30.11.69 - Berlioz, haircuts, flatmates, family

30.11.69 [First paragraph typed with a faint red ribbon, then the rest handwritten]

Dear Mum, you poor old thing! I didn’t know that you were to have a further operation! Of course I don’t mind have a hospital-trotting mother, but good grief, have you actually got anything left that you can have taken away? It’s about time, to my mind, that they started giving you something back. (Sorry about the red tape, but it’s my theme song again: the black part of this tape has now completely disintegrated: there’s a great rip extending itself throughout the entire tape as I type this.) Oh dear, things have got completely chaotic here and the tape is spreading in every direction!!

Well, well, back to a more productive method. I’m just about to go out I think to see an exhibition on Hector Berlioz at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’ve also got (from the library) a book of his memoirs that have just come out in this, his centenary year. This is the first time they’ve been available in a complete version. 

Before Mass at 12 (I don’t go to 10.30 because it’s in Latin and sung) I cut my hair again ˗ did I tell you before? (that I’d cut it) ˗ it’s more practical at this time of the year because the barbers are convinced that you need it all off, no matter how cold it is. I’ve just trimmed it ˗ somewhat roughly at the back I must admit ˗ and left the most part of it on. Why freeze?? Incidentally, it snowed yesterday (!!) I thought, ‘ugh’ at first, but now, today, that the sun is shining I feel quite happy about it ˗ I must admit it’s quite attractive, and not so cold as it’s been over the last week.

Angela’s sister has just arrived ˗ she’s homeless at present (been staying with relatives since she gave up her flat); we’ve got quite a bit of her stuff here already, such as a spare (though ancient) Hoover, a spare bed, a spin dryer, etc. She looks rather pleasant, certainly if she’s like Angela she’ll be very nice to have around.

The Crowls are having Nina problems ˗ she’s not speaking to them (she’s been at Westgate (remember the Easter seaside bit?) for a week, but is back here for the weekend. I suggested keeping out of the way until things clear up; she will have to move permanently shortly anyway, but why she should feel so hurt I don’t know. I suppose it does mean a loss of some of the comforts of the Woodland Way place, but she could never have expected to live there forever anyway. [An odd comment: she’d lived there for years already. Sounds like something Reg might have said.] Reg says it’s the quietest week they’ve spent for a while. There’s no use my being up there to complicate things at this weekend ˗ though Reg says I’m quite a cheerful person to have round, which is nice of him!

We have a new guy coming to live at the flat ˗ a sixth! He’ll take over the present music room, and we’ll shift the piano into the bedroom. [The music room was fairly small;the piano was shifted in beside my bed, in the large room I shared with David. It was probably originally intended to be a dining room or lounge.] It’s not definite yet, however, though probable.

My boss at work gets more interesting every day˗ I knew he was mad on science-fiction, but he actually writes short stories as well ˗ and gets them published as well. He was giving me the outline of one he was writing, at work, yesterday. Very intriguing. 

16.9.69 - The Trojans

16.9.69

Dear Mum, What a life! I’ve just spent the whole weekend working, and then spent all day yesterday rushing from A to B and back again. One of the other cashiers had flu apparently so I was working from 11.00 or so on Saturday until much the same hour at night, and then again all day Sunday, from 2.00 till about 10.30. However, at least the money has been balancing out, since I’ve been doing it on my own, so that seems to point to the fact that it isn’t necessarily my mistake when the money is out.

I didn’t have to work yesterday at all, though they were contemplating it at one stage (!!!) and so David and I went to the full rehearsal of The Trojans which lasted from 10.30 in the morning until 5.15! But that was with about an hour and a half off and quite a number of unnecessary breaks. What a fantastic piece it is: it lasts about four and something hours in performance, without counting the intervals, and there are barely any spots of tedium at all. I can’t type for sour nuts this morning ˗ everything is going up the wop.

