A Night in Venice
A Night in Venice
Alan Jones, Signori e Signore
Like everybody else in this great audience, Margarita and I are indebted to the great impresario Massimo Markson for organising A Night in Venice to assist Lady Fairfax's Opera Foundation in promoting the opera talent of Australia.
A year ago I was asked to pay the tribute to Joan Sutherland, whom the Venetians acclaimed as La Stupenda. I have been urged to be less reverential to-night.
Most of you will have noted that Margarita's and my latest books share a photograph of us and her tour leaders in a gondola approaching the Cà Venier dai Leoni, the home of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. In 1979 Gore Vidal took us there in a gondola and Peggy mistook me for Malcolm Fraser. The mistake is more common these days. On the terrace in front there is Marino Marini's sculpture of a full-frontal naked horseman resembling Minister Antonio Abbott. In her memoirs Peggy says:
'His penis was regularly unscrewed so as not to offend churchgoers passing by on the Grand Canal.
I can reassure you that the penis is now permanently soldered in position.
Four years ago we visited Venice for our daughter's wedding, not in Murano, the glass island, but in Burano, the lace island. The Italian civil code admirably balances the duties of husband and wife. Here is a shot of us waiting for the arrival of our motor boat to Burano. The wedding breakfast was held at the Cipriani, whose founder immortalised an American, Harry Pickering, by opening Harry's Bar in 1931.
Since we are seated with the British and Italian consuls and their wives, I venture to offer some suggestions for Opera Australia to co-operate with English and Italian companies.
Kobbé, the opera bible edited by the Queen's cousin, the 7th Earl of Harewood, does not acknowledge the Gilbert and Sullivan operas; to Venetians they are farse, farces.
The greatest English-born composer of operas and oratorios was Henry Purcell. His librettists were the poet laureates, John Dryden and Nahum Tate. His Dido and Aeneas is performed in Europe; why not in Australia?
Opera Australia's repertory includes Johann Strauss II's Fledermaus. Why not his Eine Nacht in Venedig, A Night in Venice, with its rapturous Lagunenwalzer?
The strength of the Savoy Opera is in Gilbert's satiric verses, often as good as Lord Byron's. Our Roberto Ellis has the rhymes but not the prosody. Here is a shot of John Wellings and me trying on naval hats in Venice. There have been successful Australian performances of HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Opera Australia should commission a comic opera called HMAS Tampa, starring Admiral Barrie.
Reg Livermore is brilliant as the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe. We don't, however, have to go to London to find arrogant and pretentious judges. We have a novice on the Supreme Court of NSW. His surname rhymes with Purcell, and with repel, Pimpernel and bagatelle. Reg Livermore's version of him would bring the house down.
Just a few suggestions. Grazie tanti. Ciao.
