The following posting was originally put up on the site in July. In the Big Makeover in September it somehow got deleted. The emphasis in these pages has since shifted away from general subjects to Erotic Art in the National Gallery (My Guide thereto) but as Opera is one of my greatest loves I will return to it from time to time.

Today’s rant will be about trouser roles. A subject particularly dear to my heart is the importance of trouser roles being sung by comely singers. I don’t mind a 16 stone Tosca being winched up to the top of a wall so that she can jump off it. I don’t mind a well upholstered Violetta dying in the last act from consumption and I don’t mind a late life Pavarotti prancing around the stage like an elephant on hot bricks in the role of a star-crossed juvenile lover. This is opera, and when Pavarotti goes into “Una Furtiva Lagrima” your ears tell why it does not matter that much.

Trouser roles are, however, something different. They are written with the intention of titillating the males in the audience and say something about the composer’s preferences as well as one’s own. I object strongly to seeing an aging soprano with the face of a horse, angel voiced though she may be, playing a boy. The two sexiest trouser parts in opera are, to my thinking, Cherubino in Marriage of Figaro and Oscar in The Masked Ball. Some opera fanatics with animal sensations capable of being aroused would add a third: Octavian in Rosenkavalier, where the “Mrs Robinson” scenario is like pushing on an open door (double analogy here, in case you missed it) but I don’t like the composer. Richard Strauss was a Nazi toady and no less importantly - although capable of writing a melody - chose not to do so for more than a bar or two at a time. If it was a case of the Devil having the best tunes one would have to take a view. With Richard Strauss the dilemma does not arise.

Maria Ewing is still a good looking woman but there was a moment in her life when she looked stunningly gorgeous. Peter Hall, who dumped his second wife for her, certainly thought so. In Marriage of Figaro Cherubino is a young love-lorn lad who is writing poems to an older woman. For reasons too long to go into in this blog it becomes necessary for this older woman and another woman, both leading soprano roles, to disguise Cherubino as a girl. So, here you have two grown-up women undressing a young boy, who is really a young girl, and dressing him (her, really) up as a girl. What opera director worth his salt can not make something pretty exciting about that situation? Sadly, most do not.

In The Masked Ball, which has the most beautiful tunes in all opera, Oscar is the page to the King. I saw it on a video played by a black girl, very pretty and with a gamin face, in a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. As written by Verdi the part calls for a characterisation full of verve, personality and bounce. Un-page-to-the King-like, in a nutshell. The Met girl took it further than I have ever seen before and was hitting off her master at every opportunity. The words were same-old libretto but the body language was something else. I have forgotten her name, which says something for the depth of my knowledge about opera, but I know wot I likes. [A few moments with Google suggests that it was probably a singer called Harolyn Blackwell.]

I am very keen on opera having good tunes. The last Masked Ball that I saw was as recent as a week before Hampton Court when Carol and I flew to Belfast to attend a performance at Castleward by a part/amateur part/professional company as guests of our Ulster friends. Castleward is a sort of mini-Glyndebourne with everyone dressed in full evening fig, except me. I was Mr Sartorial Elegance only from the ankles up, a packing blip having resulted in my only having trainers to wear. The Castleward production was excellent entertainment and something in which those involved could justly take pride. The Oscar, was as good with the trousers as most I have seen in the role, none having come close to the little black girl in the New York Met production (as entrancing as Maria Ewing - which is the ultimate accolade). It would be well nigh impossible to render this particular opera in any way that was not a good way to spend an evening. As I said to our friends, if it had been, say, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, I would have stayed in London and got on with the preparations for Hampton Court.

Benjamin Britten, in my book, is even more execrable than Richard Strauss. Along with his ghastly contemporary Michael Tippett he had a choice about what to do about Hitler and decided to let Hitler get on with it. Britten chose to skip off to Canada. Tippett stayed at home and progressed his career as a composer while other musicians were fighting and dying to save my sort. Both of them are on my list of bodies to be exhumed and reburied with stakes through their heart to make sure that the taxpayer is once and for all liberated from their malign influence. Britten wrote nasty operas, some of them sadistic, some of them paedophilic and all of them incapable of putting bums on seats without raiding the pay packets of shop girls in Bootle. Tippett also made a career of pilfering shop girls’ wages. They don’t do Britten or Tippett at Castleward.

