Tuesday 18th August 2015

Laura Malcolm presented the following menus in Normandy this summer:

The Thursday Welcome Menu: Maiale al Latte (Pork cooked in Milk) from the River Cafe blue book

The Friday Escalation Dinner: Pavé de Saumon with red pepper and hazlenut salsa

The Saturday Full Height Dinner: Butterflied Paprika Chicken with Apple and Fennel Salad and Caramelised Walnuts: Donna Hay from Waitrose Magazine

Sunday lunch was taken with another family at their home nearby where a magnificent cold table was offered including salmon, rare beef and salad selection as well as classic cheese and patisserie. The teenage daughter had made the wooden quail egg holder with compartment for pepper shown previously.

On Sunday evening, dinner was cancelled owing to massive lunch but some guests enjoyed Magnums (or Magna as the Laird insists) and another branded ice cream lolly with crystalised bits (name escapes but the wrapping is red: awfully well-known) while watching Dr Zhivago.

Monday lunch for 14 featured the famous spinach, goat cheese and pine nut tart where sultanas had been replaced with apricots, causing Matt Driver to worry. The second tart was caramelised garlic from Ottolenghi. The Laird’s wild boar paté, conveyed from Usk in the chill cupboard of the Touareg, was also featured.

All menus included a French cheese course with full grasp of each cheese shown in the display phase as well as interesting fruit compôtes and luxury chocolates.

Menu-ing on this scale in a private house without staff is rare these days, if ever found.

Thursday 13th August 2015

I gained Normandy last week for my annual visit of feasting and resting with after-dinner films on DVD. I will publish the menus in due course. The party was almost 50% differently abled, with 3 out of 7 having lally issues. Strangely all pains were located at the knee or lower. O’Halloran O’Brien’s foot had to be aired regularly, the Lairdess’s knee played up even worse when at rest and Matt Driver’s compression boot, following his ruptured Achilles Tendon at the Multis’ while playing frisbee in late May, came on and off. Nevertheless he sat in a corner from time to time with his computer and made a lot of money. Laura Malcolm said to him, ‘You’ll miss your compression boot when it has to come off for good.’ ‘I know. But the great hope is I’ll have to have a sling for my shoulder,’ Matt replied. His shoulder is hurting also. Otherwise Matt did a good imitation of the casual anal yapping of older people and showed a long-standing hobby, new to me, which is picture-framing. He worried greatly that apricots which Laura substituted for sultanas in the spinach tart at Monday’s lunch for 14 wouldn’t be right. He had naughty grin while winding up Laura on this subject and the matter was driven to the point of eating, despite Laura more or less wielding a kitchen knife. It was found that apricots were perfectly all right. Matt didn’t mention the subject again but probably will.  O’Halloran O’Brien was tremendously insider. He has been thrown out of so many launch parties for telling the truth, particularly about what really did happen to Angela’s Ashes. On Saturday the Laird and Lairdess arrived in the Touareg which is a vehicle named after a tribe of the Southern Sahara. I’m not sure what its involvement with the combustion engine was or has been. On board were the wild boar pate and the olives of Usk as well as the Lairdess. The Laird at once launched a drone with camera which peered into my bedroom where I was reading ‘Being Binky: My Life in Chelsea’ by the Made in Chelsea Star. She says that her stepsister, Minty, has taught her so much about relationships, make-up and fashion. At lunch, the Laird sang a medley of Flanders and Swann songs including the Horn Song which has many words set to semiquavers. He has been learning it while driving about southern England in the Touareg in preparation for a pre-Christmas perf at the Usk Historic Society’s Christmas lunch. We’re all to be there. The Laird reprised his Flanders and Swann songs at the lunch for 14 on Monday where the recital was videoed by O’Halloran O’Brien and replayed twice more in the evening. Otherwise the main topic was greengages and why in French they are called Reine Claude. I said most days that Jane Grigson appeared to believe that Reine Claude was the French name for greengages whereas in fact it is the name of one variety of green plum. There’s no word in French for green plum. Each day I was listened to less and less. The first evening we watched an awfully good Irish film about the Black and Tan times in Ireland in the 1920s. It was called something like ‘A Wind blows in the Barley.’ But I never saw any barley nor much wind. To start with it was very anti-British but as it went on you saw that the whole lot of them were getting more and more violent and horrible and fanatical. O’Halloran O’Brien said that there was no violence in Ireland in spite of everything through all the Home Rule upheaval of the late 19th century, until the British executed the perpetrators of the Easter Uprising in 1916. Fury over this swung the general population behind Sinn Féin who had previously been regarded as so many lunatics. I learned a lot about Ireland that evening which gave me pleasure although it is unlikely that I will broadcast to the Nation on the subject or write a definitive history. My knowledge such as it is will probably die with me. But it is rewarding to learn things. After lunch on Monday the Laird produced balsa wood aeroplane kits in packets. It said 8+ on the packet which is the age range normally attracted to making balsa wood aeroplanes out of a kit, winding up the rubber bands and hurling them in the air to see them fall to the ground more or less at once. O’Halloran O’Brien broke his in the construction phase and Uhu had to be fetched. Laura and Matt had Uhu in stock which was a mercy. Dr Zhivago was shown on DVD on the remaining evenings with no moment at which at least one member of the audience was not asleep. Laura turned her face away completely but nevertheless emerged with perfect grasp. We much enjoyed Dr Zhivago which is an awfully good story and very believable.  Then it was time to leave Normandy although I was begged not to leave. But as Queen Mary said at the end of the War when it was time to leave Badminton where she had been lodged for safety throughout, ‘Here I have been anything to anybody. Now I must go back to London and begin being Queen Mary all over again.’ I should mention that the Laird’s drone got stuck in a tree way out of reach. The Lairdess was heard to say to the Laird: ‘What am I to do if I’m buying you a new drone every month?’

