In a manuscript compiled around 1525 by the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi, we read that, several decades earlier, an Italian monk had been travelling in Ethiopia, and had encountered or heard a description of the city of Barrara, capital of Abbasia, near the source of the Blue Nile. This city is found on the extravagantly beautiful Fra Mauro map, completed in Murano in the Venetian lagoon around 1450 – and both accounts note that Barrara is the primary residence of the local King, Presta Jani. In the same manuscript, an itinerary from Venice to Ethiopia via Jerusalem, made around 1400 and recorded in Latin, describes how a local ruler is called Presto Johannes, and has twelve lesser kings under him – these are helpfully listed .
Later, in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius describes the whole of his masterful image of East Africa as a ‘Description of the empire of Presbyter John, or of the Abyssinians’. Now, the king himself is called David, which might indicate one of three things: in the European imagination, the territory is called the land of Prester John much as Britain was said to be named after its Trojan founder Brutus; or that European commentators realised that the king of Ethiopia had a name, and were using a title analogous to Dalai Lama; or that, much as in continental and insular French texts pagan idols were called mahomets, so non-specific foreign kings are called John: literally, Johnny Foreigner.
In various medieval traditions, from the 12th to 15th centuries, Prester John is the all-powerful king of a colossal empire somewhere near India – which, confusingly, can also be Ethiopia – and is explicitly a Christian. Though Marco Polo thought he was a recently-conquered Kerait warlord, Ong Khan, the majority of European medieval sources, from the famous, spurious Letter of 1165 to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, asserted his Christianity, which carried with it the hope of alliance with a Christian superpower in Central Asia against a heathen enemy, be it the Seljuks or the Timurids.
Denial: Not a river in Egypt.
I cannot comment as to whether the desire to render the stranger in our own image is an exclusively European trait. Somehow I doubt it. But the case of Malory’s Saracen-knight Sir Palomides is symptomatic of the longstanding approach taken by European writers and artists to admirable or notable foreign figures: despite being always described as ‘Saracen’, Palomides has no physical descriptors and even talks to himself in English. Oroonoko, Omai, recent depictions of ancient Egyptians, even Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – European writers and artists have historically imposed European, or ‘civilised’, characteristics over other, more reasonably accurate ones. This is obviously problematic, and would rightly not be tolerated (or, in social media speak, ‘called out’) in the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, what should our modern response be to historical works of art, theatre, literature, or music, which are at odds with our sensibilities but which were representative of a legitimate attitude or artistic movement at the time of their creation? This week, Mark Rylance said that he would not be happy with school-aged children reading the more anti-Semitic bits of Shakespeare. Whose responsibility is it to censor or redact Shakespeare? I’m currently reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (1950); its vocabulary is very much Of Its Time, but it would be quite idiotic to infer any cultural or racial chauvinism on Fermor’s part from this. The episode of the disappearing ‘chinaman’ statue in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day raises questions about both language and art: would we decry the chinoiserie style today, and do we accordingly despise the interior decorators of the 1750s?
Last night I watched the ENO’s new production of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, unfinished at the time of his death in 1695. Purcell had written three acts of music, including dances and several arias, and the safe assumption is that his finished work would have served as musical interludes for John Dryden’s play The Indian Queen. The two had previously collaborated on King Arthur, first staged in 1691. Dryden’s play revolves around the warring Peruvians and Mexicans in the period before the Spanish invasions, and focuses especially on a complex love-plot involving Montezuma, rightful heir to Mexico, now employed in the Peruvian army, the Peruvian princess Orazia, the Mexican usurper Zempoalla (the titular queen), and her son Acacis. Zempoalla is Boudicca, Phaedra and Dido in a single unit. Her suicide takes the dramatic place of an averted human sacrifice, and Montezuma is restored, Guiderius-style, to the throne of Mexico. It is a baroque imagining of a foreign civilisation, where all characters adhere to standards of theatrical courtesy, like Handel’s Tamerlano or Nahum Tate’s infamous rewrite of King Lear. Said would no doubt hate it.
