Siegfried at São Carlos

Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's wonderful XVIIIth century opera house, is staging a great new production of the Ring cycle by Graham Vick. This year it was Siegfried's turn. Graham Vick presents the Ring in a kind of comic book style which, at its best, is witty instead of silly something  seldom achieved by the numerous attempts to transfer to our day and age classic opera plots. (Peter Sellar's great D.Giovanni, set in the Bronx, is another exception). Personally, I found Siegfried himself, that curious mixture of adolescent bully and idealistic hero, not entirely convincing. But this is no more than a detail, albeit an important one, in what can be considered on the whole a triumph. A sure sign of success: the hours passed effortlessly and at the end the feeling was of anticipation for Gottardamerung.

Clive James' culture bath

"Il n'y a pas de genres, il n'y a que des talents". This quote by Jean François Revel is one of the many trufles to be found in "Cultural Amnesia", the great partial summation of a lifetime of reading and pontificating by Clive James, the Australian critic and TV personality. The quote and the book, which I spent a feverish summer day fevereshly reading in bed, make an implicit case for great journalism which I entirely subscribe and add to by arguing that newspaper and magazine writing provide a much better literary training than is to be found in academia. Endlessly entertaining and generally wise, even if occasionally corny, "Cultural Amnesia",a collection of "over a hundred essays", as the backpage helpfully points out, about cultural figures mainly from the XXth century, rescues from oblivion dozens of worthy writers. I found the book particularly illuminating on such topics as Vienese café society before the Anchluss, French collaborationists and the German intellectual scene after WWII.