Thanks to the generosity of friends, Mrs Spencer and I went to the opera the other week, an exceptionally rare event. Having grown up with the rougher edges of pop and rock music, the trained voices of opera singers always strike me as being artificial and overblown. And there is something about the snooty splendour of Covent Garden that brings out a chippy adolescent resentment in me, though on most matters these days I am soundly right-wing and usually enjoy a spot of luxury.
The evening didn’t begin well. Our taxi got stuck in a traffic jam and we had barely travelled 100 yards before the meter hit ten quid and we bailed out. But walking across Waterloo Bridge was almost as bad because there had been a big fireworks display for the Lord Mayor’s Show and we were repeatedly held up by officious police officers as the crowds dispersed. When we finally got to Covent Garden I was almost crying with rage and frustration.
The prospect of an enjoyable evening looked remote, especially since the Telegraph’s opera critic, Rupert Christiansen, had described the production of Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula as ‘tiresomely droopy, threadbare and a waste of everyone’s time’, while Michael Tanner had been pretty lukewarm in The Spectator.
In fact, I found it all splendid. In these anxious days of impending economic meltdown, there seemed to be something gloriously defiant about an opera house crammed with civilised people prepared to splash out £125 on a ticket. The dinner in the Amphitheatre restaurant was delicious, our seats in the auditorium were terrific, and even the opera proved unexpectedly bearable, probably because my expectations had been so low.
I loved the fact that the leading performers looked too old, and too fat, for the roles they were playing, and more remarkably still I enjoyed the bel canto singing.
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