politics – Page 11 – All Things Considered

30 Jun

The Suffering Servant

Today is the official deadline for the conclusion of talks on Iran’s nuclear capacity. There will be no conclusion and the talks will continue until Obama gets the deal he so much craves – no matter that such a deal will be a betrayal of Israel. There have been so many bluffs, lies and obfuscations that it is impossible to see clearly what the details of an agreement would look like.

The Iranians are negotiating…No, let me stop beating about the bush…the Iranians are, as usual, lying. They claim they have no intention of producing nuclear weapons and insist their uranium enrichment process is entirely for peaceful purposes. If you believe that, you might as well also believe that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra are in charge of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Why should one of the most oil-rich nations on earth want nuclear energy?

Obama, through his big mouth mouthpiece the egregious John Kerry, is so desperate for a deal that he will grant Iran all the concessions and exemptions they demand. Yes demand. For it is not Kerry and his boss the White House speechifier-in-chief who are running this show: it is Iran’s supreme leader the Ayatollah Khamenei. Iran is a theocracy – or more exactly and Allatocracy, since Allah is certainly not HO Theos – and what the supreme leader says goes.

Iran’s demands are so preposterous that no negotiating partner in his senses could take them seriously for a minute. They will allow UN inspections of their nuclear facilities – but only some facilities. This is like a thorough police search in which, however, the cops don’t look in the attic. Iran will not allow inspectors into its military bases – so how could we know that nuclear weapons were not being produced at such a site? They will not permit the questioning of Iranian scientists who previously worked on the nuclear programme.

Frankly, the talks stink and the inevitable agreement will stink to high heaven.

Does it matter? Won’t there be a delightful peace dividend out of an agreement, improved trading arrangements, smiles and handshakes all round? That’s what it will look like and Obama will claim a triumph to stick in his legacy. The rest of the world, including our very own Dave and the maleficent EU, will praise Obama as the man who – I can see the headlines – BROKE THE STALEMATE AND FINALLY BROUGHT IRAN IN OUT OF THE COLD.

Only one nation will demur – and with good reason. Israel cannot allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, for the Iranian authorities have pledged many times to wipe Israel off the map.

If they get the bomb they will be able to do just that, immediately and without warning. Thus a pre-emptive strike by Israel would be the country’s only chance.

The Iranians hate Israel because that state works efficiently and has a decent set of political liberties, including freedom to criticise the government. By contrast, Iran is a barbaric tyranny which practises imprisonment without trial, torture and routine executions.

The Israelis have no option but to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. They must do that or perish. The tragic possibility is that they might do just that and perish.

In thwarting Iran’s nuclear plans, Israel will have done the rest of the world the greatest favour – perhaps at the cost of its own survival

It reminds me of Isaiah chapter 53 and the poetic, prophetic image of Israel as God’s Suffering Servant who surely hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.

God help Israel…

23 Jun

A whiff of grapeshot

The Church Militant Tendency was well-represented on the BBC this morning when Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser came on Thought for the Day to tell us that the victory at Waterloo was a bad thing: “We worship the Prince of Peace, not the Duke of Wellington.” By contrast, he insisted, Napoleon was a good thing. If he had won and taken over in England, he would have abolished the nobility and we would have had no more of all that reactionary stuff about the Establishment of church and state. Fraser told us straight: there is nothing about patriotism in the Christian Faith.

It’s worth taking a few moments to summarise the doings of Fraser’s hero Bonaparte. He was no egalitarian, no people’s man. He set himself up as tyrant of France, killed four thousand by cannon in Paris in a single day, established concentration camps in the Caribbean and destroyed hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers out of naked self-interest.

Ordinary Englishmen did not long for the rule of Napoleon: they celebrated in the streets when they heard the good news from Waterloo.

Why does Fraser admire the tyrant Bonaparte? Because the socialism and collectivism espoused by such as Fraser always ends in the establishment of tyrannies. Where these doctrines are practised moderately, they lead merely to the impoverishment of the people. Where they are practised thoroughly, they lead to genocide and the gulag.

Never mind the history of the 19th century, Dr Fraser: just cast your eyes over the 20th century. Consider Napoleon’s heirs and successors: Stalin, Mao and the national socialist Hitler.