It turned out that Castleward was to provide one of the most memorable operatic experiences in my opera-going life. It came in the closing moments of the last act.

To understand what happened, it is necessary to know a little about the architecture of the venue and the way in which the last act of Masked Ball unfolds. The theatre is a long narrow converted barn that holds about three hundred patrons on an un-raked floor. To compensate, the stage is comprised of a series of steeply stepped surfaces. The orchestra is one fifth in view of the audience, four fifths under the stage. Not so much an auditorium as a funnel laid on its side. The opera concludes with the masked ball of the title, Verdi’s music building-up to the moment when the King gets stabbed by his best friend. This happens a few chords before the end and is marked by a climax in the score in which the entire cast belts out the melody, the voices of the sopranos soaring above the rest. It would not surprise me if even the ushers and toilet attendants were summoned to the wings to add their voices. Then comes an abrupt momentary silence before the music resumes. In Castleward’s acoustic tunnel it was not so much a listening highlight as experiencing blast from a shotgun. I would not, I said to myself, and to my friends, wished to have lived my life without experiencing that moment.

I am not someone who ovates standing. The Americans give standing ovations at the drop of almost any curtain. In London it happens less often but when it does I remain steadfastly in my seat. I came very very near to standing-up at Castleward and, had a single other person in the audience done so, I would have joined them. That no one did shows what an un-reconstructed bunch are the Ulster elite. They see themselves as more British than the rest of us and it shows. I debated whether to go it alone, which would have been quite a statement, but decided that coming from someone wearing full evening dress and trainers it would have been counter productive from the performers’ point of view.

Digression: For the sake of a better understanding of my blogs please note that, while I do not use superlatives lightly, they are not mutually exclusive. In this regard I follow the example of Samuel Pepys who, when he liked something, always said that it was the best he ever saw (or heard) or the best of its kind ever known in the world. Contrary-wise, when he did not like something, it would be the worst ever ever. This being the case, Pepys had to find words to distinguish the best of the best from just the best ever. Thus, the first time he heard a new style wind instrument developed from the recorder, he wrote:

“…but that did which please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind-musique…which is so sweet that it ravished me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home and at home, I was able to think of anything, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any music hath the real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me.”

Opera has provided several moments that I would not have wished to have lived my life without experiencing - which is my way of saying that I was ravished really sick. Two that come to mind are the first time the curtain came down on Rigoletto (Verdi) and the first time I heard the Hebrew Slaves Chorus in the third act of Nabucco (also Verdi) which luckily for me was in the Verona arena in front of a largely Italian audience made up of people of all ages and walks of life. In Italy this composition is the Song of Freedom. It is Land of Hope and Glory, We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line, Land of of My Fathers, I Belong to Glasgow and Danny Boy rolled-up in one. Which underlines a point that I sometimes make to young people that have never been to an opera - which is that they are luckier than me because they still have it all to come. I also tell everyone to avoid being desensitised by listening to opera compilations on CD.

I am now writing on Tuesday 17 July once again en route for Glyndebourne to see Macbeth. Also by Verdi but one without any good tunes (although not as dreary as his later tuneless efforts Otello and Falstaff). What Macbeth lacks in melody, it make up for with lots of drama and blood. This is very much a family occasion with three of my grandchildren among the party. Two of them are aged only 13 and I just hope that it works out well for them. It is not a good opera for comparative beginners but its saving grace is that it is, all said and done, Macbeth.

Trouser roles in Opera – A Rant Revisited.

