Standing room only on suburban trains. The Tube packed body to body. Central London’s pavements heaving with people as far as the eye can see. The world is starting to return to normal. Except that this was a Saturday. A Saturday without major festivals, landmark concerts or sporting events. And not many foreign tourists; the voices around me were British. It was an unexceptional weekend. On which the commuter lines were more crowded than any weekday in our post-Pandemic world.
I suspect that this is the new normal. Workers who now commute to London just one or two days a week, if at all, have a whole new attitude towards heading in for fun on the weekends. We’ll see if the trend holds, and if the rail companies continue to treat the weekends as off peak, or see a cheeky chance to raise their rates.
We were in the crowds for the Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery and Tannhauser at the Royal Opera. Though fellow attendees would have made up a tiny proportion of the crowds surging through the West End, both are perpetually sold out activities drawing rave reviews and steady bookings. While not necessarily comfortable bedfellows, I’m glad we were able to book both on the same day.
I had an art history professor at university who claimed that people’s instinctive love for the landscapes of Tuscany and Umbria came from the dreamy backgrounds of the paintings of Raphael and his school. We’re offered heavenly scenes of Mary, Jesus and the saints, always sitting in verdant valleys with picturesque hill towns over their shoulders. Heaven = Italy. I’m not sure about my professor’s argument … there are a lot of picturesque towns in the back of renaissance German and Netherlandish paintings as well … but there’s no question Raphael works very hard to transport us to a slice of heaven.
Having so much of his work in one place proves what anyone who knows Raphael instinctively senses: let others be edgy or provocative, Raphael is the Disney animation of the Renaissance. Good triumphs over evil, people are impossibly beautiful and the world is a pastel-tinted garden of delight. This is a man who painted far more madonnas and children than crucifixions. When he offers us a martyr, it’s Catherine standing demurely by her wheel, looking like she never suffered more than a mild cold in her whole life.
No surprises there. If this show treads any new ground, it’s about giving us Raphael in the round. Not just the child prodigy painter and beloved party boy famed for irritating Michelangelo, but a sophisticated workshop owner and businessman who designed medals and objets d’art, worked as an architect and followed Albrecht Durer’s lead in printmaking. The rooms on these lesser-known endeavours are the most interesting in the exhibition and I wish they’d been bigger. All of his architectural work, and most of his monumental frescoes, are crammed into the smallest gallery in the show. That includes a fabulous video of major buildings in Italy that deserved a space where people cold properly enjoy it.
Raphael can actually be a bit divisive: you either love him or he leaves you cold. I’m the former, Mr. B the latter, and the show sparked a lot of conversation about whether the warts-and-all precision of the Northern Renaissance is actually better art. My point: Raphael is as much about how he makes you feel as what he’s painting. His world is as comforting as a scented bubble bath, and suffused with love. I’m happy with that.
Lohengrin, of course, is suffused with love, too. But things don’t end as well in this Germanic take on the Cupid and Psyche story. In short: one of the knights entrusted with the sacred duty of guarding the Holy Grail gets a pass from his usual duties to go into the world to save a damsel in distress. They fall in love. He marries her, but the catch is that she … and no one else … can ever ask his name or where he’s from. Scheming busybodies ignite our heroine’s curiousity, she forces her new husband to reveal his identity, he does, but then has to leave forever.
This being an opera by Wagner, that simple storyline takes four and a half hours to roll out, accompanied by a lot of majestic music. Best known, amongst many familiar snippets, is the wedding chorus most people know as “here comes the bride.” Mr. B and I used that at out wedding, with the choir singing the original German lyrics, so seeing Lohengrin on stage for the first time together carried an additional spark of joy for us.
It had been eight years since we’d stepped into the Royal Opera House, deciding after the mixed bag that was Maria Stuarda that the ticket prices and add on costs of seeing opera in London just weren’t worth it when we could access so much in the country house season and in the cinema. But our go-to Longborough Festival Opera had never done Lohengrin, and we were eager to see it live. Given our limited expenditure on entertainment during COVID, we even splurged on better seats than usual.
We made a good call. The performers delivered a stellar performance (with the baddies stealing the show), the orchestra was magnificent and if you’re going someplace that has the ability to put a huge chorus on stage, Lohengrin is a fabulous opera to deploy it in. The pacing and acting were fantastic. I had no sense of so much time passing; we could have been binge watching something at home.
My only gripe was with the fascists at war staging, which had me looking for an evil dictator and a brainwashed populace. Neither are part of the story. The sets and costumes looked good, they just didn’t add to the storytelling.
Because the opera had started at three we were spilling out into Covent Garden at 7:45, looking for someplace to dine. The crowds were still formidable and anything in the market halls was packed solid. To my husband’s great disappointment, the Brasserie Blanc there didn’t survive the pandemic. So we wandered towards Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano, which did. There were no tables available, but there’s a bar with comfortable stools and gregarious barmen to handle walk-ins, and we had a celebratory round of cocktails before a delicious dinner. I gave this place a lukewarm review when we went in its preview week, but it’s settled in to become a dependable provider of excellent, upscale, authentic Italian fare with a gourmet twist.
The train home was as crowded as the one in the morning, now boisterous and more than a bit drunken. It still felt bigger than the average Saturday. For us, it certainly was.
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