Warming Up

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I went to see Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall tonight. It’s not my usual evening out and I was going with some trepidation, but had been invited by my in-laws and had mostly enjoyed Verdi’s Requiem when I’d gone with my brother-in-law. 

I don’t know if classical music leaves me a bit cold because I don’t know enough about it (though I so have an A at Music o level) or just because I suspect that all the people who say they are liking are pretending in order to look refined. I don’t think it’s the latter, which is a natural knee-jerk response to worrying that it’s because I am stupid, so it’s easier to assume that everyone else is stupid. We all do this to some extent with things that confuse us or leave us cold. I, as a comedian, should know this better than anyone. I remember my grandfather’s disappointment that all his working class workmates thought he was just being pretentious for enjoying opera. 

I tried my best to get into the performance and read the programme notes beforehand, and wondered why Charles Jenner who wrote the libretto gets left out of the billing. Why is Handel’s name in the title, but Jenner’s is not? Though once we got into it I pretty much accepted that Jenner didn’t deserve much credit. The piece consists mainly of a very few phrases repeated over and over again, almost to the point of sarcasm. The best bit is, as I am sure must have been well noted, when the choir sing “All we like sheep have gone astray” and because of the way it is phrased for a good while are just singing “Oh, we like sheep” at each other. I like sheep. But I am not going to write a massive long song about it. If i was going to write a song about liking sheep, it would just go :”I like sheep, deal with it”. I wouldn’t get hundreds of people to sing it over and over again until it began to sound like some kind of bestiality apologist hymn. Perhaps Jenner and Handel felt that if a big crowd of people sang “We like sheep”, then the audience would be convinced that loving sheep was normal and fine. 

Unfortunately in solemn and serious situations, especially when everyone is taking themselves super seriously, I can’t help but want to take the piss. And classical music takes itself so seriously that it often goes round past infinity and becomes ridiculous. One of the soloists had a very odd way of singing his pieces, adding staccato-like emphasis to each note which often meant he was singing “ha ha ha ha” in a very pompous way. My wife saw me smirking and knew instantaneously what was amusing me. But as with the Verdi piece, the soloists were my least favourite part. I sang some light opera at school and know that things are meant to be sung in a certain way, but I am not sure I like the convention. It seems phoney and pompous and if you spoke the way that these people sing everyone would think you were doing an impression of John Majors. As usual the soloists ponced around as if singing in a stupid voice made you the most important people on earth and got flowers at the end even though they were the worst thing in it. And they know they get flowers and a standing ovation whatever happens. So where’s the value in that? I speak, slightly bitterly as a performer who has never been given flowers or a standing ovation, but I know if I ever got either it would really mean something, because it’s not a fucking given. The flowers are sat there waiting for them and they get them regardless of how well they’ve done. If there was an X Factor style panel of judges working out who, if anyone, had done a good enough job to deserve flowers then at least the flowers would have meaning. Or maybe if there were only two bunches of flowers and the audience voted as to who got them. But what’s the point in accepting flowers that you know are waiting for you, even if you were to fuck the whole thing up and get your cock out.

My flowers would have gone to the trumpeter, who was properly great (though given little to do) and maybe the woman in the choir that my wife spotted who was wearing a slightly sparkly black top (whereas everyone else was in plain black) so the light caught and illuminated her every time she moved.

There was very little familiar in the piece for me, except for the Hallelujah chorus, which was a welcome blast of something with a bit of a tune that you could hum along to. Inexplicably the conductor made the whole audience stand up for this bit, so I couldn’t even sit back and enjoy it. We deserved a reward for having sat through all the other nondescript bits and for (mainly) not laughing out loud at the ridiculous way the man had been singing like a pompous laughing policeman and at Handel "not realising" he’d got hundreds of people to sing out their love for sheep. At least Verdi realised he had to put the good bit in four or five times to make up for the rubbish bit. Handel was only giving us this one short burst and putting it right near the end so we’d still resent it.

The failure was all mine. I looked at the faces of the other audience members and they mainly seemed rapt, apart from one man in my row who inexplicably spent the whole concert looking at pictures of Prince William, Kate Middleton and Prince George on his iPhone (perhaps he didn’t have a CD player and wanted inspiring music for his internet browsing). At one point, much to the chagrin of the people around him (who’d been too polite to chide him for his slightly distracting behaviour) he must have accidentally touched a video as a loud discordant noise emitted from his phone (I don’t know what he was watching but it sounded very much like the AIOTM roulette wheel sound effect). it took a while for him to shut it off. A man behind him lost his shit and tutted quite loudly before poking the man to make him stop. That is as tasty as things get at the Albert Hall.

I didn’t really care for Handel, so I enjoyed the distractions more. I enjoyed the coughs that echoed round the room as each piece ended, but was even more fascinated by the sound made by the choir as it stood and sat down in unison. I loved this sharp woomph. Being forced to listen to something for that long had at least tuned me into sound. And made me consider the ordinary in a different way.

In the end I was glad I work in an ephemeral medium. I don’t think my stuff will still be playing in a quarter of a millennium and I am pleased about that. Does the reverence for Handel come from it being worthy or it being old? I liked the idea that this stuff had been performed for 260 years, with musicians passing on the baton. But the music seemed old-fashioned and a bit irrelevant to me at least. I thought of all the great works of art that have been created because of religion. It’s amazing in one way, but in another, from my perspective at least, utterly ridiculous. This serious and pompous piece of work all about a made-up story. My life is a monument to nothing too and one that will crumble and fall probably before I do. But at least I know that. All these people taking this silly idea so utterly seriously just made it seem all the more ridiculous and even slightly tragic. 

But at least they like sheep.