Actually, Giles Fraser is quite a phenomenon in his own right and deserves our close attention.

He is the philosopher-priest who appeared last year on Christmas University Challenge to demonstrate that he doesn’t know his Aristotle from his Spinoza.

Fraser is that former canon of St Paul’s who, when the rabble-rousing oiks from Occupy turned up, invited them into the cathedral and told the police, who were trying their best to protect the place, to go away. By these actions, Fraser not only precipitated his own resignation but also that of a fine dean.

What should have been the fate of the ecclesiastical-political lout Fraser? A posting into some decent obscurity would have been merciful .

Instead, he was immediately championed by the Bishop of London who proclaimed, “Giles’s voice is a voice that must continue to be heard.”

And so heard it is. He was given a new parish, a column on The Guardian – where else? – and regular appearances on Thought for the Day. He also turns up to parade his mastery of the non sequitur on The Moral Maze

Such a man should have been dispatched with a whiff of grapeshot. His hero Napoleon would be the man to do it, of course.

18 Jun

Coniuntio Oppositorum

I count myself fortunate indeed to be living in a world of infinite possibilities and for that we have at long last escaped that oppressive environment in which you had to take what you were given. For example, when I was a boy I supposed I would always be a boy. Only recently I have I heard the voice of the liberating gospel of sexual freedom whisper – what do I mean whisper? I mean of course shout – in my ear that I can become a girl if I like. And that I can get government help with the plumbing in order to do so. I also grew up with the shockingly unimancipated and repressive Christian notion that, if I wanted to get married, it would have to be to a woman.

Thank whatever gods there be – the old pagan gods actually – that Christianity is now inoperative, so that today I am free to marry a man and to become a woman. I suppose that’s as it should be really: a man married to a woman.

But I have a few questions. What if, exercising my pagan rights, I marry a man and then he decides to turn into a woman? Would this be grounds for my divorcing him/her? Would we, after the complicated plumbing involved, even still be married?

You might think such arcane issues are intractable and labyrinthine in their personal, moral and social ramifications. But their settlement is easy-peasy compared with something I’ve just been reading about.

In the USA Rachel Dolezal says “I do take exception because it’s a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of, ‘Are you black or white?’”

I will try to get this as clear as I can and set it out in black and white, so to speak.

Ms Dolezal has resigned from her position as a big noise in The National Association for the Advancement of Black People because, while she had formerly always claimed to be black, she was recently exposed – by her parents! – as white.

I find this most disappointing, for clearly western society is not as enlightened and liberated as I had thought. Surely Ms Dolezal had no cause to resign just for telling that little porky about being black when she’s white? I thought we could all be whatever we want to be. Clearly this is not so and the forces of social oppression are not finally defeated.

Unfortunately, the matter is even more complicated. Ms Dolezal now claims she is black and indeed she worked tirelessly for an association which promotes the advancement of black people and denounces racial prejudice against them. But Ms Dolezal has form. Eleven years ago she sued her university because, she claimed, its authorities had shown racial prejudice towards her as a white woman by favouring some black people in her class.

So it appears we don’t have to be black or white; we can be black and white provided, as in the comparable case of sex – what they now call gender – we do these things sequentially.

At this point high imagination fails and I start to get all my metaphors more mixed up than even Ms Dolezal: kettles calling pans black; having your cake and eating it; one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go, go go!

O brave new world that hath such people in it…

16 Jun

Laudato si

Pope Francis is proving to be a nippy mover. Following his encyclical denouncing capitalism, he has written to us all again in a long letter about climate change and what he refers to as “the planet.” Well, he was wrong to condemn capitalism which is the single economic system to have raised more millions out of poverty than all the other systems ever tried. Perhaps the Holy Father can make up for his earlier mistake in his new letter? And, contrary to popular opinion, the Pope is not infallible except when speaking ex cathedra on matters of dogma.

It’s a gloomy read. Climate change is a catastrophic threat to our well-being, and even to our survival, and most of it is our own fault. He adds, “The Earth is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

Is it really as bad as all that?

No, not really. The prophets of doom themselves in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose non-scientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist – reckon that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of 0.05◦C per decade. Effectually, there has been no warming for the last fifteen years.

