Remembering Jonah Poplove (13 March 1993-24 Sept 2017)

 

I’ve been meaning to write this column for some time. The shocking death of American celebrity chef, author and television personality Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) reminded me again about it.

In 2013, I was delighted to be part of the Canada-India Youth Orchestra collaborative initiative in Bengaluru that would have J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D minor BWV 1043 (featuring our very own Ashley do Rego as one of the soloists), Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, and Antonin Dvořák’s formidable Symphony no. 9 (“From the New World”) on the programme. I’m no youth now, nor was I one then, so I was grateful to be included in the project. I used to play up to eight concerts a year in my England years (1998-2008) with the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra in London, and it was soul-nourishing. I actually made career choices (turning down offers further afield that would have helped advance my medical career) just so I could be in the vicinity of London, to continue to play in this extremely high-caliber ensemble. After returning to India in 2008, it still is the one thing I miss most about living in the UK. It therefore felt good to be playing such weighty repertoire again.

Most, if not all the musicians were paired so that each member of the Indian contingent shared a music-stand with a Canadian counterpart. Jonah Poplove was assigned to me.

The viola section was being led by Neal Gripp, a living viola legend, pupil of the great William Primrose and currently principal violist of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and who has commissioned and premiered several new works for the instrument.

There was something really special about Jonah, more than just his technique and musicianship, which were top-drawer. He exuded a certain radiance which was quite palpable to those around him. As desk partners, we bonded particularly well, given the hours spent together at viola sectionals and tutti rehearsals. We got to know each other even better at lunch and tea breaks, and the dinners hosted for the orchestra.

I learned that Jonah was deeply invested in music education and its many extra-musical benefits. He had begun learning violin at the age of four, and switched to viola in his teens, and was now teaching violin and viola in Ontario. He took a real interest in Child’s Play India Foundation http://www.childsplayindia.org, our music charity for disadvantaged children, and we discussed many aspects of music education, and making learning fun for children.

Perhaps it was because he realized I was a doctor, but he was extremely open about his history of depression. Although I’m not a psychiatrist, I did a year’s residency in psychiatry as part of my General Practice Vocational Training when I switched from obstetrics and gynaecology to general practice. And during my years as General Practitioner, I saw my fair share of patients with mental health issues. Jonah and I discussed how attitudes to mental health, and support networks, differed in Canada, the UK and India. I told him of my wife Chryselle’s years volunteering for Samaritans Mumbai, the suicide prevention helpline.

I have fond memories of those days. One that stands out is the mnemonic that the conductor Alain Trudel taught the violas to help us with our highly exposed but rhythmically daunting section just before the close of the third movement (Scherzo-Molto vivace) of the Dvořák: 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1. Repeated notes, at first five to a beat, then four, then three and finally one. It’s just the violas on their own, so we can’t screw it up. The solution? Think of consecutive sentences with those numbers of syllables: “I-like-po-ta-toes. Do-you-like-them? I-like-them. Too!”  Worked like a charm! I’ll never forget it. It also helps that I really do like potatoes.

Both my other treasured memories from those days are related to Jonah. We were being bussed to an evening function, and to pass the time, his fellow Canadians coaxed Jonah to recite some of his spoken-word poetry. He finally agreed, and a hush descended on the bus when he began. The ambient traffic noise seemed to fade away as he drew us into another realm, of humour, but profound wisdom and truth as well.

At the event, he surprised me further when he sang the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ to the accompaniment of his own viola, playing the chord progressions bowed on his instrument. I’ve never heard ‘Blackbird’ sung or played so innovatively or so soulfully before.

I wish I had recorded both this song and the poetry recitation.

I remember discussing with Jonah the following day Paul McCartney’s acknowledgment of the influence of Bach (McCartney was inspired by the Bourrée from Bach’s Suite in E minor for lute, BWV 996), and his reference to the Black civil rights movement in 1960s USA (the “black bird” stood for a black woman “only waiting for this moment to arise”) when he wrote the song.

Jonah had some tricky solo passages in the Pulcinella, and I would watch and learn so much as Gripp gave him a masterclass.  I remember Gripp commenting to me on Jonah’s immense potential, and what a multi-faceted human being he was. Barely twenty, he had all the world before him.

This picture is just one of so many we took in the post-concert euphoria, and in all of them Jonah is the life of the party, infectiously exuding happiness and impish humour.

After we parted, we kept in touch for a while; a lot of it had to do with ideas for Child’s Play. Then the contact dwindled to just what I could glean from his Facebook page.

I cannot convey the shock I got and the grief I felt when I heard via Facebook that Jonah took his own life in Canada last September. He’s been on my mind such a lot since then. I take solace in imagining his spirit flying high and free, like the blackbird he sang about with so much feeling that heady night.

Why am I writing about him in faraway Goa? To celebrate the life, however short, of an incredible musician, a sparkling, intelligent, witty, warm, generous human being who touched the lives of so many everywhere he went, including so many of my musician friends (almost the entire Indian viola contingent was Goan)  here.

This is also a suitable time to remind ourselves that we are all vulnerable, we all need each other. Alive! Let’s help each other to stay that way. It could be a visit, a phone-call, a kind card or letter (or text or social media message).

Let’s break taboos about mental health in general. It can be quite literally life-saving. Let’s talk more openly about it.

And for those of us who need help with depression and/or suicidal thoughts, or know someone who does, here are useful numbers: COOJ Suicide Prevention helpline (0832)2252525; Samaritans Mumbai 8422984528/8422984529/8422984530.

One of Jonah’s last Facebook posts was this quote by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly:

“It is far more important who the elementary music teacher is in a small town than who the director of an opera house is because if the opera house director is not good, he will be dismissed in a year, but a poor music teacher in a small town can kill off the love of music for thirty years from thirty classes of children. This is an enormous responsibility.”

Music education was always on Jonah’s mind. It is among the many things I will remember you for, Jonah! Rest in peace, my friend. Shalom.

(An edited version of this article was published on 17 June 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Please visit this GoFundMe link to support the making of a tribute video for Jonah Poplove by his close friends.

Here are two videos that I found, that remind us what a sensitive musician and what a loving teacher he was:

 

 

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Music and Ornithology: Mozart’s Starling

 

I got interested in birding during my England years. It was a great way to explore the outdoors on my own or with like-minded people, and to make new friends as well. The British, although not blessed with our density and profusion of birdlife, take their bird-watching very seriously indeed. I’m not the most knowledgeable or keen-eyed birder around, but certainly an enthusiastic one.

