Foreign frivolity

HOW DID A NATION as doughy and uncouth as the English ever produce the world’s greatest body of poetry? It winds foreigners up almost as much as our habit of conducting seminars in international trade with the help of a Maxim gun, and is especially galling for those neighbours who pique themselves on their creativity, notably an island slightly to the left of GB that has omitted ever to trouble the scorers with any sort of worthwhile visual or audial art despite being besotted by its own soulfulness.

At least less happier lands have always been able to laugh at our tin ear, though I suppose even that pastime lost its mojo around 1963. Nevertheless, everyone still gets off on quoting the forgotten German draft-dodger — who sadly died before he could become the outstanding Nazi he was clearly destined to be — Oscar Schmitz, with his “das Land ohne Musik” shtick.

And it’s true that, in much the same way as the shagged-out romantics in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s symbolist play Axël (1890) find the business of living too exhausting, and get the servants do it for them, the English delegated the chore of writing tunes to foreigners. Evidently you needed some kind of background racket during supper for when the weather chat dried up, so we whistled up an endless stream of Euro-minstrels from Ferrabosco, Handel and Christian Bach to Mendelssohn and, um, Ivor Novello, to take on this drudgery.

And with the joint being run from the 18th century by a gentry of porcine philistinism, plus all those boxheads in the palace, the idea that foreign was better than local soon became established dogma (and naturally remains so at the Guardian).

This applied, times a zillion, to opera, an effete affair unsuitable for J. Bull. The first version of this outrage to sneak past Priti’s Channel patrols was the mincing business borrowed by Charles II’s big-haired Europhile hangers-on from the court of the Sun King, whose idea of a night out was to be surrounded by a bunch of people prancing around him with cocked wrists.

Handel’s marginally less fey Italian variety in eighteenth-century London was still generally presumed to be an entryist melange of sodomitical papistry, its bleating eunuchs almost certainly spouting subliminal-advertising doxologies. The audience for this guff, as well as being politically and sexually whiffy, happily semaphored its own idiocy — when Handel was (weirdly) perceived to be getting a bit populist — by the creation of a rival company with the only fairly appealing name “Opera of the Nobility”.

AS USUAL, THE NATIVE way of dealing with all this was to take the piss — which itself had interesting consequences.

The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a jukebox musical concocted by John Gay to lampoon everything operatic (and the assiduous self-enrichment of PM Robert Walpole) bust all box-office records and so ensnared Walpole’s goat that he got the Lord Chamberlain (the “totally illiterate” Earl of Grafton) to censor all stage plays henceforth — thereby accidentally catalysing the birth of the non-censored sentimental novel.

Beginning with Samuel Richardson’s

Pamela, this extraordinary new phenomenon plunged readers amid the turbid lives of others, brought the sudden realisation that other humans might actually have feelings just like yours, and thereby

THE ENGLISH DELEGATED WRITING TUNES TO FOREIGNERS — YOU NEED A BACKGROUND RACKET WHEN THE TALK DRIES UP