Leave aside for a moment the apostles of the new secular religion of man-made apocalypse and instead bring on the experts and some facts. Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, writes, “In the constant media barrage of possible greenhouse-related catastrophes, almost any event is now linked to climate change. We should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice off the global temperature when this constitutes a poor use of resources and when we could use these funds far more effectively in the developing world.” For saying this, Lomborg has had death threats from the new politically-motivated apocalypticists. Other scientists who do not toe the global warming-is-happening-and-it’s-all-our- fault line have received the same. There are plenty of dissenters. A whole regiment of senior climatologists and meteorologists wrote to The Times last year to complain that they couldn’t get their research findings published – because they disagreed with the maniacal orthodoxy.

If we enjoy a warm spring, the fanatics and obsessives put it down to global warming. If we have an extra cold winter, they tell us it’s a result of global warming. If my nose feels cold or you get an attack of the gout, it will be owing to global warming. The same explanation will be given if England retain the Ashes – or indeed if we lose them. In short, global warming has taken upon itself the character of a fundamentalist religion. And it is the nature of such religions that nothing, but nothing, is allowed to count against them.

I can remember the 1950s and 1960s, colder decades, when the experts confidently threatened us with an imminent ice age. The records over the millennia show that the one thing we know for certain about the climate is that it is constantly changing. The regular cycle of climate change on earth is a series of ice ages interrupted by short periods of temperate weather. There are many eminent geographers and geologists, who have not swallowed the propaganda about global warming, and they tell us that actually we are overdue the next ice age.

Even in the period we call modern history, there have occurred much bigger climate changes than anything we are seeing now. Parts of the 18^th century were much colder than today. Dickens speaks of times when the Thames froze over for weeks on end. Whereas in the 9^th century, there were vines growing in Greenland. Are we to suppose that the warmth which produced vines at such a northerly latitude was owing to Vikings driving around in four-by-fours? Why do you think Greenland was so called? Because a thousand years ago it was fertile. Since then we have had global cooling. How do you think Hannibal got his elephants over the Alps – with skis and crampons? No, only because in his day there was hardly any snow or ice in southern Europe. Incidentally, the Greens are notorious for getting their predictions wrong. Again I can remember the oil crisis of the 1970s when they told us assuredly that the world would have finally run out of oil by the year 2000. Wrong again, spectacularly.

Furthermore, Global warming is reckoned to be caused by two gases: methane and carbon dioxide. The fact is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has actually reduced in recent years. And, within the margin of error, levels of carbon dioxide have remained the same. Carbon dioxide is a gas necessary to sustain life on earth and most of it comes from plants and human exhalations. Actually, warming is good for us: there are far more deaths from cold than from heat and, given the chance, people migrate to warm countries.

Why is there this obsession with global warming, this fierce insistence that it is happening and that it is our fault? First, it’s a nice little earner for the university laboratories. Governments have been persuaded by the Green lobby that global warming is happening and so they are chucking money at research departments that will tell them what they want to know. After the fall of Communism, the Left has adopted pretended care for the environment as a stick with which to beat big business. Global warming is happening, they say, and it’s all the fault of the nasty capitalists. Green is the new Red. Strange how people who say they care for the environment deface it with useless wind farms.

The global warming apocalyptics is in reality a new totalitarianism. The government and the BBC will not even discuss climate change. Those who dispute it are shamefully called “deniers” – which is meant to compare them with Holocaust deniers. The former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, says sceptics are dishonest and “wilfully ignorant,” and Prince Charles calls them “headless chickens.”

As Lord Lawson of Blaby has written, “There are hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty, suffering malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death. Asking the poor to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease, and to increase the numbers of premature deaths.

“Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.”

I don’t expect this Leftie Pope Frank to be hearing many confessions from penitent members of the IPCC

03 Apr

Bread and Circuses

These television events that are breaking out everywhere like a rash are not political debates. A debate is a verbal contest conducted according to rational principles, featuring the arts of sequential thought and rhetorical skills. Last night’s septet was just bread and circuses. So what’s the point of them?

They are done for the sake of the broadcasters. It gives them things to do: first the relentless trailers, billing, advertising and promoting the whole nonsense; then the farce itself; and then, for a bonus, the endless analysis. What analysis? There is no more genuine analysis than there was debate in the first place.

