I seem to be having an unusually cultural 24 hours, still reeling from Tuesday night’s wonderful Ariadne auf Naxos from the COC – so funny, so wise, so beautifully played and sung (Jane Archibald a particularly fetching Zerbinetta) – its theme one that has always intrigued me, namely high art versus comedy. Because the opera is written by Richard Strauss not Vivian Stanshall, high art triumphs – and most convincingly. It made me think how much harder it is to reconcile farce and profound human experience rather than set them up in opposition – Shakespeare figured it out but very few others have ever even tried. Tragedy is so much easier.
And now my dear son has popped in with a choice of movies we might watch tonight – mostly Scandinavian horror such as Dead Snow (Nazi zombies terrorizing people in a remote part of Norway) and Sauna, a Finnish spine-tingler about a demonic presence that may or may not be inside a sauna in a swamp being mapped by the equally aggressive conquistadors of 16th-century Russia and Sweden.
Breathless entertainment all round, to be sure, and a necessary antidote to the post-election cultural anxiety. Some friends have been saying that the arts will wither now that Harper is in control and that there will be nothing left but compulsory Beatles karaoke. I have lived through this scenario before, in Thatcher’s England. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for the creative instinct. Satire has a field day. Street performers become more efficient at dodging the kultural police. The underground does well but the problems grow for the big companies, the arts establishment. “Let them find sponsorship in the private sector,” is the Conservative solution. Oh well, that’s what our major cultural institutions have been doing (quite well actually) for years and years. Plus ça change.