The Norman Fastness: View from the Bedroom Floor of the Residence

Middle-Class Woodwork Project for Teenager: Quail-Egg Holder Made by Teenage Daughter of Norman Neighbour Where We Lunched on Sunday. Own Quails as Well

Balsa-wood Aeroplanes Under Construction

Doll in Lisieux Market

A Balsa-wood Aeroplane is Launched

Normandy Plunges into Tragic Darkness as I Leave Normandy

Sunday 9^th August 2015

I must plunge straight in: at Bayreuth it was possibly my fifth or sixth Cycle. But still I hardly know any of the motifs. Siegfried and Gottërdammerung enraptured me this time the most. I never noticed before that their music is made up almost entirely of fragments of the other two.  Maybe it was the conducting of Kirill Petrenko – so clear and light. Or indeed Bayreuth itself, where you hear Wagner as nowhere else.  But Wagner, with his motifs, employed music to a literary purpose more thoroughly than any other composer possibly. For the first time I heard that when Siegfried is forging Notung, in the music are echoes of the hammering factory music of the Nibelungs from Rheingold. Some are dismissive of Wagner’s libretto and only care for the music. But the two are inseparable. The music expresses what is going on in the characters’ minds and beyond, in the past and the future and in the mind of the composer/author in an extraordinary way as in a novel.  For all its massive scale and grandeur, The Ring is fragmentary: one mood dissolves endlessly into another. Everything is restlessly shifting and heaving into something else. Moments of triumph are short-lived. It’s hard to imagine what Hitler could have thought he was viewing. Moments of triumph often have a disagreeable note of triumphalism even before they are shortly over. Valhalla and the Ring itself have no existence except in people’s minds; they are endlessly yearned for. Nobody notices apparently that The Ring is perfectly useless; it has no power whatsoever. They go on wanting it. The Gods, who are not really Gods at all but best thought of as top people in any society, yearn to be human which they imagine to be a condition of freedom.  They long to grant freedom but in the very act of giving it take it away. Besides being human appears to be a state of being buffeted about by every misfortune – i.e. Siegmund and Sieglinde. The whole project of bringing into existence a human ‘hero’ who is going to save the world never even gets off the ground.  Wotan appears to have given up from the outset. Finally Brünnhilde has to take charge and draw a line under the chaos The Ring has created. But all she can do is throw it back in the Rhine where it will rest until another Alberich comes along and steals it – and then the whole thing will begin again. This Bayreuth Ring was disastrous as to production. The direction team were boo-ed for ten minutes at Cycle’s end. But musically it was astonishing. Outstanding singers, not all German but mostly or Scand. Brünnhilde was English and got better and better. I think, because of the shield, those who couldn’t manage the roles in the bigger houses where they would have to compete with the orchestra to be heard blossom at Bayreuth. It’s like a secret club of Wagner, kept close to the heart of Germany and the German way of singing and so rare and precious.  I could be at Bayreuth without end and long to be there again.

Saturday 7th August 2015

Lohengrin was our first opera at Bayreuth with Mrs Merkel in the row in front. Her policeman chewed gum and then fell asleep. I was enthralled not just that it was my first Bayreuth. The crowd in the opera were rats in rat body suits which they peeled off to reveal other outfits underneath, such as bright yellow jackets and beach shorts. All that was rather maddening but otherwise the production was clean and modern and the clothes well-fitted and smart.  I’ve no idea what Lohengrin is about: I don’t think Elisabeth asks Lohengrin his name just because she’s been worked on by that evil woman, who was sung by Petra Lang – a fabulous taut hoop of intensity, not in fact entirely evil, I believe.  Klaus Florian Vogt was Lohengrin and received an ovation. Mrs Merkel quickly surveyed the audience before ovating herself. This was the only ovation at Bayreuth that week, as it turned out. Klaus Florian Vogt was in fact rather loud and out of balance with the other singers and the tone was not always the ringing silver that is so ardently sought. But it was that for enough of the time and the heilden tenor is so rare and so decidedly a German sound, that an ovation was absolutely deserved.  It was thrilling to hear for maybe ten minutes at the most that wondrous silver sound. Bayreuth was yet to reveal fully its secrets, but this first evening glinted and beckoned.

Wednesday 5th August 2015

I’m circling nearer and nearer the Wagner itself. But first of all the audience. If you’re fully cyclical, i.e. taking a full Ring cycle of 14 hours over 4 days, much of the audience will be doing the same although never all of it, I notice. Usually you sit in the same place for each opera with the same neighbours. We had Mr and Mrs Glum right next to us, who never applauded but once when Mrs Glum forgot herself over Brünnhilde. Right in front was the Giraffe, with the longest neck ever. ‘He’ll be getting his dinner from the trees,’ Prince Dmitri said. Indeed, on de-funneling from the Festspielehaus, he did conspicuously veer towards the saplings in the Greatness Dropping Off area which possibly were subsequently found to have been reduced. Elsewhere were Crutch and Crutchess. They took Lohengrin too. Awfully delap, poor things, over 80 if a day but battling on on sticks and very novel as to outfits. For Lohengrin, Crutchess had a tiny pearlised jeans-type jacket and matching slacks and little else. The lower back was fully exposed, massively tanned. She knew one of the yellow Heidis (see graph below). Crutch also varied German male evening dress with a Herbert von Karajan-type white silk-jersey polo or winged-collar and no tie. It was impossible to place them. They could have been leading Bayreuth Vons – their sociability with the yellow Heidi and her massively done-up friend would suggest high status,but then who exactly was the yellow Heidi: how little one knows when in foreign – or they could have crawled forth from a nearby caravan. I forgot to mention that the Giraffe was accompanied throughout the Cycle by a priest in garb. So it was a good symmetry that I was informed by Laura Malcolm from London that the Rev Richard Coles, formerly of The Communards, was cyclical at Bayreuth and attracting world media attention for his evening cassock. I reviewed his Twitter and found he’d got the same Lederhosen picture as me, Adrian Edge. So I bowled up to him in one of the intervals and said, ‘I’m Adrian Edge of Dainty Lady TV. You got the same Lederhosen picture as me. ‘ He was charming. ‘Do you like Lederhosen?’ he asked. He said he’d been to a shop in the town where there was a surge in Lederhosen buying in progress.

