Prima la musica

Rivers of London

I swear I don't go trawling for mystery novels with operatic content: they just seem to find me. The latest, which I finished at an unspeakable hour this morning, is Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, the first in his Peter Grant series and sent to me in Kindle form by my friend Marian, the most voracious reader I know and possibly the only person left in the world who's game enough to give me books for Christmas. So far she has always been spot on.

This one, as she warned me, was not exactly my usual style. Which is to say: it was published within the last decade, is set in the present (not the Wimsey-Poirot-Alleyn '30s) and features magic. I'm not really a magic kind of girl – Harry Potter excepted – but the blurb made it sound like grown-up Harry meets Thursday Next, and since it came with Marian's recommendation, I plunged right in.

She told me I might like the London-centricity of it and she was right. I've always loved the little frisson of recognition when you spot a place you know in a work of fiction; I still remember how excited I was a decade or so ago when I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas while actually in Paris, and realised – from the book rather than my own explorations – that Gertrude and Alice's house was just around the corner from the Alliance Française building where I was doing daily battle with le subjonctif.

Likewise, then, the game of Been There Bingo I could play with this book. Because as it turns it out, the bulk of the action takes place in the one part of London I know better than any other: the streets between Covent Garden and the ENO, basically. Aaronovitch apparently used to work at the Covent Garden Waterstones – one of my favourite places for pre-show loitering and last minute purchase of opening night cards – so I guess it's no surprise he started there. New Row, Henrietta Street, St Martin's Court and the Piazza itself all provide the backdrop – and a fairly detailed and interactive one at that – for various Bad Things. The magic elements might be fantastical, the setting is deliciously real.

All of this would have been fodder enough for my London fetish but it gets better. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say there's a fairly key scene which takes place actually in the ROH during a performance of – of all things – Billy Budd. Not that it's ever identified by its title (at least I don't think it is) but opera types will pick it straight away. To be fair, it's more for the necessary presence of a particular prop than for a love of Britten that Aaronovitch has chosen this particular piece, but still: kudos to him for doing his research and, it would appear, actually attending the opera before writing about it. His descriptions of the audience, while not entirely cliché-free, are preferable to some, and I particularly liked the semi-quasi cameo by someone I choose to believe was Neil Fisher. Ruth Elleson's probably in there somewhere too, come to think of it. 

In the end, the operatic content here is more about local colour than music, and there's just as much esoteric geography – probably more – for experts on rivers and mythology as there is for opera buffs. But still. It was an excellent surprise in a book I would have thoroughly enjoyed anyway: it's well written, funny and handles the magical components with a clever mix of invention, science and literary tradition. Aaronovitch is also a screenwriter with a few Doctor Who connections, and both those things are reflected in his writing; there are scenes in Rivers of London which just scream out to be filmed, and at least one direct nod to the Doctor, not to mention a not-dissimilar sense of humour even in the face of unfathomable cosmic peril. 

A magical mystery for opera buffs? Not really. But for opera buffs who like police procedurals, lighthearted fantasy, and London – in whatever configuration – the Covent Garden antics are a delightful bonus. 

Swan Song

Reviewing the Angela Brazil titles in my Kindle (don't laugh, they're highly entertaining and completely free) I was reminded that I intended, many months ago, to blog a little something about Edmund Crispin (born Bruce Montgomery, but who am I to rob a man of his nom de plume?) and in particular his novel Swan Song. Just as that potted bio over to your left says, I'm a fan of fictional detectives, but I was lamentably late to discover Crispin and his joyously nutty professor, Gervase Fen. In truth I only found them by judging a book by its cover – or to be more precise, its spine. I was in the Waterstone's just up from the Coliseum, meandering through the crime section, and something about those Crispin signs said: Read Me.

And when I found that the author "listed his recreations as swimming, excessive smoking, Shakespeare, the operas of Wagner and Strauss, idleness and cats" and that "his antipathies were dogs, the French Film, the Renaissance of the British Film, psychoanalysis, the psychological-realistic crime story, and the contemporary theatre" I knew I was on the right track. Wagner, Strauss and cats? This was a man after my own heart. 

He was also an Oxford organ scholar and a composer, and sure enough, there's a pleasingly musical vein running through his books. One features a murderer who's found out through Fen's detailed knowledge of Ein Heldenleben, another sees a spate of cathedral organists meeting with foul play, and then there's Swan Song: all about the murder of a particularly unpleasant Hans Sachs during the first post-war performance in Englad of Die Meistersinger. What's not to love about such a premise? (Yes, from the title, I was expecting Lohengrin or Parsifal, but one can't have everything I suppose.)

It's an excellent and enjoyable whodunnit with all the requisite twists and apparent impossibilities, and well worth reading on that basis alone, but of course what I really loved were all the sly digs, inside jokes and hilariously plausible rehearsal dramas. I couldn't help wondering if the singers in Crispin's novel might have been inspired by some of those he knew in his musical capacities. Not that I suppose anybody would be clamouring to claim a description like this for themselves:

"His habits suggested, in fact, a belated attempt to revive the droit de seigneur, and his resemblance to the gross and elderly roué of Strauss's [Der Rosenkavalier] was sufficiently remarkable for it to be a subject of perpetual surprise in operatic circles that his interpretation of the role was so inadequate."

