Curtain up

OK, here’s a question. What’s the best first scene in any film ever?

I’m not going to be reckless enough to hazard a definitive answer. But I will stake a claim on behalf of Enduring Love – at least to put it in the Top Ten.

As in Ian McEwan’s original novel, the depiction of a freakish balloon accident, with death appearing out of a clear blue sky, is both horrible and breathtaking.

The rest of the film doesn’t remotely measure up to this impeccably directed opening sequence, but that’s only to be expected when said sequence is quite so stunning.

And how about the best start on the stage? Well Aeschylus’s Agamemnon has the most immediately powerful mood-setting first scene of any play before Hamlet. Verdi/Boito’s version of Othello and Wagner’s Rheingold should also get a look-in.

Which reminds me. Another one for the film list: Spaceballs. I’m only half joking.

Next week: best first episodes.

Comfortably dumb

High concept has long since moved on from its Hollywood home, and now seems poised to take over non-fiction publishing. Books that attempt to capture a key element of the zeitgeist, in business, politics, or culture – and in one easy phrase – are all over the place. If it’s not the ‘tipping point’, it’s the ‘long tail’. A recent addition to the ranks is Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Johnson is on to something a bit more interesting – and counter-cultural – than many of his peers. While every newspaper screams about dumbing down (often next to in-depth articles about Kate Middleton’s mum), Johnson points out that popular culture is in fact much more complex and dense (in a good way) than it has ever been before. I’m not sure he’s right that such developments are making us more intelligent (how on earth would you prove that anyway?), but evidence against the charge of mass culture dumbing down is overwhelming.

Even – no, especially – in television, that much-derided chewing gum for the brain, we can see the results of this smartening up right before our eyes. From the arcane web of plot that is The Wire to possibly the most intricately inter-textual sitcom ever, Arrested Development, this trend is particularly prominent in America – the capital of dumb if you’d believe half of the commentariat. And it’s popular, both in terms of ratings and – crucially – DVD sales, which allow much-needed repeat viewings.

But why is classical music not benefiting (in terms of both audience numbers and cultural prominence) from this surge of interest in more challenging cultural fare? A large part of the problem, on the traditional side of things, is the stultifying atmosphere of most concert performances. I’m not arguing for the desperate ideas of some promoters (‘speed-date to the sultry sounds of Mozart’s Requiem!’). But the dress and rituals of orchestral performance – not least the interminable multi-part curtain-calls, far more than at any play or musical I’ve ever seen – are unnecessarily off-putting. And as for opera, in the past few years only Opera North’s ‘Eight Little Greats’ season has really shown innovation in both repertory and presentation. It is hard to encourage new audiences, inspired by the vitality of the best of popular culture, to attend productions that are decades old.

There are signs of hope though, particularly at performances of contemporary classical music, where even traditional bands seem more comfortable pushing the boat out a bit. The London Sinfonietta have been doing some great stuff with Warp records, exploring in performance the connections between the likes of Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. They have also been keen to play around with the performing environment, incorporating massive projections into their concerts (gigs?). Wagner of all opera composers has historically encouraged the largest revolutions in production – and now he seems to be inspiring fresh approaches to concert performances too. Bill Viola’s central involvement in the Tristan Project (currently touring the US) takes the multi-media nature of Wagner’s intentions into new areas with the help of stunning high-definition video art.

We can only hope that these challenges to the orthodoxies of performance practice reach their own irreversible ‘tipping point’ – and encourage more fans of HBO’s The Sopranos to become admirers of Covent Garden’s sopranos too.

Sonic youth

The first English National Opera production to be conducted by new music director Edward Gardner is Britten’s Death in Venice. That feels appropriate. It’s not just that Britten was recently named ENO’s ‘House Composer’. It’s also because there’s something of the tragic and foolish Aschenbach about ENO at the moment. A recent splash of make-up at the Coliseum barely conceals the problems associated with the venue’s age and infirmity. The company’s confidence in its artistic endeavours has taken a battering in the past few years. And they’ve fallen head over heels for captivating young men. Gardner is barely in his 30s. The ageing Aschenbach himself will be played in this new production by preternaturally youthful tenor Ian Bostridge, in his role debut.

But the comparison holds out some hope for ENO, at least in the renewal that can be provided by new faces. And Britten’s opera itself offers another reason for optimism: it shows how the artform can remain timeless, and yet powerfully immediate, far longer than film.

Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice, based like the opera on Thomas Mann’s novella, now manages the perverse feat of appearing both sensationalist and stodgy. Sensationalist in its relentless focus on Aschenbach’s sexuality; stodgy in its limited canvas and monotonous use of music (particularly unforgivable in a film that changes Aschenbach’s profession from writer to composer). Continual repetition of the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony defeats its apparent object. There are only so many times you can shout ‘I’m melancholy and yearning’ before people are going to stop listening. Or caring.

Britten manages to translate the personal, sexual and artistic conflicts of the book into an altogether more complex, and more modern, work. Even with all that’s changed over the past thirty years, particularly in attitudes towards relationships – however chaste – between men and boys, this work about a dying fin-de-siècle artist still speaks to us. It’s partly the music: Britten makes it seem entirely natural to combine Verdian lyricism and Wagnerian leitmotif in a context wholly at ease with the twentieth century’s various musical revolutions. It’s also the power of the carefully pared-down libretto and the inspired idea of making Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach’s affection, a mute dance role. But more than that, it has a great deal to say even to those of us who are not faded writers with a late-flowering attraction towards boys. It makes Aschenbach more clearly than ever a symbol of European culture in a post-modern age: riven by doubts about its own achievements, casting lustful yet apprehensive glances at apparently more vibrant cultures elsewhere, and torn between reason and fervour. Apollo and Dionysus, given such a strong musical and physical presence in the opera, continue to pull us in opposing directions.

ENO too – willingly or not – demonstrates where we find ourselves culturally in the early twenty-first century. There’s some great stuff going on here, but they don’t really seem to know where they’re heading. Thankfully, unlike Aschenbach, they still have time to decide.