all the inhabitants of the brownstone “Lonely House” – are considerable, but handled with dexterity. Today there is a tendency, when “high art” goes down-market, to render the result as “trash” –viz Anna Nichole. Weill and his collaborators were much too sensitive to be derogatory or patronising about their proletarian characters. They took them for what they were, human beings on the bottom of the pile, but not worthless for that reason, and just at the right moment, Weill knows how to apply the power of music to lift the ordinary up to the epic, fulfilling Janacek’s motto for his prison opera “From the House of the Dead”: “In every creature a spark of God”. Every young composer should study this score, and hopefully more of them can be inspired to reveal the music contained, perhaps half buried, in ordinary life.

“Discovery of the Year”

The announcement this morning that Weinberg’s opera « The Passenger » in its original production at the Bregenz Festival, now in performance at English National Opera, one of its co-producers, has been nominated as the « Discovery of the year » by the influential German magazine “Opernwelt” is a good moment to assess some of reactions to it in the British press. The nomination, one of five categories awarded annually, is not a “stitch up” by the editorial board of the magazine, but the result of a poll of 50 music critics from 5 European countries (including the UK) plus the US, so it represents a broad consensus of the leading authorities on music and opera. This throws into perspective this paragraph from Stephen Pollard in the Jewish Chronicle:

 “Let's leave aside the fact that Weinberg's music is derivative in the extreme. The notion that any of it is fit to represent the Shoah ought to have been so obviously and self-evidently ridiculous to any discerning listener that it is bizarre that the plug was not pulled on any proposed staging at the start.”

Discerning listeners who thought the opposite include John Allison, editor of Opera Magazine, Albrecht Thiemann, editor of Opernwelt who reviews the DVD extremely thoughtfully alongside the nomination, and Alex Ross in the New Yorker, reviewing the DVD, whose brilliant summary of 20^th century music “And the rest is noise” is sufficient testimony to his judgment, not to mention the management of the Israeli Opera who will perform the work in Tel Aviv in Spring 2013, along with the Intendants of Warsaw, Houston, Chicago, and Copenhagen all of whom have or are actively considering scheduling it.

Given the anguish that the subject inevitably arouses, it is understandable that people should feel strongly, and Pollard raises in his review my quotation of Jurg Amman: “In the face of reality, all invention is obscene” and then proceeds to say “Whether or not Amann's assertion is true - are Primo Levi's works obscene?...” – exposing a fatal lack of clear thinking. Primo Levi, as far as I am aware, invented nothing. His work is one of recollection, not invention. The point of my quoting Amann was in fact to disagree with him: no-one, least of all from our generation, can tell Zofia Posmych (an Auschwitz surviver and the author of the original book) or Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who escaped to Russia but whose entire family perished, that they may not attempt to reach a deeper understanding of these experiences through art. This is an entirely different level of authenticity to all those who have come afterwards and constantly exploit the Shoah in books and films. This does not, as Pollard rightly says, guarantee the quality of their work, but it guarantees their right to try.

Elsewhere there have been more devious attempts to question Posmych’s authenticity. Michael White wrote in his Telegraph blog:

“the libretto is based on the vaguely true-life novel of Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz; and its plotline belongs to the genre of Sophie's Choice and The Reader in that it's a reminiscence of life in the camp as told – not necessarily reliably – by women who experienced it.”

Posmych was in Auschwitz for 3 years, and the novel is about "her" SS Aufseherin Anna-Liese Franz with whom she worked in extremely cramped conditions for at least a year of that time, as the accountant in the kitchens. What on earth is "vague" about this true-life experience and why would he wish to smear Posmych's truthfulness by using such a word?
“.. its plotline belongs to the genre of Sophie's Choice and The Reader in that it's a reminiscence of life in the camp as told – not necessarily reliably – by women who experienced it."
If her novel belongs to this genre, which I doubt, then it must have founded the genre. It was written in the 1960s, a generation before the later examples. Neither of the writers of these two books was in Auschwitz - indeed Schlink (The Reader) was only born in 1944. The women who "not necessarily reliably" tell their stories are fictional characters. Why does Michael White try, by implication, to include Zofia Posmych, a real living person, in this list of unreliable fictional witnesses?

But then we discover that “reliable witnesses” are not necessarily to be found in the Jewish Chronicle either. James Inverne writes in his comment:

“One colleague emailed me the following day to say how furious he was at what he saw as the manipulation of the Holocaust to serve the theatre's cynical demands. It was all so false, he fulminated, with the clearly well-fed members of the chorus and a scene where a group of female Auschwitz prisoners produced candles and had a little party for the main character's birthday. He told me that a friend had encountered a lady crying on the theatre's front steps. Her grandmother had been in the camps. "If they had been able to get candles," she raged, "they would have eaten them".

