Dinner, Drinks and Disaster
A playlist of power dinners, caffeine cravings and cursed fruit
It finally feels like actual summer in London. Balmy 27 degrees, windows open, pints poured and the summer festivals beginning to stir.
There are music festivals everywhere, of course, but 2 of the great classical ones are Salzburg and Glyndebourne. Salzburg has the grand European weight of it all: concerts, recitals, opera, serious people in traditional Austrian attire (Lederhosen guys). Glyndebourne, meanwhile, is its own very particular thing. An opera house built by one man for his singer wife, in the middle of the Sussex countryside, with an interval long enough for people to have a full picnic in the gardens.
And when I say picnic, I don’t necessarily mean someone eating a slightly warm egg sandwich out of a Pret bag. Though, to be clear, that is absolutely closer to what I brought last time. Glyndebourne picnics can be a whole production: champagne, catering, proper plates, and full china sets.
This year, Glyndebourne opened its season with Puccini’s Tosca, which amazed me because it’s the first time the opera has ever been staged there. For such a famous piece, and such a reliable crowd-pleaser, that feels pretty incredible. Maybe it says something about Glyndebourne itself: when a festival is that established, it doesn’t always need to reach for the most obvious titles.
Anyway, the reviews came in, and one detail immediately caught my attention: the famous Act II has been set in a restaurant. The Times called it ‘murder with spaghetti’, which is frankly quite hard to resist.
And yes, it’s not traditional. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Because food in opera is very rarely just food. A meal can be power. A drink can be seduction. A dinner table can become a battlefield. Someone can be eating calmly while another person’s life is falling apart in the next room, which is exactly what happens in Tosca. The civilised surface is the point. The napkins, the wine, the plates, the table manners. All of it sitting on top of something much uglier.
So this week, inspired by festival season, Glyndebourne picnics, and Scarpia apparently having his dinner in a restaurant, I’m looking at classical music where food and drink come with strings attached.
Power dinners. Caffeine cravings. Cursed fruit.
Tosca: Act II - Giacomo Puccini
Tosca is one of those operas where the title character is, in a way, playing herself. Floria Tosca is an opera singer. A famous one. She is glamorous, devout, dramatic, jealous, and very used to being the centre of attention. In Act I, she arrives at the church where her lover, the painter Cavaradossi, is working, notices that the Madonna he has painted looks suspiciously like another woman, and immediately spirals.
By the end of the opera, this will seem like a fairly minor inconvenience.
The plot underneath all the jealousy is political. Cavaradossi has been helping Angelotti, an escaped political prisoner, hide from the authorities in Rome. Unfortunately for everyone, the man in charge of finding him is Baron Scarpia, one of opera’s most unpleasant creations: police chief, predator, manipulator, and the kind of man who seems to enjoy cruelty as if it were a fine wine.
At the end of Act I comes the famous Te Deum, which I’m including in the playlist because it tells us almost everything we need to know about him. A Te Deum is a Christian hymn of praise, and Puccini sets it inside a grand church service, with bells, organ, chorus and ritual. But while the crowd is singing to God, Scarpia is thinking about Tosca. He wants Angelotti captured, Cavaradossi destroyed, and Tosca in his possession. Sacred music and filthy thoughts happening at the same time. It’s grotesque, but it is also brilliant.
Then Act II opens in Scarpia’s apartment. He is eating dinner.
That detail matters. He is not pacing around in a rage. He is not losing control. He is dining. Meanwhile, Cavaradossi has been arrested and is being questioned. When he refuses to give up Angelotti’s hiding place, Scarpia has him tortured offstage while Tosca is forced to listen.
That is the horror of the scene. We don’t need to see the torture. We hear enough. Cavaradossi’s cries come from another room, Scarpia continues applying pressure, and Tosca is pushed further and further towards breaking point. It is not just violence. It is violence with table manners.
Eventually Scarpia offers Tosca a deal: give herself to him, and he will save Cavaradossi’s life. That is the moment that leads into ‘Vissi d’arte’, one of the most famous soprano arias in the repertoire. Tosca turns to God and asks what she has done to deserve this. She has lived for art, she has lived for love, she has helped others. Why is this happening to her?
And that is worth remembering next time you hear the aria out of context. It is not just a beautiful sad song. It comes after an almost unbearable stretch of psychological torture. It is a release, but not a peaceful one. More like the moment someone finally cracks.
Scarpia says the execution will be staged. Tosca believes him. Then, when he comes close to claim his reward, she stabs him.
But this is opera, so even that doesn’t save anyone. In Act III, Cavaradossi is shot for real. Tosca rushes over, tells him to stop pretending, and then realises what has happened. The soldiers come for her. She jumps from the battlements. And that’s it. No soft landing. No epilogue. Just disaster.
Don Giovanni: banquet scene - W. A. Mozart
Don Giovanni is Mozart’s version of the Don Juan story: the aristocrat who devotes his life to seducing, deceiving and discarding women, while somehow expecting the world to keep applauding him for it.
Early in the opera, his servant Leporello sings the famous Catalogue Aria, where he lists the women Don Giovanni has seduced across Europe. The numbers are ridiculous: hundreds here, dozens there, and in Spain alone, 1,003. It is funny, but it is also disgusting, which is basically the whole opera in miniature.
I think Don Giovanni might be my favourite Mozart opera. It has 3 major female roles, 5 important male roles, brilliant arias, brilliant ensembles, and a strange mix of comedy, danger and darkness that Mozart handles almost too well. One minute it feels like a farce. The next, the ground drops beneath you.
The opera begins with Don Giovanni escaping from Donna Anna’s room after attacking her. Her father, the Commendatore, rushes in to defend her, and Don Giovanni kills him. That murder hangs over the whole opera, even when everyone on stage seems to be running in different directions: Donna Anna wants justice, Donna Elvira wants him to repent, Zerlina gets caught in his charm, Leporello wants to survive being his servant, and Don Giovanni just keeps going.
Then we reach the banquet scene.
Don Giovanni is at home, eating an enormous dinner while musicians play for him. In a nice little joke, Mozart has the onstage band play snippets of popular operas of the time, including a tune from his own The Marriage of Figaro. It is a man turning dinner into theatre. He wants music, food, wine, servants, applause. Even at the end, he is still staging himself.
Donna Elvira arrives and begs him one last time to change. He refuses. She leaves, screams, and then something extraordinary happens: the statue of the Commendatore appears.
This is the dead man Don Giovanni killed at the start of the opera. Earlier, Don Giovanni had mockingly invited the statue to dinner. Now the statue has turned up.
The music changes completely. It becomes darker, heavier, colder. Mozart uses chromaticism, which means notes moving by tiny half-steps, to create a sliding, uneasy feeling. It’s as if the music itself has lost stable ground. The timpani, basically the drums of the orchestra, add these terrifying bursts of weight. Suddenly this is no longer a dinner party. It is a reckoning.
The Commendatore asks Don Giovanni to repent. Don Giovanni refuses. Then he asks Don Giovanni to give him his hand. Again, he agrees. It is the last act of arrogance from a man who has mistaken bravado for courage.
And then he is dragged to hell.