It’s in two parts really; the first concerns the acceptance into Troy of the Trojan horse, and shows how Cassandra was able to foresee it all happening and no one would pay any attention to her. It also introduces us to a whole host of characters in a big court scene, but very few of them have anything much to do except comment on the death of Laocoön, who has just been eaten up by a snake that came out of the sea. Aeneas is the most important character apart from Cassandra, and he and a few others escape (Cassandra and most of the Trojan women commit suicide rather than be captured) and make their way into the second part of the opera which is about the Trojans in Carthage where Dido reigns as Queen, and this section concerns the love story of Dido and Aeneas and her suicide when he goes off to Rome. (I think!)

It’s an epic piece and near enough needs the time it takes to tell ˗ in fact one would be very upset to lose anything much, it’s all so original. The opening has a long scene between Cassandra and her boyfriend, Chorebus (he is killed off stage somewhere later on) which is very dramatic, then we get the court scene where they describe the snake bit ˗ Aeneas sees it just prior to the opening of the scene; before this there is a bit done in pantomime where Andromache and her little boy enter in mourning (for whom?) while the chorus of people comment very dispiritedly: they dislike having sad things happening, but this is only the beginning of a long lot of tragedy. This court scene was designed in golds and blacks; very starkly brilliant. The people go off and discover the Trojan horse, and bring it on stage to much rejoicing: only momentarily thinking there may be something strange about it when a slight clatter of armour is heard from inside!

The next scene shows Aeneas asleep in his tent; and during a long introduction we hear the approach of Hector’s ghost ˗ he has come to rouse Aeneas up to battle; and the sudden shock in the orchestra when he does wake him is quite frightening! The last scene shows the Cassandra suicide. All this part of the opera is done in very dark colouring and dismal lighting. In the next part, colour abounds. (By this time I was sitting in one of the boxes with Alistair and we could see all the detail.) Dido first greets Aeneas on his arrival, and then promptly the latter saves the Carthaginians from being overtaken by the Nubians (I think!). Slowly we see these two fall in love, especially in a long gorgeous and yet very simple duet, that was done yesterday in the most fabulous way.

Aeneas goes off in the next scene and Dido commits suicide in the last in a very moving death scene. I really need about a dozen newsletters to tell you all about it and the wealth of detail, but suffice to say I think it will be one of the greatest successes that the Garden has ever had.

After this I rushed home because Mike had given me two tickets for The Battle of Britain premiere and as I didn’t have any clothes because I hadn’t been able to get to the laundrette when I should have over the weekend, I intended to go round then and wash myself something. I knew Hazel was also going to the film but was to be sitting a different seat[ing area]. I didn’t have anyone else to go with so I rang her and she said she’d come and sit with me, but then told me that I didn’t have nearly as much time as I expected. I went to the laundrette anyway, and found that I wasn’t going to have much time to dry the clothes so thought I’d just dry what I needed. Just as I was about to do so a woman stepped in and pinched the dryer! So I went back to the flat intending to iron the clothes I needed, dry, but this wouldn’t work either; so I borrowed a pair of David’s sox, and ironed my tattiest shirt, and set out with these and my dinner jacket. [My ‘dinner jacket’? I don’t remember ever having one of these!] I’d missed the train, then couldn’t get a bus, then couldn’t get a tube, then another connecting tube, then found I didn’t have a handkerchief and a cut on my face from shaving started to bleed!! AAAgh! What a night. The film turned out to be singularly dull, and isn’t worth seeing at all. In spite of its cast and fairly spectacular battle scenes. Douglas Bader went up the stairs while I was standing in the foyer with Hazel and we saw Kenneth More about two foot away afterwards. But otherwise it was a drag and not a good full stop to The Trojans! Love, Mike

22.6.69: Berlioz, radio and TV

22.6.69

Dear Mum, I’m still wending my happy way thru all your birthday presents and probably won’t have any teeth left by the time I’m finished! Didn’t I tell you that I did usher in St Paul’s? Actually I didn’t really usher, I just stood at the door and collected tickets and told people where to go. The concerts themselves were a little disappointing. Because St Paul’s is little more than one great echo chamber, only the people right at the front could get a satisfactory effect; although apparently it recorded very well. I stood at the back on both nights and consequently heard much of it as a not very remarkable blur. The most thrilling moment was, as it had been at home in Christchurch, when the ten tympani players and the four different groups of brass players (scattered all over St Pauls) all played at once in that massive Dies Irae section in the Requiem. St Paul’s, for all that it stood up to the bombing of the last war, was actually trembling! Not the most pleasant of effects ˗ with the feeling that rather a large number of tons of masonry might be about to descend on your head at any moment!