Such drivel is not susceptible to analysis. They’d be better off analysing the entrails of a dead cat.

But see how it fills up the air time – and that’s all the broadcasters want.

Actually, it’s not quite all. What they hope for – and usually get – is some solecism, some slip, some unguarded remark by one or more of the participants. Then they run over this again and again in endless gleeful repeats.

Would it be possible to have proper debates? It might be, but really there would be no point to them. A public debate is only as good as its public. And the British public is so intellectually debauched and linguistically deprived by generations of lousy schooling and the ravenous pop culture that it wouldn’t recognise a rational argument if it were to sit up and bite them on the bum.

Scrap the debates. Bring on the gladiators, the Christians and the lions. If we must, let’s at least have some real bread and circuses.

12 Dec

Free to do what you’re told

I am ceaselessly impressed by the ability of the human mind to shoot itself in the foot, so to speak. Consider this…

The concepts of freedom and liberty have never been so bandied about. Those words are our contemporary shibboleths. Taken together with the word democracy, they form a modern, and of course secular, trinity, so we should always give them their initial capitals: Democracy, Liberty and Freedom. Whosoever will be politically-correct, before all things it is necessary that he hold this Secular Faith.

Even when it is easy to demonstrate that this Secular Faith amounts to a pile of gibberish and that it is immediately undermined by its own internal contradictions.

The chief contradiction is in this: never so much jabber about Freedom, yet the three most powerful and influential dogmas over the last century and more are all deterministic. I refer to Marxism, Darwinism and Freudianism.

Marx turned Hegel on his head, accepting the Hegelian dialectic but re-interpreting this as dialectical materialism. Under this, all our choices are illusory, for everything that happens – and this means absolutely everything that happens in our personal lives, our politics and our history – is determined by economic forces. How odd then that Marx should promote his version of determinism and then urge us all to choose communism. Nice trick if we could do it, Karl!

Freud’s version of the deterministic contradiction famously took the form of a psychological dialectic in which the human mind consists of three sections: the Ego, the Superego and the Id. The Ego is our waking consciousness – the place where we would exercise our freedoms if these freedoms were real. But Freud goes on to say that the Ego is governed and directed by the other two sections, the Superego and the Id which are unconscious and over which the Ego has no control. So Ziggy, what’s free about free-association in the snake oil of psychoanalysis?

Darwin told us that our lives are determined by natural selection. Darwinism has evolved since Charlie’s days and now tells us – through such luminaries as Richard Dawkins – that we are the slaves of our genes. The contradiction again. So when Richard tells his wife how much he loves her, what should she think? My advice: “Don’t trust him, Lalla, it’s only his genes talking!”

This is all barmy enough already, but there is confusion the worse confounded. For many Darwinists claim also to be communists, and there are Freudians who are Darwinians too. (Choose – I use the word ironically, of course – any combination of these three deterministic ideologies that appeals to you).

What then follows is that you have set yourself not merely at the mercy of an internal contradiction in any one of the three, but the compounded contradiction involved in believing two or three ideologies which are also the contradictories of one another.

Specifically, if unconscious forces are the basis of all that happens, then both economic forces and genetic forces are relegated to a place of only secondary consideration. Work your way through the whole unholy trinity. Perm any two from three…

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll

25 Nov

Bad karma

We can always rely on the Labour party to come up with plenty of creative thinking. Here’s today’s dollop…

Britain’s private schools will lose £700m in tax breaks unless they agree to break down the “corrosive divide of privilege” and do more to help children from state schools, according to Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary.

His logic is impeccable. It is as if I should argue that the local first class butcher should be fined unless he agrees to assist the filthy tripe shop on the next street.

On the department of education’s own admission, 43% of children leave state education, after eleven years of compulsory and expensive schooling, unable to read, write and count efficiently.

I taught for years in a bog standard comprehensive as a head of department and I know that state schooling resembles that filthy tripe shop. Half the teachers were themselves in need of remedial education. One maths master required every Monday morning the assistance of the PE man to add up his pupils’ dinner money. An RE teacher in my department thought that one of the gospels was written in the Middle Ages – by St Paul. An English teacher spoke of something as “mitigating against.”

