Poor old thing

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 1st July 2009

On the Saturday night of Glastonbury festival I wasn’t off my face in a field listening to some banging techno, but at the Museum of Garden History watching the noted harpsichordist William Christie and two marvellous sopranos perform songs by Purcell.

So that’s me ****ed, then. I am now officially and incontrovertibly an old fart.

And I don’t like it, let me tell you, I really don’t. I’m not saying Purcell doesn’t rock. He does, especially when served in small doses and there’s a really delicious picnic you can eat on William Bligh’s tomb afterwards. But it just isn’t the same as being pilled up in front of the Other Stage waiting for the strobes and the next enormous break before floating off in the vague direction of the Tiny Tea Tent in search of like-minded monged folk with whom to talk amiable drivel.

The thought of what I was missing was so painful I could scarcely even bring myself to watch the BBC’s extensive Glasto TV coverage. ‘That was just the BEST Glastonbury Sunday I think there’s EVER been,’ said Jo Whiley at one point, and I thought, ‘I SO hate you.’ As, of course, I hate this mag’s editor who was there, and Alex James who went one better by being the main entertainment. Bastards!

Anyway, Mendelssohn. Did you know that, despite being one of the Germans’ favourite composers, he was banned by the Nazis from being performed to Aryans lest his vile Jewishness (as noted by Wagner) sully their racially pure ears? This came as a shock to his descendants who considered themselves Christians, Felix having converted to Lutheranism several generations before. Now suddenly they found themselves in severe danger of being transported to concentration camps, unless they could prove themselves sufficiently Gentile to satisfy the Nazi genealogists.

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