Dan invited me a few days before. He was press and I would be his guest at the Glyndebourne opera festival’s production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He had decided to walk from Lewes to the opera, which he had guessed would take about an hour. He asked me what I thought but I told him to take the reins. I was busy watching Game of Thrones. My friend Marcello called:
‘Hello’, he said in a silly voice.
‘Fuck off’. I hung up, then quickly messaged, ‘Sorry, I’m busy.’
‘Hahahaha-
you with a girl?’
I didn’t reply.
‘I get it, the macho attack.’
I hastily closed WhatsApp on my computer, as his messages were appearing in notifications on my screen.
I was with a girl, a friend of mine. We were watching Game of Thrones. We had both seen Game of Thrones before, we had seen all the naked celebrities and extras. We had also seen each other naked; I wondered if we might again.
‘I only do one boy at a time,’ she told me when I started stroking her.
‘But girls?’
‘I can do a girl and a boy,’ as though at market.
I smiled, ‘Aren’t I girl enough for you?’
She flashed an ironic eye over my body.
‘No.’
‘Hmmmm.’
Her boundary was a moral one, but this personal clause sounded, if not improvised now, then improvised whenever she came up with it: borne out of experience more than principle, and so bound to the bending laws of reality as opposed to the fixed laws of fiction. Even so, not a code I should try to break, not unless she wanted me to.
‘Hmmm,’ I paused, and then in a puppyish whine asked, ‘Why don’t you want to have sex with me?’
She laughed. ‘Because of my dignity.’
I smiled back, ‘yes, well, you win.’
But she was magnanimous in victory.
‘I do like you a little’, she said before nuzzling my arms.
The next day, Dan did take the reins. We did walk, but first swimming with my friend the girl and Game of Thrones and delicious post-swim snuggles; more dallying about tracks I needed to finish; more spontaneous hosting and more work on my friend’s birthday gift - a customised pack of cards that was much more expensive and labour/admin-intensive than I was bargaining for, though there’s something very pleasant in calling up the customer service of those who make customised decks of cards and that is that you’re never on hold - 2 to 3 beeps and then:
‘Hello, this is Matt Pope, number 921508.’
‘Ah yes, just looking now.’
‘Is this Lara?’
‘Briony. Lara’s away.’
‘Cool. I was wondering about getting the cards in time…. Sorry, I know the package usually takes 10 working days to arrive and, well basically, I need it before then. Is there any chance we could do before?’
‘Well obviously we do express delivery which is 3 days, that’s extra though.’
‘Ah, that sounds better, or perhaps delivering it to Stockholm? I don’t know where you’re based.’
‘Yeah so obviously we make the cards in London.’
‘Right, OK.’
‘Yeah…. so obviously it’s more complicated to send to Stockholm.’
‘Express delivery sounds great, thanks, obviously.’
I met Dan at Lewes after sitting on a train that I was lucky to have a seat on. Around me were three young men in black tie. All Cambridge, all well-adjusted and set up for the families they either had or would at some point have. The one in front was good-looking in a sort of public school way, his face as poised to laugh as it was to sneer; were he on Game of Thrones he might have been a Lannister, though his mouth was more Targaryen. He had a music score open in front of him with pencil markings showing entries and tempi and the sort of things that conductors need to remember. So, he was a conductor. A conductor with a pre-tied bow-tie - I would have liked to know his thoughts on bow-ties, though I wouldn’t have wanted him to tell me.
‘But the counterpoint! The counterpoint is incredible,’ he told his friends with genuine passion.
I wondered if he was referring to the music we were about to see - I hadn’t known Wagner was known for his counterpoint. Was it possible that I was listening to an original opinion, or was he talking about someone else? Over the course of their conversation it became apparent that he was pretty serious about his career and spent a considerable amount of time abroad with musicians whose foreign names lent them, and by extension him, prestige. His friends admired that he was an artist, and what’s more, an artist who was getting paid and providing; on his phone was a picture of a baby girl.
The man on my right was taller than the two opposite. His hair was, if not ginger, then the kind of copper that flecks the beards of brown haired men. He was an accountant, and by the sounds of it a good one. He explained to the last of them, a short-haired and gentle fellow with a kind face rounded at the edges, like Tintin’s, the plot of Tristan und Isolde.
It was an excellent synopsis. They talked of their college days, where they had sung for ‘Cleobury’ (Stephen Cleobury - former director of music at King’s College, Cambridge), and ‘Neth’ (Andrew Nethsingha - formerly same job at St. John’s, Cambridge now holding directorship at Westminster Abbey). The conductor mentioned a girl they had known and whom he had recently bumped into.
‘She’s lovely,’ he asserted, ‘she really is a very nice person.’
The others heartily agreed and the conductor continued,
‘I imagine you knew her better than I did,’ he said to the accountant.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you did a lot at university; you packed a lot in.’
‘I suppose.’
‘I would have said you were very efficient.’
They all laughed, at once amused and embarrassed by their oblique bawdiness.
