Raphael and Wagner make an ordinary London Saturday extraordinary

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.

V&A's opera show is a wonder of modern storytelling

There was a point so outrageously fabulous during the V&A's new opera exhibition that I found myself quivering with the pure, unadulterated joy of a small child on Christmas morning.

It's in the section devoted to Handel's Rinaldo. The exhibit displays wrap around a disused stage with early18th century scenery piled in the wings, ropes and pulleys hanging from the rafters. Suddenly, you hear the hubbub of crowd noise, the tap-tap-tap of a baton, and scenery moves into place. As the overture rises, layers of canvas-on-wood waves ... one behind another to a painted horizon ... churn in a circular motion, creating a remarkably convincing illusion of a swelling sea. Rinaldo's boat crosses from one side, a sea deity rides from the other, while scenery clouds part to reveal a sun shining down on a glittering foreign city. It is magical. And exactly the way the London audience would have seen it upon its debut in 1711.

It's one of many moments in this blockbuster show that stirred powerful emotions from glee to dread. Great opera should make you feel, and this masterful collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Opera House does that with aplomb. This is a great exhibition because of the way it sheds light on its topic, and because of the objects it brings together, but mostly because it has combined design and technology to give us an immersive experience that embodies the very best of modern storytelling.

You know you're in for something special when you get given a set of top-quality wireless headphones with your ticket, head towards a lavish red curtain and find Tony Pappano, music director of the ROH, welcoming you in. From there, you wander through seven operatic experiences, exploring each production in tandem with the city in which it premiered and thus the political and social trends of its time. These spaces spiral around a final, central area where a series of large screens show off the state of opera in the modern world.

While opera combines many art forms, the music comes first. So giving this exhibit a stirring soundtrack is the foundation of its success. The sound quality is excellent, the choice of musical excerpts beautiful and the technology that shifts you automatically from one audio element to the next is almost flawless. (There were a few times when I stood too close to a section divider and had the next opera cutting in prematurely, but you quickly get the hang of coming back into the main path.)

There are plenty of fascinating things in cases to look at, from beautiful instruments to lavish costumes and original scores. Set design has always been a critical part of opera, and it plays a significant role here. In the Marriage of Figaro section, they've brought in a whole wall from the set of the ROH's highly acclaimed production. In the bit on Strauss' Salome, heavy with Freudian associations, you can take a seat on an oversized version of Freud's famous, Turkey-carpet covered couch to watch the action. Labels on the walls of each section capture key points in snackable bites; design for the social media generation. A risky move ... it could have seemed a cheap attempt to get down with the "yoof" ... but it was actually a beautifully conceived way to get essential facts across quickly and simply. This is worlds away from the dry, academic labels that usually accompany worthy museum shows.

In each case, there are videos of real performances to add to your understanding. Beyond the exhibition, the BBC has produced a two-part show with Lucy Worsley on the same topic. The V&A's web site is full of additional information and short films. The seriously keen can even sign up for classes at the museum. This is the embodiment of the modern, multi-media, multi-channel exhibition.

It's not all perfect. The format of seven premiers in seven cities is an interesting concept, but ultimately creates a rod for their own backs. It works beautifully for the early operas. We experience Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea at the same time the decadent opulence of Venice gives birth to the art form. Handel's Rinaldo in London sees opera grow up and move beyond Italy as the English capital grows to world prominence, while Mozart's Marriage of Figaro puts Enlightenment trends in Vienna on stage. Verdi's Nabucco premier in Milan is unquestionably linked to the Italian unification movement, but we start to lack balance here as this part of the show becomes more about the politics than the opera. (Although I found one of my favourite displays here: a photographic wall of 150 Italian opera houses, backlit and shining like precious jewels.)

We really slide off the rails when Wagner's Tannhauser gets paired with Louis Napoleon's Paris. True,  a quirk of history did throw this opera and city together; but it's an uncomfortable forced marriage. Wagner and his work was so inextricably linked to Germany, and the role of "Mad" King Ludwig is one of opera's greatest off-stage stories. To do Wagner and his enormous impact on the art form justice, we deserved one of the Munich premieres. Instead, it felt like the curators wanted to avoid the troubling German nationalist legacy, and needed to wedge Paris in somewhere, so pushed the two together.

Then it's on to Dresden, where I actually enjoyed exploring Strauss' Salome more than I thought I would. Though the Dresden tie seemed completely incidental; most of the trends we were talking about here came out of Vienna. While I'm still not enough of a convert to want to see a full production of this challenging (both musically and topically) production, linking it to the world's growing awareness of female sexuality and teenage angst was fascinating. Oscar Wilde's play and Beardsley's prints (beautiful but disturbing) show how Salome's story was so much bigger, and on trend, than the one opera.

Unfortunately, the final section on Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (paired with Leningrad) risked destroying all the joy that had come before. The plot is distressing, the political reality of Stalin's Russia horrible and the music so discordantly awful that I had to take off my headphones. Porgy and Bess would have been a much more satisfying, and palatable, take on the move toward modern opera, but I assume its launch in Boston ... hardly a world-renown opera town ... took it out of contention.

Sadly, I was so disturbed by the Shostakovich that I didn't have the mental energy to spend much time in the final room with the screens exploring opera since 1945. Having resumed my headphones, I entered to a blast of discordant notes, violent images and ugly, industrial set design that reinforced my ingrained prejudices that the art form has steadily gone to hell since the death of Puccini. I would have liked to have been convinced otherwise. My greatest complaint about the otherwise wonderful show is that they didn't use this fantastic opportunity to change my mind.

Instead, I slipped quickly back into the Wagner section, closed my eyes and listened again to the overture to Tannhauser. Then I took off my headphones and walked through the modern bit in silence.    Emotional equilibrium recovered, my final verdict remains overwhelmingly positive. This unique exploration of the art form will intrigue anyone who's even mildly interested in opera, while the topic, format and design will delight people fascinated by how we tell stories.

Opera: Passion, Power and Politics is on at London's Victoria and Albert Museum through 25 February. It's a good idea to book tickets in advance, especially on weekends or for Friday night openings.