When The Diva Met The Dictator

For centuries, the medium of opera has been open to political interpretation, a theme brilliantly distilled in the V&A’s newest exhibition.

- Clive Aslet

SURELY the perfect exhibition to greet Tristram Hunt in his first year as V&A director is ‘Opera’. No other museum could mount such a show. And let’s not forget that Dr Hunt is a former MP. The show’s subtitle is ‘Passion, Power and Politics’, reflecting that it can be a highly political artform.

This observation may be unwelcome to the listener, who simply wants his ears to be seduced by beautiful music rather than being reminded that some of the meanings behind that music may be alien to his own political philosophy. All too often, this disconnect is addressed by directors who impose their own—perhaps inappropriate—ideas that are at odds with the nature of the piece.

Wagner suffers particularly from the contemporary cult of Regietheater, in which the director’s vision is held to be supreme and unchallengeable, even if it’s violently at odds with the composer’s stated intentions. The avant-garde ‘ring Cycle’ at Bayreuth, directed by Frank Castorf, is a pre-eminent example: it’s too incoherent to have an internal logic of its own that would trump Wagner’s.

Oh, for the happy nights of 1976, when the all-French team (startling in itself, in that bastion of German culture) led by conductor Pierre Boulez and director Patrice Chéreau put the work through a Marxist critique. It was rigorous, intelligent and worked. I don’t suppose Jeremy Corbyn was in the audience, but one could imagine it.