Weegee: A Night At The Opera

Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee for his uncanny ability to beat the police to a crime scene, took this picture on the opening night at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The encounter between the society women and the snarling drunk on the right feels like a stroke of luck. In fact, Weegee's assistant had picked up one of the regulars at a local bar, plied her with cheap wine and, on Weegee's signal, sent her lurching into the frame.

Daily Telegraph: Viewfinder: the most inspiring and surprising images you'll see this week

So they're not drag queens, then?

Something that Weegee was noted for...

Matthew Parris: Under My Umbrella

Oh, don't ask, just don't ask...

The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera: Rather Startled, I Watched

When, one summer’s afternoon in 1995, Kees Moeliker heard a bang on the window of his office at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, he could never have anticipated this.

Twenty years later the events that followed, which became the subject of a legendary scientific paper, have made the transition from academic journal to stage: London is set to witness the public premiere of The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera.

A few minutes before the bang, that fateful day in Holland, a mallard duck had been feeling romantic. Ducks have a wooing technique that could charitably be described as persistent.

Biologists have another term: they call it “rape flights”. Chasing their quarry until it is completely exhausted, the mallards are then able – having proven their stamina – to win the heart of their amore.

In this case, the amore was another male mallard, and his luck was only going to get worse: flying into the office window, he was killed instantly. Luckily for the world, behind that window was Dr Moeliker, a zoology academic, who went down to investigate.

“Rather startled, I watched,” he wrote in the resultant academic paper, describing how the duck, “mounted the corpse and started to copulate”.

“The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his ‘mate’: when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering series of two-note ‘raeb-raeb’ calls…To the best of my knowledge, this case is the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.”

The paper has proved a sensation and now, at the King’s Place in London in August, it will be set to music – with the words, “Rather startled, I watched” forming the aria.

“It was a beautifully written paper, it has been crying out to be set to music,” said Dan Gillingwater, the composer, of his motivation. “It’s high art; I’ve got a clarinet quintet playing, and it sounds a bit like Handel.”

He was particularly proud of the two contemporary dancers he has “portraying the act itself” .

“I’ve got a great dancer who plays the murdering shagger. He does this beautiful solo dance of despair when the poor creature dies, and then he leaps on and does the dirty.”

The opera will be performed on August 8 and 9 but Gillingwater, a primary school teacher, hopes to take it into schools, perhaps along with other arguably more serious scientific papers set to music.

“I realise we probably can’t get homosexual necrophilia into primary schools, but we might be able to get it into secondary schools,” he said, optimistically.

Telegraph.

Now booking!

Opera: Queen

[Mariusz] Kwiecien is at Covent Garden to sing Krol Roger, a little-known opera composed by fellow Pole Karol Szymanowski in the 1920s. It tells the story of a Sicilian king and his queen and court who fall under the spell of a shapely young shepherd’s quasi-religious promises of sensuality and sexual abandon. The opera is one man’s struggle between duty and homoerotic hedonism but everyman’s struggle between intellect and impulse.

While Mozart’s Don Giovanni is Kwiecien’s calling card — he has sung it worldwide including at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and most recently at Covent Garden — Krol Roger is something of a personal manifesto. Kwiecien has championed the opera from Paris to Santa Fe, and not only for its shimmering music, which ranges from a byzantine choral opening to standout arias. The piece speaks directly to his Polish roots and a desire to see tolerance rattle Poland’s enduring homophobic social attitudes.

“Poland is such a conservative country dominated by the [Catholic] church,” says Kwiecien, who lives between New York and Krakow. “When I come back to my country I love to see the changes; Polish people are becoming more European. But in one aspect Poland is never changing: it is so traditional.”

Szymanowski privately wrestled with his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was widely disapproved of. Among his gay lovers was Boris Kochno, 22 years his junior, who later became the lover of Sergei Diaghilev and Cole Porter. Szymanowski wrote a gay novel, Efebos, some of which he gave to Kochno, and this expression of tolerance sowed the seeds of Krol Roger, completed a few years later.

“Our nation created this kind of musician, who created such a fantastic piece that celebrates the differences: being different as a man, different as a human being,” says Kwiecien, who won’t be drawn on his own private life. “But in Krol Roger, Polish people always see the Shepherd coming as Jesus Christ . . . and they still think that homosexuality is inappropriate. We have to change the mind of our nation.”

Krol Roger could be considered the world’s first gay opera; it was embraced by American gay culture in the 1990s and last year, before Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics, gay rights campaigners proposed it as the ideal operatic rallying cry against Putin’s anti-gay legislation, calling on Russian super-maestro Valery Gergiev to conduct. “You cannot say that Krol Roger is an opera about straight people because it’s not,” says Kwiecien.

Kasper Holten’s production at Covent Garden presents the homoeroticism between King and Shepherd as a seduction tool for the impostor’s grander political machinations. “Thank God,” adds Kwiecien, who is glad of a new angle...

The Times.

PS And coming up at the Royal Opera House, Pleasure, set in the toilets of a gay club, by Mark Simpson (not that one).

Brokeback Mountain: The Opera!

Yes, this shit is even shitter than you could have ever imagined in your darkest nightmares where you woke up screaming 'What is this gay shit?' in absolute terror.

Telegraph: Questions To Which The Answer Is 'No'...

Daily Telegraph.