The Great Affair: Mozart in Munich #4: Le Nozze di Figaro

Pride comes before a fall, as we all know, and it was with great and terrible pride that I ventured into the shower having replaced my broken shower gel, only to realise that I had left my conditioner in Slovenia. Oh dear.

I was right in the middle of the complicated dress-getting-into routine, hair dripping, when there was a knock on the door.
“Danny?” I yelled. A vague response I took as a yes. “Just a minute!”
Poor guy. About five minutes later I opened the door to find him sitting in the corridor, doner kebabs in hand. Hopefully the prospect of the opera made him feel a little less like a glorified delivery boy. After identifying which sandwich was “ohne salat”, and once Danny was eventually convinced that the yellow handtowel tucked into my dress was for cleanliness and not a fashion statement (there was some confusion) we ate. And what a fabulous doner it was, and a true Münchner experience, or at least Danny’s Münchner experience.

Danny went to change, and I tried to stick my feet together. After stepping into my shoes, I suggested we leave at 6.25 instead of 6.30. “That’s in four minutes,” Danny pointed out incredulously. “Can you be ready in four minutes?” Of course I could, I declared, and applied my makeup with due expediency. Eschewing foundation and starting to put on sun cream, Danny mocked in a way I felt was unworthy of him.
“The sun is going down, Kathleen.”
“I have sensitive skin,” I protested.
The thing that held us up was my ridiculous necklace, that was all tangled up. Eventually I just put it on knotted and continued to untangle as we walked. We descended the stairs, with me trying to highlight the different artistic themes of each flight. “I really like this modern one,” I gushed, and stuck my arm in a cactus.

Outside… well, fine then, yes, the sun had gone down enough that sun cream wasn’t really necessary. And I was all sticky. We found our way back to the opera, and took the requisite pictures demanded by Mariam (though I wish I wasn’t doing quite what I am doing in them – I had the envelope with the tickets out, then stuck it back in my bag for pictures, then didn’t want to have it fall out, so I’m clutching my bag before me in both hands, like Miss Marple).

Then began the challenge of finding our “seats” – “Stehplatz”, now there’s a word I should have looked up. We were standing with a not wonderful view of the stage, on the end of a row, so we spent a good few minutes climbing up and down the steps to let people past. Sorry, Danny.

But he took it in good spirits and as soon as the overture started, I had forgotten the inconvenience. You can’t be in the Munich opera house, listening to the Marriage of Figaro, and not feel somewhat fortunate. Likewise, to be in an auditorium with so many great performers on stage, live! The countess sticks out in my mind – played by Anja Harteros, a fact that had escaped me before as I know of very few current opera singers, and didn’t pay attention. Her aria in Act III, E Susanna non vien!...Dove sono i bei momenti, captivated me, and my goodness how the auditorium erupted at the end. I’ve never seen anyone actually stop a show before. But numerous cries of Brava later, things continued. Se Vuol Ballare, the Cavatina, was great fun. People jumped out of windows, horses didn’t see things, gardeners complained (the gardener was great); it was a riot! Danny particularly liked Figaro’s aria, Tutto è disposto...Aprite un po' quegli occhi, about all women being evil and only using love for their own ends, while I liked the same aria because it began “Open your eyes, you stupid men”. A primordial conflict given contemporary restatement through the classical era? It was all over too soon, though possibly not too soon for our feet, as we both spent a lot of time stepping in and out of our shoes – barefoot at the opera; what would Mozart think? Also, our knowledge of what actually went on was patchy, but we got the gist. We think. Since I was struggling to see the German supertitles under the silly little fringy curtains they dangled from the balcony, I was fairly confident that it would be even worse for Danny, who is some inches taller. Sure enough, we found that we had only a vague understanding between us – he understood pretty much everything he read but didn’t risk his spinal alignment following all supertitles. I, meanwhile, was reading everything and getting about eighty percent. Curtains – bad idea. I bought a programme with libretto (in German), so I can look stuff up later.

Once Danny had picked up his stuff, we had to part painfully. He admitted he would probably cry later, and through his brave front I could tell he would be incapacitated till Monday. Wouldn’t you? Really, I don’t know how some of you get through the day without me. I have this effect on people.

Before bed, I remembered to take a few pictures of the cafes below, since they looked pretty in the evening.

I had just gone to bed when the rain started, as if someone had switched a shower on. It was heavy, and at the same moment a refreshingly cool breeze swept into my room. Lovely. Lightning followed, but the thunder was quiet, and I was soon asleep. About an hour later I was awoken by a deafening thunderclap. As I lay watching the reflected lightning play on the ceiling there was a bright flash, a crack, and the shadow of something falling – followed by a loud clattering, like debris falling from a building site. I was still half-asleep, so I resisted the urge to rush to the window to investigate right away, but an hour later when the chainsaw started up I was forced into alertness. There was a police car outside, a bunch of policemen standing around with a woman in a dressing gown, one at one end of the platz with a chainsaw and another shining a torch around. Between the two more active members of the assembly was a large tree, now lying between the two cages on the wreckage of a few tables and umbrellas.