Never trust an opera critic – unless he’s got a six-pack
I WONDER what Rupert Christiansen, opera critic for The Telegraph, looks like naked. Does he have that V snaking into his shorts, you know the one sported by Tom Daley and David Beckham? A pronounced vein on his bicep from an addiction to the gym? And nice abs, those are important.
Hmmm, what else? Good, professionally cleaned teeth with no bad, cheap caps where you can see a dark join. Is he a good dresser, by which I don’t mean does he wear a panama hat and chinos, the uniform of the privately educated posh boy, but something tailored and expensive? Does he brush his tongue? Have crusty feet? EEuwwww! I certainly hope not!
I want to know all these things about him before I can believe a word of what he writes as an opera critic. Unfair, I hear you murmur. Sexist, even! Well, not as unfair as his review of Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught, 27, who stars as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. He called her ‘dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom dishabille, disguised as Mariandel or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William’.
The Financial Times’s male critic was almost as bad, calling the rising star of international opera a ‘chubby bundle of puppy fat’.
In The Guardian, where female commentators pretend to be feminists but are merely bad tempered (thank you, Hanif Kureishi, for giving me that line), she was called ‘stocky’.
Scant mention was given by any of the above critics to the woman’s talent, which is undoubtedly gi-normous (sorry). (An aside: a female critic writing in The Guardian last week about how great it is that Mariah Carey has had her 20lb of postpartum twins fat airbrushed for her new album cover, rather than having actual plastic surgery, once asked a rather curvy friend of mine: ‘So, are you terminally single?’ Just ’cos you’re thin, girlfriend, doesn’t mean you’re attractive…)
Anyhow, what this sorry, shameful bullying of a young talent tells us is that it isn’t just teenage girls who have been brainwashed to believe being thin equals being good.
Everyone now feels this way: even posh, well-educated men! I am sick and tired of women’s looks being eviscerated when they have nothing whatsoever to do with their work; in fact, isn’t Tara Erraught’s stature an asset, given she has to belt out arias without a microphone? I’m not an opera expert, having grown up in Essex and been educated at Southend Tech, but even I, someone who has worshipped at the altar of Vogue since 1975, choose my records for how they sound: I’d choose Carole King over an over aerobicised, airbrushed Beyonce any day.
But I have also been asking myself, are women to blame for the current status quo?
Have we made the bigger bird at the top such a rarity, she sticks out (again, sorry). It is OK to have one curvaceous, famous, successful singer at large (Adele, and again, sorry, but as we can see it is so easy, and cheap, and lazy to make fun of bigger women), but that’s your lot, mate. There is a quota. Just so you think the world has got a bit nicer.
Trust me. It hasn’t.
PS I WENT to Brigitte Bardot’s house on Thursday. I knew only the road name, but recognised the water bar by the gate for passing dogs. She is now 79, and a recluse. I took a selfie by her wheelie bin. I wanted to pay homage, not because of her great beauty, but because she has always loved animals. Her passion is what has withstood the test of time, not her face. But someone like Rupert Christiansen, who probably inhales foie gras for breakfast, would never have the intelligence to grasp this simple fact…