Michael Neve

Opera and opera-going proliferate at very strange times. The opera revival of the last decade is a matter of considerable interest, since in some ways it seems so inappropriate, so profligate, when all the talk is about tightening belts. Opera booms when the expense of it is most ruinous, and events seem most ‘operatic’ when they are huge, scary and very much for real. Opera as a cultural form lays bare the fact that there is money to sustain it while at the same time – the same Wagnerian time, one might say – it calls into question the base that sustains it. Something was changed utterly when the children of Switzerland decided a few years ago to seek out and destroy the national opera house. Opera in Switzerland had become the symbol of an EEC style of bloatedness, of financial mismanagement on a scale that only the financing of opera could rival. After the riots in Switzerland, punks against Puccini, it really did seem that Herbert von Karajan was a Nazi; that Luciano Pavarotti was the ultimate Italian mother’s boy, bent on world domination, and that opera would be subsidised in the industrial wastelands of a Europe unable to employ vast numbers of its own citizens. History repeats itself, appearing first as tragedy, then as farce, and then as opera.–

How do minds close? Under what series of angers, of single visions, does the deliberate deafness take hold? Not an easy question to answer, since part of the dialectical nightmare of this argument is that the only way a closed mind might be opened is by a mind single-mindedly bent on the task. And you end up with two closed minds, as in a quarrel. It is salutary to reflect how comparatively rare is the expression ‘I don’t know,’ and to admit that arguing with (say) John Wesley, or Bertolt Brecht, or even – to be banal – Roger Scruton, would be a pretty grim business.–

‘Havelock Ellis has sent me the sixth volume of his studies, Sex in Relation to Society,’ Freud wrote to Jung, in late April 1910. ‘Unfortunately my receptivity is consumed by my nine analyses. But I shall set it aside for the holidays along with the wonderful Schreber.’ Freud is here referring to the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of his nervous illness had appeared in 1903, and constitute one of the most celebrated case-studies of paranoia in the literature. The letter of 1910 to Jung goes on: ‘Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital …’

The town of Stockbridge, in Massachusetts, is weird. Not in the diminished, all-too-contemporary sense of merely odd, or strange, but weird as Shakespeare might have meant it: ‘having the power to control the fate or destiny of men’, ‘partaking or suggestive of the supernatural’ (OED). Weird, too, in the way that Tennyson meant it, particularly as the word appears in his poem ‘The Princess’. The visitor to Stockbridge is liable to feel certain ghostlinesses in the town: a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville said something unmemorable to Hawthorne. Stockbridge, the site of the family grave – known, weirdly, as ‘the Pie’ – of the Sedgwick family.