I don’t know if it was boredom or the wish to avoid writing the umptieth essay that led me to take a quiz on Classic FM with the catchy title ‘Can we guess your NAME from your musical taste?’ (http://www.classicfm.com/lifestyle/quizzes/guess-your-name/). And after choosing Johann Strauss II as my musical soulmate, after revealing that if I had to choose one composer I would listen to for the rest of my life it would be Bach (who else?) and that I felt the music of Elgar was really underrated, they pronounced the verdict: my name was Julie. As you might guess, I was extremely disappointed because they had got it wrong. But what was even more wrong than the name was the description that came with it. It read, ‘You’re lovely, classy Julie. You’re very cultured, and you live for outdoor opera season. Nothing could ever beat prosecco and Puccini.’ I don’t even know where to start. Apart from the fact that none of the words ‘lovely’, ‘classy’ or ‘cultured’ have ever been uttered in reference to my person, the only thing I hate with more ferocity than opera is outdoor opera. Some people might find it romantic, but outdoor opera is just opera with bugs. And I don’t drink Prosecco. In fact, I don’t drink at all. Classic FM had got it all wrong.
Enter the stage my colleague Z. Z is a nice fellow who one day happened to pronounce the magic words: comp tickets. I don’t know why but I can never say no to comp tickets. Even if I don’t want to see whatever it is that the comp tickets grant me access to, some Pavlovian reflex makes me raise my hand and say, ‘Can I get one, please?’, if there are comp tickets available. This case was no different and thus, I ended up on the guest list for Opera Holland Park, which is – you guessed it correctly – an outdoor opera. When I told my sister about my extreme luck in having secured tickets to not only one but to two operas, she nearly disowned me. She could not believe we were related. She hated opera because it was so overly dramatic, which I felt was a strange thing to say given that she is a singer herself.
Believing that people would be more than happy to keep me company, I had gotten two tickets for each opera. And indeed, the first friend I asked immediately said that she would love to go. Another eight people ditched me. One had to work, one wasn’t feeling well, two weren’t in London, two had other commitments, one said ‘maybe’ and was never heard of again and one just didn’t reply. One person ditched me twice. It was stunned. This had never happened to me before. In Austria, people who practically never talk to me send me messages asking if they can come to a concert with me. And while being a comp ticket bitch is also a bit problematic, it gave me the idea that finally saved me. Only one text message away from a nervous breakdown, I did what I should have done in the first place: I asked my friend from Germany. He knew the drill. He had what he called ‘a vague commitment’ but was happy to postpone it so that he could come with me.
One day later, I went to see Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’. Although I got lost in Holland Park on my way to the venue (why did that not surprise me?), fate made up for my bad luck because I bumped into an acquaintance. Yes, I seem to have acquaintances in London that I casually bump into at the opera now. I feel very important. The opera itself was fabulous. Seldom have I been so taken with on-stage suffering and seldom has an opera felt so right to me. My favourite scene was the one where Alfredo insults Violetta and a 30-person choir takes him to pieces for being mean to a woman. That is the way life should be. Additional entertainment was provided by two birds who were either having a fight or singing a duet or doing stuff that I cannot mention on this page. I could barely believe it, but I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
The second opera on my list was Mozart’s ‘Cosí fan tutte’. That one I particularly looked forward to because I had played what I believed to be an amazingly important part in the preparation of the opera: I had copied the bowings for the second violins during my internship at the City of London Sinfonia. ‘It should take you three to four hours to copy the bowings’, my colleague said before leaving for an appointment. It was 116 pages in total. After an hour, I had done seven pages. Seven and a half hours later (minus a 20-minute lunch break and five minutes which I spent giving myself prep talk and tried to convince myself not to cry), I was done. With the bowings and the world at large. So was the colleague who kept an eye on me that day. He had been waiting for me to finish for the better part of an hour so that he could go home and been stunned by my blatant refusal to leave until I was one. (Colleague: ‘You don’t need to finish!’ Me: ‘But I’m not done.’ Colleague: ‘You are keeping me here.’ Me, as if talking to stupid person: ‘I AM NOT DONE.’)
Although I find the content of ‘Cosí fan tutte’ sexist crap, it was tremendously funny and the music is just heavenly. Also, I finally understood what people mean when they say that operas that were written 200 years ago are still relevant today because they talk about the human condition. It means that sisters sitting around with big hair and too much makeup and dramatically singing about the guys they are dating has always been a thing. Also, my sister had been right about opera in general. It was rather over the top, but then, I felt that singing the word ‘misericordia’ when something terrible happens was a behaviour I should add to my own repertoire because given how chaotic my life is, it might come in very useful.
This time, the weather Gods provided us with some additional sound effects. What seemed to be torrential rain made it quite hard to hear what was happening on stage for about the first half hour, so I sometimes felt like watching a silent movie (‘In colour, though’, my companion said.) On the upside, I have never heard such an earnest version of ‘Suave sia il vento!’ In the end, as is the custom with opera goers, we gave our opinion on what we he seen. ‘Sche woas!’ (‘It was beautiful!’) Just to keep up with the tradition I’d started, I also got lost on my way out of the park, which was bad because there was no lighting. That I found more than a tad odd in a country that’s so obsessed with health and safety. So did the elderly people walking just in front of us.
I never thought I would say these words, but Classic FM might have been right in that case. I do enjoy outdoor opera and while I said no to a glass of Prosecco and went for cranberry juice instead, I even pretended to be all cultured while self-importantly giving my opinion on things I knew nothing about. There’s a part of me that thinks I should double check my passport to see if my name has mysteriously changed to Julie. I hope it hasn’t because I’ve spent so much time teaching people my name around here. In a fit of madness, I even went to Goldsmiths‘ Postgrad Prosecco event. Because that’s what lovely, classy Julie does. Too bad they didn’t play Puccini there.