We stayed in a German hotel 19 kilometres from Bayreuth. It was a Schloss on a rock in a wood. What could have been better? Massive beamy rooms, huge fireplaces, bits of the World Ash Tree piled up beside, hunting trophies, heavy German furniture, flesh-based breakfast options. All the Ring people would have loved it and felt that nothing had changed. In the breakfast room a young American couple were reading the plot of the Ring aloud to each other. In later days they ceased eating in the breakfast room. They came in, ‘foraged’ as Prince Dmitri put it, at the buffet and went back to their room with their spoil. I’m fairly sure that he was in a bed outfit for this exercise. They didn’t look especially wagnérienne. Perhaps they were working up to it in the privacy of their room.  Otherwise there was much Ring talk in the breakfast room in the mornings and in the hunting hall by the blazing fire in the evenings after the perfs. Another American, an arse, said it was the worst Rheingold he’d ever seen and he’d tried to return his tickets for Valkyrie. We never saw him again, thank God. A little fragile ober blonde Rheinmaiden type and husband, both middle-aged, suddenly got friendly. He said he could only take one perf a year. So, after Rheingold they returned to Munich. The Austrian couple living in Zurich were a different matter. He was an actor, very great, I should imagine. Sixties or seventies. Interesting eye-wear. Wife in a good green suit, even at breakfast. Must have had contacts because they were getting tickets last minute somehow. He knew all the gossip. She refused the last min ticket for Valkyrie after the experience of Rheingold in a clapped-out filling station in Nowheresville, USA, with much of the action taking place in a tiny bedroom over the shop – singers having to knock each other out of the way to get to the window to sing out of. But I liked Erda as top-class madame or mafia-matriarch with white mink to the floor, sequinned sheath dress and 50s set hair. So when we got back from Valkyrie Mrs Zurich-Austria was installed in the hunting hall awaiting her husband, not yet back. ‘Why can’t they have surtitles?’ she said. She said most of the audience had no idea what was going on. I thought at Bayreuth they were the most fearsome connoisseurs. Apparently not. She said that after Lohengrin, an audience member was heard telling another that it was all about how cross Lohengrin was that he couldn’t find the Holy Grail. Her husband came back and said she’d made a big mistake refusing the Valk, it was marvellous. Actually it was my least favourite. Partly I love the Valk so much, an actual perf never quite delivers. Brünnhilde hadn’t  become what she afterwards became either. But the set, an oil-rig at Baku beside the Caspian Sea, was so dreary – all brown and endless ladders and gangways they had to climb just to come down again. Remember: if you’re ever putting on a Wagner avoid brown at all costs. Anyway, after that the Zurich-Austrias’ source of tickets must have dried up, for they were not seen again. Finally it was just Prince Dmitri and me, Adrian Edge, plus the non-speaking young Americans who were fully cyclical in the German hotel.

The Yellow Lohengrin Heidi, Friendly with Crutch and Crutchess

Crutch and Crutchess, Seen from Behind: Her Pearlised Country ‘n Western Look for Lohengrin was More Sensational

The Rev Richard Coles Snapped this Lederhosen Too

Friday 31st July 2015

Sorry – I haven’t much time. Librettos of Der fliegende Holländer and the Götterdämmerung to finish. There are no surtitles in the Festspielehaus because it wouldn’t be pure. Surtitles and air-conditioning have been ruled out to the end of time apparently. Prince Dmitri and I are agreed – we could start the whole thing again next week and take another six Wagner operas run. Oh, we’ll come again to Bayreuth. We must. Last night I suffered not at all on the hard seat for Siegfried after rigorous exercising beforehand. At the end I only wished it could all begin again. Completely enthralling despite the crazy production. Yet I don’t dare to touch it. Not the Wagner. Here, at Bayreuth, it’s so much more than the sum of its parts. So I’m concentrating instead on the parade of outfits beforehand and the German nature of the occasion which is part of its magic and mystery, as well as the proscenium arch inside the Festspeilehaus and the strange way it looks when the curtain is down. Quite extraordinary. No graph will capture the way it seems to recede and how an absolute division between the audience and the stage is established with this dead space around the arch completely bare and plain and the other world lurking there out of sight until the curtain goes up. Then there is the audience which airs itself outside until the brass players from the orch, decreed by Wagner, summon them from the balcony to the confinement of the  hard wooden seats and bare floor within. So many sights to see. Much black is worn by ladies. Even with bright yellow they must have black, giving a Heide meets Siegfried look sometimes. I thought it was black for Wagner but then remembered that until quite recently black was worn by men and women at all evening entertainments in Germany. Of course, to us it has sinister overtones. There’s no doubt the German look is quite firm and purposeful. The outfit statements are uncompromising and they love a glint and a flash from their fabrics but only rarely bright colours apart from yellow for the blonde ladies. National costume is seen as well as lederhosen. What would the equivalent be at Glyndebourniana? Indeed what is the English equivalent of Bayreuth? we wondered. In the end, Prince Dmitri said, ‘The D’Oyly Carte’. It’s true. Gilbert and Sullivan is the English Wagner. What else is there? But Bayreuth is very German. There’s no escaping it although it’s not quite clear what that means.

The Strange Effect before the Curtain Goes Up: No Graph can Capture It

A Look for the Festspielehaus

National Costume

A Heidi Meets Siegfried Look

Legs

This Greatness was at Die Valkyrie and is In Fact English-Speaking.

Another Heidi

Classic Look for the Older German Opera-Goer

This is How Packed in We Are

Thursday 30th July 2015

I’ve been here since Saturday in fact, with Prince Dmitri who got tickets after 10 years of trying. We’re at one of the rarest places in the world. At last, at last to enter that priceless house. Reggie Cresswell told me he had been here years ago but I never could believe it. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who’s been, apart from Bernard Levin but I never met him.  Now we’re here all week. Three operas we’ve seen and three more from tonight. On Sunday we drove up in evening dress for the first one, which was Lohengrin. The gable of the fly tower looms over the trees as you approach from the town below. It’s no beauty. Fairly grim red brick with some stone relief it sits half way up a hill with a public park on the slope below. In front of us was a huge gleaming Royce which came to a halt at the side of the building. An enlarged German Greatness emerged in floor length Valkyrie draperies in moss green. We followed the Royce into the car park which in fact was husband-driven not chauffed. Then we were there – at the Festspielehaus itself, at Bayreuth, at Wagner’s special theatre, built to his requirements for the performance of his works alone. Before the performance the Greatnesses gather outside in the open air. There’s no foyer space inside. The second day, before Rheingold, there was a sudden shower and you’ve never seen such a rush for cover of priceless frockage. The German women have a certain look: there’s a hint of a shield and burnished helmet whether or not that they actually bear these items. Much shot silk in metallic shades, black greatly favoured for Wagner with the occasional ancient Heidi in yellow flounces. The minute they opened the doors to the theatre we raced in. To get that first glimpse of this place so much heard of and never seen even in picture. The stage area, with the curtain down, is the first thing to strike – ghostly, grey green almost disappearing, somehow a no-go area into which no audience member may wander with this strange great grey roll before it, which is the famous shield, on which so much depends. Then the auditorium itself, with some classical grandeur up high but the floor just bare scuffed boards and the famous hard-backed seats with minimal upholstery for the bum. Everyone stands until the last possible moment and people have to squeeze by to their seats because there are no aisles, you just load in from either side and soon the amphitheatre, for that is what it is, is just packed, a seething mass, there in all that finery, not to endure but to be demanded of, to bend with every fibre of the being, and among them, arriving for Lohengrin, sidling into her seat right in the middle directly in front of us was Mrs Merkel herself, head to toe in silver and attending to her Blackberry at the last minute before Lohengrin was underway.

