Music and Opera

Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the crisis the way it knows best — by assembling the most glamorous possible list of vocal megastars and presenting them at astronomical expense. But dollars can’t get around social distancing, and in lockdown even the greatest voice is only as good as the mic on a smartphone. Cue four hours of free-to-view party pieces from 43 of the world’s greatest singers, broadcast live from their homes without orchestra, without editing and without excuses. So the credits rolled with all the bombast familiar from the Met’s cinema relays, and it was

No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time that I would never again be so moved by a performance of anything. I have kept an open mind ever since, and still it takes me no time or effort to answer the question. Obviously I can’t discuss here why I regard Parsifal as a supreme work, but even if I thought that Wagner had written greater ones, or that some other master composer had — in fact, I do think there are several works by four composers that are as great as Parsifal, though at that altitude rankings and

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a

In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across Europe — a plague which, until that point, strict quarantine had kept out. Within a year it had killed a quarter of the town. The remaining residents gathered together and made a vow: if they were spared, they would stage a play of the life and death of Jesus, and would continue to do so

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis, and if the name conveyed a certain bleak Magyar humour, the resourcefulness couldn’t be faulted. Elsewhere, orchestras were still talking optimistically about broadcasting concerts from empty halls, and (even more optimistically) about persuading online viewers to pay for them. Realising that any activity that brings 90 musicians into close proximity was probably running out of road, the BFO’s music director Ivan Fischer announced that ‘this is not the time for orchestral music’ and launched a programme of chamber recitals by the orchestra’s players, livestreamed from their rehearsal hall. Logging on

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to

Who was the most influential figure in 20th-century classical music? Stravinsky? Pierre Boulez? What about Bernstein or Britten? John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Powerful public figures all. But there’s a case to be made for a very different kind of character — less king than kingmaker, a musical éminence grise.With a Who’s Who of pupils that included Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, John Eliot Gardiner and Daniel Barenboim, Nadia Boulanger is the most powerful musician you’ve never heard of, ‘the most important teacher since Socrates’, as one composer only partly joked. Photographs show us a stern, spectacled, almost invariably elderly figure. Neatly coiffed

‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the role of Florestan regardless, and begged our indulgence. The mind plays tricks and after an announcement like that it’s hard to be entirely sure whether you’re hearing a skilfully proportioned interpretation or a singer dialling it down. But let the record show that Kaufmann did sing, and if you’ve booked for this production on the

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them that modern audiences will be unable to empathise with anything involving swords, castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why they work hard to imagine new contexts that can make these hopelessly dated dramas address contemporary life as we live it, right here, right now. Counts, village maidens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown