Sculptures of Roman Theatre Masks
Reflections on Opera
What Opera Means: Categories and Case-Studies, Christopher Wintle, edited by Kate Hopkins, Boydell & Brewer, 2018, 288 pp, pb., £15.99, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN
Books on opera abound. Books on Wagner, alone, are said to be as numerous as those on Napoleon, perhaps more so. Those on Mozart rank not far behind. Verdi joined Wagner in celebration of a bicentenary in 2013, and a plethora of publications to mark that occasion included the piquant Verdi and/or Wagner by Peter Conrad, reviewed on these pages. Both figures stride like colossi through Christopher Wintle’s What Opera Means, a collection of reviews, programme essays and lectures from his distinguished career as commentator on the genre, notably at The TLS, where for a period in the early 1980s this writer was his predecessor.
Recurrent appearance of the 2013 bi-centenarians in Wintle’s book reflects their ubiquity on the boards over subsequent decades. At Covent Garden, several cycles of The Ring of the Nibelungen have been mounted, as well as a ‘festival’ to stage all of Verdi. Wintle came to write programme notes in this epoch, and the programme note – a genre of its own – is key to his style: descriptive, informative, learned. Critic gives way to guide for most of his book, conducting audiences towards a work rather than rating or slating its execution. The approach is charming, veering toward the judgemental rarely, such as when flagging admonitions about Wagner made de rigueur after World War II by the likes of Auden and Adorno. Wintle’s accommodative tone shifts in an extended last section formed of critical pieces. Several reveal a caustic awareness of the contemporary problem of ‘dogmatic’ directors or, to a lesser degree, recent composers.
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Whither Ukraine?
Mountain Foros Church near Yalta (Ukraine)
Whither Ukraine?
THE FOURTH REPUBLIC: Why Europe Needs Ukraine and Why Ukraine Needs Europe, Borys Lozhkin, Kyiv: Novyj Druk, 2016, reviewed by Stoddard Martin
It is a principle nearly unarguable in the capitalist West that the ‘shock therapy’ delivered by Leszek Balcerowicz to the Polish economy in the early 1990s resulted in the great success story among the transformations that followed the end of the Cold War. Mass privatisation after the fall of Marxism eradicated a command economy, Soviet style. Horrendous recession and epoch-making devaluation eventually led to the uplands of status as a ‘tiger economy’. With backsliding prevented by joining NATO in 1998 and the EU in 2004, Poland continued its new dawn of growth through the world financial crisis of 2008-9 and beyond.
In the signal instance of that country, the word ‘oligarch’ was scarcely bandied around and ‘a sunny place for shady people’ rarely cited as the ultimate destination of capital from a nation’s efforts. While Les paradis fiscaux became the playpens of plutocratic Russians, building houses and fixing toilets in the West rendered Poles fêted and hated as plucky mains d’oeuvre, and a goodly portion of what they were able to scrabble together was remitted back to the homeland. The story has been decidedly more mixed for the neighbour that Poland shares with its colossal Slavic sibling to the east and over which the two have grappled for centuries.
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