Even with Pink, There’s Black: Lohengrin go-ers

A Lohengrin Look

Classic Wagner Look for the Festspielehaus

A Many Silked Greatness with Blue Jacket for Lohengrin

Within the Festspielehaus Itself. That Grey Roll is the Famous Shield

Wednesday 29th July 2015

Last Friday was the Press Preview of the Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace which I attended on behalf of Dainty Lady TV. Royston King was also present and furious at my turquoise Prada mac and no tie for the Palace. He is recently an OBE and has arranged to be invested at Windsor by the Queen, who does few Investitures these days. They’re old friends and the Investiture can be guaranteed to go straight off the rails when they meet. With him was a rather fabulous young man from the top drawer of a certain rakish long-haired glamour. He could have been the hot one from Sense and Sensibility, not Colonel Brandon. ‘Which county?’ I said. He was plainly Landed Gentry, like me., although I’m also modern, of course. In the corridors of Buckingham Palace, Royston said that his family were slaves while we were being Landed Gentry in the 18th and 19th centuries. But now Royston is OBE. So we set off through the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace. It is a massively important interior, incredibly grand and sumptuous and really very un-English. I go every year as an ordinary member of the public, but never before privately when you can take pictures. Oh I’ve such pictures for you. I was thrilled to see again the Grand Staircase, with its exquisite balustrade of golden leaves. And the Green Drawing, although Royston was not pleased that I pointed out the view from it of bare asphalt which is the roof of the carriage entrance on the floor below. Behind the great gilt-wood sofa is an expanse of asphalt. The Green Drawing Room is a triumph of decoration. See graph below. I can’t begin to describe it. All the rooms are excellent, not dictator-baroque. No hint of pompous and although magnificent, on a pleasing small scale. One room leads into another. It’s really very cosy. The theme of this year’s summer opening is the hospitality of the Palace. They’ve got the Ballroom laid for a State Dinner. We can see Her place and beforehand there’s an exhibition of some of her recent evening dresses as well as jewellery (the actual diamonds) to go with. There are bolts of cloth on display of dresses yet to come. To be shown such a thing! Somehow I’d got wind that there were more dresses in later rooms. I had to hold back not to gulp down the treat all in one go. Royston and I looked at presents given by visiting Heads of State on State Visits – some innovative modern Sevrès from Giscard d’Estaing for instance. At last we came into the Music Room. This is where guests for the Garden Parties pass through so they’d put on stands, not even in glass cases and just inches from the viewer, three of her recent Garden Party outfits. You could have reached out and touched them. Would you ever be so near? I couldn’t believe it. Her fabrics and form so utterly near. I could have stayed for ever but we passed through the gorgeous White Drawing which is really yellow and out into the tea tent. Royston explained about the rakish young man as he sat with us enjoying a baguette at 20% off. Apparently he is less various as to ladies than previously. Also his hair was perhaps too long. The Royal Gardener joined us but I had to dash off. Royston said that She had been round the day before to make sure everything was all right for the Public for the Summer opening of the Palace while she is away for the summer.

A Corner of the Green Drawing Room: Indescribable Splendour and Art: Why don’t You Try to Have a Drawing Room like this?

The View of Asphalt from the Green Drawing Room

Stained Upholstery a Problem even at the Palace: How near the Throne One felt

The Stained Banquette in Situ in the Picture Gallery where a World-Class Collection Hangs

The Franz Hals at Buckingham Palace: This Artist has been Revived by Reggie Cresswell and is now Admired

A Recent Evening Frock

A Less Recent Evening Frock by Hardy Amies

Dresses Yet to Come!

Her Banquet Place

Her View of the Banquet

Another View of Her Place: Can One have Enough? Notice that the Pudding Spoon and Fork are Laid across the Top. Horrible Robin Smallmeal said This was Common but He was Wrong

Given by the President of Mexico: A Tree of Her Life

Her Blue Garden Party Outfit: That Close!

Her in the Blue Outift

The Pink Garden Party Outfit with Her Wearing It

The Yellow Garden Party Outfit: Something Gone a Bit Wrong with It on the Left Side – Seam Rucked?

The Couture Unpressed Hem of the Yellow Garden Party Outfit: a Little Pinched?

The View into the 1844 Room, Where She Gives Audiences: A New Feature of this Year’s Opening: You Can’t go In but you Can See in

