Camille Pissarro painted this picture of a cricket match in Bedford Park in 1897. He came to live in England in 1870 and the reason surprised me.
He was born on St Thomas, now part of the US Virgin Islands, then in the Danish West Indies. Although he had been educated and was painting in France his Danish nationality forced him to leave at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. He went to Upper Norwood, not to Bedford Park, for the excellent reason that it hadn’t been built. Turnham Green station opened in 1869 and in 1875 a developer bought twenty-four acres just to the north and built what is regarded as the world’s first garden suburb. By the 1890s it was a fashionable address and when Pissarro came back to live there he had neighbours like WB Yeats and the playwright Pinero.
In 1882, a year before he died, Wagner’s Parsifal premiered at Bayreuth. It was his last opera and I think his most difficult unless you are a Wagnerian of great dedication and stamina. I have neither of these attributes and have yet to see a full performance. Saturday evening at St Michael and All Angels in Bedford Park was no exception. I wrote recently about the newish opera company, Fulham Opera, and now I find that Elemental Opera is warbling away just a few stops along the District Line. First, the small orchestra conducted by Michael Thrift produced a much bigger sound than I would have thought possible; two violins, a viola, a cello, a double bass and a piano. However, they had a secret weapon; the church organ. It made the orchestral parts sublime. The singing (in English) was pretty good too. The problem for me is that nothing much happens in Parsifal. After almost two hours something did happen. There was an interval and I took the opportunity to escape having enjoyed what I’d heard but not wanting to over-egg the Parsifal pudding; another three hours lay ahead. I expect I missed a lot of good bits.
