Robert Thicknesse on Opera

Odes to joy

OF ALL THE GREAT BORES spawned by the pandemic, few can be more insufferable than those people who went to Venice and then deluged you with crappy pictures of some tragic deserted piazza, accompanied by poorly encrypted encomia about how lucky Venice was to have them. A similar fate befell the blameless old joint — a crowd of pseudo-cultural creeps descending like elitist locusts — in 1814, after the French slunk out, having looted it dry since 1797. The place was shabby and ruinous: the population had shrunk by tens of thousands as the young legged it en masse, the harbours were silted up, pot-hounds haunted the weed-infested campi, wood rotted and paint peeled and it smelt frightful. And yet in this purposeless backwater, a wonderful thing had happened: a…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2021

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