Lebrecht (The Maestro Myth
and Who Killed Classical Music?), music critic for the Daily Telegraph
in London, is one of the liveliest writers on music today, although occasionally he seems to enjoy whipping up a controversy or a scandal for its own sake, and cannot resist a wittily salacious line (a male ballet dancer is said to have "his privates on parade"). What he has accomplished in this account of the past 50-odd years in the life of the Royal Opera House (and its companion the Royal Ballet) is extraordinarily valuable. It is no less than a detailed scrutiny of the relationship between politics and the arts, between private patronage and state support, and of the drastically altered notions of class and taste created by a developing British social landscape. Lebrecht has been admirably thorough in digging up obscure documents, interviewing survivors from the ROH's early postwar years, and accomplishing a fly-on-the-wall act at dozens of key meetings that embroiled the successive embattled directors of the establishment (four in the past couple of years alone). The modern ROH was essentially the creation of the late George Maynard Keynes, who supported its ballet branch for the sake of his dancer wife, and who set in motion the remarkable tightrope walk between state funding and commercial enterprise on which it has teetered ever since. Lebrecht has applied a similar scrutiny to the entire postwar era—and not neglected to add plenty of spicy detail about conductors, composers and divas ranging from Callas to Solti to Sutherland, from Fonteyn to Ashton, Britten to Tippet. This is a triumph of social and musical history. Pictures not seen by PW. (Oct. 26).