Nice. Not to mention the novel's opening paragraph:

"There are few creatures more stupid than the average singer. It would appear that the fractional adjustment of larynx, glottis, and sinuses required in the production of beautiful sounds must almost invariably be accompanied – so perverse are the habits of Providence – by the witlessness of a barnyard fowl."

And so on and so forth, but for all the swipes he takes at them, singers on the whole emerge quite charmingly from the story – the reprehensible victim excepted – and in fact the hero (or is he?) is himself a rising star heldentenor. Whose other half happens to be a twenty-something year old writer. Now why does that ring a bell?

Wagner himself is also quite roundly defended by Crispin, who was obviously irked by those who viewed him as a de facto Nazi and accordingly banned his work. Adam, the aforementioned tenor, gives a little speech on the subject early on:

"It's a highbrow axiom...that Wagner was responsible for the rise of Nazism. If you want to be in the fashion you must refer darkly to the evil workings of the Ring in the Teutonic mentality – though as the whole cycle of operas is devoted to showing that even the gods can't break an agreement without bringing the whole universe crashing about their ears, I've never been able to see what possible encouragement Hitler can have got out of it..."

Perhaps not a massively popular opinion in 1947.  

As the whodunnit heats up, the operatic stuff fades away a bit, but still: it's a 1940s murder mystery about opera singers and therefore pretty much my ideal book. If Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey could have been interpolated – it is set in Oxford, after all – I'd never need to read another novel ever again. Several of my favourite mystery novelists have incorporated opera into their books – Gladys Mitchell in Death at the Opera, Ngaio Marsh in Photo Finish – but I think Swan Song probably does the funniest and most thorough job of it. For once I half resented the intrusion of the murder: I would have been quite happy just to watch the Meistersinger rehearsals unfold in all their very recognisable chaos.

Who's My Bottom?

I spent most of this afternoon reading tenor Christopher Gillett's very funny book, Who's My Bottom? I will confess that I retain a slight – and no doubt old fashioned – wariness of self published books, the product of a life spent in bookshops fending off productions which more than justify the term "vanity publishing" – but in this case I had no such suspicions. I knew Gillett's writing from his blog – this post, in particular, was one of those "thank you for writing down all my own thoughts so articulately" moments – and I knew the book must be good, because ever since its publication, my Twitter feed has been full of people whose tastes I trust relating the guffaws it had given them. 

Now, I am very very good indeed at intending to read books, and very very bad at obtaining and reading them, so not surprisingly, hadn't got around to acquiring this one. However, I recently risked bringing shame upon my family of Book People and had Santa bring me a Kindle for Christmas. Do I feel guilty? A little, but I have to be honest, it's almost obscenely convenient, and it has definitely made the leap from "I Want" to "I Own" a whole lot shorter. This afternoon it occured to me to wonder whether Who's My Bottom? (which I seem determined to type as "Where's My Bottom?", a Freudian slip I'd really rather not investigate) was available for Kindle, and ten minutes later, 'twas mine.

The book is essentially a series of brief and hilarious glimpses of behind-the-scenes madness in the opera world. Not necessarily grand scale madness, but just the sort of absurdities, eccentricities and frustrations which every singer runs into, but which few, I suspect, would have the talent to do justice on paper. Gillett, however, has just that talent. He's honest – about himself as much as anybody or anything else – but not bitchy; he names just enough names (and places) that a cursory Google will find you the specifics (if you need them); and above all he's very, very funny. And while I've only spent a year involved in this side of the business – and indirectly at that – I can tell you that most of Gillett's stories had me grinning (or grimacing) in recognition. It really is like this, or at least it can be. 

The title, by the way, is (if you hadn't guessed it already) a reference to Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Gillett has made the role of Flute in that opera something of a signature part, and indeed anecdotes from various Dream productions abound – including reports from a recent-ish Madrid production, which frame the book as a whole. In fact, parallels between Flute and Gillett himself become a motif, not to mention a running joke. (He does seem to have spent a lot of his early career in drag.)

Lest this blog post grow longer than the book itself, I'll start stopping now, but you'll have gathered in any case that this is a recommendation. There are plenty of tell-all books about opera, but a lot of them come with an agenda, and many are rather dated by now – Frances Alda's catty memoir is hilarious but probably not massively reflective of today's opera business...although then again... Anyway, the point is, this isn't really a tell-all book, so much as a tell-some-and-funnily book, and a very witty – if, alas, all too fleeting – insight into what goes on behind the curtains and out of earshot. 

Oh, and a couple of side notes for Australian opera types: the Bottom Christopher meets in the book's opening pages is of course none other than our own Conal Coad, and we know from OA's production how perfect he is in that role; and while his name doesn't come up in descriptions of the nudity-laced rehearsals, Rosa, a Horse Opera also numbered one Lyndon Terracini among its cast.