The Daily Telegraph

Ukraine stands tall through the glorious tones of classical music

- Jane shilling read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

What does the embattled Ukrainian nation most urgently require? Weapons? Humanitari­an aid? Internatio­nal war crimes investigat­ors? A performanc­e of Rossini’s comic opera, The Barber of Seville? The answer is probably all of them

– and the opera is not the least necessary item on that list.

On Saturday, Kyiv’s grand opera house reopened, after only the third significan­t hiatus in its history, with a production of Rossini’s opera buffa. Performanc­es will be given on weekday afternoons, with the audience retreating to the basement in the event of shelling.

The history of Ukrainian culture is one of struggle and defiance; its spirit embodied by the great national poet and champion of independen­ce, Taras Shevchenko, for whom the Kyiv opera house is named. At the very beginning of the current conflict, music became a symbol of resistance. In Odesa, staff and artistes rallied to surround the city’s neobaroque opera house with tank traps and sandbags.

But the music goes on. The morale-boosting properties of popular music are widely celebrated, but classical music touches a different place in the heart, offering not just consolatio­n or a brief respite from fear and destructio­n, but the promise of a future in which the clamour of war will be stilled, while the harmonies remain.

The fragility and power of live performanc­e in times of conflict has a particular resonance: the lunchtime concerts presented by Dame Myra Hess at the National Gallery during the second World War; the desperate 1942 Leningrad premiere of Shostakovi­ch’s 7th symphony, given while the city was under siege, by starving musicians wrapped “like cabbages” in layers of clothes to stop them shivering; the Haydn string trio performed in 1993, again in a city under siege, by the Sarajevo String Quartet – reduced to three members after their second violinist, Momir Vlacic, was killed. Interrupte­d by a bomb that fell so close that the viola player’s music stand was knocked over, the trio’s leader, Dzevad Sabanagic, paused, then raised his bow, and the music continued.

In Kyiv, too, the overture begins. Rosina, Bartolo, Figaro and Count Almaviva sing their sublime tangle of romantic confusions, proving once again that, as the journalist and author Ed Vulliamy wrote in his memoir of music and conflict, When Words Fail, “the many devastatio­ns wreaked by war do not switch off the music”.

In 1988, Prince Charles’s admission, “I happily talk to plants and trees and listen to them,” was widely derided. But in 2009, research by the RHS proved he had been right all along. Ten tomato plants were read excerpts from The Day of the Triffids, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The tomato apostrophi­sed by Darwin’s great-granddaugh­ter, Sarah, was the winner, beating the best male-nurtured runner-up by a decisive two inches.

It is not just the plants that benefit from a herbaceous tête-à-tête: Rebecca Pow, a minister in the Department for Environmen­t, Food and Rural Affairs, has said that talking to the plants in her garden helped with her grief after her husband’s recent death. So, as the Chelsea Flower Show begins, what better moment than to find a bit of foliage and get chatting?

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