How are all the invalids? Give my love to them all ˗ a bit belatedly, I’m afraid. I’ve been wracking my brains to try and remember if you actually said what was wrong with Mary and I don’t know if you did. I seem to remember something about it’s being similar to your operation ˗ but am I right or not?

I have the Verdi Requiem playing rather loudly in my ear at the moment (the other was the Berlioz) ˗ it never ceases to amaze me just how beautiful it is. I did some coaching with a mezzo on it earlier this year, and like it all the more each time I hear it.

I’ve been writing some more music, recently. I find it gets something out of my system, and though it would be nice to have some of it performed eventually, that particular aspect of it doesn’t greatly bother me.

The other evening David, Hazel and I walked down to Victoria thru St James Park to see a film, and on the way back (after we’d played on the by-then-deserted swings and see-saws in the Park!) we were strolling along frightening each other when 2 guys who were coming towards us suddenly stopped in front of us, and poked 2 white, long objects at us! After the initial shock I realised they were only rolled-up newspapers (!) but it was worrying for a moment. Anyway they were trying to find someone who had belted one of them on the head, for heaven’s sake! They went off muttering, as we were obviously very harmless. There seemed to be a lot of bodies wandering around the Park (and this was about 11.30) and I certainly would never go in there alone at that time of night.

We’ve had Scottish TV down over the last week filming round the place and generally being a nuisance. I’m in two scenes, one of which they should use, with me seated at a piano waiting for a rehearsal to start, and also in the Italian lesson, which they’ll probably cut. Also, I forgot to tell you I was interviewed recently for the overseas transmission which should turn up at home eventually! If they don’t cut what I said right down. I felt surprisingly calm about it all, mainly because I got so little warning, I think! I’m also playing in the background of another rehearsal they recorded, so you never know ˗ I might be heard yet, love Mike.  

24.5.69 Peter Grimes and others

24.5.69

Dear Mum, you’ll never guess where I’ve just been. In the ROYAL BOX at Covent Garden. It is a great big box, with a little room behind it where we had iced champagne ˗ and coffee ˗ and which has its own private entrance, and loo. That’s about as close as I’ll ever get to royalty I think! We (the two designers of the mid-term pieces, and David Syrus) were invited to go along by John Kentish, our Director of Studies, and the producer of Manon. Don’t ask me how he happened to have the Royal Box for the occasion ˗ but it was great to see the doormen and ushers etc sort of doing slight double-takes when they realised I wasn’t one of your normal paying people! (Actually the Garden is full of snobs anyway ˗ and I’m not helping by the sound of that last sentence! ˗ especially those who are Friends of the Garden: people who support the Garden by subscriptions and by which they get preferential bookings, etc. They are frequently completely ignorant, and don’t seem to be afraid of showing the fact. God knows what they think about as they sit thru hour upon hour of singing in foreign languages. Some of them came on the last night of the mid-terms and you’d think they own the place.) [Here endeth Crowl’s ongoing inverse snobbery ˗ for the moment.] Mr Kentish couldn’t come in the end but his wife was there with two friends, a Mr and Mrs Michael Dodd, I think, and they were rather charming and not too far above us menials. (We had our own special waiter for the box too!)

Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes

The opera, after all that, was Peter Grimes: Britten, who else? And we could have spat on the conductor (according to Mrs Kentish); it was Colin Davis, one of the most dynamic conductors around, and the tenor was Jon Vickers, who is just unbelievably great. The sort of person I’ll my grandchildren about. [But haven’t yet!] (We were closer to him in the Opera Centre canteen one day than tonight, but it was still very exciting being right on top of the orchestra, and having a close-up view of the stage. Well, of most of it. There is a certain disadvantage about a box ˗ it’s at the side of course, and so you can’t see one side of the stage at all. And all the action happened down on our side, which meant we had to strain a little to see. I don’t know how the Queen gets on! But what a fabulous opera this is. It keeps hitting you time and again, and really is probably the greatest opera Britten has written, so far as sheer drama goes. It has everything (the six big sea pictures for a start, between scene changes) [so overwhelmed, obviously, that I increased the number of the Four Sea Interludes, as they’re actually known], off-stage bands, tremendous chorus sections, storms, kids, a complete scene without orchestra, where Grimes is accompanied only by an off-stage dream chorus and a fog-horn (!) and where he goes quite mad (this was terrific!), riots, drums played by the singers. You name it! [On the night Colin Davis collapsed, in 2011, and fell from the orchestral pit podium at Covent Garden, his job as conductor for that performance was taken over by David Syrus, who had been at the Garden since leaving the Opera Centre.]

On Sunday evening David G and I went to a concert at the Festival Hall, mainly because Jennifer Vyvyan, whom he’s worked with, and likes a lot, and she was singing the solo in Britten’s Les Illuminations. Guilini was conducting, and thought the audience got up on its feet and clapped him at the end; I don’t know that I think he’s all that great. The Britten was fabulous, and but the Schubert Fifth [Symphony] that preceded it was nothing startling. (I was going to say to write home about, but that seems a little contradictory.) The last item was the rather marvellous Romeo and Juliet suite by Berlioz, and being Berlioz it was very exciting and very sentimental and full of lush orchestrations and big tunes and funny odd bits, and generally very interesting.

Yesterday, being Whit (!) Monday, David and Hazel and I went out, first to the Regent’s Park Zoo, tho’ it wasn’t anything startling, and then later to Fiddler on the Roof (which I’d seen, but liked very much, in Sydney). This is a rather marvellous musical but the cast here has been doing it so long (it’s in its third year I think (that the whole thing didn’t quite have the magic of the previous occasion. [The Sydney production had been a real eye-opener, with a brilliant Hayes Gordon in the leading role; Alfie Bass played the lead in London, and was a real disappointment.]

[Handwritten] This is terrible ˗ I started this letter over a week ago and just keep not finishing it, and since then I’ve seen Peter Grimes again. Oh, it is fabulous. I’ve put my name down to usher for the 2 concerts in St Paul’s celebrating the Berlioz anniversary and that is going on in the next 2 nights.

On Saturday last I went to what I thought was a very good production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Old Vic ˗ marvellously costumed and moved (Laurence Olivier producted it). But other opinions have said that it wrecked the play by making it funny in the wrong places.

On Sunday I went to the last Boulez concert at the Festival Hall where they played more Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was a great concert and much more easy to take than the previous one I went to. They were all earlier works and still vaguely in the late Romantic type of sound.

Well, I better close here ˗ I’ve got to get home to do some work ˗ I’m at the Centre at the moment. I’m glad to hear you liked your present ˗ I thought the palette knife (is it?) was the thing you mightn’t use! Give my love to Fred, Mike.  

25.11.68: Cold in the nose and a great concert

Monday the 25^th [Nov 1968]  

Dear old Mum, I’m typing this in the kitchen after having got up at 2.00 [pm] to have some breakfast...!  the thing is I’ve decided to have the day off, because last Thursday I found I had a very sore throat – everyone at the school has something like that, and on Friday it was making me feel so rotten I took the opportunity to come home early, having nothing special to do, and went to bed very early that night.  I was due to go out to the Crowls on Saturday morning, and when I woke up, though I was still fairly croaky, I felt a lot better.  But I think the combination of their very hot house (and the cold outside) forced it up into my head – the cold that is – and so when I got back here last night I was very sniffly, etc.  I had intended going in today, because this morning, for a start, we were going to a rehearsal of Manon Lescaut by Puccini at Covent Garden, but when I found that the first thing my idiot nose decided to do was bleed like mad, I gave up and went back to bed.  And there I’ve been until now.  Actually this is the first trouble I’ve had since I’ve been here, and it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner, because, as I say there have been colds floating around the Centre for weeks.  [I was always prone to bleeding noses – so this wasn’t unusual.]

