Rancid Pansies (24 page)

The scene is the drawing room of Balmoral Castle, nearing teatime on a rainy afternoon around the year 1990. Present are the Queen, on her knees on the hearthrug tempting a corgi with the sort of things corgis find tempting; the Duke of
Edinburgh
, who is listlessly leafing through a magazine devoted to field sports; Prince Charles in a kilt, who has just found Sir Stamford Raffles’s
History of Java
in the Castle library and is reading passages from it aloud to a potted banana plant to make it feel more loved; and Princess Diana, a downcast
presence
who, as the orchestra begins its lead-in, leans back on an overstuffed sofa with her exquisite arms thrown wide along its back. It is a posture both of despair and of transcendence. Wearing an outfit by Versace, she is outstandingly the best dressed person in the room with the possible exception of the corgi, whose au naturel look is unassailable. The Duke’s wardrobe, in particular, appears to have come from a Range Rover boot sale. Diana sings:

I just thought I’d run a draft of the opera’s first scene by you to give you a foretaste of my libretto and to convey its
dramatic
, slightly foregone tone. Diana’s liberation is close at hand, when with her boys at boarding school and her husband busy with the organisational minutiae of shoehorning adultery into his tight ceremonial schedule she can devote herself to charity work and a fun time. No longer is she the ‘Shy Di’ of her engagement ten years earlier: the demure, biddable
kindergarten
teacher who innocently allowed press photographers to pose her like a Bendy Toy against the light so those 24-carat legs were outlined against the filmy white background of her dress. Now, through her amazing wardrobe (requiring two full-time staff to manage) and the confidence that cult status
confers, she goes her own way, disco dancing and hobnobbing with lepers and other outcasts such as far-flung British Army units. I’m afraid I daren’t divulge the two arias I have written for her and Charles when their respective extramarital affairs become revealed via eavesdropped conversations. I’m pinning great hopes on these ‘Squidgy’ and ‘Tampax’
scenas
and it would be a shame to spoil their effect by giving the game away in advance. Suffice it to say they employ a device that as far as I know is novel in opera although not in gynaecology. I’ll say no more. Marta has promised me she will devote her best
energies
to match the brilliant words with equally brilliant music.

Oh dear, though – there are so many good things. I long to quote them so they will send you scurrying to buy tickets before they’re all sold out. For instance, Diana’s tragicomic number on learning of her friend Gianni Versace’s death not long before her own. It begins:

and if you think you catch a whiff of banality there you must remember that the very
essence
of opera (not to mention
musicals
) is cod philosophy and stock human emotion. The words alone shouldn’t try to express anything too deep otherwise they push the music into second place, and vice versa. I’m sure you’ll remember Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss
thrashing
all that out pretty thoroughly in
Capriccio
, based on the old parody by Casti,
Prima la musica e poi le parole
. In Strauss’s opera Flamand the composer and Olivier the poet are constantly trying to decide which comes first, the music or the words. This question was to remain open until decades later when the lyricist Sammy Kahn settled it by saying ‘The cheque’.

Again, I don’t want to give away too much but at the start of my final Act, following Diana’s death and just before the scenes of her dramatic apotheosis in the Vatican
and beyond
, the stage will be completely dark except for a single spot. A
voice with piano accompaniment will sing an old ballad that she loved, the nineteenth-century folk prototype of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ called ‘Dilated Wench Inn’. This is a very moving moment and I worry about the sort of smartarses who might think it funny to make anagrams of this classic song’s title such as ‘Wild, thinned acne’, ‘Dent-chinned wail’ and things involving candles. In order to remove the
temptation
I have re-titled it ‘Much adieu about nothing’:  

‘Bad taste’ do I hear? The tutting of the petits bourgeois? At the risk of sounding immodest by implied comparison, I remind myself that Beethoven was shocked by Mozart’s
choosing
to set the libretto of
Così fan tutte
. The deaf prude from Bonn thought it in execrable taste. Reaching a friendly hand across the centuries to little, farting, periwigged Mozart I can reassure him that there are worse things than being accused of bad taste. Being praised for good taste, for one. And writing lyrics full of grammatical howlers for another (the Brown Dirt Cowboy please note). Oh – and as a final note for now, I’ve
written a quite spare speaking role for the Duke of Edinburgh who appears in several scenes. He acts as an irascible, pithy version of a Greek chorus and is often silently onstage in one corner, cleaning a 12-bore shotgun. I confess I’ve shamelessly tailored this part for myself. As many people will know, my singing voice is rather exceptional but, alas, not professionally trained and I don’t think Donizetti-like roulades would fit well with Marta’s music, which to me sounds like an idyllic
marriage
between Prokoviev and Jonathan Dove. So I’ve written myself a largely silent but always expressive part in my own opera. Sometimes I think my whole life has been nothing but an overture to being onstage at last.

