YOU wouldn’t need to search for long before finding a perfect Christmas ballet: The Nutcracker is an obvious choice, with its opening scene of children decorating a Christmas tree, running about and opening presents, followed by dancing tin soldiers, mice and snowflakes and the Sugar Plum Fairy ruling over the Kingdom of Sweets. A Christmas opera is not quite so easy to find, at least not a family-friendly one. Taking an excited group of children or grandchildren to Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner could end in tears. Based on Thornton Wilder’s one-act play (in turn filched by Orson Welles for a scene in Citizen Kane), it traces the history of the Bayard family over 90 years, complete with births, deaths, alcoholism and depression.
An opera that was written specifically for children, and for television, is Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. As children in Italy, Menotti and his younger brother would try to stay awake on Christmas Eve, awaiting the arrival of the Three Kings bearing presents. They each had their favourite: Gian Carlo liked King Melchior, whereas his brother preferred King Kaspar, who he insisted was kind, eccentric and very deaf. In the fullness of time, this interpretation was to make its way into the opera.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 30, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