I finished my cards, working to redo my artwork for a third time. When I rang up the company to check all was received and that all would be delivered in time, Ms. Obviously was very helpful even if she made it sound like I might be providing her with material to chat about with her colleagues. Obviously the deadline was 1pm - earlier she had told me it was obviously 12. I was always a step behind whatever news she was already a step ahead. Never mind, the work was done and I could enjoy the smug feeling of one who is sitting on a good gift for their friend. 5 minutes later we were in Lewes station.
Dan and I walked into Lewes proper. We walked slowly.
‘This is pretty leisurely’, I said when we made the high street.
‘What do you mean? You want me to hurry up?’
‘I mean that it feels like we’ve just arrived at wherever we’re going.’
‘Haha fair enough.’
But we didn’t speed up. Instead we had a pasty.
There was a steep hill, and I sweated into my full black tie. Dan was in a linen t-shirt and shorts with orange cap (it was a great outfit) and made ‘told-you-so’ noises.
‘I wasn’t going to put this stuff in a bag.’
‘I suppose mine will be crumpled.’
‘Are you a golfer?’ I asked apropos of a sign reading ‘GOLFERS ONLY’.
‘No, why - are you?’
‘No. I like all the walking-’
‘Yeah you get to see some beautiful places,’
‘Yeah, that’s chill, but I can’t play slow sports. It’s not that they’re boring, it’s that I’m awful at anything that requires me to think before doing. I have good… athletic instincts. I’m good at rugby, but rugby’s reactive and spontaneous. Even tennis, at least the speed we or I play it, is too slow. There’s too much time to think before each shot, too much time to fuck it up.’
‘Have you ever done ju-jitsu?’
‘No, why have you?’
‘Ju-jitsu is like the golf of martial arts. You’d think it’s fast and reactive, but it’s slow and strategic. Even when you’re fighting, you have to continue down a line of attack, like chess.’
‘If I did martial arts, I’d do Wing Chun.’
‘Don’t know it.’
‘Yeah, it’s a form of karate, less known in the West. I think it was invented by this guy called Ip Man, pronounced Yip Man? Still I guess that’s a westernised name.’
‘Ha yeah,’
‘But yeah, I think this was when the Japanese were being awful in the Second World War, absolutely ghastly.’
‘Ghastly,’ he affirmed.
‘You know, the Rape of Nanking and that - for which they STILL haven’t apologised.’
‘Yeah, it’s-’
‘And Ip Man taught his village Wing Chun to help them resist.’
‘Ah cool. Yeah I was surprised by how much the Chinese still loathe the Japanese.’
‘Manchurians?’
‘No, just like so many places in China.’
‘Boycott Hello Kitty.’
‘Making a miniature cute version of everything.’
‘Hate it. They’ve yet to apologise for the Rape of Nanking.’
‘Hello Kitty? Ghastly.’
‘It’s not a joke, Dan.’
‘Then stop joking about it.’
The walk was wonderful. Our trail over the South Downs was near enough the coast to pick up the sea-breeze and cries of seagulls cresting the hills, and in the heat nothing could have been more welcome. We arrived at Glyndebourne itself feeling grounded, or as Dan said, like ‘natives of the Earth.’
Dan went to get changed. A friend I hadn’t seen in eight years bumped into me. She was working. We caught up, she left. Dan was done changing. I ran over.
‘Do you know how much our tickets would have been?’
‘No?’
‘Three hundred.’
‘How’d you know that?’
‘A friend, just ran into- knew her at Manchester, haven’t seen her since. Director of Staff as it happens. So basically anyone you see will have spent something like I dunno £200 to be here, and that’s excluding picnic stuff of course. You and I are probably in the 4-6% of people here under 30, or 40 even. If there were more young people here think of the breeding opportunities! Ideal mating ground for the affluent.’
‘Indeed. When I went to the opera in April my friend was so curious about how they all made their money.’
‘Yeah? What’s their trick?’
‘Arms-dealers.’
‘Oh, she was suspicious,’ I said, disappointed.
‘No, but it’s possible. There are a lot of well-off people here. Let’s go and find ours.’
Glyndebourne must always be lovely, at least in the summer. A couple of years prior, I had been Dan’s guest at a November performance of Rigoletto. It was autumn and cold and dark and we took a bus to and from. It was good, but it wasn’t the Glyndebourne that makes guests sigh.
I wouldn’t want to ruin it for anyone who might go but… I used to mock it, I mocked it for what I thought it represented, the worldly world of ‘being there’ and ‘doing it’, the whole picnic of it all to which so many of my friends apparently aspired, but even if there’s a dose of that who cares? It’s the same with Glastonbury: there’s too much actual beauty and goodness to mind what it’s alloyed with, and it is to its beauty, as well as its picnicking, that I must repent. One look at the river - the bourne - itself, and the lily pads crowding from shore to shore, the sun softening the water and giving shadow and relief to its many greens; the scene looked like a still from Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza, or that film starring Colin Firth set in ‘30s Eton, Another Country. It is, as I said shaking my head to one of our party, Felicity, one of the best things I have ever seen.
