A Night at the Opera

Charlton 4 Rochdale 1

So, after all the defensive statements about Charlton being in line to be humiliated yet again in the third round of the Cup, which various bloggers, including myself, have been making all week, it turned out that there was nothing at all to worry about. The Inspector concludes his report by saying that it is nice to feel like a proper Premiership club for once, although as real ‘proper’ Premiership clubs like Aston Villa and Manchester City have been knocked out by lower league opposition, maybe the feeling is still a little misplaced. Certainly, from the point of view of the Magic and Romance of the Cup, the Charlton result is not really all that exciting, except for the fans involved.

My oldest friend had phoned me earlier in the day, proposing that we improve on our existing arrangement to have dinner by going first to the Teatro de la Zarzuela, to see a light opera. The name of the theatre is also the name of the genre. Zarzuela is slightly similar to Gilbert and Sullivan, and was popular around the same time, but in my humble opinion, G. & S. operas were much funnier and the music rather better, too. Zarzuela is still very popular in Spain, though the productions are always revivals, so there is an early-last-century, set-in-stone feel to them.

Thus, instead of my usual lazy Saturday evening idly reading football reports on the computer, I had to get moving. I delayed going off to the shower until the Charlton result was safely in, even though the 4-1 scoreline had been in place for twenty minutes or so. As I stood there soaping myself (not with Imperial Leather), it occurred to me that by the time I was dressed and ready to leave, the BBC would have produced their report on the game. And so, a little later, hair dried and street clothes in place, I seated myself at the machine prior to giving it an extremely rare evening off, and clicked on the ‘BBC Sport Football’ button on my taskbar. Of course the Manchester United and Manchester City débâcles were occupying most of the screen; the reporters getting so positively orgasmic that I wondered what on earth they would do if it were United who had been eliminated and City who had just drawn. The top part of the BBC football page has links to the top stories, and these of course were the giant-killing and near-giant-killing feats. Below are the other stories, but crumbling sanity! (A phrase invented as far as I know, by Michael Frayn in one of his very funny pieces for The Observer or The Guardian in the sixties) There was no mention of the Charlton game at all!

It was getting late, so I shut down the machine and got the bus down to Madrid’s central square, more of a circus really, the Plaza de Cibeles. Most guidebooks and travel writers would have you believe that the Puerta del Sol is the central square of Madrid, but I would argue that this has not been the case for years. Sol is more famous, but Cibeles is what divides Madrid north from Madrid south; and Madrid east from Madrid west. Spain’s national bank, the Banco de España, stands on one side of it, and the wedding-cake lookalike Post Office, or Gran Palacio de Comunicaciones, as it is officially known, on the other. The theatre is in a little street called Jovellanos, about two hundred yards beyond the back of the bank. And there I arrived and met my friend at about quarter to eight.

The show, called El Asombro de Damasco, was first produced in Madrid in 1916. The plot was rather weak, and the lyrics, which I was able to read right in front of me on the surtitle screen from our location on the last-but-one row of the Gods, were diabolical, neither scanning nor rhyming all that much. The librettists cannot have known that one day their lyrics would be being read at the same time they were being sung, or one feels they would have made more of an effort with them. The music and the singing were lovely, though, and the sets, a street and then a house, in Damascus (see title) were beautifully done; also the costumes and dancing were attractive and entertaining, respectively. As for the Asombro, it was difficult to tell. The word means something like ‘amazement’ or ‘astonishment’, and when El Asombro de Damasco was performed in London, for it was, apparently, in 1924, the word was translated as 'wonder', which is about as near as you're going to get, I suppose. In the context of this operetta, it refers to the overpowering beauty of the main female character. One thing that cannot be properly appreciated from a seat in the Gods, without opera glasses (and we did not have them, nor were they provided) is whether someone is beautiful or not; they are just too far away. She sang beautifully, and moved elegantly, but as the plot requires her to reduce three important male residents of the city to gibbering wrecks by simply lowering her veil, she has to be very beautiful too. I am sure she was - no shortage of beautiful young ladies in Madrid - but on this occasion I was unable to judge how effective the casting was.

The two acts were each about 50 minutes long, and so it was that, not long after ten o’clock, my friend and I joined thousands of our fellow citizens in search of food and drink. There are dozens of attractive little bars within easy walking distance of the theatre, but it was quite a while before we found one which wasn’t heaving with customers. Well it was Saturday night. Eventually we managed a quick beer, and then wandered off in search of a restaurant.

After being turned away from two places, we settled for the Hylogui, an old haunt, which does basic Spanish food in a rather old-fashioned way, and which is very big, so there were no difficulties about getting a table.

It was only when we were embarking on our main courses that I decided to turn the talk away from the show we had seen, to the FA Cup. My friend is English, too, and came to Madrid in the same year as I did, and has been a friend of mine ever since. He does not support a team of his own, though he does admit to a slight weakness for Brechin City in Scotland, for reasons which even he is uncertain of. Not wishing to be exultant about the Charlton result, and not, of course, having been able to read anything about it, either, I started by merely asking him if he had had time to look at the results before leaving home. He had, and talked very enthusiastically about the upsets, and the various results; and like the BBC, he particularly liked the Manchester United and Aston Villa ones. Practically all the other games were discussed, yet he did not mention Charlton once. In the end, I had to mention them, and point out that giant-killing is great fun, as long as it isn't your team that is on the receiving end. But this proves how uninteresting the result is to people who are not involved, for my friend is not one of those people who would avoid mentioning my team with some vague notion of annoying me; he does not operate like that at all.

Dinner over, we were able to return to Argüelles, where my friend also lives, on the underground, which in Madrid runs until about 1.45, Saturday or not, and whether it be Christmas Day or no.

Farewells were said outside San Bernardo station, and I walked up the hill home, thinking that I would be able to read about the Charlton game. I called up the BBC page, reckoning they would have corrected their earlier oversight, but they hadn’t. I found the report eventually by clicking on a link to Charlton, which took me to the little page where they have any news there might be, and then at last, clicking on a link to the report, which, to be fair, was perfectly all right. Wyn Grant was quite contented, too, and his report is preceded by a nice account of January 1947, when Rochdale were Charlton’s opponents in the third round too. There is a scan of part of the programme from that match, which Charlton won 3-1. The special kick about all this is that in 1947 Charlton won the cup, on 26 April, beating Burnley, my other team, as irony would have it, 1-0. Could we have a repeat of the two 1947 finalists in 2005? Well as Burnley’s home game against Liverpool on Friday night was rained off, both teams go into tomorrow’s fourth round draw.

More about irony and Burnley quite soon; the Blackburn piece I’m putting into abeyance for a while.