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Diary

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Matthew d'Ancona spends his week enjoying Wagner

Back from the fire on the mountain-top, a reminder of how grey London life can be. The attacks on Caroline Michel, new boss at the literary agency PFD, are as dreary as it gets. Caroline, for many years a senior publisher, transformed William Morris’s operation in London. So when I heard that PFD had poached her I thought, like everyone who knows her, that this venerable literary institution would be united in its excitement at pulling off such a coup. Instead: the distinctive sound of ruffled tweed, muttering men, and a flurry of resignations (ostensibly over the thwarting of a management buyout by the firm’s agents). Well, there is no shortage of jealousy in this town of Caroline and of her equally talented husband, Matthew Evans. Add to that tall poppy syndrome, a heavy dose of sexism, and season with envy — et voilà. Caroline will go from strength to strength, but the sad truth is that, nearly 30 years after we elected our first female Prime Minister, there is still part of the British psyche that cannot cope with successful women.

Another day, another Brünnhilde. At Sunday’s performance of Siegfried, the Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin steps up to the plate. Her duet with the Walsung hero is no less stunning that her fellow stand-in’s on Friday. To call such a feat grace under pressure does not do it full justice.

‘Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh’! Selig grüßt dich den Weib!’ Brünnhilde’s final words end the saga, the curtain falls on the blazing hall of the gods, and this world of love, greed, magic and cosmic drama recedes from view. And we Ring-followers disperse into the London streets, where on every corner there is a Siegfried, a Fricka, a Mime, a Sieglinde, a crowd of Valkyrie carousing in a bar, a watchful Wanderer by the Covent Garden merry-go-round: an autumnal city of a million private myths, a million secret legends of the heart.

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