At some point over the years (I can’t remember where I came across it), I had read about Mozart owning a pet starling. So much about composers is urban legend and needs to be fact-checked, so it didn’t really register. But I was reminded about this on my Facebook feed a few days ago. So I decided to look it up.

It turns out to be true. In fact, last year, Seattle-based ecophilosopher, naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt published a book, “Mozart’s Starling”, based not just on her historical research, but she also made the effort to rear a starling (named Carmen, who still lives with her) to experience first-hand what it is like, living with a bird of this species.

For bird nerds: the bird that Mozart purchased in 1784 is likely to have been the common or European starling, Sturnus vulgaris.

Although extensive records of letters from Mozart to his father, sister and others (and vice versa) exist, he only very briefly (and probably at the nudging of his wife Constanze, as money passed through Mozart’s hands like a sieve) kept a record of all his purchases during this period.

This is how we know that he bought a starling on 27 May 1784 for 34 kreutzer.  Now this in itself was not something remarkable; the Mozart family was accustomed to having pet birds. When Mozart was fourteen, he wrote back home to his sister Nannerl while on tour in Naples: “Write me, how is Mr. Canary? Does he still sing? Does he still pipe? Do you know why I am thinking of the canary? Because there is one in our anteroom that makes the same little sounds as ours.”

Another letter written by Nannerl a few years later reveals that the Mozarts also owned tomtits and a red-breasted robin. We also know that Mozart had a pet canary in the final years of his life, because his biographer Hermann Abert documented that on Mozart’s deathbed “it was with great reluctance that he agreed to have his pet canary removed, first to the adjacent room, then even further away, because he could no longer bear the sound of its singing.”

Why then a whole book particularly dedicated to the starling? This is where music comes in. Starlings are fantastic mimics, on par with birds more famed for their mimicry, such as a parrot or parakeet. Although the European starling is not found here, I have heard its cousin the common myna from the same starling species mimic mundane urban sounds such as the irritating beep of a reversing car.

What caught Mozart’s fancy was the fact that this starling had ‘learnt’ the opening bars of the last movement (Allegretto-Presto) of his Piano Concerto in G major (No. 17, K. 453) that he had completed just a few weeks earlier, and had not yet been performed in public. Mozart even took the trouble to notate how closely the bird’s version matched his composition; apart from a fermata (a pause over a note) and two sharpened G notes instead of G natural, the bird had learnt the tune perfectly.

 

 

Mozart in many ways could be regarded as the epitome of the musical mimic, and indeed when on tour as a child, would often be asked to perform a given tune in the style of other composers living or dead.  It was a party trick often expected of gifted composers such as Mozart. Through history, we find other composers being asked to do this as well. Perhaps Mozart was amused by the kindred spirit, although an avian one.

Presumably Mozart taught the melody to the bird, or perhaps the starling picked it up soon after purchase, who knows? But however the starling came to learn it, it pleased Mozart. “Das war schön!” (“That was nice!”), he wrote alongside.

The starling lived a good three years with its owner, which apparently is the average lifespan of a starling in captivity, although the longevity record is almost 23 years. It would have been companion (and sometimes inspiration too with its birdsong and chatter?) to Mozart in some of his most fertile years.

Mozart, who had a love-hate relationship with his father Leopold, nevertheless was devastated by the latter’s death on 28 May 1787, even more so because, for a whole host of reasons, he couldn’t leave Vienna to attend the funeral in Salzburg. (It is widely believed that the vengeful Commendatore in Mozart’s dark opera Don Giovanni, written in October 1787, is a thinly-veiled reference to his father).

Literally days after his father’s demise, on 4 June 1787, Mozart’s starling died. He arranged an elaborate funeral service for the bird, exhorting his friends to arrive in mourning black clothes, “a funeral procession, in which everyone who could sing had to join in, heavily veiled”, followed by a solemn burial of the bird in his garden. Was this Mozart having a laugh? Perhaps. It is possible that the over-the-top ritual appealed to the darker side of his humour, or was it his cathartic way of holding some sort of memorial in memory of his father?

That Mozart loved his starling is abundantly clear from the lengthy poem he wrote, “a sort of requiem, epitaph in verse” for it. This is the English translation:

“Here rests a bird called Starling,

A foolish little Darling.

He was still in his prime

When he ran out of time,

And my sweet little friend

Came to a bitter end,

Creating a terrible smart

Deep in my heart.

Gentle Reader! Shed a tear,

For he was dear,

Sometimes a bit too jolly

And, at times, quite folly,

But nevermore

A bore.I bet he is now up on high

Praising my friendship to the sky,

Which I render

Without tender;

For when he took his sudden leave,

Which brought to me such grief,

He was not thinking of the man

Who writes and rhymes as no one can.

June 4, 1787.

Mozart”

There is a theory propounded by Meredith West, a psychology professor at Indiana University, that Mozart’s A Musical Joke (Ein musikalischer Spaß), K. 522, completed ten days after the starling died, on 14 June 1787, is a tribute to his pet. Do have a listen, and you’ll soon realize why it has its title.

It is unlikely anything he ever wrote, and sounds like a sequence of unrelated musical ideas illogically strung together. Musicologists have attributed it to a send-up by Mozart of some of his contemporaries he was making a playful dig at. But to West, “this composition has starling written all over it.”

In her book “Mozart’s Starling”, and in a freewheeling talk on the subject, available on YouTube, Haupt takes you through linguistics and the construction of “sentences” by various species including ours, and of course her own personal experience living with a starling.

The stringing of (to us) unconnected ideas are the hallmark of a starling birdsong “sentence.”  So it is possible that Mozart’s K.522 composition could have been a musical ode to his pet bird.

(An edited version of this article was published on 10 June 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

 

Pushing Boundaries: Sheku Kanneh-Mason

When a royal couple have their thunder stolen at their own wedding ceremony by a teenager, that must really take some doing.

I was not among the over 2 billion people worldwide that watched the live television coverage of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. To be honest, I hadn’t even registered when it was scheduled, and we were anyway deep in the Mollem jungle as part of Nature’s Nest weekend summer camp for children and parents.

But when we got back to civilization, it was impossible to miss the hoopla around the event, with all social media abuzz. Views about the very institution of the royal family are sharply divided, of course. Many Britons (and overseas, Americans seem to lap it up more than other nationalities) are staunch royalists, but equally many aren’t. There is an amusing video clip of a stadium-full of Celtic fans chanting (to the tune of “She’ll be coming down the mountain”), in no uncertain terms, what they think of the royal wedding, to put it very mildly.

