Ed McLachlan
Van Dusen, is a multicultural utopia. The Duke of Hastings is black, as is Queen Charlotte herself (Golda Rosheuvel). The idea comes from the suggestion that Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was directly descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family. In Bridgerton’s ‘what if’ version of history, the wife of George III opens up the court to other people of colour, and this – along with the romping – is the selling point of the series, turning it from a formulaic romcom to a mildly subversive and surprisingly witty jeu d’esprit. This is not colour-blind casting because racial integration is central to the plot. Meanwhile Lady Whistledown, whose identity we now know, continues to influence opinion in her weekly scandal sheets and Eloise, the fifth Bridgeton sibling (Claudia Jessie) is attending talks about women’s rights in Bloomsbury. On the other side of the square, the newly widowed Lady Featherington is trying to marry off her daughters while preparing to share her home with her husband’s heir. If the Bridgerton family storyline is a remix of Pride and Prejudice, the Featherington storyline is Sense and Sensibility, with Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters dependent on near-relatives. Season 2 is as relaxing as an opium pipe. Sadly, however, it is all good clean fun.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE CHOIR REFORM AT ST JOHN’S, CAMBRIDGE: ALLEGRI’S MISERERE ‘The Choir of St John’s, Cambridge,’ crowed the college’s newly appointed Master, Heather Hancock, ‘has a stellar reputation for its contribution to the rich choral tradition of the UK.’ How typical of our times, then, that one of Mrs Hancock’s earliest announcements concerned the ending of a key element in the choir’s distinctive contribution to that tradition: its all-male make-up. This, in part, ‘to honour the College’s overarching commitment to [gender] equality’. How much Mrs Hancock knows about the inner workings of the UK choral tradition, I’ve no idea. One person who might is the chair of the committee that appointed her, Professor Emerita Deborah Howard, an architectural historian who made extensive on-site use of the St John’s choir during research for her groundbreaking study Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice (Yale, 2009). The differences between girls’ and
boys’ voices, Howard has written, is ‘much debated’. Nowadays it is campaigners who mostly have the floor: singer Lesley Garrett, who in 2018 launched a media campaign against Cambridge’s King’s College choir (‘an excuse to hand on male privilege’); or the fellow who wrote to Private Eye recently suggesting that the paper’s calling all-male cathedral choirs ‘one of the glories of English culture’ was ‘akin to defending fox-hunting’. Highly trained boy trebles are, of course, the tenors and basses of the future. Ponder, if you will, what the lessening of that supply entails. A particular enrichment of our choral tradition these past 70 years has come from a revolution in the fashioning of boys’ voices initiated by two remarkable choir-makers: George Malcolm at Westminster Cathedral and George Guest during his 40 years at St John’s. The floaty head-voice that Victorian choirmasters had encouraged boys to perfect – a thing, at best, of ineffable beauty – was anathema to Malcolm. What he sought was the sound of the boys of the great Continental cathedral choirs: one that’s gutsier, more emotionally engaged, with greater depth of colour. ‘A strong, resonant chest sound,’ says David Hill, a The Oldie Spring 2022 67
