Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather.

The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.

What? Why? No time to wonder, because you forgot to disable autoplay and YouTube, which sees your most secret desires, has already launched another distraction: Kaiserball, one and a half hours of prime Viennese movie-operetta from 1956. There are palaces, pretty girls and Habsburg uniforms. ‘Between Salzburg and Bad Ischl runs a dear little railway,’ goes the song, and a steam train chuffs through Technicolor mountains. This stuff is like crack for me, and the algorithms know it. That’s the afternoon gone.

Okay, a new day; time to see what YouTube offers the serious opera-lover. Michael Tanner recently described an extraordinary 1962 Bayreuth Parsifal, and YouTube holds open an irresistible possibility: what if, against all odds and copyright laws, someone secretly recorded that unforgettable performance? No? Well, it was worth a look, because YouTube does have a Bavarian Radio tape of another complete Parsifal from the same run, admittedly without the last-minute substitution of Astrid Varnay, whose Kundry burned itself so fiercely on to Tanner’s memory.