Two issues that haunt the way culture is performed and enjoyed have come into sharp focus with the convergence of two sudden rows on the music scene. One is over a graphic interpretation of a rape scene in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell at Covent Garden, wherein a woman is stripped on stage and violated by soldiers. The other concerns the upcoming BBC Albert Hall Prom featuring “high-octane” rap and grime music led by Wretch 32 et al. Both are condemned, variously, as either gratuitous and tasteless, or praised as cutting-edge innovation. So have the boundaries been excitingly pushed back? Or has a line been unjustifiably crossed, diminishing all concerned?
Let’s start with the “Grime Prom” on 12 August. It is, surely, part of a long and estimable performance history, and of an ethos which represents the best of how the “classical” music world should relate to popular music, and vice versa. We should be sick and tired of the ubiquitous partition of “classical” from “pop”, in schedules and among audiences and fans; in some cases the bigotry – and ignorance of the other – is entirely mutual, and always tedious. After all, Jimi Hendrix cited Handel and Mahler among his major influences, while Dmitri Shostakovich – who outlived Hendrix by five years – loved (and composed) jazz and comic operetta. He even wrote a ballet about football.
I’m at work on a book about music, war and peace that seeks – indeed, it demands – to discuss the work of Daniel Barenboim alongside that of Jefferson Airplane. For me, an early taste of cross-fertilisation through music’s Berlin Wall came at the 1970 Proms, with a superb performance by Soft Machine. Drummer Robert Wyatt recalled how he “went out the back for a quick fag” before the set and was refused re-entry by door security, despite his insistence that “I’ve got to play in there”. “They only have proper music in here,” retorted the doorman.
The classical influence was something that distinguished great British rock from its American equivalent: King Crimson, Pink Floyd with the Philip Jones ensemble, Deep Purple with the RPO – even Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and his collaboration with Pierre Boulez.
Cream’s Jack Bruce began life as a cellist and, above all, there is the case of rock’n’roll’s most restlessly innovative genius, John Cale, who trained as a classical viola player, went on an adventure through the Velvet Underground and far beyond, only to return to Cardiff and London in 2010 with a full orchestration of his album Paris 1919. The finale at the Festival Hall of Hedda Gabler with full orchestra was unforgettable in the same way as the denouement of a great symphony.
My first article about music for our sister paper, the Guardian, was an interview with the Kronos Quartet of San Francisco before they played Purple Haze at the Wigmore Hall (to both wolf-whistles and applause). Kronos’s leader, David Harrington, said: “If the first damn thing people see is a quartet coming out on stage wearing business suits, you can’t get much further from the spirit of most music than that.” And, anyway, wasn’t the first great heavy metal riff written by Wagner: the Nibelungs’ hammers in Das Rheingold?
So it makes sense for the rockers to embrace “classical” and for the “classical world” to embrace rock – and now rap – music. There is much celebration of the fact that Simon Rattle is to take over the London Symphony Orchestra, and properly so: it was thrilling last week to hear his first – typically Rattle-esque – programme since the appointment: a sinewy Brahms piano concerto followed by Dvorak’s glorious settings of Czech fairytales. But less is being said about Rattle’s enthusiasm for what gets called “outreach” work of which the LSO – along with Venezuela’s El Sistema – is a trailblazer and world example.
The LSO’s “Discovery” programme, which takes music into the community and nurtures music within it, turns 25 this summer, and Rattle’s second concert premiered a children’s opera The Monster in the Maze, which had been worked up at Discovery’s hub in St Luke’s, Old Street. Later this summer, Discovery’s 25thanniversary programme will feature compositions by its Digital Technology Group, which does “grime proms” in miniature at St Lukes all the time.
Last time I went to hear them, a rapper called Josh was singing a song he had written to commemorate a young friend of his, Jessie Wright, who had been strangled in King’s Cross. Another young musician, Ahmed, was writing a rap for another teenager, Agnes Sina-Inakoju, who had been shot in a takeaway just round the corner. “Going down LSO” is a local rappers’ term for dropping by St Luke’s for practice sessions.
What has all this to do with the LSO? It is, says managing director Kathryn McDowell, “a crucial part of what we do. I’ve seen it over and over – the power of music to change people”. And as the “classical” world must nurture such music, so too must it bring in those who may never hear the masters: as the founder of El Sistema, José Antonio Abreu, told me, unforgettably, in Caracas: “The rich have a duty to the poor which they will never pay financially. But they can pay it socially: to deprive the poor of the beauty of the highest art is a terrible form of oppression.” If Wretch 32 cares to turn up for the early concert on 12 August before his own, he will hear Ravel and Stravinsky.
