Vivienne Westwood has been doing the Semele walk for the past couple of years.
Now it’s Sydney’s turn.
They are paying top dollar to see it.
But no-one seems to be having a good time. Not even one smile.
She ain’t happy: Westwood’s punk Handel hits Sydney Harbour
January 9, 2013 by
If it is fact that the preponderance of opera fans are aged over 50 then Westwood’s characteristic styles will go down like a lead balloon since they are entirely redolent of post-war austerity and working-class frocks – with little or no class or elegance of style- a style which though novel to the 1980s and 1990s chattering classes, would be all too familiar to those of us who grew up back then in the 40s and 50s.
Handel’s operas always attracted the ‘high society’, and were the beau-monde events of the London season. The soloists were the highest-paid singers in Europe – Senesino, for example earned in just one season a sufficient sum to purchase a fine house in a fashionable part of town. We mustn’t forget this social phenomenon – just a generation earlier, Purcell’s soloists were just ordinary musicians. It greatly irked the ‘old buffers’ to find that ‘mere fiddlers’ such as Handel were booking tables at fine eateries, alongside their erstwhile ‘masters’.
What eventually toppled Italian Opera in C18th London was not a dearth of patrons, but the reverse – the onset of an era of pious religiosity which inveighed against theatrical pursuits. With the exception of a brief flowering in the last decade of the C18th (Storace, Dibdin, Linley, Attwood) this faux-religiosity killed off opera in England until the C20th.