Whatever one’s viewpoint, it’s undeniable that classical music gets a huge boost at royal ceremonial occasions, be they weddings, funerals, coronations or jubilees. Through history there’s so much music written specifically for ceremonial events (think Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks of 1749, or his anthem Zadok the Priest written for the coronation of George II in 1727). But interest in classical music in general shows an upswing around these milestones. Indeed Decca Records will release an album of all the music performed at this wedding.

The cynosure of all eyes and ears around the world at the ceremony was nineteen-year old Sheku Kanneh-Mason. If it’s a name people have trouble spelling or pronouncing, it is just something they’ll have to get used to, as his star, already in the ascendant before this (he won the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year award at the age of seventeen, the first black musician ever to win the award in its 38-year history), is poised now to rise to even greater heights.

 

He was scheduled to perform in Los Angeles, but readily altered his plans to fit in the royal wedding performance after Markle personally called, requesting him to play.

Sheku is only one of seven remarkable siblings, all of whom play musical instruments to an extremely high standard: Isata, 21, violin and piano; Braimah, 20, violin; Konya, 17, piano and violin; Jeneba, 15, piano and cello; Aminata, 12, violin and piano; and Mariatu, just 8, cello and piano.

Isata, Braimah, Sheku, Konya and Jeneba are all studying at the Royal Academy of Music London, almost all on full scholarships, and their younger siblings are poised to join them as well. Isata, Braimah and Sheku constitute the Kanneh-Mason Piano Trio, and have already taken many prestigious concert venues by storm.

Neither of their parents are musicians, although they both played instruments in their own childhood. Their father Stuart Mason has roots in Antigua, and is a business manager, working for a luxury hotel chain, while their Sierra Leone-born mother Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh is a former lecturer in literature at the University of Birmingham.

So how did the musical spark turn into a flame in the family? I find such stories fascinating. It all began with the parents thinking it a good idea to begin the eldest on the piano. Not only did Isata exceed their expectations at the instrument (she got to the 2014 final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year), but she was the catalyst in inspiring all the siblings that followed, in a sort of domino effect.

In an interview to the Financial Times in January 2018, their mother stresses that she was determined “never to remark on the lack of black people in classical music to our children”. Perhaps this is why Sheku grew up giving little thought to the unbalanced black-to-white ratio of classical musicians at the concerts his parents took him to; this and of course the fact that as all seven siblings played a musical instrument, he never thought that “what we were doing might not be normal”.

This is the constant refrain of any journalist who’s been to their home to interview them: that there’s someone either practicing or listening to music in the house all the time, the Kanneh-Mason version of a “normal” family.

The older six siblings were competitors in 2015 Britain’s Got Talent (BGT) as the Kanneh-Masons and got to the semi-finals.  They succeeded in making classical music ‘cool’.

“I think a lot of people think classical music is boring” said Isata in a TV interview, “but we just want everyone to enjoy it as much as we do.” This was also the comment of the BGT judges, that classical music, often seen by others as “stuffy”, was given “character, personality and fun” by the Kanneh-Masons, opening up whole new audiences among those who hadn’t appreciated it before.

After winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year (and now even more so after performing at the royal wedding), Sheku has come to be viewed as a poster-boy, and ambassador for young black musicians in a white-dominated arena.

Isata, Braimah and Sheku are all members of Chineke! orchestra, (which I written about several columns ago), the first professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of majority black and minority ethnic (BME) musicians, founded in 2015.

Sheku has brought the cello back into the spotlight again. Comparisons are already being made by critics to the celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987), high praise indeed.

du Pré’s own siblings Piers and Hilary had this to say in reaction to Sheku’s debut CD album ‘Inspiration’ (recorded with the City of Birmingham Orchestra conducted by Mirga Gražintė-Tyla and released in January 2018) in which he dedicates a piece (‘Tears for Jacqueline’) to her:  “Jackie would often say, ‘So many cellists can play technically well, but can they make music?’ Sheku makes music. He’s the first cellist since Jackie who has that natural and vibrant abandonment when playing. A sheer delight. Jackie would have loved to meet him.”

The success of the CD made Sheku “the UK’s youngest cellist to break into the Official Albums Chart Top 20 with his debut album”. Incidentally, his hometown Nottingham named a bus in his honour after he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award, and the signing of the CD contract took place on board that bus.

He showed his commitment to music education by donating £3,000 in January 2018 to his former secondary school, enabling ten other pupils to continue their cello lessons.

If you missed all of the royal wedding, no matter. Just get online and listen to ten minutes of Sheku Kanneh-Mason for “that natural and vibrant abandonment when playing”. It will make your day.

(An edited version of this article was published on 3 June 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

`Five Beethoven Piano Concertos, Two Days, One Pianist (and Orchestra) = Heaven!

 

Although much is made of the classical music scene in Goa, from time to time, I try to find an excuse to visit Mumbai for the vastly superior fare usually on offer at the NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts) at Nariman Point. One can book concerts online, and most of them are quite affordable and extremely good value-for-money, especially if you compare it with what is served up at outrageously-overpriced, shoddily-rehearsed, hastily-cobbled ‘music festivals’ here. Participating musicians have themselves told me of ending up playing under-rehearsed concerts, and the multiple onstage slip-ups. But our gullible public laps it all up, with ‘standing ovations’ to boot.

Due to Child’s Play and other commitments, it gets difficult to stay away from home for too long, and often the NCPA concerts, especially featuring their Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), have gaps of several days between them. This makes sense for Mumbaikars but is impractical for out-of-town visitors.

So when I scanned the month’s schedule and found two back-to-back concerts featuring the Camerata Ireland, I was naturally interested. And when I learned that their founder, Irish pianist-conductor and winner of the prestigious Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in 1986, Barry Douglas, would be playing (and conducting from the piano) all five Beethoven piano concertos, I was sold.

I’ve heard the Beethoven piano concertos performed live before, but never as a cycle. To play and conduct them all is a huge feat in itself, but hearing them in almost chronological order also reveals huge insights that might otherwise have been missed.

I said “almost chronological order”, because in terms of planning programme length and onstage orchestral forces, it seemed more practical to pair off the Third (C minor, opus 37) and Fifth (E flat major, opus 73) Piano Concertos on the second day: both require a pair each of flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets; and timpani and strings. On the first day, we therefore began with the Second Piano Concerto (B flat major, opus 19), followed by the First (C major, opus 15), which actually makes chronological sense as the Second was written before the First, even though they were later published in the reverse order; and the Fourth Piano Concerto (G major, opus 58) followed after the intermission.

The orchestral forces summoned by Beethoven are the so-called “standard complement” of doubled winds and brass that became common from the first half of the nineteenth century. But in his First, Second and Fourth Piano Concertos, the score specifies a single flute. Another good reason to programme these on the same day.