The ENO went in an entirely different direction. The programme triumphantly declares that Purcell’s work has been ‘completed by Peter Sellars’, the prolific American director. This feat has been achieved by splicing Purcell’s surviving music (described as a ‘torso’ by Sellars) with re-worded songs from the Greatest Hits of his Orpheus Britannicus, his choral pieces setting the words of the penitential psalms, and diegetic monologues from The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by the Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar. Now, this is hardly the place to address the patronising attitude Sellars holds of Purcell and Dryden (he has described Restoration London as ‘a vision of hell’, called Dryden’s play ‘bizarre fantasy’ and said ‘there was no such thing as opera in England in the seventeenth century’). Dryden’s plots, settings and characters have vanished, to be replaced with a practically single-strand narrative concerning the marriage of Aztec princess Teculihuatzin (the titular queen, now somewhat demoted) to a conquistador, and her shifting fortunes as her people are slaughtered and her daughter is brought up as a Spaniard.
Aguirre, Wrath of Codpiece.
It has been amusing to read reviews over the past few days and see how professional critics struggle to reconcile their disappointment at its disjointed structure and gimmicky staging to their sense that this, as ‘event theatre’ by a renowned director, ought to be understood as visionary. The soloists were for the most part wonderful – especially the countertenor Vince Yi and the soprano Lucy Crowe – while the orchestra, conducted by Laurence Cummings, was excellent. The troupe of dancers, following Christopher Williams’ choreography, beautifully interpreted a set of masque-like sequences to suit the graffiti wasteland of the stage – according to the elderly gentleman behind me, perhaps a useful dovetailing of Sellars’ aesthetic and the ENO’s much-publicised financial tribulations.
Nonetheless my problems with the production are manifold, and the majority can be summarised thus: there was no nuance, no subtext, anywhere in the production. From the long dramatic pauses inserted into the choral pieces, to the farcically literal miming of the chorus, to the gun-toting, camouflaged Spanish soldiers, to the Guantanamo Bay imagery, the effect was to bludgeon the audience with Sellars’ interpretation of Purcell’s music: colonialism is bad and you should feel bad. Thus the most interesting aspect of Sellars’ additions was the casting of the Puerto Rican actress Maritxell Carrero as the narrator-self of the displaced Teculihuatzin and her daughter Leonor, the voice of a Spanish-speaking actress superimposed on the confessions of an Aztec princess and her estranged, Spanish-speaking child.
Yet the narrator’s presence was symptomatic of Sellars’ leading of his audience. She served mostly for narrative exposition, and broke up dramatically compelling scenes in the manner of cinematic voiceover, too often falling into the ‘little did I know’ formula. Elsewhere, she stood next to the ‘action’, as it were, and effectively explained, even as the singers staged the marriage consummation, that the characters were having sex and were enjoying it. These sections – of which, if I remember correctly, there were three – were in effect Aguirre, Wrath of God if crossed with Fifty Shades of Grey. The narrator could be seen as the only real character, and appeared in every scene. The singer playing Teculihuatzin, soprano Julia Bullock, was given correspondingly little to do – all the more surprising since the role was created for her.
I found myself thinking, perhaps I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t understand it. But I fear I understood it all too well, and the intellectual get-out clause that I’ve since created – that Sellars plunders and marginalises Purcell’s music as an ironic reflection of the plunders and massacres of the period of the Spanish conquest – would, if true, be a statement of such overwhelming artistic hyperbole that even Pseud’s Corner wouldn’t take it. Such was the overt presentation of Sellars’ themes that what I mainly took away from it was a feeling of being patronised, and a crushing disappointment at the treatment of Purcell’s music. I adore Purcell, his dramatic, orchestral, vocal and choral music, in many contexts and stagings, and still remember fondly the ENO’s 2006 production of King Arthur, where the Cold Genius emerged from a fridge. I wasn’t expecting gold-plated armour and elaborate Sun King sets. I did expect Purcell.
noon auctoritee 