大象传媒

Sexual intercourse, according to the poet Philip Larkin, began in 1963. Well, it was certainly in the news in 1963, with the climax of the Profumo scandal and the very public divorce case of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. The latter case was brought, on the grounds of Margaret's serial adultery, by her husband The Duke, himself no stranger to philandering.

The lurid details of Margaret鈥檚 sex life were dragged through the court. The judge seemed almost to enjoy his disgust in revealing the depths of her depravity: her many lovers and strange sexual practices (the likes of which, the judge said, were seldom found north of Marrakech). The hypocrisy, the racism and the misogyny of the British establishment were fully on display in a courtroom spectacle; a high drama, peopled by larger-than-life characters. It was, you might say, operatic.

Three decades after the divorce case, and shortly after the death of the Duchess, two young men in their 20s took up the challenge of putting her tragedy on the operatic stage. Thomas Ad猫s was a prodigiously gifted young star of British music and Philip Hensher a novelist and critic.

Powder Her Face, as the duo called their chamber-sized opera, received its world premiere at Cheltenham on 1 July 1995, capturing perfectly the high-class sleaze, the camp, the cigarette-holder glamour of the world of the Duchess ("sex and perfume and furs", as Philip Hensher memorably put it). Margaret had been a much photographed beauty, a debutante, even a line in the English version of Cole Porter鈥檚 song You鈥檙e The Top. The opera opens with a deliciously sleazy Piazzola-like tango, as two of the ageing Duchess鈥檚 servants lark around dressing up in her clothes and makeup and aping her entitled bad behaviour. We cut back to the 1930s and Hensher and Ades give us a perfect No毛l Coward-like song, sung by a character called The Lounge Lizard. 鈥淭hey wrote that song for me, you know," sings the Duchess.

But it鈥檚 not all high camp and biting irony. Powder Her Face is dazzling in its use of the full range of expression that only opera can offer: from the eye-wateringly high coloratura of a seduction aria to the deep, funereal bass of the Angel of Death (in his guise as a hotel manager). We even get a quote from Schubert鈥檚 Death and the Maiden, just to underline the point. Ad猫s almost fools us into believing that his small ensemble is a huge, late Romantic orchestra. Early on, we hear a searing orchestral interlude which wouldn't have been out of place in Berg鈥檚 Lulu (another opera about the fear of female sexuality).

For all its knowing cleverness, Powder Her Face is a tragedy. As unappealing, entitled, and out-of-step with the times as the Duchess was, the music tells us to feel for her as, at the end, the Hotel Manager tells her that nobody can avoid this moment. Her car is waiting: death has arrived.

This is an excerpt from a recording by the Almeida Ensemble directed by Thomas Ad猫s with soprano Jill Gomez and bass Roger Bryson.

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