In keeping with HIP (historically informed performance) practice, Douglas followed the placement of the string section prevalent in Beethoven’s day: first and second violins to left and right of the audience respectively, with the violas and cellos from left to right (as seen from the audience) between them, and the double-basses behind the second violins. The woodwinds and brass were arrayed in two rows behind the strings, with the timpani next to the basses. And the piano? A modern-day concert grand, with its lid completely taken off, with its keyboard facing the audience, so that Douglas could play and conduct in the very heart of the ensemble.

The seating arrangement of the first and second violins brought out the interplay in the writing, and the bouncing of themes back and forth between them. This “stereophonic” effect gets lost when the violins are lumped together in the ‘modern’ arrangement. And speaking from personal experience as an orchestral player, it helps to be seated closer to the bass line, and one gets a better sense of the harmonic foundation of a composition when ‘period’ seating is followed.

(In contrast, here’s a clip of Barry Douglas and the Camerata Ireland playing the Second Piano Concerto, but with more ‘conventional seating and placement of the piano)

Written between 1788 and 1809, Beethoven’s Piano Concertos cover a timespan straddling both the so-called ‘early’ (the first two concertos) and his more mature ‘middle’ (the last three concertos) periods of his compositional career. This was also when great innovations were being made in the evolution of the piano as an instrument, and Beethoven was quick to assimilate these advantages into his writing, in terms of expressivity, tonal and dynamic range. As soon as more notes were added to the gamut of the keyboard, Beethoven would use these in his composing, so that anyone wanting to play his music had to have the advanced piano model. Conversely, contemporary piano-makers sought and valued Beethoven’s opinion and suggestions. One could therefore hear a sea-change in Beethoven’s writing for the instrument, from the Mozartean elegance of the ‘early’ concertos to the Sturm und Drang of the ‘Emperor’, the last in the Piano Concerto cycle.

One fact that leapt out just from scanning the programme: every final movement all the Piano Concertos is a Rondo (which means it has a recurring principal theme interspersed among other contrasting ones). He does this in his other concertos as well (his Violin Concerto, and Triple Concerto for violin, cello and piano).

If one marveled at Barry Douglas’ sheer stamina, to say nothing of his virtuosity, in accomplishing the marathon of the Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle in two consecutive evenings, one has to also think of the powers at Beethoven’s command. Apparently, on the day of the premiere of his Second Piano Concerto, he arrived (already unwell due to abdominal colic) to find the instrument flat by a half-tone. The winds couldn’t tune down as well, so the simplest expedient was for him to transpose the solo part for the whole concerto up a half-tone, in his head, and perform it!

Why can’t we have the same concert decorum here that the NCPA has? They constantly attract newcomers from all walks of life to classical music concerts, yet all their concerts go off without a hitch. The doors close a minute before (no ‘VIPs’ waltzing in and out whenever they like), everyone is seated with their phones off, and the concert begins on the dot.

Latecomers are allowed in by ushers only after a whole work has finished, and not before. No wailing babies, or children running up and down the aisle, no chit-chat once the music begins. A simple pre-concert announcement about switching off phones and not clapping between movements ensures near-total compliance. Those who unwittingly whip out their phone-cameras to make recordings are spotted at once by ushers and gently dissuaded, but even this happens less and less often.

For decades now, we keep hearing about the need to ‘educate’ audiences here, but this has to go hand-in-hand with just a few, very simple changes put into effect: doors (that do not slam, creak, squeak or click, but open and close noiselessly!) manned by trained staff who only let latecomers in after whole works are completed, and not in between. This and a few pre-concert announcements about phones and concert etiquette, reinforced by vigilant ushers, have made a huge difference to audience behaviour (and enjoyment of the concert-going experience) there, and could easily be achieved here as well.

(An edited version of this article was published on 27 May 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

In defence of the much-sullied Salieri

Let us try to imagine how we are remembered, faraway into the distant future. Centuries from now, if, despite all that we have achieved in this life, future generations simply do not recall, still less celebrate, any of it. Even worse, what if posterity rubs more salt into the wound, and maligns our legacy, attributing to us a horrible crime that we never committed.

When, as a tribute to the recently-deceased Czech-American film director Miloš Forman, a screening of his award-winning film 1984 ‘Amadeus’ (a “fictionalised biography” of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) based on the 1979 stage play of the same name by Peter Shaffer) was scheduled by the Cinephile Club, I went, of course. It would be great to watch (and hear) it again on the big screen.

But I have a few issues with the film. The strong American accent of Tom Hulce’s Mozart, but that’s just me. I accept it’s unavoidable as it’s an American production after all. There’s also his irritating laugh, meant to show Mozart’s impish sense of humour and supposed irreverence for authority figures, but it just seems exaggerated and forced.

There’s also the impression created that Mozart wrote “with no corrections of any kind”, “music already finished in his head”, “as if taking dictation” from a Divine source.

The truth is that Mozart did write sketches, from small snippets to extensive drafts, for his compositions. His phenomenal musical prowess was exaggerated to the point of mythology in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century seems to have been the “century of mythologisation” in so many spheres, all over the world, even in our own Goa, but that’s another story.

My biggest grouse with the film, however, is its slanderous depiction of Italian composer, conductor and teacher Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) as Mozart’s jealous rival, so possessed by envy that he might even resort to coldblooded, calculated murder.

Shaffer’s play and Forman’s film adaptation did Salieri the double-edged favour of catapulting him out of obscurity back into public consciousness (I was eighteen when ‘Amadeus’ was released, and had certainly not heard of him before)I, but for all the wrong reasons.

To be fair to Shaffer, the tarnishing of Salieri had begun much earlier, decades after Mozart’s untimely death in 1791 at just thirty-five, with rumours circulating that Salieri had poisoned Mozart. The background to this was the rivalry between the German and Italian schools of music, which spilled into Viennese circles as well. In the letters exchanged between Mozart and his father Leopold, references are made to “cabals” of Italians led by Salieri allegedly obstructing the progress of Mozart’s career.

One particular example (mentioned in the film as well) was when Mozart applied in 1781 for the post of music teacher of Princess Elisabeth of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead, on account of his reputation as a singing teacher. Mozart applied the following year to be her piano teacher. Leopold wrote to Mozart’s sister Nannerl: “Salieri and his tribe will move heaven and earth to put it down.”

The two composers had their differences again when Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte was in Prague preparing for the production of Don Giovanni when da Ponte was recalled to Vienna for a royal wedding at which Salieri’s opera Axur, rex d’Ormus was to be staged. Mozart was obviously displeased, but Salieri may not have had a hand in the decision.