Googling around in the course of writing my July 23 rant on how much I hated it when opera producers failed to make the best of the erotic potential afforded by trouser roles – a trouser role being a male played by a female singer dressed as a male – I came across a reference to a DVD of the young Maria Ewing playing Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The production in question was not a theatrical performance but a film made in 1975 when she was 25 years old. It has been re-issued on DVD and is available on Amazon.com. The director was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

I love Amazon for the big difference its presence on the Internet has made for my researches into the far reaches of Art. Its “one click shopping” is a modern wonder of the world that I sometimes describe as “click click - knock knock” the first being the sound of the mouse and the second the postman at the door. The two events can be as close in time as 48 hours when I am logged on to amazon.co.uk. The 1975 movie was nowhere to be found on the UK Amazon site and so I had to order it up from amazon.com in America. It arrived the day before yesterday.

For someone looking for an awareness on the part of the director that Mozart had written the role for the delectation of the men in the audience (me among them) this movie delivers Big Time. Ewing approaching 60 is still a looker but, as I have already said, was gorgeous beyond belief in her younger days. There is a character in the Hans Anderson Tinder Box fairytale which goes by the name “the dog with eyes as big as saucers” and in the 1975 movie Ewing’s eyes set in her lovely little gamin face are as big as dinner plates. Someone was watching this girl from Detroit and two years later she made her Met NY debut in the same part. The rest is opera history.

The way director Ponnelle played it, Susanna the housekeeper undresses Cherubino out of shot throwing his clothes , item by item. into a room which the camera is filming. Watching them, and striving to get a better look, is Susanna’s mistress, the Countess, played by Kiri Te Kanawa. Cherubino (a boy played by a girl who is being undressed by a woman) is eventually stark naked and we know it. But by a clever juxtaposition of body and dressmaker’s dummy neither we nor the Countess get to see anything that we ought not to see. For sure, though, if this had been a 1946 live performance at the San Francisco Opera the local cops, who had busted Sally Rand for doing much the same with ostrich feathers, would have rushed in from every corner of the theatre.

You will find dozens of reviews of the 1975 Ponnelle movie on the web, almost all of them ecstatic, but none of them that I have seen mention the way in which the undressing scene is handled. It is all grist to my mill because the sibling to my Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery (part written) is An Anatomy of Titillation. It is not yet started but will be sooner or later, and so I look out for things.

In my the-trouble-with-trouser-roles rant I referred briefly to the opera Der Rosenkavalier that starts with a love making scene between a strapping young gallant (played by a woman} and a much older woman, wife of a Field Marshall. On satellite on Saturday there was a showing of this opera in which Kiri Te Kanawa (as lovely to look as ever) again plays the older woman. Unfortunately the role of the toyboy lover Octavian was taken by a singer who to my thinking was more like eye-ship’s biscuit than candy. And so although there was a lot of tumbling about on a bed the size of a parking lot it did not compensate for Richard Strauss’s rotten score.

Compensation did come once the gymnastics were out of the way because the work has a good story line and can be played for (and in this production was) laughs. Especially commendable was a bravura performance in the part of Baron Ochs, a horrible old lech slated to marry an innocent young girl fresh out of a convent. Watching it I thought to myself that if our Lana [Lana Clarkson, shot with Phil Spector’s gun] had had the good fortune to have the services of a good writer and a competent director in her attempt at a career as a comedienne she might well have made a decent show reel and it would have been an instant hit and she would not have had to have taken a crummy job at the House of Blues. Sadly, it was not to be; and the rest, once again, is history.

A sincere apology to everyone

Over the past few months I have posted some inappropriate pictures and jokes
with a view to interesting readers who I thought shared the same tastes
and sense of humor.

Unfortunately this was not the case and I seem to have upset quite
a few people who have accused me of being sexist and shallow.

If you were one of these people, please accept my sincerest apology.

From now on I will only post material with an
educational content that pays due regard to the sensibilities
of those with the traditional values that come from a deep understanding
of our cultural heritage.

Below is a picture of the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris .

P. S. For those of you who are interested, Pont Neuf is the oldest bridge
In Paris and took 26 years to build. Construction began in 1578 and
Ended in 1604. ‘Le Pont Neuf’ is actually made of two independent bridges,
One with seven arches and the other with five arches.