The strange thing is that no such scene exists! There is an old Polish character, Bronka, who uses a stub of a candle for her prayers, and there is a little dialogue in which one of the prisoners gives her a fragment of wax she has stolen from the office. Then, in an entirely different scene, the prisoners congratulate the leading character, Marta, on her birthday. There are no candles in this scene, but one prisoner tries to give her a carrot, another a scrap of cloth.

It is rather chilling to examine the depth of invention in this quote, because if the scene didn’t exist presumably the colleague who emailed a report about it was also invented, not to mention the lady weeping on the steps whose grandmother would have eaten candles if she could have got them. All this “invention” seems an unnecessary way to bolster a point of view to which he is anyway perfectly entitled.  

When I thought about programming this work for the Bregenz Festival, I considered very carefully the questions raised by the “Shoah as art” issue. And my conclusion is absolutely firm: what else is art for if NOT to confront subjects that are otherwise almost indescribable? The study of history has been able to reveal countless facts about the Shoah, but not really brought us any nearer to understanding how one of the world’s best educated and cultivated nations could have descended to perpetrate such barbarity. Inverne asks what was the point of exhuming this work, and in answer I would point to what Posmych did in her book which is, in my view, superbly realised by Weinberg. She sought to understand her Aufseherin, with whom she was forced work at very close quarters over a number of months, as a woman, and to imagine how this Aufseherin would picture herself once she came to be confronted with the reality of her past. The Aufseherin is of course a nonentity – not one of the architects of the Shoah. But the dread machine needed wheels. Here is a portrait in words and music of just such a tiny wheel of terror – not caricatured as a monster, not excused or forgiven, but understood in a way that possibly only art can achieve.  

Strangely enough, in the many reactions to the work in Bregenz, the issue of cultural inappropriateness hardly ever came up. Pollard’s sentence here is illuminating: “But the result is - cannot be otherwise - the Shoah as fodder for entertainment.” At another point Inverne refers to the “cynical demands of the theatre”. Both remarks betray a very British unease with culture. I have often found myself as an Anglo-Saxon irritated by the insistence in the German speaking world of a gulf between culture and entertainment, but for once I am grateful for it. People in central Europe would not normally refer to an opera as “entertainment”, nor regard the demands of theatre as being necessarily “cynical”. There is indeed an expectation that music and theatre will attempt to embody profound and ennobling ideas, and even when Mozart is being funny he often does just that. In their own way and with their own resources, Posmych and Weinberg bring an ennobling humanitarian sensibility to a terrible subject. I am happy to defend their integrity.  

Knowing that a revival of Weinberg’s The Passenger was approaching at ENO, I couldn’t resist picking up Jürg Amman’s edition of the autobiographical notes made by Alfred Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, whilst he was awaiting execution in Cracow after the war. The latter part of the book describing his time as Kommandant is a depressing litany of the complaints of a dingy little bureaucrat, struggling to build the massive complex of Birkenau with an inadequate work-force of half-starved Russian POWs, and then gassing them. We know from other sources that when he came home from these exhausting labours, he could be consoled by the sight of his children dressed up as Jewish prisoners - complete with yellow star - playing in the garden. They had ordered the costumes especially from seamstresses in the camp. I have always been interested by this combination of domesticity and terror so presciently described by Beethoven in the opening scenes of Fidelio.  The domesticity is the truly frightening aspect.

Höss’s youthful experiences were, however, anything but domestic, and paint an extraordinary and telling picture of pre-Fascist Europe. He grew up in a strictly religious household, and was himself destined for the Priesthood. He was, however, fascinated by soldiering, and joined up in a cavalry unit half way through the 1^st World War, when he was 17. When the war abruptly and, for German soldiers in particular, inexplicably ended, Höss was the officer of a Cavalry Unit fighting in Palestine, on the other side of the front from my Grandfather as it happens. His unit was ordered to surrender and to be interned, but instead they decided to march home, and Höss laconically describes how this armed unit of cavalry proceeded up through Turkey, across the Black Sea, through Romania, Hungary Austria and finally home, “requisitioning” transport, fodder and anything else they needed, presumably at gun point if necessary. It is hard for us to imagine a Europe in which that would be possible.    