This persecution mentality could have been a mere figment of the imagination of the part of the Mozarts, but it lent credence to the conspiracy theory after Mozart’s premature death.

In 1832, the German composer Albert Lortzing (1801-1851) composed a Singspiel ‘Szenen aus Mozarts Leben’ (Scenes from Mozart’s Life) LoVW28 describing a jealous Salieri obstructing Mozart’s career.

The fact that the same year, Russian poet, playwright and novelist Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) published his poetic drama ‘Mozart and Salieri’ shows how far the rumour had spread. Pushkin’s work in turn was the inspiration for an opera of the same name in 1897 by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and a silent film in 1914 by Victor Tourjansky. The same Pushkin drama also inspired Peter Shaffer’s play ‘Amadeus’.

But let’s examine the evidence, if any, to support the rumour. Salieri was a hugely respected composer in his day. His known oeuvre contains 652 works, with forty operas (no mean feat), several ballets, secular choruses and cantatas, five oratorios, several masses (including two Requiem Masses; he had no need to ‘ghost-commission’ one from another composer!), six concertos, several symphonies, and so much more.

He began his career as protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), and so ironically his music was much more in the German tradition of Gluck and less in the Italian ‘camp’, as it were. Although Italian by birth, he had lived almost six decades in imperial Vienna and was regarded by his peers as a ‘German’ composer. Salieri was also teacher to Beethoven, Liszt and Schubert among many others.

Did professional rivalry sizzle between Mozart and Salieri? But of course; it would have been inevitable. But if anything, the written evidence of resentment weighs heavily on the side of Mozart, not Salieri. Had the roles been reversed and Salieri had died under uncertain circumstances before Mozart, would Mozart’s carping about Salieri in his correspondence have been used as evidence against him?

Despite their rivalry, they actually saw each other as friends and colleagues, and even supported each other’s work. In 1788 when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister, he revived Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro instead writing a new opera of his own. (In the film, much is made of Salieri planting a maid in the Mozarts’ residence to unearth the Figaro opera and complain to the Emperor. It didn’t happen). In 1790, when Salieri went to the coronation festivities of Leopold II, he took three Mozart masses with him.

Mozart and Salieri even co-wrote a cantata for voice and piano, ‘Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia’, considered lost but rediscovered in 2016. Salieri also suggested the premieres of several of Mozart’s works, including his Piano Concerto KV482, Clarinet quintet and the famous Symphony no. 40, even conducting the latter himself in 1791.

Mozart’s last surviving letter of October 1791 describes collecting Salieri in his carriage to his opera The Magic Flute: “He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not a piece that didn’t elicit a ‘Bravo!’ or ‘Bello!’ out of him.”

Salieri also was teacher to Mozart’s younger son Franz Xaver, born the year Mozart died.

Although Mozart’s premature death understandably led to much speculation, the consensus today seems to indicate kidney disease (acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis), compounded by medical mismanagement. But posterity should exonerate Salieri’s reputation once and for all. He deserves far better. It is already happening, with a revival of his music to much acclaim.

(An edited version of this article was published on 20 May 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A Star is Born!

 

I first met Anthea Luna-Marie Dias in the months running up to our 2016 Child’s Play Christmas concert. We were being visited by Juilliard-trained  cellist-conductor Avery Waite, and our Camerata Child’s Play rehearsals were underway.

Anthea was just ten years old, but already playing to a level that she could handle the demands (the Christmas medley needed a few shifts beyond the third position, so beyond the ‘comfort zone’ of many, and some artificial harmonics) of the first violin part.

Despite the distance from Margão to twice-weekly Panjim rehearsals, she was prompt and prepared every time. I made a special mention of her at the Christmas concert, and have had my eye on Anthea’s progress ever since.

In November 2016, I forwarded a video of Anthea playing the first movement of the Mozart violin concerto no. 3 (K. 316) in G major to a violin pedagogue in the Symphony Orchestra of India because her playing was already fairly impressive.

My friendship with her teacher Winston Collaco spans several decades. We probably first met in the 1980s, playing together under the baton of Maestro Rev. Fr. Lourdino Barreto. In my medical student years, I would take my violin to college on Saturdays so that I could go directly from Bambolim to Margao to take lessons from Winston. So yes, he’s been a violin teacher at least since then! In 1986, he prepared me for Grade 8 of the Trinity College exam and helped me secure an Honours grade.

We became even closer in 1989, the year that American violin pedagogue and conductor Prof. George Trautwein and his wife Barbara were in Goa. Winston and I were the exact same ages as their own two sons, and we became like their surrogate children here. I still fondly remember that year (which happily coincided with the liberating year of my internship, relatively free from medical studies) as a golden year in widening my musical horizons.

Then I got caught up in my obstetrics and gynaecology residency, and if I remember right Winston got into the banking profession. Nevertheless, after relocating back to Goa after a decade in the UK to set up Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org), the first teacher I turned to when we began our partnership with Hamara School was Winston.

Irfan Shimpigar, who was in that first batch of students and is still with us at Child’s Play, is a beneficiary of the crucial initial grounding given by Winston. Sadly, after about a year and a half, Winston wasn’t able to sustain the schedule of weekly lessons with Child’s Play.

But we continued to stay in touch. I was aware that Winston was hugely sought-after as a violin teacher. But I only heard Anthea play again at the SPIC-MACAY end-of-workshop concert at the Kala Academy conducted by visiting Norwegian musicians some months ago. She played the first two movements of the Beethoven ’Spring’ violin sonata (Opus 24, no. 5) in F major with remarkable poise, facility and confidence.

The time was more than ripe for her to give a public recital to a larger audience than the sparse turn-out at the SPIC-MACAY concert, and I am glad that ProMusica provided this platform to her, along with many teenage performers and a few older ones.

I attended the Porvorim concert on 21 April 2018. Anthea (understandably due to time constraints, as she was sharing the stage with eight other soloists) played just the first movement of the Spring Sonata.

When I read on the programme that she would also be playing Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), opus 20, at first I was incredulous.

The work is a mini-concerto, (scored for violin and piano, and recorded by the composer himself and later arranged for violin and orchestra), with a dramatic ‘first movement’ with much quasi-improvisatory cadenza-like virtuoso writing, a muted, melancholy central movement, and a fiery (you almost expect to see sparks fly from the contact of bow with string) devil-may-care vivace finale in the style of the irrepressible Hungarian folk dance, the csárdás. (Incidentally, Sarasate apparently ‘lifted’ the haunting central lyrical melody almost note-for-note from a Hungarian composer Elémer Szentirmay, and feigned innocence when challenged, claiming he had ‘heard it from gypsies’, and therefore presumed it to be a Roma folk tune!)

