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Illustration by David Foldvari.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
Illustration by David Foldvari.

Take your seats for a fight at the opera

This article is more than 5 years old
David Mitchell

Nothing enhances our lives quite like a good spat between cultural purists and the supposed riff-raff

Sometimes I think I’m the perfect person to analyse the cultural impact of music. I’m pretty sure no one else has ever thought that about me, though. And actually, even I don’t think it very often.

My weakness in the role would undoubtedly be my ignorance of music. Not complete ignorance: it’s impossible, it turns out, no matter how little interest you show, to remain alive for 44 years in modern Britain without having heard of Mozart and Rihanna – though I had to check the spelling of the latter. And, come to think of it, I’m quite partial to Magic FM on a car journey and also I watched that Bros documentary everyone’s going on about.

But I admit I don’t know much about music. Is that really such a problem though? The more I think about it, the more I reckon that’s actually what might make me amazing at analysing its cultural impact. I don’t have any musical tastes that could skew my judgment and confuse the analysis with thoughts of whether this bit of music, or type of music, is “better” than that bit or type. I can see what’s really going on, unencumbered by strong views on Coldplay or David Bowie or clapping at the end of movements (which Elvis Presley’s entourage were reduced to at the end). I don’t have a dog in the fight, which makes me ideal as an analyst of dog fighting.

Someone who does have a dog in the fight is Mark Wigglesworth. He’s the former music director of the English National Opera so must be massively keen on music. He’s probably got all of Rihanna’s albums and a poster of Mozart in his bedroom. So I was worried, when I saw he was dabbling in some analysis of the cultural impact of music, that he might be out of his depth. Well, you be the judge. Unless you’re into music at all, in which case perhaps you’d better stay out of it.

It was about the ENO’s policy of performing operas in English – which means, in the majority of cases, in translation (though I’m sure that’ll change after Brexit when homegrown opera is freed from its Euro‑shackles). This is an issue in the opera world: should operas be sung with the words they were composed for or those the audience can understand? Writing on the music website Bachtrack, Wigglesworth stoutly defended the latter policy.

If you’re currently struggling to care because this is a discussion of something that happens in rooms you have no intention of entering, then let me try to grab your attention by mentioning the slagging off. Alongside some reasoned argument asserting that “opera is drama first and foremost” and “beauty is not as powerful a medium as meaning” (that’s worth a fridge magnet), Wigglesworth had a tentative dig at his opponents’ motives: “A more unspoken view is one that thinks singing in a foreign language ‘keeps the riff-raff away’,” he said, adding: “I do believe a certain pleasure in cultural elitism exists, even if only by a few.”

You can feel the nervousness as he wrote that. “I don’t mean you!” he’s reassuring any specific opponent of translated opera who might take offence. “You think what you think purely on artistic grounds and I respectfully disagree! It’s some other guys, who happen to have the same opinion as you but for much less wholesome reasons, who are the snobs.”

This is much more interesting, because it’s not about music, it’s about “riff-raff”. Wigglesworth wants to make “opera accessible to all” and “all”, by definition, includes riff-raff. He sees this as the ENO’s mission. “Accessibility,” he writes, “is not really about the price of a ticket. For accessibility to be meaningful and long lasting it has to come from the work itself… When Mozart wanted to write for ‘the people’ he did so in their native German. He trusted that if more people understood the piece, more would enjoy it.”

This makes sense, but I can’t help wondering how much riff-raff the ENO currently attracts, even with its populist policy of singing words the audience can actually understand. Obviously I don’t know – I’ve never been there because of my irrational fear of hours and hours of boredom – but I find it hard to believe that, if I did go, I’d think: “Look at the riff-raff in here! The sooner they start doing operas in Italian and get the carpets steam cleaned, the better. This English translation of La traviata they’ve put on is an absolute scum-magnet.”

But I think Wigglesworth is basically right. He’s just slightly confused matters with the term “riff-raff”, because this isn’t about class, it’s about tribalism. The riff-raff here are people who see themselves as opera buffs but whom the anti‑translation opera buffs would say aren’t proper buffs because they don’t like opera enough to sit through it when the words are gobbledygook – or aren’t proper buffs because they haven’t troubled to learn Italian and German.

It’s like hardcore fans of an indie band despising newer fans who only got into them once they became successful. It’s not about music, it’s not about class, it’s about a group defining itself around something from which it derives a sense of moral superiority. In the middle ages, people like that founded monastic orders.

And, to be honest, most of us are a bit like that. We all need someone to look down on. The pro-accessibility opera fans are looking down on the linguistic purists – for being elitist snobs, but also for being ignorant of opera’s history as a popular art form – just as much as the purists are looking down on them. They’re all having a lovely time feeling like they’re better than other people – just as people who believe passionately in egalitarianism instinctively feel like they’re better than those who don’t believe passionately in egalitarianism.

Which means that the ENO’s policy on singing opera in English must not change. The bitching it engenders is vital to both sides of the opera community’s sense of self. Disagreeing about it is enjoyable and, without it, all that’s left to entertain them is opera.

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