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There's More to the Picture than Meets the Eye

The fragrance of slow cooked meat wafted through the darkening street and stopped short at Joya’s nose. Dinner was still hours away and even then, her mom would serve up boiled beans and carrots and say ‘Eat your vegetables Joya. Today is a vegetarian night’. Six nights of the week were now ‘vegetarian’. Her mom had recently started listening to a podcast by a health ‘expert’ who had explained that animal protein causes cancer and kidney disease. ‘Plant protein is best dear’, she said. So now the daily meals, which had already been ‘healthy’ were now fit only for a vegetarian grasshopper. Joya resentfully stared at up at the shop selling the biriyani. Glaring lights spilled onto the street in a frenzy of good spirit. Raucous, well-fed people floated around inside, flaunting their good luck. Sullenly, she turned away. Her gaze fell on the house standing beside the shop. Joya caught her breath. Just next door to the eatery, but it may well have been a house on the moon. Its façad...
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Opera and the Rhythms of Nature

You feel us when the sun is hidden in the daytime by the rain falling in drenching sheets. We are in the rocks that tower above your tiny winding road, in the convulsions of the deep earth that raze your cities, in the winds that howl around a lonely coast. I, the Earth provide the fuel that lights your Fire, yet poisons the Air. The Water in the seas is rising with the melting ice. All that we know is slowly disappearing, together with the giant bears that still haunt the ice under the lonely northern skies. A great storm is coming. And yet…. Ours are the rhythms that end all things, only to begin once more. You are with us when you meet with the Oneness. We are the five ‘elements’ conceived in ancient Hindu thought – Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Sky. Ours are the rhythms that brought life into being. Ours are the rhythms that pulse through opera, from Julie Taymor’s airy ‘Magic Flute’ to Rusalka’s watery home, to her eyes raised to the sky, singing to a radiant moon. To the fiery r...
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Two Friends in Kyiv

  Sviatoslav Playing the Bandura, drawn by Tintin When the Ukrainian Orchestra performed ‘Ode to Joy’ in Kiev Square on March 10, 2022, to mark World Happiness Day, I looked at the photograph and thought once again of Sviatoslav and Blahovista. Less than a year ago, these two kids living in Kyiv, Ukraine, were sharing music, art and love with children across the world, courtesy the Met Opera Global Summer Camp. Blahovista had photographed herself in that Square, when she showed off the city to fellow campers. Here in Kolkata, as the spring froths around us, spraying the new-made green with jets of colour and life, I remember the summer when this brother and sister had introduced themselves and their world to my son Tintin and to opera loving friends from every continent. When you’re less than ten years old, it’s a long way from Kolkata to Kiev. But in the summer of 2020, when the Met Opera summer camp went online and ‘Global’, all of that changed.   Each time camp ends, th...
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Hansel and Gretel and a Walk in Calcutta

St James Church, Calcutta   (PC Team Walk Calcutta Walk)) With our hemisphere hurrying towards the dark Solstice, family traditions around food are uppermost in everyone’s minds and the season brings with it Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The setting in the meagerly provisioned kitchen of the children’s family home, in the haunted woods with its dream feast and in the risky kitchen of the witch, blends seamlessly with our everyday lives of hunger, desire and hope. In Calcutta, where I live, two of my friends, Deep and Ayon, have thought up a new tradition of food around the Solstice. On the first Sunday of December this year, we were on a trail that was strongly reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s forest walk. Throughout the year, Ayon and Deep take their friends out to explore cultural and historical traditions in the city. Because they walk everywhere, their group is named ‘Walk Calcutta Walk’. This was our first time exploring old bakeries. And because it was close ...
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The Ghost Ship and the Wounded Bird: Lucia di Lammermoor

‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ got the young boys in the class of Met Opera educator, Dr Emily Saenz, singing ‘The Ghost Ship’ – a sea shanty by Don Besig and Nancy Price. Here is the refrain – ‘And the cold wind blew…..’. The winds that blew over Lammermoor were indeed cold on the forehead of Edgar, the Master of Ravenswood, protagonist of Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Bride of Lammermoor’. A dashing gentleman, Ravenswood, fierce, alone in the world, temporarily overshadowed by family misfortune, yet with all his life ahead of him. Time and the political fortunes have brought his old and noble family to its knees and Ravenswood swears vengeance on those who displaced them. Instead, he falls in love with Lucy, the daughter of his family’s enemy. Ravenswood now wants to reconcile, and the reader may fully expect him to be lucky, especially as the politics in London turn is his favour. Yet, this young man appears to be the ghost ship of that sea shanty, rudderless in the wild ocean. Where did those...
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Papageno's Birds

  ‘Papageno, that’s my name, catching birds, that’s my game’. As Papageno introduces himself in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, we are invited – not to catch – but to observe the birds in our own backyard. In the winter of 2020, for the first time in many years, I don’t have to go in to work. So, I watch the sun in its short path across the sky and I watch the birds that have chosen to winter in the field outside our home. This land, cultivated part of the year, and flooded during the rest, has escaped the hatchet of urbanization. Here in the wintertime, as I first learned in 2020, a number of birds show up – a few dozen egrets, a handful of ducks and half a dozen cranes. I fish out an old pair of binoculars. The ducks swim in and out of the wetland reeds. The egrets settle at the edges. The cranes are huge and when I watch them fly close, they look primitive. I imagine myself in a younger, warmer, wetter world, staring at the creatures that dominated those skies, destined to be the ...
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Queen Mab's speech in Romeo and Juliet

 Charles Gounod's opera Romeo and Juliet included a version of Shakespeare's Queen Mab speech. In the summer of 2020, the Met Opera Global summer camp created a marvellous writing prompt - what does the Queen Mab speech inspire you to create? Here's what I found. When You Dream When you dream, don't imagine You're quite alone Expect the Night Queen, in her starry wrap and gaunt face, Swaying like cobwebs, dusty, shimmering Over night-time lids and liquid skin, And then you dream, of warm summers And warm butter, Of butterflies waltzing in creeks of light, Perhaps of witches, hair sweeping and reaching Towards the moon in ancient song. Broomsticks and cat fur brushing your hands Perhaps you see James Watson and Francis Crick Walking by the rushes of another pond, Daisies floating in the summer sun, When those two dreamed, with eyes intent, Of gypsy horns and twisted cells. Sometimes it's anger behind your eyes, Swirling and swelling in rhythms intense, Soon to be...
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