Szentirmay, Csak egy szép lány van a világon

Sarasate, Zigeunerweisen

Zigeunerweisen has virtually all the technique and pyrotechnics in a violinist’s bag-of-tricks: harmonics, glissandi, double-stopped passages, left- and right-hand pizzicato, flying spiccati and ricochet bowings. And it demands a “stream of beautiful sound” (a description by the famed Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick of Sarasate’s own playing), particularly in, but not confined to, the un poco più lento ‘central movement’.

I must confess (despite knowing of her commendable recent ATCL triumph) I was not aware that little Anthea had such prowess under her belt, and I was on the edge of my seat, hands clenched together almost in prayer as she began to play. But she tossed off the fireworks with such nonchalance and played with a sweet tone and maturity beyond her years. She seemed to be relishing every moment of the drama. That she was fully ‘in the zone’ was evident from the way she calmly took off her mute and looked over her shoulder to cue her accompanist Maria Gisela Pereira to launch into the runaway dash to the finish line.

Although we share a surname, Anthea Dias is not a relative, and there is no conflict of interest in my showering well-deserved praise upon her.  I have never heard any Goan 12-year-old, or older or younger, ever play on any instrument as prodigiously or precociously as Anthea did that evening. And I am not alone in this opinion. Let me share what my friend Nigel Britto, Times of India music critic, who trekked all the way down to Margão for the 28 April concert just to hear her had to say on social media shortly after: “There are very, very few people as gifted as Anthea Dias, all of 12 years old, from Margão. Recently watched her perform Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, and was stunned. Blazing proficiency, supreme confidence, and an unusually profound feel for the music. For those nine-odd minutes at Harmonia, time stood still. Nobody’s concentration wavered. Couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Saying that jaws dropped all around would be an understatement.”

And I am even more excited to learn after a conversation I had later with Winston, that getting other young children to Anthea’s level and even beyond, is a very realistic goal, with the proper coaching. If anyone can bring about a true ‘Renaissance’ in classical music in Goa, it is not organisers of flashy pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo concerts in exotic locations, or old-wine-in-new-bottle ensembles, choral and instrumental, with the same tired old ‘usual suspects’, but it is music educators like my friend Winston Collaco, who lovingly nurture tender young minds, hands, hearts and souls to their fullest potential.

(An edited version of this article was published on 13 May 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

In the Press: Child’s Play’s summer camp!

“There’s the soft scent of a tango wafting through the corridors of Don Bosco oratory. In a small hall on the first floor, a bespectacled conductor, violin in hand, instructs 30-odd children seated neatly in rows.” Read the full article here. (Times of India, Sunday 6 May 2018)

The Eta Cohen Legacy

Chances are that many of you will already have heard of Eta Cohen. Perhaps you, like me, studied from student violin books in your childhood. Or perhaps your children are studying from them even today.

My introduction to the entity ‘Eta Cohen’ began one afternoon when I was seven or eight. My violin teacher Prof. Carlos Costa asked us to buy the book from the only music shop in Panjim then, Pedro Fernandes.

I had no idea who Eta Cohen was, or even if it was a man or woman, although the name sounded feminine. It’s not the sort of thing one discussed at violin class at the time. One just opened the book to where one was meant to play, and got on with it.  It was a name unlike any I had encountered before.

The first time I met another Cohen was much later, in 1990, if memory serves correctly. The great violinist Raymond Cohen (1919-2011) played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Bombay Chamber Orchestra, and I was in the violin section for that concert.

He also gave a duo recital with his wife, the pianist Anthyea Rael, at which the work that today sticks most in my memory is his encore piece, Jascha Heifetz’s virtuoso arrangement of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, the popular song from Gershwin’s opera ‘Porgy and Bess’. It was the first time I heard the tune, or indeed about the opera, so it was my entry point to so much more in music.

A few years later, I was in London, and met Cohens galore, socially, among work colleagues and patients, and musician friends in orchestra and chamber ensembles I played in around the UK. One of my hospital postings (Northwick Park) very early on took me to the vicinity of Golders Green in London, which has a prominent Jewish community. At some point around then, the penny dropped that Cohen was a Jewish surname.

Cohen (or Kohen) is Hebrew for ‘priest’, and bearing the surname is thought to often indicate that one’s patrilineal ancestors were priests in the Temple of Jerusalem. Variants of the surname include Coen, Cohn, Kahn, Kohn, Kagan, Kogan, among others.

Another famous Cohen, also associated with music, that I came across in my London years, and who passed away recently, was Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen (1934-2016).

He was told in his childhood that he was a descendant of the Biblical prophet and High Priest Aaron.

I recently finished reading the most gripping book by yet another Cohen. ‘The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey’ by author, journalist and columnist for the New York Times Roger Cohen is a painfully graphic account of his own history, “a Jewish story of the twentieth century,” bearing upon “migration and displacement and suicide and persecution and assimilation.”

It pulls no punches, both in describing the horrors of the pogroms, the mass executions in Lithuanian village squares and woods by Nazi Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators, the Holocaust that followed; and his criticism of the discriminatory policies of the state of Israel against the Palestinians, which he strongly feels are self-defeating in the long run. As he puts it: “No people has more ethical reason to resist the inebriation of domination than the Jews, most of whose history has involved exclusion imposed by the powerful.”

Another fact became clear to me: all the last three Cohens I’ve mentioned (Eta, Leonard and Roger) have their ancestral roots traced back to Lithuania, and all their family migrations are a tale of flight from anti-Semitic pogroms in the Pale of Settlement around the turn of the twentieth century.

Eta Cohen (1916-2012) was born in Sunderland to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She studied the violin locally, and began teaching the instrument at sixteen, after leaving school. A year later, she was to teach at the local education authority. Unable to find satisfactory teaching material, she began to write out lessons for her students, which became the foundation for her own Eta Cohen Violin Method. This evolved into a series of bestselling student books, the first of which (‘Miss Cohen’s tutorial for beginners’) was published in 1940.

In 1945, she married cloth merchant Ephraim Smith, whose parents were also Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. During the war years, she taught at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and other schools, and took violin lessons from two great violin pedagogues, Carl Flesch and Max Rostal.

In her teaching career spanning seven decades and lecture tours of the UK, US Australia and Europe, she published a total of six volumes (the last published by Novello in the year of her death at 96, in 2012) as well as repertoire books, duets and rounds, and contributed articles on string teaching and playing in leading journals. She had also been presented the European String Teachers Association (ESTA) Lifetime Achievement Award months before her death.

James Murphy, director of the Southbank Sinfonia, described the Eta Cohen Violin Method as “the Delia Smith of violin methods … the much-imitated, indispensable original”.