As for the other – related – matter, of rape in Rossini: why, shockwaves across the stage are as old as theatre itself. Patricide, infanticide, suicide and violation are among the quintessences of ancient Greek drama. Much ink has been spilled recently on the issue of cross-casting the major roles in Shakespeare, whereby men play women and vice versa, so that in many of Shakespeare’s gender-bending scenes men pretending to be women pretend to be men, and vice versa.
The idea is hardly new. Sarah Bernhardt’ as Hamlet in the late 1890s caused two men in the audience to fight a duel over the matter of cross-casting. When it works – as it did with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero – it is subtly effective; when it becomes a trend norm, it can infuriate – as it did two Bosnian visitors I entertained in London once, determined to see some Shakespeare, but frustrated that, of four available productions, not one was in English with the lead roles played by an actor of the sex for which the part was written. I empathised with the bright young former child concentration camp prisoner, now 27, who asked: “Do you in London ever do Shakespeare in English, with Lady Macbeth played by a woman?”
But the value of experiment in high art is self-evident; and there is something crass as well as boorish about a lot of fairly or very wealthy people – not all of whom will have paid for their seats – booing their way through Rossini’s music and Sir Antonio Pappano’s conducting. And there is a deep irony in this, which vindicates Damiano Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell and ridicules the posh, boorish booers, which is this: today’s reactionaries and establishment will always be dependent on the revolutionaries and radicalism of yore for cultural stimulation. Not much good art ever came from conservatives or conservatism; only recently the National Gallery staged a blockbuster exhibition of works which the French impressionists’ great supporter and dealer failed to sell. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, nowadays a staple, caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1912, into which the police intervened with violence.
And one wonders: what do besuited businessmen and politicians think they are listening to when they applaud the prisoners’ chorus in Beethoven’s Fidelio, or Verdi’s passionate cry of liberty in Don Carlos? Mozart’s portrayal of Figaro and Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello – “I want to serve no more!” – was political heresy in its day. What do they think is happening when Wagner’s Siegfried cuts in half the staff of his grandfather, Wotan, God of Gods, on which the laws or order are carved, to be told: “Pass on, for I cannot stop you.”?
The thing about shock value, though, is that it has to be good. There was a similar scene to Michieletto’s Rossini in a Don Giovanni at the English National Opera recently, which simply did not work – all the wrong words used to describe Rossini were apposite: “gratuitous”, “pretentious”. The production was that of Calixto Bieito who had arrived from Edinburgh, where he staged Ramon del Valle-Inclan’s Barbaric Comedies featuring a priest masturbating over a woman’s skeleton, to widespread disdain.
But Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell is another matter entirely. This was Rossini’s last and most serious opera, his commentary on themes of liberty and violence which erupted during the pre-Risorgimento Italy – and tumultuous Europe – of his day. To set William Tell’s war in – apparently – Bosnia 20 years ago was searingly apposite, very powerful, and aptly conveyed by a musically electrifying performance, at once epic and bleak.
For what it is worth, I speak as author of two books on the carnage in Bosnia – both containing chapters on the systematic mass violation of women in that war – and write this during the week of the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Michieletto and Pappano’s Rossini far outflanks that “rape tour” by William Hague and Angelina Jolie in terms of raw understanding of what happened, and happens, in war. Covent Garden’s Guillaume Tell, more than anything I’ve seen, captures the callously but casually recreational nature of the sadism I know in war – and to what better end, quite honestly, could the interpretation of great art in warfare aspire?
Euripides: Medea (431BC) Medea’s killing of her own children seems to have caused discomfort, but the play was accepted into the canon of Greek tragedy.
The first Impressionist exhibition, Paris (1874) One critic wrote of Monet’s work: “A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this.”
Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) The premiere led to riots in and outside the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, between supporters and opponents. Le Figaro called it “puerile barbarity”.
Hair (1967) Caused outrage for its nudity and desecration of the American flag.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) Banned in several countries for scenes of rape and torture.
Howard Brenton: The Romans in Britain (1980) Subject of a private prosecution by Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
- This article was amended on 12 July 2015. A previous version wrongly stated that The Monster in the Maze had its premiere at St Lukes. This has been corrected