Somehow when he got home, “bieder”  family life and training for the Priesthood didn’t seem appropriate anymore, so he went and joined up with the many thousands of armed, discontented and unemployed German soldiers who made up the “Freikorps” – in effect private armies. His particular group was fighting in the Baltic States, originally handed to Germany when the Bolshevik government pulled out of the war at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and then given their independence from Germany a few months later at the treaty of Versailles. The Bolsheviks by then regretted their earlier decision to pull out of what had for a couple of centuries been Tsarist possessions and re-invaded, the Baltic States raised their own troops to fight for their independence, and the Freikorps arrived to try to reclaim German influence and land in the area. The recruiting posters explicitly promised settlement rights. The resulting 3-way battles were indescribably brutal, a war without frontiers in which each side practised some sort of scorched earth policy, raping and pillaging at will. And this was no small affair. Officially, the Germans were not allowed to have an army according to the Versailles Treaty, so these unofficial forces eventually coalesced under the bizarre title of “Western Russian Army” – a force of 50,000 men!

Eventually, however, the Baltic States did get their independence (though not for long – Stalin and Ribbentrop saw to that.) and Höss’s men returned to the Ruhr where they set about harassing, and murdering, the occupying French forces, for which activities Höss was tried and sent to jail. When he was released, he joined the Artemannan – (Arte indicating Race) - a back to the soil “Green” movement embodying “Blut und Boden” (Blood and soil) ideas of rural self-sufficiency turning its back on the degenerate cities and embodying the purity of ancient German values. I am rather intrigued by this “Greenpeace meets Fascism”  aspect, remembering also that the post war Labour government in Britain had a similar rural re-settlement programme for demobbed soldiers under the slogan: “2 acres and a cow”! Höss’s success as a smallholder is not on record, but in this Aryan idyll he did do his patriotic duty by producing in quick succession the 3 children with a later penchant for dressing down. Another leader of this perverse Fascist hippie-dom was none other than Himmler, who duly summoned Höss to join the SS when Hitler came to power. None of this excuses anything at all, but it goes a long way to explain why the Weimar democracy was such a fragile flower.     

I wrote some time ago about the « Fall Fallada » - and the mechanisms of forgetting or obscuring the memory of an artist who has been banned in one, evil, world and then again ignored or side-lined in the after-life of a more apparently civilised one. The composer Weinberg also fits this bill, though by no means the cliché about forgotten artists – that “there must be a good reason why….”. Weinberg was forgotten firstly because within Soviet society he was an outsider, a Jew and a foreigner (Polish) with dubious in-laws – what is called a “spoilt biography” in Soviet parlance – and had no official base in a society which didn’t recognise individual achievement.

Secondly his identity was thrown into question the moment when, in the last days of September 1939, he was branded at the Soviet border as Moshe Vainberg, by implication  not only losing his real name (Mieczyslaw Weinberg) but his country as well. When he made a return visit to Poland in the 1970s he made the mistake of doing so as part of a Soviet delegation, and was ostracised by the Polish composers who regarded him as a collaborator with the occupying power. The fact that he did not flee into the Soviet Union in 1939 of his own volition cut no ice then, and in some quarters still does not today. When I try to say to the Poles that Weinberg deserves a place as an important Polish composer alongside Penderecki and Lutoslawski (frankly he is better than either of these) I get the feeling that even if this is now reluctantly acknowledged as a fact, it is to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Then of course the network of individuals who did support Weinberg during his lifetime – this reads like a roll call of the great Soviet musicians – Rostropovich, Oistrakh, Gilels, Kogan, Kondrashin etc – vanished along with the collapsing Soviet State – an event which occurred two days after the premiere of his last opera, “The Idiot”, effectively obliterating any recognition of that work in the wreckage of the “Evil Empire”.

If I turn round to the post -Soviet Russians of today  instead and say that Weinberg ‘s “Holocaust” opera, The Passenger, which receives its British premiere at ENO on Monday 19^th directed by yours truly, is without doubt the most significant opera composed in the Russian language since War and Peace, then the silence is deafening. It was finally given its Russian premiere in concert at the Stanislavsky Theatre in 2006, but never staged. Initially, at Shostakovich’s instigation, it was commissioned by the Bolshoi, but having been branded with the fatal Soviet code words “abstract humanism” (code for “Why waste time feeling sorry for Jews when we could be celebrating the advance of Communism?”) was never allowed to be put on there, nor in any other theatre under Soviet control – which included Prague where a production was planned in the 1970s. The German concept of “Wiedergutmachung” (making good the faults of the past) does not extend to modern Russia.

I am sure we would all like to think that we judge artistic works on their merits, and are not unduly biased by whether they are written by southerners or northerners, Jews or Gentiles. But that ignores the point that if, like Weinberg, you are forced into surrendering your base, the result may well be not that people are prejudiced against you, but that having no-one to fight for you, you will simply not be played, and therefore only be judged in the cold empty courts of ignorance.  