Her daughter Hazel Smith wrote a moving tribute in The Guardian: “Her great insight was that teaching the violin would be most successful if taught incrementally: the opposite of her own first lesson in which, as she often related, her teacher’s only instructions were, ‘Here’s the violin, here’s the bow. Now play!’ As a rebuttal to this ‘deep-end’ approach to learning, she taught one new idea at a time. Her ability to break down difficult technical tasks and reconstruct them in easy to manage stages is a hallmark of the books.”

Eta Cohen’s Foreword in her Student’s Book 1 has several pieces of advice to teachers which are still worth remembering:

“Remember quality is more important than speed.” There is an obsession among the teaching fraternity with zipping through teaching material, with scant attention to getting the basic fundamentals right. The result is the illusion of ‘progress’, but with poor tone, insecure intonation, and very little if any phrasing, or feeling for the piece being played. This is sadly quite pervasive.

“Encourage pupils to sing the music.” This also happens less and less in contemporary teaching. My generation was brought up with having to first learn and sing solfeggio, so singing our music was de rigeur for us.

“Only when the pupil is accustomed to using every inch of the hair should they go on to play with various lengths and speeds of bow.” Too many more modern ‘methods’ disregard this, with the result that the eloquence of the bow, the ‘lung’ of the instrument, is underused.

As new, flashy, gimmicky methods vie for attention like latest fashions, it is well worth thinking of the “much-imitated, indispensible, original” Eta Cohen Violin Method.

(An edited version of this article was published on 29 April 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

The Trout in Film

What is it about film villains and classical music? Serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played chillingly by Anthony Hopkins) is not only “intellectually brilliant”, but “cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, cuisine and music.” He is depicted as having been a sitting member on the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s board of directors. Irritated by the flutist messing his part in Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, Lecter (Red Dragon 2002) makes him ‘disappear’ and it is implied that the hapless musician’s organs are served up in the banquet Lecter throws for the orchestra board.

Bond villains in particular love classical music as well. In ‘Quantum of Solace’ (2008), the ‘bad guys’ love it so much that they hold a conference  meeting through microphones and earpieces during a performance of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ while seated scattered about the Bregenz opera house.

There are many more such examples. But today let us examine the fascination with one work in particular: the Lied, or song, ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout), composed in 1817 for solo voice and piano with music by the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), when he was just twenty. Many of us heard it quite recently, at the splendid recital by Patricia Rozario in Old Goa, with Mark Troop at the piano.

For some reason, film villains take sadistic pleasure from it. In the Bond film ‘Never Say Never Again’, the evil Largo (note the musical term, although it is hardly goosebump-inducing; would Tremolo have worked better?) whistles the opening bars as he punishes the leading lady Domino for her betrayal.

In the 2011 film Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows, Professor Moriarty toys with Holmes, in a malicious prelude to torturing him. “You are familiar with Schubert’s work?” he asks, adding “the Trout is perhaps my favourite.”

He even explains the song (or his understanding of it): “A fisherman grows weary of trying to catch an elusive fish. So he muddies the water, confuses the fish. It doesn’t realise until too late that it has swum into a trap.”   The parallel is obvious; Moriarty is the fisherman, and Holmes has swum into his trap.

To add to the allegory, Holmes is hoisted up off the ground, dangling helplessly like a line-caught fish. Moriarty then plays the phonograph recording of ‘Die Forelle’ and sings along with it as the torture commences. The background music adds a sinister edge to the final bars of the piano accompaniment until the phonograph stops playing. This clip has left its Pavlovian imprint upon the Trout for me; it’s hard not to think of it when listening to the Schubert Lied now.

So, what do the lyrics of ‘Die Forelle’ really mean, and who wrote them?  Schubert set the text of a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (yes, uncanny similarity in surnames) to music in 1817. It tells the story of a “capricious trout” (“launische Forelle”) in a “bright little brook” (“einem Bachlein Helle”). The rest of the story pans out pretty much as Professor Moriarty tells it in the film. An observer watches the trout at first darting about in the “clearness of the water” and then, after the fisherman muddies the water, ending up “squirming”, while the observer’s  blood rages at the fate of the “betrayed fish.”

But is that all there is to the poem and the song, a description of a fishing trip? Or is there more to it? For some reason (some accounts state that he found it “too didactic”), Schubert didn’t include the last stanza in his setting of Schubart’s poem to music, and one could argue that the whole point of the poem lies in that excised stanza. It delivers a moral, if rather preachy, message to young women, to be wary of the wiles of young men:

“At the golden fountain/ of youth, you linger so confidently; / But think of the trout, / and if you see danger, flee! / Most of the time you only fail due to a lack /of cleverness. Maiden/beware of the seducer with the fishing-rod! / Or else, too late, you may bleed!”

So, given that Schubert left out the stanza, how does the singer approach the Lied? In chapter Ten (“Performing Lieder: The Mysterious Mix) of the book “German Lieder in the nineteenth century”,   Professor Emeritus of the University of Colorado Robert Spillman discusses it at length and offers his viewpoint: “Perhaps knowing the poet’s more serious concern [he used the story as an allegory of the deceptive enticement of a young woman] gives the singer reason to allow righteous indignation, anger and sad regret in some measure to enter into his or her voice.” He elaborates on the expressiveness of the piano part to depict bubbling water, darting fish, and “perhaps even the flapping motion of a helpless fish out of water”, and how the singer’s knowledge of the nuances of the German language, the construction of the lines, and the exploitation of the onomatopoeic power of words (for instance, “zappelt”, which can variously mean “flapped”, “floundered” or “wriggled”) and phrases can be extremely pictorial and evocative.

The Lied prove so popular that Schubert was commissioned (by music patron and amateur cellist Sylvester Paumgartner) to write a work of chamber music based upon it. This is how and why, two years later, he wrote his Piano Quintet (nicknamed ‘the Trout’ or ‘Die Forelle’) in A major, D. 667, in which the fourth movement has a set of variations based on ‘Die Forelle’ melody. All the other movements but one (the Scherzo) also have motifs and figures from the Lied.

But rather than the usual piano quintet configuration (piano plus string quartet ie two violins, viola and cello), Schubert wrote this work for piano, violin, viola, cello and double-bass. This is because he wrote it for a group of musicians who were coming together a work by another composer, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, for this combination.

The inclusion of double-bass to add to the cello in the lower register frees the piano part to explore the higher register of the instrument, giving the work a unique sonority.