Parents send their children to fee paying schools in order to escape a state system, so awful it amounts to child abuse. Moreover, most of these parents are not Russian oligarchs or wealthy coves such as Dave Cameron, and they scrimp and save, denying themselves and their families many of the good things in life, so desperate are they to avoid having to send their children to the state school dumps. And this payment off fees is over and above the extortionate amount they have already paid in taxes to support the useless comprehensives.

There be two sacred cows: the NHS and state education. Both receive more and more of taxpayers’ money as the years go by. And the result is that they relentlessly get worse. This is because state education and socialised medicine have grown so monstrously large and so overwhelming bureaucratised that they no longer exists for those they were set up to serve but for the hordes of highly unionised and politicised “professionals” who manage them.

I mentioned sacred cows and the phrase makes me think of bad karma. And that’s what state education is: “on a board untrue with a twisted cue and elliptical billiard balls.”

12 Nov

Lily Allen and the bishop’s balls

A bishop has praised the pop star Lily Allen for her feminist songs and claimed that misogyny is “still very evident” in the Church of England. The Rt Rev’d Martyn Snow, our youngest bishop, said Allen’s lyrics on the single Hard Out Here “poignantly” capture society’s sexist double standards. He commends the song to his thirteen-year-old daughter.

The edifying ditty goes like this:

“If I told you ‘bout my sex life you’d call me a slut / When boys be talkin’ ‘bout their bitches no-one’s making a fuss… Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits / It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard out here for a bitch.”

Just the thing for the bishop’s pubescent offspring to sing along to.

Bishop Snow refers to Allen’s lyrics in what he calls an “essay” reflecting on his daughter, Roxanne’s thirteenth birthday. This “essay” is worth quoting at length, not least for its literary merits:

“The passing of this particular landmark has caused me to reflect a little on the world my daughter is entering and in particular the effects of the so-called feminist revolution. In 2010, Lily Allen won an award for her song The Fear which brilliantly captured the manipulation, insecurity and fear which is at the heart of consumerism. Four years and two babies later, Allen has returned with a song which angrily and poignantly captures how far the feminist revolution has not brought us. Allen highlights the double standards in private sexuality and public work. It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests while women are blamed for being loose and free.”

He concludes: “None of this is new, of course. Indeed, it is depressingly familiar. But it is worth stopping to think about the way the feminist revolution, while bringing huge gains in some areas, has had almost no impact in others. Far more women may go out to work now than they did fifty years ago, yet a woman is paid £82 for the work a man will be paid £100 for. By now, you may be asking how a bishop in the Church of England would dare to write about feminism. After all, it has taken us twenty years to accept that women can not only be vicars but can also hold senior leadership positions in the church. We are hardly the model of equality. And my female colleagues are very clear that even as the first woman is appointed as a bishop – expected in the next few months – misogyny is still very evident in the pews of our churches. So the church is no better than the rest of society but at least we are moving in the right direction.”

Can I play at teachers and pupils for a minute and mark the lad’s “essay”?

First, it has not taken the church twenty years to get around to ordaining women. It took 2000 years and many wonder why it was ever attempted.

Secondly, the phrase “We are moving in the right direction” is a meretricious slogan where reasoned argument would be more meritorious: who says we’re moving in the right direction?

Thirdly, “It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests, while women are blamed for being loose and free.” Hasn’t the lad noticed that scores of women journalists fill the papers with reminiscences of their sexual exploits, and get well paid for it? There’s a word somewhere for that profession.

Fourthly, has he considered the spectacular success of Lily Allen by which she becomes the living refutation of the feminist manifesto?

But the most amusing aspect of the lad’s “essay” is the remark about the church’s alleged misogyny. Hasn’t the lad also noticed that actually the church has become terrifically feminised? Or did I only imagine that I have had to sit through all those services – ululations, more like – conducted by women and featuring night lights, mawkish prancing about the chancel and God addressed as “She”?

What more can I say? Beta minus, Snowy lad.

And end by adapting a line from the great Lily Allen’s song: Forget this balls and grow… Grow what?

How about Up?

