DIARY
Ihave never wanted to go to the Last Night of the Proms on the grounds that it would be terribly embarrassing. In the Albert Hall last week, to watch Bruckner's Fifth, I was reminded of this by taking a look at the promenaders during the ap- plause at the end. A number of wildly enthusiastic bearded men in the front row were just the people I imagine enjoying the dressing up and the bobbing up and down out of time with the music on the last night. However, my feelings are no reason for changing the event and nor are those of Mark Elder, the conductor. His qualms about the patriotic music and the BBC's swift replacement of him with another conductor contributed to the false impress- ion that the Last Night of the Proms is a vitally important issue. It isn't really and the event is hardly an extension of football hooliganism. It is, if anything, an extension of Rag Week in which the students have a laugh and then get sentimental at the end. The promenaders are not the type who shout 'England!' but who shout 'Heave!' when the lid is lifted off a grand piano before a concerto. The other promenaders in the balcony then shout 'Ho!' in reply. It is not desperately funny but it is traditional and harmless. To be fair to them, the promenaders did come up with a passable joke at a recent performance of Orpheus and Eurydice when the BBC changed the time of the interval. They chanted in unison that the BBC apologised for the absence of the original interval who was indisposed and thanked the new interval for stepping in at short notice. That seems to be a better measure of the audience than imagining that they are a mob of jingoistic Sun-readers. They do sing 'wider still and wider' in the middle of 'Land of Hope and Glory' but the words have less specific meaning in this context than the vague "ere we go' in its impromptu performances.
Though no musical expert, I find myself surprisingly well-placed to enter the great debate about whether opera singers should be fat or not. The current controversy surrounds the soprano Jane Eaglen who is playing the part of Tosca at the English National Opera. I saw this production last week not long after seeing Jane Eaglen in the Albert Hall singing in Janacek's Gla- golitic Mass. On both occasions it was clear that she is a large lady. In the concert it made no difference yet in the opera I found it very distracting. It is difficult enough to suspend disbelief in opera without the size of the heroine adding to the problem — and I would have to say it did. Thinking that it was unkind of the director to make Tosca sit on such a small chair or make her run up such a steep ramp to kill herself
IAN HISLOP
does not help one get involved with the plot. And the plot itself becomes distorted if you are wondering why on earth the police chief Scarpia cannot contain his lust for this woman, and why she should be terrified of him when she's twice his size. Surely, I thought, in a naturalistic produc- tion set in 1944 the beautiful voice should have been accompanied by a slimmer figure? And yet when thinking through the question, instead of watching the stage, it occurred to me that Tosca is an opera singer in the opera. The vogue for slim divas, according to its opponents, is de- finitely a post-war phenomenon. So in a truly naturalistic production set in 1944 an opera singer would have to be fat. Jane Eaglen is in fact perfect casting.
The film International Guerrillas is having trouble getting a cinema release. This is the one where Salman Rushdie is played as a drunk master-criminal at the centre of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Islam. Having been terribly popular as a Muslim home video its distributors now want people to watch it in public. The problem is that the police fear there might be a disturbance of the peace if this happens. They do not specify who would be disturbing the peace and on the face of it there are a number of candidates. The Board of Deputies could mount a protest at an anti-Semitic film that is deeply offensive to their religion. The friends of Salman Rushdie could protest at an anti- author film that is deeply offensive to their colleague. However, it is clear that the police are worried about what I always think of as 'the Cat Stevens gang' of extremist Muslims who want to capitalise on the publicity to indulge in a bit of incitement. The latest news is that the film may be shown in a couple of weeks, which, with a bit of luck will mean that it and its audience will have been overtaken by history. There are now signs that Iran's death threat to Rushdie is to be lifted as part of better relations with the EEC in the light of the Gulf crisis. The fatwa is to be revoked not for religious or even huma- nitarian reasons but as a bit of Middle- Eastern realpolitik. In the film the Hand of Allah zaps Rushdie with a bolt of lightning. In life the Muslim community may find things are more prosaic. The hand of Saddam Hussein will grant Rushdie a reprieve.
My first thoughts on seeing the vast church that the President of the Ivory Coast has erected to the glory of God and himself were those of revulsion. Having spent £160 million of what he says is his own money on recreating the basilica of St Peter's in his birthplace, President Houphouet-Boigny has more or less bank- rupted his country. In the middle of third-world Africa the opulence looks grotesque. Yet one detail on a report on the television news made me stop a mo- ment. It was a stained glass window where Houphouet-Boigny had put himself in the picture as a supplicant at the foot of Christ. Thinking of all the reverent sightseeing I've done in Italy, it struck me as no different from all the fat Florentines and smug Sienese who put themselves into so many Renaissance panels and paintings in churches that must have seemed equally grandiose projects at the time. And there was presumably plenty of poverty in Europe that could have been tackled with a religious patron's hand-out. No wonder the Pope had to accept the gift of the basilica from the President. It would be a tricky one for him to argue about.
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