For those interested, there is available to watch on YouTube, a film from 1969, a year short of fifty years ago, by film-maker Christopher Nupen, titled ‘The Trout”  of a historic performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall London of the quintet by Daniel Barenboim (piano), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Pinchas Zukerman (viola), Jacqueline du Pré (cello), and our own Zubin Mehta (double-bass), all of them full of irrepressible youthful vigour and mischief, and all around the age Schubert himself was when he wrote the work.

(An edited version of this article was published on 22 April 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

 

Victoria and Giacomo

Much has been written about the 2017 British biographical comedy-drama ‘Victoria and Abdul’ and the multiple contrasts between the two protagonists: Queen and subject; geriatric frailty and youth; Christianity (and the head of the church of England, no less) and Islam; the violation of Victorian taboos of race and class and protocol, a tale of love and loathing at the heart of the British court that would put the Empress of India on a collision course with her royal household, all over her relationship with an Indian ‘servant’.

The film opens with a sort of disclaimer: “Based on facts…mostly.” The one-word caveat “mostly” says a lot. Based on Shrabani Basu’s eponymous book, it is directed by Stephen Frears, with screenplay by Lee Hall. Hall later published the screenplay of the film in another book, also called ‘Victoria and Abdul.’ In the introduction, he recounts how Frears’ “beady eye for the preposterousness of any situation and his generally wicked sense of irony” was perfectly matched with Hall’s own “’subaltern’ take on the pretensions of empire”.

A fair degree of artistic license is taken. The one I wish to remark upon is the encounter with the Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini when the royal household goes to Florence on vacation. This encounter isn’t mentioned in Basu’s book.

 

“PONSONBY: Signor Puccini has arrived, your Majesty.

(We are in the middle of the recital. The Royal Household are listening to a fat man singing ‘Donna non vidi mai’ at the piano. Abdul is listening intently next to the Queen, Bertie next to Lady Churchill. Ponsonby says something to Dr. Reid. The Munshi turns)

ABDUL: Shhhh!

(The fat man at the piano finishes his song. Abdul applauds enthusiastically).

QUEEN VICTORIA: And where did you say it was from, Mr. Puccini?

PUCCINI: It’s from my new opera ‘Manon Lescaut’. It’s about two lovers separated by the class divide who run away together.

QUEEN VICTORIA: It sounds marvelous.

PUCCINI: But she is imprisoned for her love, Your Majesty.

QUEEN VICTORIA: Oh.

PUCCINI: But they escape.

QUEEN VICTORIA: Bravo

PUCCINI: But finally she dies leaving him utterly bereft.

QUEEN VICTORIA: I’m not sure we like the sound of it. We prefer comic opera. Do you know any Gilbert and Sullivan?

ABDUL: Perhaps Your Majesty will sing a song?

QUEEN VICTORIA: Oh no. I couldn’t possibly.

(The Household on cue) :

LADY CHURCHILL: But please, Your Majesty.

BERTIE (aside): God save us!

QUEEN VICTORIA: Well, just one. From ‘Pinafore’, Bertie.

BERTIE: Do I have to?

(Bertie, reluctantly, goes to the piano)

QUEEN VICTORIA: ‘Little Buttercup.’ In C.

(Bertie sits at the piano with immense reluctance. Queen Victoria sings ‘Little Buttercup’ poorly. She dries, but Ponsonby prompts the applause.)”

So, is this encounter fact or fiction? Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (1858-1924) were certainly contemporaries. Puccini’s opera ‘Manon Lescaut’ premiered in 1893, which fits neatly with the timeframe 1887-1897 between Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees when her attachment to Abdul Karim blossomed.

Basu’s book describes the annual trip to Europe of the royal household: Portsmouth to Cherbourg on board the ‘Victoria and Albert’ (escorted by torpedo boats!); then the Royal train from there to Florence, where the Queen would stay at the Villa Palmieri or the Villa Fabricotti, meeting other royalty, visiting the Uffizi gallery, and other pastimes. Thence the entourage would travel to Berlin or other destinations.

Thus, although it is possible that the Queen of England and the King of Opera could have met, such a momentous encounter would certainly have been chronicled. Interestingly, in the film, after the quoted extract above, Queen Victoria exclaims “I was taught by Mendelssohn, you know!” although this isn’t in Lee Hall’s published version of the script.

Both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert were accomplished pianists and singers (so the screenplay reference to her singing ‘poorly’ is perhaps undeserved, or reflects her advanced age). Their shared love of music was one of the many things that fuelled their mutual attraction. When Mendelssohn was invited to Buckingham Palace, according to one account, the royal couple was nervous with anticipation: “For all their exalted station, they were quite fluttery!”

A meticulous diarist, the Queen wrote later: “After dinner came Mendelssohn, whose acquaintance I was so anxious to make… He is short, dark, & Jewish-looking, delicate, with a fine intellectual forehead. I should say he must be about 35 or 6. He is very pleasing & modest… He played first of all some of his ‘Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words)’, after which…he asked us to give him a theme upon which he could improvise. We gave him 2, ‘Rule Britannia’, & the Austrian National Anthem. He began immediately & really I have never heard anything so beautiful, the way in which he blended them both together & changed over from one to the other, was quite wonderful as well as the exquisite harmony & feeling he puts into the variations, & the powerful rich chords, & modulations, which reminded me of all his beautiful compositions. At one moment he played the Austrian National Anthem with the right hand, he played ‘Rule Britannia’ as the bass, with his left! He made some further improvisations on well-known tunes & songs. We were all filled with the greatest admiration. Poor Mendelssohn was quite exhausted when he had done playing.”

She would certainly have jotted down a similar account of her meeting with Puccini had it taken place. So we have to assume that some artistic liberty was taken in inserting Puccini (dismissively described, tongue-in-cheek, as ‘a fat man’ and played with great relish and in fine voice by Simon Callow) into the screenplay.

One good reason would be to compare the class divide between the lovers Manon Lescaut and Chevalier Renato des Grieux in Puccini’s opera and between Victoria and Abdul, a cinematic form of allegorical play-within-a-play. It is also an omen of the fate awaiting Victoria and Abdul: “But finally she dies, leaving him utterly bereft.” The story of Victoria and Abdul is in itself a tragicomic opera of sorts.

And the title of the aria ‘Donna non vidi mai’, sung by des Grieux totally besotted by Manon soon after their first encounter, can be loosely translated as ‘Never before have I beheld a woman such as this.’

This could well be the sentiment of Abdul, (who shushes Dr. Reid and Ponsonby, his archenemies in the Royal Household, when their chatter disturbs the performance of the aria and “applauds enthusiastically” at the end of it), in his adoring regard for the Queen.

(An edited version of this article was published on 8 April 2018 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)