Speak for yourself, matey

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 23 · 6 December 2012

From Luc Bourrousse

Adam Mars-Jones’s reaction to the Baghdad story reported by Michael Halperin in How to Be Gay reveals an unsure grasp of camp (LRB, 22 November). Not campy: soldier quoting in Italian a prima donna in unseemly circumstances? Come on.

The quote is not in the least ‘erudite’ (Tosca is nothing like a rarity, most opera lovers know it, and they are not all erudite any more than they are all gay) and obviously not ‘solemnly statesmanlike’ (unless statesmen are all uneducated impulsive performers like Floria Tosca). It has all the cheap drama of Sardou and was already pretty stagey as uttered by Sarah Bernhardt in the original play (‘Et c’est devant ça que tremblait toute une ville!’). In Puccini’s opera, as spoken (rather than sung) by a prima donna milking each word for effect, it is frankly campy. Under the circumstances of Saddam’s death, the whole idea is at best as vacuously stagey as in Sardou, at worst like something out of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.

And while we are at Tosca, Mme Vera Galupe-Borszkh channels the Essential Diva rather than a specific singer, and if one should be mentioned, it would be, rather than Maria Callas, the famed Met (and Covent Garden) Tosca of the 1950s and 1960s, Zinka Milanov of the Balkan accent and memorable lines (‘This girl is wonderful: she sounds like a young me!’) – not to mention the glorious voice.

Luc Bourrousse
Bordeaux