Friday 24th July 2015

So much incident both before and after Harry Rollo’s triumph in Vienna, reaching a climax on the Saturday night before we boarded for London on the Sunday. For instance Rufus Pitman said one of the Titans in the Kunsthistoriches Museum would make a good duvet cover, Reggie condemned Titan’s portraits as ‘not very good’ but homed in on a St Sebastian with unusual arrow configuration – through the forehead is rare, if not unique. Reggie is mad for St Sebastian’s. In the Object Rooms (or Kunstkammer) of the Kunsthistoriches, there was a rock crystal piece that had cost Philip of Spain more than a Titian. ‘But it’s got damaged during washing up,’ Reggie said. There was indeed a terrible crack. ‘At least you don’t have to wash up a Titian,’ Rufus said. I forgot to mention how I solved the just-out-of-the-dishwasher hot butter dish problem in the hotel – by purloining ice cubes from the breakfast champagne bucket! What a brain wave.  Anthony Mottram gained Vienna, partly by bicycle. Oh yes, he was there for Harry Rollo’s great perf. We never stopped talking. So many memories, particularly of that living toilet in Business Class on the flight back from Sofia at the time of the Prague floods. That toilet yapped and clattered all the flight long. You could say its seat was loose but that would be dreary.  It was a living toilet. In Vienna there was a see-thru toilet in one of the cafés – but not living through. So we moved towards Harry Rollo’s great perf. All the waiters were talking about the previous ones. Vienna is one of the hardest places to penetrate with anything new. But Harry Rollo penetrated Vienna. A Bulti arrived by air from Los Angeles for the perf. ‘Did you stop for re-fuelling?’ Anthony Mottram asked her. We assumed she’d come by private jet but it turned out not. The private jet was to be only for going on to London from Vienna. Then we were gathered for the perf. Previously we’d been up to the roof of the performance house, right inside the chandelier from where eerie tendrils were to emanate during the perf – what were they?  The Bulti had a nice little black cardy and a ra-ra skirt in the foyer just before the perf. I would have said it was a Thursday afternoon outfit with no particular house leaping out – a charming modest touch for one so extensive as to wealth. We found that we were seated by chance next to Simeon Bond who’d also gained from London and with whom I’d failed to have tea the day before owing to having to cover Schönbrunn. So we were all flowing together for the great moment. Would we rise to it? Would we be good enough? I think we were. The shimmer and other world began, yet terrible and bringing much of the cruelty of this one in but transformed and somehow better although all having to come to an end, dissolving away … as our magical Vienna was going to do the next day. But before that we were back-stage and then in the restaurant. Harry said, ‘We won’t pay.’ I sat next to the Bulti who described her usual day which was work in the morning, reading in the afternoon and events in the evening. Anthony Mottram had one of Harry’s team who had come from London for the day, plus a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter performing group who were going to perform beside a lake in August. Such a concentration of world-class names!  It was a living legend. From without a person would grow faint at the idea of this gathering. But did I mention that the night before, Harry Rollo in a mint-green Marc Jacobs summer shirt with very intermittent decoration, was seated in a bar: ‘What is success?’ he was saying. ‘Whitney Houston? Was she a success?’ What about Amy Winehouse? Really more of a disaster, wouldn’t you say?’ Now in the restaurant  he and Mercury Mr Kitten were asking the Bulti how they would know where to go for the private jet when they got to the airport the next day. For they were to be conveyed back to London on it too, you see . She looked very faintly pained and thought for a while. ‘The driver will know,’ she said eventually with such a miraculous, wispy vagueness.  A man was standing over us. I thought he must be the patron of the restaurant. He had that look. ‘That picture on the wall,’ I said. ‘It looks familiar. Have you had it long?’ But he was bemused. When he’d gone, Harry said, ‘That was the head of Performance in Vienna. He’s one of the most important people in Vienna…’ where Art counts for something.

And so, the next day our Vienna began to break up. There were more Art visits. We saw the  star Cellini item in the Kunstkammer and covered the Italian wing. Neither Reggie nor Rufus Pitman liked the Raphaël despite my clever remarks about it. What we adored was a painting of a Hapsburg palace in the 18th century which is shown to be run down, with weeds growing around it. On my previous visit to Vienna for Dainty Lady TV, the curator of the Kunsthistoriches museum (Viennese version of North Oxford lady don) explained the immense significance of this work but I’ve forgotten what she said. Anyway, it’s immensely significant and thrilling to look at. We passed several times the Sisi museum but didn’t go in. Anthony Mottram boarded for Prague, where he is a ‘consultant’, by train rather than bicycle. Finally Reggie and I were in a holding pattern over Heathrow, gazing down on our beloved homeland but thinking of Vienna, now an empty shell. Harry and Mercury, Mr Kitten had left on the private jet at lunchtime.  ‘We’ve arriving at the fashionable hour,’ Reggie said. ‘7.30 on a Sunday evening.’ Hence the delay.