And prematurely onstage I already am these days, though it is causing me nothing but chagrin.
L’affaire
Darcie Barrington has produced world-class hysteria. Led by the Italians, the whole of Europe’s media have converged on Le Roccie these last weeks. Leo Wolstenholme’s footage of the child
discovering
she can see has been shown and re-shown until, like the Twin Towers standing and falling and standing and falling over and over again, it no longer feels like before-and-after so much as a permanent state of indecision. Like the
pornographic
freeze-frame it has become emptily iconic of nothing but itself, although for Leo and Co. it must surely be iconic of a large sum of money. Things have eased a bit now but at its worst, when the town was practically besieged by newshounds wearing some of the most abominable deodorants you ever smelt, I dared hardly stir out of the Belgian’s flat for fear of being buttonholed by complete strangers demanding I cure symptoms so disgusting I marvelled they could still be alive. For the first time ever I began to feel a sneaking degree of
sympathy
for the late Jesus Christ, who must have encountered similar problems – and he was operating in pre-Judaean National Health Service days. I had become so easily
recognisable
because
Il Tirreno’
s stills of me examining that Diana
statuette
were syndicated everywhere over absurd and lying copy claiming that the late Princess was ‘channelling’ through me
which, like tunnelling through Paris, must equally be a doomed activity for her. Still, the nuns in my building drop creakily to their knees when I pass them on the stairs, and sheer embarrassment as well as
noblesse
obliges me to raise a hand in vague benediction.

Up at Le Roccie it became such pandemonium I put on a large pair of dark glasses and went and fetched Marta and Joan, bringing them back to the Belgian’s spare bedroom where they crammed together for a night before I found them the last hotel room in town. They stayed there a week until the worst was over. Despite all the upset and subterfuge Marta seemed oddly unperturbed. I don’t know what’s got into her: I’ve never known her so sunny. Resignation? Love? The days go by and Joan is still very much in residence with her. At least they accept their love nest has now been terminally squatted on by the huge smelly vulture of cult religiosity and are resigned to leaving for good. This has privately cheered me, as you may imagine: Marta’s reign as Queen of Le Roccie has been amusingly brief. Complete strangers with vile diseases knock at her door demanding to use the lavatory or to be healed. What they get is Joan’s tattooed, muscular forearm barring the way and some rich English naval expletives.

Yet despite all this disruption Marta’s mood remains
defiantly
merry. She has spent her time down here in exile reading my nearly completed libretto and now tells me it is ‘brilliant’. To be strictly accurate, what she said was ‘Gerree, never I have laughed so much. It is brilliant
satjriski
, yes?’ This is no less gratifying, of course, since she told me a long time ago that because of their post-war history of Soviet occupation
Voynovians
take satire extremely seriously as an art form. For them it always floats as a wafer-thin layer over great tragic depths, like an iridescent film of tanning oil on a fathomless ocean. I am completely certain that she recognises my opera’s
fundamental
high seriousness. She is, after all, a serious artist herself and would hardly waste her talents on setting anything but the best texts. And if I needed further assurance, the great Max
Christ himself says that if she finishes the score in time he will première the opera next year in his own prestigious Haysel Festival. If it succeeds there it will naturally become squabbled over by Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and the Met. I draw the line at Garsington.

I should explain the origins of this festival. Some time in the past I alluded to Max and Jennifer’s early days in Crendlesham Hall when they were still in the throes of renovation. One of the reasons they chose the house was because of its immense and ancient barn about a hundred yards away known as ‘the Haysel’, one of those daft Suffolk dialect words dating from the days when the peasantry couldn’t pronounce ‘haymaking’, which is what I’m told it means. Apparently, when haymaking was finished the sunburned swains used to occupy as much of this barn as wasn’t stuffed with hay for the sort of drunken revelry that kept the local birth rate soaring. In 1521, only the other day by Suffolk standards, the bawdiness became so unbridled that Crendlesham’s rector was himself erroneously inseminated in the prickly depths of the mow. For many years thereafter an effort was made to conduct the haymaking
festivities
with a little more sobriety although it was noticed that the rector himself never missed a haysel, presumably in order to quell any immorality as soon as he saw it. But eventually he died and the annual celebrations in the great barn returned to their former licentiousness and according to parish records continued pretty much unchanged until twentieth-century prudery, the mechanisation of farming and the diminishing need for hay brought this venerable tradition to an end. After that the barn became little more than a shelter for rats and decaying tractors and fell into an advanced stage of
decrepitude
. Max’s ambition had always been to restore the huge old building with its oak timbers salvaged from tall ships down the ages. He planned it as a concert hall where he could hold a summer festival to showcase his now-famous Colchester
Symphony
Orchestra and introduce young composers and
instrumentalists
. Thus the Haysel Festival, which after a bare couple
of seasons in the beautifully refurbished hall has already become a fixture in the diary of anyone who fancies
themselves
in touch with music. So Max’s promise to première
Rancid
Pansies
(memo: find a proper title!) at the Haysel will ensure it the best possible launch for an international career.