10 Nov

Horatio’s back

I suspect some malign power has slipped something into our drinking water to turn us all stupid. Just cast your eyes over the following report:

Swiss researchers carried out an experiment to make artificial ‘ghosts’ They were investigating why some people feel a ‘creepy presence’ And in the research they found it was just a trick of the brain The sensation was re-created by researchers using a robot to interfere with the sensory signals in the brains of blindfolded volunteers. The illusion came from a programmed delay between the brain’s processing of the body’s movements

“This confirms that it is caused by an altered perception of their own bodies in the brain,” said Professor Olaf Blanke.

No it doesn’t, Professor Blanke.

The fact that scientists can replicate artificially the experience of those reporting to have seen a ghost no more disproves the reality of ghosts than the artificial creation of the sensation of eating pork pie and mushy peas disproves the existence of real pies and peas.

The mistake is the confusion of ontology with neurology.

All our experiences take place in our brains, from the view of Mont Blanc to our acute dislike of Strictly Come Dancing. The relation between what takes place in the brain and what is out there – if there is anything out there, or even if there is an out there – is one of the most abiding problems of philosophy. And Professor Blanke and his mates have not solved it.

Please don’t compound the mistake by assuming that I’m arguing for the existence of ghosts. I’m not. I’m merely stating what ought to be obvious, even to neuroscientists and all materialists: that my (and your) neural activity neither explains nor explains away what actually is or might be.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Probably

04 Nov

Le Nozze di Figaro

It’s easy to feel up to one’s ears in politics, so well described by Eliot as “endless palaver.”

Better to think about Mozart and particularly the miracle that is Figaro. It nearly didn’t get composed at all, for Beaumarchais’ play on which it is based was banned. Mozart told Lorenzo da Ponte that he had no hope of getting the ban lifted, whereupon Da Ponte said, “Leave it to me.” As court poet, he had access to the emperor, a civilised man, a music-lover and a devotee of Mozart. The emperor reminded Da Ponte that the play was banned, but the poet replied, “It won’t be seditious in our hands.”

And so it came to be written and at great speed – Da Ponte recording that often the verses he delivered to Mozart were returned fully composed the same day!

Mozart was overjoyed by Da Ponte’s words, for Da Ponte was no mere rhymer but a genuine poet with the poet’s facility in assonance, dissonance and above all rhythm. Any hack composer could have made something out of Da Ponte’s marvellous productions. In Mozart’s hands they became an indissoluble masterpiece.

In my view there is nothing in opera – not even Don Giovanni or Cosi and certainly not the vulgar, strangulated hernia operas of the 19th century – that even comes near the greatness of Figaro which is a torrent of wit, melody and human sympathy. On the face of it, Figaro is a popular tale of a servant getting the better of his bumptious, bullying master – below stairs characters outwitting the toffs. No wonder the emperor was nervous about its appearance, a mere two years before the French Revolution and all the European gentry running scared that the whole continent would go the same way as France. No wonder also that aristocrats’ subscriptions to Mozart’s hugely popular piano concerts in Vienna fell away dramatically at this time.

Figaro is packed with glorious solo arias, but it is the ensemble singing which is truly remarkable: six or more players all interlocking their themes with the most astonishing verve, clarity and sureness of touch. The counterpoint of the various moods and motives are the currents of life itself. In these parts, Figaro hints at the same transcendence we find in St Matthew Passion. At this level of musical understanding – coupled with Mozart’s unmatched acquaintance with and sympathy for the ways of the human heart – there is no distinction to be made between religious and secular music.

All great music is religious.

Non piu andrai was Mozart’s favourite tune. He repeats it in the second act of Don Giovanni and he would often, as a party piece, improvise sublime variations on it at the piano. The English soprano Nancy Storace was the first Susanna. By this time she had damaged her voice by attempting strenuous coloratura exercises as a young girl and Mozart chose her as much for her vivacious acting as for her singing. None of the characters is idealised; there is no caricature. All are flawed, often mischievous and occasionally malevolent. But there is not one who is unlovable.

So we have to conclude that Figaro is politics after all: but politics in the same sense that The Divine Comedy is politics.

Like St Matthew Passion, Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s Figaro is about forgiveness.

There are times when this sublime confluence of love and beauty is too much to take.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: politics