With acknowledgments to whoever thought this up in the first place, and to my step-daughter Wendy who sent the original version to me a few days ago.

For anyone interested (and for the Posterity that has, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, no vote) I am putting up two illustrated articles that between them tell much of the story of my efforts at these two shows.

On the eve of the Chelsea Flower Show Saga magazine published a feature article about me which is here: Chelsea Flower Show, Saga Magazine, Anthony Samuelson.

For the Hampton Court Flower Show my sponsor Prudential Insurance produced a brochure. which is here: Hampton Court Flower Show, Anthony Samuelson, Prudential brochure

Click on thumbnail images (left) to see larger versions.

Both the Saga magazine article and the Prudential’s brochure for Hampton Court benefit from the independently-minded insights of the brilliant writer James Alexander-Sinclair. He has a web site devoted to garden and landscape design that can be found here. James sent me a very amusing Christmas card (the digital sort) that is here: 08-ostriches-chirping.mp3 James says that he thinks it might be festive Ostriches singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, but it could just as easily be a cover of Shakin’ Stevens’ Blue Christmas.

Whenever I was asked whether I would do another flower show and I always replied: No. I said that 2007 would be my one and only year. This remains the case. There will, however, be a book all about my experiences in the world of gardening in due course.

A part of my follow-up game plan for the already completed (but in need of a publisher) Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology is a series of further titles along similar lines. Thus: Ten Sexiest Moments in Art, ditto …History, ditto …Television, …the Movies, …Ancient Greecene, …Ancient Rome, ……Cyberspace,…Advertising, etc., etc.. I keep a list of possible titles to which I add from time to time when another one occurs to me. At the moment the total possible titles identified by me stands at 37.

In the areas of human endeavour listed above I have omitted to mention the most prolific, best known, and therefore most obvious source for sexy moments: the Bible. It runs a close second to mythology for extraordinary tales of human and extra-human sexuality and as the author of the Moralized Ovid recognized, even the most kinky deeds of the most lascivious characters in Greek and Biblical legend can be laundered into role models for the Christian faithful. “Prefigure” is the verb that, alchemy fashion, turns base sexual misconduct into golden examples of piety.

This train of thought was set in motion by a consideration of the picture-within-the-picture paintings on view in Hogarth’s Marriage Settlement which is the first painting in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode series. In my desire to get to the picture behind a curtain in the second painting (the Tete a Tete) as quickly as possible I leap-frogged the first painting. Most of the pictures-within-pictures in the Marriage Settlement are monumentally dull and it needs an especially febrile imagination to find a sex angle. It can be argued that as the setting is in Lord Squander’s palatial mansion the choice of pictures hanging on the walls has to reflect his Lordship’s taste as well as serving to drive the narrative forward. I do not think this stacks up because one the pictures in the Marriage Settlement is the very very sexy Judith in the tent of Holofernes and in the fourth painting La Toilette we will find Lot and his Daughters both of which stories are shoe-ins for the Ten Sexiest Moments in the Bible. So why not, Mr Hogarth, some more of the same?

The life of King David provided many opportunities for erotic art but killing Goliath was not one of them unless, as we shall presently see, you have the balls of a Donatello. (I could, perhaps, have worded this better.) Instead of David killing Goliath Hogarth could have given us David and Bathsheba, David and Jonathan, the Rape by one of David’s sons of his daughter Tamnar, David gathering 200 Philistine foreskins or David and Abishag. The last two subjects have gone entirely unnoticed by artists. While the harvesting of foreskins in order to obtain the hand in marriage of King Saul’s daughter would not be a turn-on for most people (but might have made a good Bateman cartoon) I find it extraordinary that the story of Abishag (a personal favourite) has been overlooked by the Old Masters.

Abishag, named kind of Happy Families style, was a young girl who was put into the old King’s bed when he was dying to warm him up. To no avail, the Bible tells us, but it was worth a try. Using what resources are available (that do not include any benefit derived from having been trained to draw) I have done what I can to fill this quite serious gap in the erotic canon.