Wagner Encounter in Canada's Kootenay Mountains

I was driving back to Vancouver from Nelson, British Columbia one October afternoon and had decided to take the route up past Ainsworth Hot Springs towards Nakusp and on through the mountain to Vernon. It was a day and night of torrential rain. I stopped and soaked in the Springs, visited the sweet little town of Kaslo and was fiddling with the CD player in the rental car when I came to New Denver.

The afternoon was darkening and the mountain range that lined my route was disappearing into low cloud. I pulled into New Denver in the hope of finding a cup of tea and a decent cake, and soon saw that this was a small one-street town. The autumn colours gave it charm. As I was driving down the main street, my eye was drawn to a photo of a man in a shop window. His was an Edwardian face that I thought I knew: CS Lewis? Elgar? What on earth would they be doing in the middle of rural BC? I did a U turn, parked the car and got out to look.
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The Edwardian man was none other than Arturo Toscanini - his face gazing sternly out from a CD cover. But by now, it was the adjacent window that had my attention. The Dream Ring" was the title of a box CD sitting in dead centre. Somebody, whoever it was who owned this surprising little shop, had, as far as I could make out, created his or her idea of a perfect Ring by mixing various singers into one dream performance.

The shop also served as the information centre for the nearby provincial park which went by the name of, and I am not making this up, the Valhalla provincial park. The shop was closed but a lone woman was walking along the street and seemed to be heading towards it. I watched her approach. It was one of those rare days when we seem to be aligned with whatever it is that runs our universe. Of course, this lone woman would be headed to this particular store, of the score of businesses on the street. And she was. But she was the wife of the maker and mixer of all that recorded music. I sensed that she didn't quite share my enthusiasm (not surprising really. I was in a state of high excitement. Toscanini and Richard Wagner in the shadow of the Valhalla Provincial Park!) She let me in and let me look around. Her husband, Richard Caniell, had worked for RCA in New York, where he had attended most of Toscanini's concerts. Caniell is the founder of Immortal Performances Recorded Music Society www.immortalperformances.org - a non -profit organization that offers some stunning Toscanini performances along with that Dream Ring - Mr Caniell's fantasy mix of the greatest voices of the Golden Age of the Met into a virtually seamless recording. Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior and Friedrich Schorr's Wotan. I had maxed out the Visa and couldn't afford the Ring but I decided to take that 'Edwardian man' that I'd glimpsed in the window, along for the rest of my ride through the driving rain and the mountain passes. I purchased an "Arturo Toscanini - all Wagner" featuring Tannhauser, Tristan, Walkure, Lohengrin and Gotterdammerung with a rehearsal segment from 1947.

As dusk settled, Arturo Toscanini and I set off - he giving fairly good-natured instructions to the orchestra and croaking along with the music, I, negotiating some hair-raising bends in the battering wind and rain ad zero visibility. The maestro, Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel and I arrived safely several hours later. I like to think that some other great spirit, the creator of all that glorious music was overseeing our progress. After all, surely he must , waft by the Valhalla Park from time to time.

Tristan und Isolde live from the Met - but please DON'T pass the popcorn

On this freezing March Easter weekend, my Saturday looked to be perfect – a dress rehearsal of Carmen at the Royal Opera House in the morning and, if the tube is behaving, a quick lunch and onto the Metropolitan Opera’s live transmission of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill.

I discovered these broadcasts last year in Vancouver. On Canada’s West Coast, the time difference has us up early – 10.30 for a normal opera, 930 for a Wagner. This has one huge advantage in our downtown cineplex. The popcorn concession for regular cinema has not yet opened. Muffins are available and coffee – both measuring very low on the Richter scale of noise made while being consumed. Then, during Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, one lone man wandered downstairs during the second intermission and found the fatal popcorn. Surely the noisiest foodstuff known to man –a Richter eight or nine – so why do we sell it during a cinematic performance that demands that we hear?

Daniel Barenboim discussed the current disdain for hearing and listening in last year’s Reith lectures and, perhaps, when Jack Black is crashing through his latest dysfunctional screen-life, none of us need to hear the details. But when that man made his way up the aisle in the Vancouver cinema last year, clutching his bottomless (they are always bottomless) bag of popcorn, I knew that Puccini was going to come out the worse for the encounter. Manon Lescaut, alone in that notorious ‘desert outside New Orleans’, started to sing “Solo, (crunch) perduta (crackle) abandonnata (rustle – sound of hand rummaging deep in bag for the buttery bits at the bottom.) And unlike the sweet wrapper that takes a mere whole aria to unwrap, popcorn never ends. Popcorn in cinemas has to be the closest mankind will come to a brush with eternity.

But I kept faith in the culture of Old Europe. Corn, as any geographer will tell you, is an American crop so, even if we have succumbed to this very American snack while we watch a Hollywood film, surely the Gate in Notting Hill, must know that you cannot eat popcorn during Wagner? Oscar Wilde was right about many, many things but very wrong about Wagner’s music. It isn’t so loud that you can talk through it (I paraphrase). Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with its endless yearning, its great ocean of desire, (and not for more butter and plenty of salt) is full of silences, pauses, great orchestral drawings in of breath before we are carried ever upward to Wagner’s unique form of ecstasy.

Oddly enough, the young woman at the concession stand at the Gate understood this. She was obviously not an opera goer but she had realized that ‘popcorn and opera don’t go together.’ Alas, her manager apparently does not agree. And so I walked away crestfallen from the Gate. At 30 pounds a seat, I wasn’t going to risk it. So here I sit back at the house listening to Radio 3, very sorry that I missed Deborah Voigt and the Met debut of Robert Dean Smith. For cinema managers who need guidance on this matter here is a quick list of acceptable opera foods if we really must, and it would seem that we really must, be stuffing something into our mouths at every waking moment of our day.

FOOD THAT YOU CAN EAT AT A MET BROADCAST IF YOU SIMPLY MUST:
Soup (no crusty baguettes to go with it mind!) , pureed vegetables, lightly scrambled egg but no bacon, fruit compote, yogurt (but not with bits of fruit in it – particularly not pineapple or any kind of apple) chocolate mousse – milk, dark or white – is always acceptable but no slurping your spoon.

DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT EATING:
Popcorn, crisps, bagels, kit-kats, crunchie bars, snickers, raw carrots, courgettes or peppers, battered fish, fried chicken, steak and kidney pie.

Cinema personnel requiring further information should feel free to contact me at :thesinginghouse@gmail.com