Lord Harewood RIP

I last visited the magnificent Palladian Harewood House whilst on my bike trip through Yorkshire in May 2009. The current (7th) Earl clearly not only cherished his immense inheritance, but had enhanced its collections in so many ways. Of his renowned collection of 20th Century paintings and sculpture, the first glimpse you have upon entering the house is Epstein's still-shocking "Adam". My photograph shows Astrid Zydower's 1984 work, "Orpheus".

As an eager opera-goer in my 20s, my bible was Kobbé, in its radical revision by the same Lord Harewood, who seemed to know everything there was to know about opera. And so indeed Tom Sutcliffe confirms in his comprehensive obituary of the 7th Earl in today's Guardian.

It mentions "the competition between the Wells and Sir Georg Solti's Garden, which faintly echoed the royal operatic rows involving Lord Harewood's Hanoverian forebears in Handel's day." I wonder if he knew this: the 1st Earl's younger brother, Francis, 14 when Handel died, never married, but fathered ten children by one of the day's Covent Garden superstars, Ann Catley. A properly comprehensive biography of her is eagerly awaited, but from what we already know, she (and therefore Francis Lascelles) would certainly have been at the centre of many of the operatic controversies of the day.

Our children (no opera singers amongst them, alas) are part of Francis and Ann's immense brood - 4th grat-grandchildren.

Lunch at The Blue Zucchini

Our good friends Sarah and Helena Priday invited us out yesterday, to The Blue Zucchini in Tetbury. The conversation barely parted from the topic of music, even after Sarah had left early, on Bampton Opera duty. We seemed to be surrounded by excellent raconteurs. Two of the other guests turned out to have been employed by the impressario Victor Hochhauser in a past life: many were the stories that came gushing out about their years working with him, his wife and the rest of their very distinctive cadre. "There was the time," said one, "when Mstislav Rostropovich started tickling Victor, who ran round and round the office laughing helplessly, trying to escape and crying Oh do stop Slava!"

As you may imagine, we were easily the last party to leave the restaurant.

Lost in translation

Opera in English - save when that's the composer's language - perturbs me. The more so now that surtitles have become commonplace. Caroline and I were at the London Coliseum on Monday. Some magnificent orchestral playing - and singing, from principals in demand to sing their roles the world over. Was it "The Knight of the Rose" we saw? No. According to the programme, and as common sense dictates, it was Der Rosenkavalier. So why make someone as distinguished as a Sarah Connolly or a John Tomlinson learn their roles in English, rather than letting them and the rest of the cast sing in the original German? Is it really so as to make opera more accessible? We were very kindly given tickets, but with prices as they are, I really doubt whether the language factor is what brings a wider range of the public in. (Does the film industry dub foreign films? No, it surtitles them.) Is it so as to draw a line between ENO and Covent Garden? Why not just allow them to compete on musical and dramatic excellence? It can't surely be anything to do with the name "English National Opera"! Do Welsh National sing in Welsh? The late Alan Blyth's essay in the ENO programme book itself squishes any argument for performing Der Rosenkavalier in English: Hofmannsthal sets "standards of... literary excellence never before achieved... The text was written in an imaginary parlance... something inevitably lost in translation."

On the way to the Coliseum, we popped in to the recently reopened St Martin-in-the-Fields. Those short-listed for the commission for a new East window were asked to "animate the light" by a work which harmonised with the clear glass of the other church windows. I hope my photograph illustrates how nothing seems to have been lost by Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary in translating this brief.