THANK YOU FOR THE SECOND JERSEY!  The green one with Oddfellows!  [ I presume this meant the lollies known as Oddfellows, but I could be wrong!]  It’s even warmer than the brown if that’s possible, and fits very well.  You really are a trick, you know; it must have cost you more since I decided to go away than it was costing you to have me at home.  And, by the way, if I haven’t already said anything about the postal notes, for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about not sending them; it’s not a strict necessity, you know!  I like very much getting them, of course, but it would also be nice if you would look after yourself as well as your looking me, you know.  And thanks for the Peanuts – we get all the top papers at the Centre each day, but of course they’re too tops to have anything as interesting as Peanuts in them!  Harking back to the money bit, I was working it out the other day, and it appears that I’m living on an average of about £8 – 10 or less a week, if my cheque book is anything to go by, and also remembering that I’ve been on international (Crowl) assistance during the period I worked on.  If I deduct my rent from that it becomes six pounds, which is less than a pound a day, and rather surprises me now that I come to look at it.  Perhaps it’s right, however! 

What is the story about poor wee Francisco now?  Will you be getting a new address or something, do you know?  At least he has relatives, I suppose that’s something for the poor wee chap.  [This was a South Korean orphan that I supported, in South Korea.]

I noticed an article on the O’Flahertys in one of the Tablets – did you see it?  They’ve got seven children of their own!  [I don’t know who these were – though I had relatives by this name, none of them had seven children.]

[The next section of the letter can't be posted here.]

What’s wrong with John Stokes’ nose?  Nice to see Des Ryan again, eh? [A cousin, and an uncle.]

Since I last wrote, the crisis between Kingsley and self is over – at least, he didn’t know anything about it really – and the crisis-maker, yours truly, seems to have calmed down, and life goes on its way! 

By the way the fogs here are no longer the impenetrable ones they used to get, because so much of London is in the smokeless zone, but it was just driving in one that I found so bad.  London is in a state of haze most of the time anyway, and even on the brightest days you can’t see more than a mile or two from a tall building.  Funny thing with the Crowls, particularly Reg, they almost get a little upset it seems if I don’t go and see them – I’ve only been going on alternate weekends lately, because it’s just as tiring to go up there as to stay home and go out with Kevin or Mike.  I don’t really think they’re offended or anything – don’t know what it is really.  Perhaps it’s almost like having part of his brother at home, or something?  [My father, in other words.]

Peter Rowlands who lost his bubby – he’s not been married long either, and he’s in his 40s too – must have been rather hard on them.  [Peter was someone I'd known from the Dunedin music scene.]

David Gorringe, Kurt, and I went to a concert version of a new Malcolm Williamson opera on Monday last – he played the accompaniment himself, alternating with unbelievable rapidity between a piano and harpsichord, and percussion, or sometimes playing both instruments at once!  There were only four singers, and they all took several parts.  Though the story was pretty obscure, the music was surprisingly easy listening, and very enjoyable.  Hazel was there turning pages for him and handing him instruments to bash!  [This may have been The Growing Castle which is dated 1968. I can’t find anything about Williamson’s version of it, except that it was based on a play by Strindberg, was in two acts and lasted about an hour and a half. ]

On Tuesday David and I went to La Boheme – a terrible performance.  On Thursday, we both turned up again at a Festival Hall concert, and sat in seats two rows from the front!  They played a terribly exciting King Lear Overture by Berlioz, the Schuman Piano Concerto, and the Bruckner 3^rd Symphony.  This last was tremendous, uplifting, like Wagner without actually ringing you out at the same time!  We were so close we could see the loose hair on the lead violinist’s bow, the price tags on one of the other violinist’s socks, another old fellow only pretending to play through the Berlioz – they took him off limping after it – and we could also hear both the leader and the pianist breathing Very Heavily throughout!  Fascinating.  [Handwritten] Better go back to bed I think.  Listen don’t worry about flying over to nurse me.  I think I’ll survive.  Love, Mike.  [I remember the loose hair on the leader’s bow: it spent the entire overture trying to catch up and never quite made it.]