December was, unusually, a quiet time for me. No Messiahs (though I started reading the new book on Messiah by Charles King, Every Valley) and no Christmas oratorios. As far as singing went, December meant teaching German song in Vienna (Schubert, Zemlinsky, Pfitzner) and joining in with those stirring hymns at a couple of carol services, with people staring at me during “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (music by Mendelssohn) because I am, to be honest, a bit too loud.
I go because my daughter sings in the choir of St Jude’s in Hampstead Garden Suburb. It’s a rather strange, Lutyens-designed church with a sinister, faintly Orwellian steeple—something of the Ministry of Truth about it—but it has grown on me over the years. In its candle-lit, vasty and frescoed interior, I can almost believe I’m sitting in a Venetian basilica. The only thing that irritates me is the barren greyness of the modern versions of the readings and the liturgy. I remember it starting when I was a choirboy in suburban Streatham half a century ago, as we moved from what was called, in the language of ecclesiastical bureaucracy, Series Two to Series Three. The language of Cranmer, the language of the King James Bible (made, let us remember, by committee) has been rejected by the Church of England, and something has been lost in the process—the linguistic beauty of holiness—and it’s not as though what remains is any more comprehensible than what was there before.
On to some other Christmas traditions. At the cinema—the admirable Prince Charles off Leicester Square—Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), whose story of American community-minded decency (Jimmy Stewart) triumphing over corporate, rack-renting nastiness (Lionel Barrymore) seems ever more to the point. It’s also a good example of how sentimentality needn’t be dirty word or a reactionary force. At home, Ingmar Bergman’s glorious Fanny and Alexander (1982), a fairytale saturated with colour and true human emotion. The first hour or so is a plot-free, nostalgia-heavy recreation of an upper-middle-class bohemian Swedish Christmas around 1910—Bergman’s own Uppsala Christmases repurposed and reimagined. Watching the documentary about the making of the film, shot in tandem (it was intended to be Bergman’s last movie), I was struck by two things: the extraordinary, transformative magic that light and film can cast over a well-designed film or theatre set, making the flimsy and insubstantial real and alive; and the look on Bergman’s face as he directs his actors—engaged, compassionate, inspiring.
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A few weeks later, I went to a screening of the new film about Callas, Maria, directed by Pablo Larraìn and starring Angelina Jolie. Callas worked in an area of opera that I have never and could never touch, but she remains for me a touchstone of expressive singing and operatic acting. There’s very little of her stage work to see on video, but the famous second act of Tosca with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia, in the Zeffirelli production at Covent Garden, is spine-chilling and, somehow, a connection back to what the great theatre divas of the 19th century must have been like—think Eleonora Duse or Sarah Bernhardt. In the revival of bel canto, of Bellini and Donizetti, during the mid-20th century, Callas’s vocalism—often on the edge of a sort of romantic expressionism—touches me far more than the utter perfection of Joan Sutherland. Even in the singing of Schubert, these are the two schools that have been playing off against each other from the outset, with Schubert’s friends arguing, after his death, about the best way to deliver his songs. A sort of classicism versus a sort of romanticism. I suppose, in the end, we need both.
One particular thing struck me on the evening of the screening, emerging from the discussion beforehand. On the panel was Isabella de Sabata, a former record executive (we once made a Christmas album together) and granddaughter of the legendary Italian conductor Victor de Sabata. She had a telling Callas anecdote to hand. Working with La Divina, de Sabata had called out, as is the conductor’s wont, “Watch me!” Callas’s reply was: “No. Watch me!” This wasn’t just the bolshie diva. It may have had to do with Callas’s shortsightedness. But I’m sure it also expressed something crucial about the ideal relationship between singer and conductor: a sort of symbiosis that can lift dramatic performance above technical issues, bars and beats, and into emotional truth. And emotional truth was surely at the heart of what Callas was about.
