ASIA-PACIFIC This year, two of the summer music festivals have chosen the same theme on which to base their programming. The Glimmerglass Festival, in New York State, and the Edinburgh International Festival, under its new director Jonathan Mills, have chosen as their controlling theme the myth of Orpheus and will be mounting productions of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Gluck’s Orfeus et Euridice [the first opera proper, some say] and much else. Edinburgh, being larger, takes it furthest, into a new production of a contemporary American piece that has the women win at the end.
A neat intellectual trope – although possibly (we’ll see) more pleasing in the mind than in the consumption – and such a tight thematic treatment is a new departure for Edinburgh. How very annoyed Mills must be.
Orpheus, you’ll remember, was the doughty fellow who ventured across the Styx and into the Underworld in search of his beloved and recently departed Eurydice, negotiating an unprecedented return fare with Charon and charming the Furies of Hades with no bargaining tool other than the sweetness of his lute. Things ended badly for the couple but it is one of the myths that remains vivid to us as a great story of the power of love. (The ancients had their own quaint version of this: in some of the accounts, it is said that Orpheus, having lost his darling, thereafter stayed faithful to her memory by chastely turning his back on other women and taking to his bed only “youths”.)
But it was presumably not so much as a tale of the power of love, more as one of the power of art, that has led one composer after another to adopt and adapt the story through the centuries. Like most heroes of the time, Orpheus was of doubtful parentage: early sources have him as the son of a mortal king (with the muse Calliope as his mother), but later writers accord him as father none other than the mighty Apollo, god of medicine and music. The conjunction of the two arts – or skills, or scams, or mysteries, or whatever they were at the time and have remained – was an early indication of the idea that the arts in general and, perhaps music in particular, have curative properties. Like multivitamins, yoga and reflexology, they are good for whatever it is you’ve got.
By the time Apollo’s son had been able to charm open the gates of Hell itself with his lute-playing, the power of art seemed beyond question (although perhaps not, given human doubts and frailties, always able to deliver a happy ending).
In a secular age, we know all about the power of art. It has become a truism that the vast, shiny new art galleries are now our temples, our places of congregation and worship, filled with treasure and mystery. It is especially true in Britain. As the 2012 Olympic Games approach, there seems to be much more excited talk about our wide-ranging “cultural Olympiad” than about any athletes the British Isles might be able to produce. The British are an eminently practical people and we have realised that there isn’t time to invent a sport at which we might conceivably win a medal but we can save a little of the dreadful embarrassment of nul point in the sporting arena by retaliating with what we do best – we are, after all, world-class gallery-gazers and gold-medal theatre-goers, both producers and consumers of every contemporary art from opera to hip-hop, installation to arabesque. We may not be able to hurl a javelin or sprint round a track but we’re really good at this art business: watch us go.
And it is all about faith – which may be why we respond to the story of Orpheus. One of the high priests of our contemporary cult, Damien Hirst, has recently produced what may be the pinnacle of useless wonder in his diamond-encrusted skull, a flashy and unsubtle [but wonderfully crafted, hauntingly beautiful]play on the word “brilliant”. Part of its instant, add-water-and-stir mythic quality is its apparently arbitrary price-tag of £50m, a crafty comment on the money-market of new art and a macho challenge to the mega-rich collectors: c’mon, c’mon, it’s saying, you big-guy Russians, which of you has the cojones for this? Believe in me, it’s saying – can you do that? It is unmistakably a votive object, ludicrous and fantabulous, pointless, gorgeous, a sacred thing in a world without sacredness: faith, at a price.
Faith in art has always come at a price. Imagine the dazed and bereft young widow Johanna van Gogh, hugging the baby Vincent Willem, desperately worried about the pittance coming in from the lodgers, nothing to do of a lonely evening but gaze at her sad, mad, dead brother-in-law’s worthless “Potato Eaters” over the tiny fireplace, and his unreliable friend Paul Gauguin’s unsaleable “Negress” hanging over her dead husband Theo’s threadbare sofa. But her faith was such that in her quest to keep the flame she even unstapled one canvas by the older Vincent [whom she had encountered for a total of about five days] from the side of a hen coop near Arles, where it was doing important work keeping the fox from the poultry.
That was, in its way, the equivalent of negotiating the same-day return to Hades. What is asked of us now, in the way of faith, is to believe that some piece of work produced yesterday is worth an amount that would feed the population of a small country for quite a while. But then, Giotto is supposed to have painted certain scenes on his knees.
Peter Aspden is back next week
