Dear Rowley,
Brighton Royal Pavilion has to be the singular most peculiar residence ever commissioned by an English prince. The Nash exterior is an Indian palace decorated with domes, minarets and filigree arches but is painted to resemble Portland stone. The Crace & Jones interiors are Chinese-inspired but on a scale of opulence, flamboyancy and theatricality reminiscent of an MGM soundstage. I imagine Crace like a Regency Cecil B DeMille looking at watercolours of Peking’s Imperial Palace and telling his patron the future King George IV, ‘it’s cute George, but let’s make it bigger’.
Does any building so perfectly sketch the character of its patron as Brighton Royal Pavilion? I can only think of Ludwig II of Bavaria’s mad fantasy Neuschwanstein Castle. Like his seaside pleasure palace, George IV was extravagant, contradictory, sensuous and slightly vulgar. ‘What’s not to like?’ I hear you ask. Crace’s dining room has to be one of the most fantastical interiors in Britain. The chandeliers hang from the claws of silver leaf dragons with sunbursts of looking glass reflecting light from a thousand lustres down onto the table.
Incredible to think that Queen Victoria ordered all the furniture, fireplaces and fittings to be stripped from the Royal Pavilion in 1850 when she sold it to Brighton for £50,000. The young queen wished to distance herself from her profligate Hanoverian uncles and (perhaps understandably) had no use for an exotic seaside pleasure palace where her subjects proved much too close for comfort. Queen Victoria returned much of the furniture commissioned for the Royal Pavilion when it became clear the building would not be demolished.
The Pavilion was the making of Brighton so to demolish it would seem churlish. Brighton was a fishing village in decline when the then Prince of Wales acquired his seaside farmhouse in 1787. When he commissioned Henry Holland to aggrandise the house into his Marine Pavilion, the prince acquired vast tracts of land surrounding it. By the time John Nash turned the Palladian villa into a Maharaja’s palace Brighton was a magnet for the beau monde. Incredible to think Nash literally encased Holland’s house with a cast iron frame upon which he iced his mad minarets and domes.
The royal family clearly recognised the architectural importance of the Royal Pavilion. We have that magpie curator Queen Mary to thank for returning further pieces from Buckingham Palace to the Pavilion in the early 20th century. So what we see today is the Prince Regent’s Royal Pavilion including acres of carpet rewoven from the original pattern and hand painted Chinese wallpapers that echo fragments found during restoration.
Though I do prefer ‘upstairs’ to ‘downstairs’ when visiting statelies, the kitchens at the Pavilion are spectacular. One walks through an annex from the dining room into the kitchens as the Prince Regent was wont to do to congratulate his cooks. The soaring ceilings are supported by four vast trompe l’oeil palm trees and every surface gleams with copper pots, saucepans and jelly moulds.
Hollywood did come to call in 1969 when Vincente Minnelli directed Barbra Streisand in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. The musical’s storyline involved reincarnation with Streisand playing Melinda Tentrees in her character’s past life. Melinda is a Regency adventuress who attends a banquet at the Royal Pavilion and the entire sequence is filmed on location. The film is sacred to fashion as well as film buffs because Cecil Beaton designed the Regency costumes for Lady Tentrees.
Having only visited Brighton in the rain, I’d never fallen for the charms of the Royal Pavilion. To me the oriental palace looked slightly lost in the tatty, hippie seaside town; an exotic curio abandoned at the whim of kings like the animals in the old royal menagerie at the Tower of London. On this trip – celebrating Mum’s birthday with an evening at Glyndebourne – the rains came down on cue but I saw the Royal Pavilion with different eyes. The restoration is quite clearly a labour of love and even in autumn one can see the grounds landscaped in early 19th century fashion are terribly pretty.
La Traviata did not disappoint at Glyndebourne. Though you long for a summer afternoon and picnics on the lawn, the auditorium always works its magic. The acoustics are as clear as a bell and Irina Dubrovskaya’s Violetta sang like a nightingale in a role that demands more mood swings than Blanche Dubois at her most skittish. Verdi is sympathetic towards Violetta. He was living with mistress Giuseppina Strepponi when composing La Traviata so had witnessed the pleasures and pain of a demimondaine.
Isn’t it interesting that opera singers now have to look like their characters? Dubrovskaya was a slip of a thing; utterly convincing as a young woman in the grip of tuberculosis and Zach Borchievsky’s Alfredo was as young and handsome a buck as the role demanded. I suppose this is a consequence of high definition recordings from the world’s greatest opera houses blown up on cinema screens. Would a well-upholstered diva be cast as Violetta or Mimi today however sweet her coloratura?