Post-Lockdown Opera Rehearsal, Holland Park: A new poem by Sebastian Richter

Post-Lockdown Opera Rehearsal, Holland Park

Summer will not sing more beautifully than this.

Verdi, I would guess, epiphanic and sudden,

grows out of the open-air rehearsal marquee

superimposing tone on neutrality:

the boy’s football match finds its drama,

an elderly couple, their inveterate hands linked,

becomes first courtship, perhaps beside the Arno,

when a music like this went off in their minds.

The eventual concert, tense with the burden of money,

will intervene between listener and music

with the distractions of formality,

but now, the soprano gilds the pigeons with sun,

the drinks in the café are all ambrosial,

and we are taller, that much stronger, for this music.

Sebastian Richter