I have decided to fight for Weinberg’s opera, and am looking for a conductor to join the excellent Gabriel Chmura in championing his powerful  symphonic works that so deserve to be released from the vault of silence into which the double jeopardy of historical fate has cast them.

Well I do for one, and I can reassure everyone in Wales that I have determined that after living through the agonies of a decade of open-air performances in Bregenz, I am never again going to put myself at the mercy of the weather, particularly not Welsh weather! As I am sure you realise it never ever rains in Bregenz, but the anxiety that it might rain is the purest form of torture. Of course there are up-sides to open-air - there are elements of sheer scale that you can achieve in Bregenz that you could never fit into any building, not even a circus tent, but there are also buildings other than theatres....

In Britain our obsession with picnics, gardens, and nostalgia for the apparatus of aristocratic life have spawned a rash of country-house opera venues - every ha-ha now has its aria – but they do invite the suspicion  that the surrounding brouhaha of picnic hampers and long dresses and giggly second halves is actually more important than the opera, and in any case the nature of the venue doesn't really impact on the performance itself except perhaps in a negative sense - such as rain drumming on a plastic roof!

The British defying the weather! (Grange Park opera)

An alternative to this Arcadian fantasy is to use buildings of radically different cultural atmosphere whose scale is theatrical even if they are not theatres. The ne plus ultra of this is the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Germany, where a great deal of money has been invested in restoring and converting the colossal relics of Germany's rust belt industrial heritage into arts venues, from the magnificent Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum to the dramatic remains of Europe's once-largest coal mine in Essen.

Die Soldaten - from the Ruhrtriennale, actually here at the 5th Avenue Armoury in New York.

 The point about these spaces is that if they are intelligently used, their special ambience, far removed from red plush 19th century theatres, can transform our feelings about the works which are performed in them.

Conjugal duty took me to Tallinn where my wife Nicola Raab was directing Parsifal in just such a space - a disused Soviet-era ship yard. This was however no chicly restored factory space à la Ruhr, but a factory scattered with bits of machinery, nuts and bolts and rusting objects threatening to snag every passing pair of tights, as if the workers had just a few minutes before flung down their tools and left in a panic.

The route to this venue was also part of the experience. Starting from the Soviet/Speer-like remains of a vast sea-shore complex created for the 1980s Olympics and, in a telling tribute to the sustainability of Soviet ambition, already crumbling, a culture trail ran past and, if you chose, through an astonishing abandoned jail - the scene of horrors perpetrated by each of the relentless sequence of conquerors and occupiers to ply their ghastly trade in this much trampled-over land. In a country now apparently blissfully free of Health and Saftey Gauleiter you are at liberty to ramble through this jail in which some cells still have bunk beds with bedding on, exuding an almost  palpable smell of fear and pain.

This vision of a claustrophobic male community is the perfect set-up for Parsifal, and reminds me that I have always wanted to programme Parsifal along-side Janacek's From the House of the Dead - curiously enough the more optimistic of the two works! Having left the jail you follow an old railway-line into the ship-yard which is still partially active, and gradually begin to notice strange, tense, concentrated figures clutching an object wrapped in a cloth that you rapidly realise is a chalice.

These ”knights” - are they German or Soviet?- exude that sense of a hopeless and faded fanaticism that hangs like a pall over that half of Europe that has experienced both tyrannies, perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the Baltic states - the negligible and discardable playthings of Great Power politics.

As soon as the first bars are played, you realise that this Parsifal will not only be transformed by its grim Soviet architectural context but also by the chance that this factory has the most sublime acoustic, beating even Bayreuth, so that the orchestra sounds ravishing, the singers are clear and audible, and all the ethereal voices from above achieve here an utterly magical transcendental quality.

Designer (Robert Innes Hopkins) and director work very simply but extremely effectively within this space, relating each element to the inherent nature of the factory. The objects which each "knight" cradles reverently in his arms are revealed to be lengths of steel piping from the factory, but Amfortas's object dematerialises magically so that the grail is actually a torture within his own body. The magnificent chorus – it is no surprise with voices like this that Estonia famously sang its way to freedom! -  is extremely subtly handled to express both sincere spirituality and the sinister threat of dogmatic fanaticism. The "flower maidens" start out as head-scarfed factory girls, before getting down to their underwear which, given the striking beauty of so many Estonian women, is an entirely delightful vision. 

The whole experience was almost unbearably moving, a combination of musical, political, religious and geographical resonances which added up to a performance of Parsifal that I don’t expect to be bettered in my lifetime. These extra-mural adventures can be extremely rewarding, but of course so long as they are the exception. For Monday to Friday give me a good old theatre with a sound roof!