The other night in Munich we paid one Euro per minute to watch a comically grand and grandly comic opera, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.
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I had supposed that Seville was located in Spain, that Rossini originated in Italy, that the main lead (Juan Diego Florez) was Peruvian and the mezzo-soprano (Kate Lindsey) American, but this production was inimitably Bavarian. The Bavarian State Opera performed in an opera house so full of stuff (mainly pink, fussy, frilly and utterly uncomfortable) as to proclaim that no sentimentality on the stage nor pretension in the audience would be deemed over the top.
Down in central Bavaria, you have moved ominously close to the sartorial heritage of the von Trapp family. Dirndls beckon, lederhosen are treated with respect, forest green can be worn at any hour of the day, and some men still hanker after those natty, buttoned-up velvet-trimmed versions of a Nehru jacket.
Following that misguided lead, you can spend a lot on clothes but still look bad. One gentleman synchronised his jacket with his shirt (bright green with shiny orange), while lots of others sported hair bleached as brilliantly white as their shirts and teeth. A young man resplendent in a silk cravat had tucked the tail of a rather large animal into his pants pocket. If the rest of the animal was lurking farther inside, it was at least sleeping peacefully.
A few of the women took the mawkish, fake-baroque setting of the Barber too much to heart; although their hair could never budge by a millimetre, their jewels glittered, their dresses twinkled, and they swayed like galleons under full sail on the way to the absurdly lavish buffet at interval. Lindsey may have sung and acted magically well, but her costumes were drably mundane, Cinderella-esque, compared with those in the audience. The singer probably also missed out on the calories from two full plates of food at half-time.
Outside, Munich absorbed foreign influences – like Italian operas and Peruvian bel canto tenors – rather less graciously. An “American breakfast” comprised not only eggs, bacon, toast and tomatoes but also a stick of chewing gum. I was more charmed if less filled by the “existentialist breakfast” served in Berlin; that was simply a cup of black coffee accompanied by a single cigarette.