Don't worry about the plot, just listen to the music
MATTHEW PARRIS
My New Year's resolution came to me just before Christmas as I watched the English National Opera's production of Verdi's Nabucco.
Nabucco is a work which for years I have wanted to see. The hit tunes and choruses are familiar enough, but the opera from which they come had always been a mystery. So when a kind friend invited me to join his little opera party at the Coliseum last week, I accepted at once. The staging of this ENO production was said to be bizarre but I knew the soloists, chorus and orchestra would be first-rate. When music is strong, one can suspend disbelief in a production and (if necessary closing one's eyes) sit back and enjoy the sound. 1 knew nothing of the story but hearing the whole thing in English might help me pick up the plot, too. I looked forward immensely to the occasion.
But by the time I got there, after an after- noon's struggle to get a decent parliamentary sketch out of an unusually scrappy session of Questions to the Foreign Secretary, I was feeling shattered. MPs had all been scream- ing about the Nice summit, half of them con- vinced it was the beginning, and the other half the end, of civilisation. For hours I had been trying to work out what people meant, who was right, and why. I just about made my deadline.
Running through the rain from the House of Commons to St Martin's Lane, I arrived minutes before the doors closed and bound- ed panting up the stairs to the dress circle where our host had taken a box. The others were already there. I settled into my seat, still breathless. As composure returned and the warmth of the theatre enveloped me, I realised there remained just a couple of minutes to mug up on the plot. The others had a programme.
But then again, 'Why bother?' I thought. I'd probably get the gist of the story as we went along; or there was the interval in which to catch up. Our box was a comfort- able nest — no place to swot. With that pleasant sense both of involvement yet of privacy which a box at the opera lends, I could get into this performance as much, or as little, as I liked. The orchestra struck up. The sound was full, rich and splendid. `Hang the plot,' I thought, 'I'll just guess.'
Nabucco is glorious. Great waves of cho- rus washed over me. Down on the stage, regiments of oddly dressed people, some in chains, surged about amid what looked like scaffolding, while others sang like angels. Someone was oppressing someone, I think. The story seemed to involve two opposed groups, one or two kings (or chiefs, or gen- erals), elements of insanity, and a captive woman with whom a man (I could not determine his status) was madly in love.
There was also another woman who seemed to be in love with him, but he seemed indifferent to her. Then there was a chap with a fantastic bass voice who looked like some kind of a rabbi; one got the impression that he wasn't too cuddly a character. As for the rest . . . oh, who cared? Intermittently, I opened and shut my eyes and lapped up not the sense but the noise, the sheer, beautiful noise.
With the interval came a tray with cham- pagne and glasses. Bliss! A fellow guest, more studious than I, took up the pro- gramme and began to read aloud the synop- sis of what had happened so far, but it was full of names and complex relationships, and the champagne was cool, and my day's intel- lectual struggle was over, and. . . .
I gave up. If the first half had been so pleasurable without my having an inkling of what was going on, why not lean back and enjoy the second half in the same way?
I did. One picked up a rough idea of who the bad people were by their general demeanour; the mad were not hard to spot; and the woman who was (for whatever rea- son) in chains, and her lover, were obvious- ly to be supported, so I decided to be on their side. I didn't care for the rabbi because he looked obsessive.
Thus proceeded an excellent night at the opera. I cannot honestly say it equipped me to answer examination questions on Nabucco but I gained a jolly good feeling for the thing as a whole, reposed my antipathies and sym- pathies (I'm confident) on the appropriate heads, and loved the music. Speaking very broadly, I do now feel I know this opera. At supper afterwards, conversation turned to the European Union and (briefly) the Treaty of Nice. And it was at this point, with the Nabucco experience still fresh in my mind, that a mid-life realisation dawned. All at once it seemed so clear: what was true of Verdi is true of British politics too. The plot doesn't matter. Just lis- ten to the music. My whole outlook on poli- tics may now be transformed.
So let the argument rage about Maas- tricht, Nice, Blair and Hague. Let those MPs in select committees cross-question the Chancellor for hour upon angry hour about the burden of taxation as a propor- tion of real disposable income. Let the Tories shout their statistics about stop-and- search operations since Macpherson, and the Labour front bench reply in kind. Let John Redwood insist that, properly con- strued, the Brussels small print from the latest European summit admits of no inter- pretation but his. And let Robin Cook as vehemently assert that a careful reading of the plot argues otherwise. I'm switching off the argument. I'm listening to the music. All those old interminable disputes about the Enclosures, the Corn Laws, Catholic Emancipation or the Thirty-Nine Articles seemed to demand the same close textual analysis, the same furrowed brows, the same Jesuitical claims and counterclaims, the same urgent insistence that we read the precise wording of Article 19, Clause 7, Sub-clause 2 (a), which — aha! — proves the point. When Gorbachev met Reagan in Reykjavik to begin the 1980s historic détente between their two great nations, we were as eagerly absorbed in the details of the precise measures of disarmament each was offering. No doubt somebody did need to understand. But did I? I now doubt it.
So I shall watch the coming general elec- tion as I watched Nabucco. There will be goodies and baddies and I shall guess who they are by the way they walk and the way they sing. There will be obsessives and lunatics and I shall divine this by their swiv- elling eyes and jerky hand-movements. And, all the while, there will be great cho- ruses and moving solos, and waves of applause and shouts of 'Bravo!' and the occasional jeer and hiss. These are the stuff of politics. The rest is detail. Life is short.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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