Wagner isn’t for everyone. Not at these prices, anyway

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/12/wagner-prices-eno-peoples-opera

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Five hours of Wagner might not be everyone’s idea of a merry Saturday afternoon but the English National Opera’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was spellbinding. ENO’s orchestra was conducted magnificently by Edward Gardner. In Richard Jones’s meticulous production, the idea of the medieval mastersingers was teased out to embrace all the great artists of the German-speaking world, from Brahms and Goethe to Pina Bausch and Joseph Beuys – often the outsiders and experimentalists of their day, eventually absorbed, for better or worse, into the canon.

Related: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg review – sharp focus, humour and inspiration

Iain Paterson, the Scottish bass-baritone, shone as a sceptical, sensitive, sometimes even depressive shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs. He is surely the most well-rounded and alert of all Wagner’s characters, this wry, watchful man who patiently cobbles together the lives of the lovers Eva and Walther.

It was a great show, the sort of evening that makes one long for ENO to find ways to continue and flourish despite the sudden departures of its chairman and executive director over the past weeks, and the news that the Arts Council was effectively putting the company into special measures. Do go – if you can afford to. Though there are seats around the £16 mark, those in the stalls and circle – by far the best for sound and sight – cost well into three figures. Not what you could call “people’s opera” prices, sad to say.

Of art and power

The Hayward Gallery’s History is Now exhibition – in which seven artists have curated sections addressing Britain’s postwar history – is a bit like modern life itself. To borrow a phrase from Nancy Banks-Smith, writing about last month’s episodes of the Archers, “everything happens at once and nothing makes any sense”.

But it is rather wonderful, this defiantly nonlinear, sideways and partial vision of the UK, consciously mounted in the run-up to the general election. One wonders whether Tate Britain ought not dare to mount this kind of politically alert, state-of-the-nation exhibition.

Roger Hiorns’s room, for example, consists entirely of a reporterly laying-out of his obsessive research into BSE and CJD: the documents, files and memos he has collated tell us not just about the anatomy of a particular public health crisis but are a metonym for the workings of Whitehall and Westminster, and of the often unhappy alliance between science and politics. And Richard Wentworth’s room takes the notion of the beach as a starting point, from a place of cheery national recreation to the bleak, defended strands of the second world war, via Paul Nash’s surrealistic wartime vision of piled-up, wrecked aircraft, resembling the waves of the sea. A show notable for its timing, and much else.

Priceless pictogram

The Guardian is ever thrusting into the future, keenly speeding towards the furthest reaches of technological innovation. But from my desk, from where the editor-in-chief’s office is visible, I have sometimes observed the following phenomenon. When that personage’s assistant needs to summon him urgently out of the building in order that he might fulfil some important external engagement, she occasionally sticks two pieces of A4 paper on the outside of his glass office wall, facing inwards. One is picture of a tie. The other is picture of a taxi.

What could be clearer to a man besieged on the telephone or otherwise detained in camera? It gives me simple pleasure to see my colleagues recrudesce into a technological age pre-dating even the alphabet. Sometimes, only a pictogram will do.

• This article was amended on 25 February 2015. An earlier version suggested that the cheapest tickets for The Mastersingers of Nuremberg were £30-£40.