Spanish steps
Robin Holloway
‘He’s composing me!’ cries the horrified poet in Strauss’s Capriccio as the musician takes the new sonnet and violates its purity by setting it to music. But violation can also be fulfilment (as the opera gradually reveals); and this my feelings on being for the first time in some 40 years’ composing ‘danced to’ can confirm. Off last week to Madrid with an open mind to see what would happen when the National Ballet of Spain were let loose upon half-an-hour’s-worth of my two-hour Gilded Goldbergs (itself a bashful yet unabashed retake on Bach’s original), with choreography by the company’s director Nacho Duato.
Owing to conflicting information, I arrived at the enchanting Teatro de la Zarzuela in good time for an 8.30 start, to find that the programme had commenced at 8, and I’d already missed about a third of its first item, my raison d’être. Indeed, the foyer had seemed uncannily deserted. Oh well, this is modern art, I thought, for the chosen few — particularly on a Saturday evening rich in alternative delights. But no! The theatre was packed. I had to protest in vain my right of entry, and, when it was denied, push hard through protesting usherettes to the dark auditorium, seek out a single free seat and suspire panting into the remaining two thirds.
Since the sound-source was simply the commercial CDs there was no worry regarding the musical performance. Apprehensions concerned the visuals. What on earth would they do with something so absolutely lacking narrative or atmosphere, so essentially abstract?
Which, of course, is the strength of what was achieved. However teased, subverted, encrusted, transformed, this Gilded angle on the Goldbergs remains as much a matter of pattern, design, proportion, as in JSB: all these are the very stuff of choreographic invention. Within, I could sense implicit human content — archetypal, erotica, tale of longing and loss, death and elegy whose explicit surface was all detail, movement, formality, physical prowess and grace, gymnastic gestures of great expressive beauty.
Giannandrea Poesio would be able to appraise with expertise. I can only register a complex mix of puzzlement (why move like that to this music?), beguilement (yes, I see what they mean), and delight (now that truly responds to and realises something latent in the musical shapes, their rhetoric, their emotion), which in the end, as I caught my breath and relaxed into the unfamiliar surroundings, was convincing and moving. Most so in the darkest, twistiest Variation, to which the tormented youth seemed to die of love, then in the reprise of the theme and its valedictory coda, wherein the rest of the cast re-entered to celebrate and mourn him, while screeds of scrumpled-up paper floated gently down from the flies, intimating deconstruction, evanescence, all-the-world-a-bubble.
Free, now, to wander the Saturday night streets of central Madrid, grandly civic/ governmental/mercantile, as if Westminster ministries, City banks, Law Courts, Bond Street shops were superimposed upon the same compact terrain. Seductively inviting above all other, the wide-open portals of the Casino de Madrid, lights ablaze, flunkeys alert, who nevertheless didn’t query one’s right of ingress. Once passed, a wondrous world of faites ce que vous voudrez unfolded. I could glide unchecked and uncensored in and out of several glamorous parties, be offered canapés and wine — the more welcome after the mean flight’s scrimping economies. When one sees the polite question mark in the host’s eyes it’s time to move unhurriedly on, up the scrumptious staircase — rococo Vienna/ Würzburg as recreated in Second Empire Paris with extra gewgaws from c.1910 — to the gorgeous Club Library on an upper floor, where a bar like a high altar is manned by eight acolyte waiters looking out over a décor of Pall Mall cubed, enhanced, as well as portraits, sporting prints, etc., with multiple vintage typewriters, and roulette tables at which one could lose one’s entire spirit and substance. Beyond and within, a gothique sanctum with Spanish classics bound in black leather locked away behind glass like sainted relics, and coat-hangers upon which a saint might well be served a sticky end.
At the Casino’s very top, a swish restaurant with tables galore laid out for an elaborate dinner like a scene from The Young Visiters (sic). Chutzpah failed me here: the maître’s eye was not accommodating; I escaped by lift (wrought brass with glass and thick-pile velour), to glide through a couple more receptions on the lower storeys before making thoughtfully for the egress.
The morning after, central Madrid in soft pale humid sunlight, revealing a dreamscape city of bizarre and promiscuous grandeur, buildings pompous, heavy, ornate, extravagant, preposterous, in every style from Ritzy swagger, via classical, baroque, rococo, gothic, nouveau and deco, to fascistico and moderne, riotously crowded with statuary allegorical, zodiacal, patriotic, universal — no dome without an Athena or Minerva, no pediment without a quadriga: a city of wedding cakes, sweet, silly and squishy, yet hard and unappetising as concrete, scalloped icing set into cliffs above entrance caverns measured up for ornamental giants and giantesses, albeit serving in sober fact a race not usually remarked for height. Suitably dwarfed, I crept gaping, eyes agoggle, inwardly laughing, at extravagance unparalleled even by Paris, Milan, Brussels, Budapest, let alone London.
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