And the perfect prelude and postlude to Tristan und Isolde; not Wagner’s longest, but still at four hours it isn’t a short opera. On the whole I found myself moved, provoked, and totally bored. A few things struck me: that I was never bored watching Game of Thrones, that it was very German (emotional articulacy to the point of making emotion boring to anyone not so interested in its direct expression), that Tristan could have been better cast but acted well, that Wagner could have used an editor, that the ending justifies every single moment of potential frustration throughout the entire work.
After it finished I talked to Felicity about the whole thing:
‘It’s not really my thing,’ she said. ‘It’s very… it’s very manly; it’s told by a man. I’m more into Figaro, that kind of thing.’
‘I love Figaro, saw it last week. It’s not as… German.’
‘Yes, we need humour, it’s a part of life and there’s not much of it in the Wagner.’
‘Well, I’d say that’s quite a British outlook no?, the fear of being a bore and all that, the suspicion of anything that takes itself too seriously. Not that I’m against that, against humour, but I think it can be easy to retreat to it. Nico Muhly, the composer…’, I noticed Donald Macleod, (Felicity’s friend, presenter of Radio 3’s Composer of the Week and a sort of hero of mine) nodding as he shifted towards our conversation.
‘Well, Nico Muhly loves Gibbons,’ I continued, ‘He says that listening to Gibbons is like being a guest at a great dinner party, all quips and chipping in. Wagner [Romantic Music if we’re being faithful to Muhly] is like listening to an old man at a bar in his cups telling you about his love life.’
‘Well I would have said with Wagner it was more about his philosophy.’
’Sure OK, but if Muhly’s analogy were accurate, you’d be listening to him go on about his philosophy, and at points you’d follow and at points you’d be impatient or bored, but if the analogy were accurate you’d, well at the end he’d say something that tied everything together and you’d understand and feel it was worth it. The point would be made and you would understand that he’d just communicated something that was worth taking the time to communicate…. I just think that when at the end Isolde sings about rapture, it’s something inarticulable, like whatever you might have felt on one particular walk in a forest, or even looking at this river, but something both intensely personal and totally universal.’
‘Yes’
‘At the end I was waiting for the end, like I was thinking, ‘come on, come on, here we go’ and I knew the climax was coming. I don’t know the piece but I’d seen Stephen Fry fuck up the end in a video so I knew where we were but when it actually arrived I was beaming in spite of myself.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
We smiled at each other and later when I asked if anyone had seen the bottle cap for the unfinished wine I’d brought, she went into the recycling to find it. She had the most luminous eyes, I told Dan, like whatshername from Tolstoy - ‘Mary?’
‘Don’t talk to me about Tolstoy you won’t get anything back. Not until April.’
We made our way back to the taxi rank. I walked with Donald. I won’t say all of what he said - some of which was quite damning (not about the opera), but it was very spirited. At one point I asked him who his next composer for the week was.
‘Ah well, for the first time since I’ve been doing it I now have a six week break.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘My last composer, however, was Liszt.’
‘That sounds like a good one.’
‘Yes, but an odd one. I like some of his music, not all of it.’
‘I guess you looked at tone poems and all that.’
‘Indeed, we looked at the five facets of Liszt.’
‘Hahaha’. He looked at me quizzically, ‘sorry, it’s only that just now you sounded exactly like Donald Macleod from Composer of the Week’
He chuckled, and then with genial irony said, ‘that’s what happens when you’ve spent as many years as I have bullshitting.’
Dan had to write 380 words on the opera for the next morning. We were workshopping what he might say. The main points were that the tenor could have been better but that the orchestra was fantastic. Earlier, after the second act, Dan and I were discussing the singers:
‘She [the woman playing Isolde] is good, but she’s not quite hitting it for me. Perhaps I’m being unfair as she isn’t so near as Karen Cargill [playing Isolde’s maidservant Brangäne], but she’s a little underpowered for what the production needs.’
I agreed, ‘yes, it needs to be ecstatic, and she’s not quite… riding the noise.’
‘Yes…. yes.’
And later, while waiting for the train….
‘But you’re right, Dan,’ said, Sarah, one of his capital-L Literature colleagues at UCL, ‘she has a lovely voice, but as you say she wasn’t able to ride the sound so much. You have to use that line!’
I looked at Dan, ‘How dare you?! You stole my line!’
‘Haha! That’s not…. Look, that’s the kind of thing I say. I always use the word ‘ride’, it’s in my repertoire. I would have said it even if you hadn’t.’
I looked at my phone only to find that a close friend of Dan’s and a distant one of mine, Benedict, had responded to an Instagram story I’d shared of Dan and me drinking complimentary press prosecco:
‘Feed him opinions and see if they appear in the review.’
I showed Dan. We both laughed.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said.
I smiled, ‘is it?’
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/classical-opera/article/tristan-und-isolde-review-a-beautifully-abstracted-production-70px5ns8g
"Yes." was my favourite bit.
But that's not to say the rest of it wasn't an excellent read, too.