Notes on Lucia di Lammermoor

Andy asked me, a week or so ago, what the Scots make of Lucia, highlighting the equally unlikely pairing of Puccini and the Wild West in La fanciulla del West.

Well, it appears Walter Scott tended to play fast and loose with historical accuracy at the best of times, tending to prefer a highly romanticised view of Scotland, yet the librettist takes this even further. While Scott sets his novel The bride of Lammermoor during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), the opera refers to the recent passing of a King William, leaving a Queen Mary on the throne. The Mary in question cannot be Mary Queen of Scots (who was around over a century earlier, preceded by James V), yet as the lack of any ordinal following her name suggests, she was the first Scottish monarch of that name. Mary II and her husband William III, both of whom had an equal claim to the throne, came to the throne in 1689 - interestingly, after the union of the crowns (in 1603), but before the Act of Union of 1707 - which would make sense in the case of this opera, if it weren't for his surviving her rather than the other way round.

That said, I doubt many opera lovers pay that much attention to such minor matters as historical accuracy - let's face it, that's not the point of this particular artform. Despite Donizetti's music being, in a lot of places, utterly unsuited to tragedy (there are times when it veers dangerously close to Gilbert and Sullivan), all is swept away by the glorious bel canto of the two principals. Okay, there may be a distinct lack of Scottish influence to the score, but come on, who cares when you've got the ne plus ultra of operatic mad scenes?

A cultural roller-coaster

My mother is coming to visit on Friday which, as ever, heralds an intense few days' culture: we've got something on every day.

Some friends are coming round on Friday evening for a game of Ex libris (think a literary spin on Balderdash). The next evening sees us holding a French dinner party (artichoke gratin, a selection of Alpine cheeses and apple charlotte), and after church on Sunday we're off to Dundas Castle for The life of Jesus Christ, which (assuming the rain holds off) promises to be stunning.

On Monday we'll be off to the Filmhouse (one of Edinburgh's arthouse cinemas) to catch Beijing bicycle - this is apparently Edinburgh Bike Week, but that comes second to Mother's interest in all things Chinese. Tuesday evening sees us at Guys and dolls at the Playhouse, all leading up to Lucia di Lammermoor at the Festival Theatre the following evening.

Mother's always keen to try out the city's restaurants, so we have a table booked at David Bann (one of the vegetarian restaurants in Edinburgh) pre-Lucia and will probably be off to the sizzling Scot at some stage.

Enough to be getting on with, I think. At least, I'll have a little breather before Festival madness kicks in ...

Christian malappropisms

As a child, I'd hope I was not alone in misunderstanding parts of the liturgy when attending church. The possible resurrection of the Mass in Latin has reminded me of these, though it wouldn't surprise me if children hearing the texts in a language other than their own produced some fresh misconceptions.

In my case, I somehow got the impression the Nicene Creed was called the Nicotine Creed. Slightly more worrying was my conviction the Te Deum contained the line "Thou didst not abort the Virgin's womb", which I thought was pretty obvious. I mean, having gone to all that trouble with the Immaculate Conception, it wasn't very likely God would have a change of heart ...

Emphatically not kicking myself

In the early hours of Sunday morning, as I was walking home from a friend's 30th birthday party, I was accosted by a man who claimed to be a record producer after new vocal talent. Asked to sing something, I asked him what style he was after (trying hard not to laugh) and left him after suggesting my voice mightn't be in top condition at that hour.

Had it not been for the hour and my minor inebriation, I might have been tempted. But what record producer stalks the streets of Edinburgh at a quarter to three in the morning?

Luke reckons my debut album should be Wagner. I retaliated with a proposal of Boulez, Cage and Xenakis - you know, real crowd-pleasers.

Why Elgar is not worth the bother

It's the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar's birth today, an ideal occasion to write about why I don't like his music.

You see, I'm inherently suspicious of anyone who is very little (if at all) known outside their own country - Z-list celebrities certainly, but also those composers who are adored by a given nation but unheard of elsewhere. The ones who wrote little beyond operetta make up a high proportion of these as it's a genre which doesn't travel well, not helped by the relative poor quality of the music. Please don't go telling me that Gilbert and Sullivan is high art because I will shoot you down. The fact the latter wished more attention were paid to his serious music says a great deal.

Now even I wouldn't put Elgar in this category; the amount of light music he wrote is comparatively small compared to his other output. It's not even a case of disliking him on account of political incorrectness (displayed by works such as The spirit of England which, to be fair, are typical of the Imperial English view of the world): true, there are times when he can be insufferably English, but this was a man who didn't actually like the association of his Pomp and circumstance March no. 1 with Land of hope and glory. That said, his outlook was so limited that little of his music is known outside the English(-speaking) world.

If we limit ourselves to purely instrumental works (which have a greater chance of international acceptance because of the lack of any text to get in the way), the Pomp and circumstance Marches can be, in the wrong hands, little better than bombastic Sousa marches. Even at their best, they appear po-faced when compared to the fun of Walton's efforts (Crown Imperial, Orb and sceptre and the like), which can be taken as satirical swipes at the genre. Only the 'cello concerto escapes such jingoism, and that's largely because of Jacqueline du Pré, whose association with the piece has (in Britain, at least) sadly become mired in sentiment. The same is of the Enigma variations, which would be his greatest orchestral work if it weren't for the dreadfully English nobility of Nimrod.

The fact I don't like the thickness of his textures is very much a personal matter, in the same way as I don't much care for the German Romantics, but at least they're not always so pompous and humourless. Wagner seems just as bad until you hear bits of Die Meistersinger or the beautiful chamber music of the Siegfried-Idyll, while Strauss maintained his youthful outlook far beyond Der Rosenkavalier. Even Brahms, another one I have litte time for, wrote a sublime violin concerto amid all the more turgid stuff.

Great artists create for the world. Elgar didn't and thus cannot hope to be among them.

I never heard so musical a discord

Andy's comments to my previous post have put me in reflective mood with regards to the incongruities of the music heard in some operas when compared to their settings. To the best of my recollection, there is very little in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor to reinforce the Scottish locations, while Andy points out the unlikely pairing of Puccini's hyperlyrical style with a Western setting in La fanciulla des West. John Wayne it ain't.

However, it strikes me that some operas get away with this quite neatly. Bizet's Carmen benefits from the ease with which French composers of the period adopted an Hispanic idiom, with the result that the music sounds typical of its composer without losing any of its Spanish flavour. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Aida is historically so far removed from modern times (only marginally more than when it was written) that any attempt on Verdi's part to introduce even pseudo-ancient Egyptian influences would sound quite strange. It's probably helped by the fact that next to nothing is known about music of the period: despite the survival of some instruments and various pictorial representations of music-making, there's still a lot of conjecture about what it sounded like.

That said, there's one opera, among the best-loved of them all, which has almost succeeded in side-stepping the issue entirely. Le nozze di Figaro is an Italian opera composed by an Austrian, based on a French play set in Spain - and just to spice things up, one of the characters speaks of going on a diplomatic trip to London. Mozart's only attempt at making the music sound relevant to its setting is a fandango at the end of Act III, and to be honest it doesn't work - you can tell he never crossed the Pyrenees. Obviously the work as a whole more than makes up for this (very minor) blemish, but the sheer mixture of cultures involved in its conception is impressive in its own way. Given how much of a cultural melting-pot Vienna was in its imperial days, it's almost a shame the EU never seized on Figaro's pan-European qualifications ...

(Bonus points if you can name the source of this post's title. Without the assistance of a search engine!)