In sight of the <em>Ring</em>

Anniversary-consciousness is no doubt primarily commercially driven, certainly in the music world, where the fact that a scarcely remembered composer has been dead for exactly 300 years is a reason for featuring him as This Week’s Composer on Radio Three, but more importantly for many record companies to persuade us that it is time to revalue his contribution to the Orpheus myth, the first to have a bass hero, etc., etc.

Anniversary-consciousness is no doubt primarily commercially driven, certainly in the music world, where the fact that a scarcely remembered composer has been dead for exactly 300 years is a reason for featuring him as This Week’s Composer on Radio Three, but more importantly for many record companies to persuade us that it is time to revalue his contribution to the Orpheus myth, the first to have a bass hero, etc., etc. Last year was a chance, less gratefully taken by some than others, to listen to every dramatic work by Handel, and enormous proportions of the output of Haydn, Purcell, Mendelssohn. Whether this made much difference to anyone’s view of these composers is not easily answerable, though it may have done something to dent the exorbitant claims of Handelians about their hero’s incapacity for writing anything except masterpieces.

Though not widely advertised yet, 2013 will be the bicentenary of Wagner’s and Verdi’s births, and the centenary of Britten’s. Since the first two are great solely on account of their operas, and the last is clearly more important as an operatic composer than anything else, the opera houses of the world are going to have their work cut out. It’s hard to know whether to be excited or filled with dread at the prospect. Leaving Britten to one side, only on the grounds that his operas are not difficult to stage or cast, we will inevitably be faced with vast cycles of the two 19th-century giants’ works, about which the operatic directors are presumably already salivating.