My Room in the Hotel Altstadt, Vienna. Black and Red

The See-thru Toilet at the Café Diglas, Vienna. Not Quite What it Seemed

Above the Chandelier in the Performance House, Vienna

Back-stage in the Performance House, Vienna

Some Performance-Goers: He’s Got No Socks On

Delapidated Hapsburg Country Place by Bernardo Bellotto

Rufus Pitman was Taken with This Hair

Rare Arrow-Through-the-Forehead St Sebastian: Reggie Entranced

Truly Great Picture: Must be a Caravaggio of a Murderer

Tuesday 21st July 2015

I went to Schönbrunn in the summer of 1987 with Anthony Mottram. We came over from Budapest. It was just after he’d moved into the Bloc and was about to become what he afterwards became – one of the leading figures in the restoration of the Bloc to Western ways, ‘consultant’ of Prague. Before that we’d undergone another estrangement of five years for reasons no longer accessible to memory, to chime in with other fallings-out and reconciliations since first meeting in 1970. Schönbrunn was rather dreary in those days. Parquet, stoves and walls, no presence of Marie Theresia nor any other Royalty. Now – well, you won’t believe that a Palace could have its Imperial past so restored. For anyone who cares deeply for Royalty, as we all do, Schönbrunn is the golden essence of Royalty in ravishing reality. You can feel their lives in the rooms. The apartments of Emperor Franz Joseph and Sisi (not that she was there much) have been opened. We saw Sisi’s weighing scales – she led the way in thinness and weight-watching. She was the origin of the thin movement, as well as the first Royalty of stature to be regularly plagued by paparazzi. A photograph was on view of two dark lady-shapes, seen from behind, clearly late 19th century, in walking outfits and with umbrellas. This was Sisi and her attendant being pap-ed. Her dislike of the Court and love  of free wandering in resort towns was what killed her. A maniac with a file stabbed poor Sisi. At first, such were her corsets, there appeared to be no wound. Only when she was unwound was she found to be in a fatal state and soon after died. She gave three hours each day to her coiffure when alive. Sisi wasn’t often in the massive matrimonial bed at Schönbrunn, in fact twins shoved together. Her husband had simple soldier tendencies and died on a little day bed in another room. His desk was a coarse oak affair such as might have been seen in any clerks’ office at the time. He insisted on being up at 6 to do ‘work’. Really the Imperial life was quite suburban with heavy swirly decor to match. Their dining room is terribly grand hotel. We passed on to the Maria Theresia part of the Palace. The place is so vast a new Emperor just shut down the previous one’s bit and colonised another. These apartments are Art. It’s an important rococo interior. Reggie Cresswell pointed out the disconcerting way the curlicues weave into one other de-stablilising the viewer, and giving a decor that isn’t quite there although it obviously is, in one respect, being made of plaster and gilt. This is a more advanced rococo than I saw at the Palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam last year. Harry Rollo had alerted us to the Lacquer Room and also the one where some Princesses had chopped up a lot of rare Chinese miniatures to make a collage for the walls. Strange how the 18th century monarchs created important interiors – one thinks of Sans Souci, Le Palais Buckingham (strictly early 19th), Schönbrunn – but the later 19th century ones didn’t – Sandringham, Balmoral, Osborne, the Franz Josef part of Schönbrunn… not that all Royalties aren’t great and the late 19th century ones especially dear somehow, with their tendency to produce publications, Box Brownies, leg-of-mutton sleeves, small dogs, love of the Alps, many German relations, and indescribable yearning. I see when I said earlier that you could feel the lives of the Royalties at Schönbrunn, it’s really only Sisi and the Emperor Franz Josef who spring out. Maria Theresia seems quite dumpy from paintings, not very rococo herself. Her legacy is palatial apartments, art greater than her.

We walked up to the Gloriette for luncheon, Reggie and Rufus having important conversation about London affairs on the way. Oh how to get a plaque erected to one in one’s lifetime! That was my concern, but Rufus was thinking of V.S. Pritchett, who has received no blue plaque. What is to be done? Later, in a grove at Schönbrunn, Reggie read aloud from The Flower Beneath the Foot the death of the Archduchess before a model of a toilet block she was planning. As well, a facility for dogs drifts in her dying mind and then Schönbrunn where she first heard The Blue Danube …

Schönbrunn: So Intimate

The Gloriette Where We Lunched

Schönbrunn: a Real Home

Schönbrunn: the Garden Side.

Sisi’s Scales

The Emperor Franz Josef’s Death Bed: the Empire was Not to Last Much Longer After him

The Emperor Franz Josef’s Lav

The Emperor and Empress’s Bed

The Emperor Franz Josef’s Grand Hotel Dining Room with Very Plain Settings

The Great Hall of Schönbrunn: a Rococo Masterpiece

See How the Curlicues Weave and Mislead

The Lacquer Room in the Marie Theresia Apartments

Rare Chinese Miniatures Chopped Up by some Princesses for a Wall Collage