Alexandra Coghlan

Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history

Flamboyant theatrics were part of Michael Volpe’s life as CEO of Opera Holland Park. But those of his feuding Italian relatives rival anything seen on stage

Michael Volpe.  
issue 29 June 2024

‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks… estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly Anglicised, Sunday-best ‘Michael’ at odds with the sly, sinuously Italian ‘Volpe’ – fox.

The scene where the elderly Nicola cuts his young grandson dead in the street is pure Puccini

Fast forward 50 years and this particular fox is well and truly in the hen house. Volpe is a boy done good: a leading figure in the UK classical music establishment, the founder and former CEO of Opera Holland Park, a trenchant voice in broadsheet opinion columns, now with an OBE pinned to his lapel. His first book, Noisy at the Wrong Times (2015), retraced the unlikely path that took him, a bright, mouthy, belligerent child from ‘a two-roomed slum’, via the enlightened state boarding school Woolverstone Hall (the ‘poor man’s Eton’), to a successful career in the most elite of arts. Now his second book gleefully complicates the neat narrative of success the first seemed to offer.

Volpe is clear about the book he set out to write: ‘empirical’; ‘scientifically and socially important’; a dispassionate examination of nationalism and identity in the wake of Brexit, complete with ‘data and interviews’. Thank goodness that isn’t the book he wrote. The only time Do I Bark Like A Dog? approaches arm’s-length is when it takes a run-up to a dramatic punch.

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