Volpe Do I Bark Like a Dog?

How an Italian Family History Shaped a Boy in London
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80447-136-4
Verlag: Renard Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Growing up in the heart of London's immigrant Italian community, Michael Volpe always felt disconnected from the UK, the country of his birth. He felt different to his friends, had alternative cultural experiences, and never truly felt he belonged - an unease that has been exacerbated by Brexit for many immigrant families living in the UK. Exploring his colourful, rich and often dramatic life in London and summers spent in southern Italy among his large extended family, Do I Bark Like a Dog? considers the roots of Volpe's identity. Delving into family secrets and lies, he discovers how extraordinary events filtered through time to propel his unlikely but successful career in opera. Evocatively written and featuring circus stars, fascists and faked deaths, Do I Bark Like a Dog? is a deeply moving testimony to Volpe's mother and her family, and an extraordinary journey into the heart of a life that has left an indelible mark on the world of opera.

Michael Volpe obe is a writer and opera company leader best known for founding Opera Holland Park. Born to an Italian immigrant family in London, Michael attended Woolverstone Hall school, where he explored his love of music and drama - an experience he wrote about in his memoir Noisy at the Wrong Times. In 1996 he founded Opera Holland Park, and became a specialist in late Italian opera. He retired from Holland Park in 2020, and was awarded an OBE for services to opera; he now leads the pioneering company If Opera. He lives in London with his wife and three children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Volpe, Michael

Leseproben

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I was born in Kensington in 1965. I grew up in Shepherd’s Bush, on the streets and railway tracks of west London, the housing estates of Fulham, the terraces at Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge, and at a remarkable English school at the bucolic end of Suffolk. I work in the world of opera, and Princess Anne pinned an OBE on my lapel at Windsor Castle, and yet, to this day, I feel one hundred per cent Italian.

How I perceive myself has always been framed by my immigrant family and childhood experiences, by the culture and language around me, the places where I spend time and the dramas and angst that seem so uniquely Mediterranean. This interpretation of myself seemed never to be just incidental or a mere oddity; it was more than that, and it is something I believe set me apart – I think it still does – although not in any particularly superior way.

That’s a lie, actually. I did, at some point, believe it made me superior. When I was a child, the sense of otherness came through my knowledge of things beyond the experience of my friends, if only of culture, language, landscapes and food. These were profound topics to impose upon my playmates, and impose them I most certainly did. Ever since, people have asked me what I mean when I declare my cultural allegiance, but to be perfectly honest I don’t have a ready or easy explanation.

As I grew through my teens and into adulthood, my Italianness sometimes met with hostility, racism or lazy stereotyping; yet despite such incidents, my experience and demonstrable attachment to my cultural origins more often met with a positive glow. The boom in international travel meant that more people became Italophiles, and more and more would talk animatedly to me about their love of the place.

I identify with Italy and, although I have never made it my home, at home is what I feel whenever I visit the country, despite its myriad problems – a list of which would also fill a book.

The determination of others to criticise and upbraid me for feeling this way appears to be endless. ‘You were born in England, so you are English,’ they say.

Ironically, the fact that a person was born in the UK now appears to mean very little to some – and they don’t actually think being born here means much if your skin isn’t lily-white.

Instinctively, I find absurd the idea that my place of birth – the legal definition of my nationality – and the passport I hold define me more distinctly than the culture that nurtured me. Here I often meet with objections, because people believe the UK did nurture and educate me, and it was the UK that supported my immigrant family. None of this is untrue, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about who I am. As it so happens, because my parents registered my birth in Italy, I am an Italian citizen, can vote in elections there and was even called up for military service, so I am legally an Italian, too. But, if I might paraphrase the quote attributed erroneously to the Duke of Wellington: ‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’

Well, does it?

I first heard the quote when one of my uncles, who lives in the UK but is an inveterate Italian patriot, used it to insist that my brothers and I ought to consider ourselves, first and foremost, Italians. Actually, what he used to say was: ‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ I have no idea where the dog came into it, but I knew what he meant. The original quote I have since seen appropriated by racists on the far right, so the question, particularly post-Brexit referendum, has begun to take on a more sinister undertone. But this was also a genetic argument – almost one about racial purity – that I am instinctively uncomfortable with. I don’t feel as though I want to make an argument in favour of this dimension of the discussion, but cannot promise I won’t go perilously close to it at times.

To be perfectly honest, I have always felt a little like a fish out of water in Britain, and I know many who feel the same. You cannot experience a life that has a dimension of rich, foreign family history (experiences, a different language, a name that singles you out) and not find yourself scrabbling for a sense of where you belong. It claws at you, digs you in the ribs and, in my case, makes me look at the British with the eye of an outsider.

And then came Brexit. What had been a lifelong philosophical imbalance for me became a bona fide reality as half of the UK decided any association with the country of my family was to be eschewed. Brexiters may tell you they feel animosity towards the institution of the EU, not towards Europeans, but it doesn’t actually feel like that.

Nostalgia for my social and genetic history, those Italian family visits that were like character-plays, is packaged into parcels of memory: a home life and several holidays distinguished by our growth from small children into teenagers, and then into adults. It is a measure of either its potency or my emotional penury that my identity is based on what amounts to a few months’ worth of experience in Italy as a child and as a young man. I would contend, however, that I had a reference point and persistent experiences that none of my friends in London had.

I can imagine there are countless people, from all races and religions, who feel the way I do about their cultural histories. Our everyday lives are here in the UK, where we experience everything the country has to offer, or is supposed to stand for. We go through the big events with those who consider themselves to be exclusively British – or English – but we don’t always feel a part of it. When the Queen died, I looked at the whole extraordinary process without a patriotic eye, but I fully understood what she meant to the country. I saw a national performance I could admire, but not feel. This wasn’t an anti-royalist position; the Queen had figured large in my life, just as she had in everybody else’s. My mother was fascinated by the royals, and I was never taught to hate them, yet I don’t have a pride in them as English people do. The Queen’s death created a strange feeling in the country, similar to its reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Indeed, although that event had an inherently shocking impact on most people, including me, it was the strangeness of its aftermath that most struck me. Working close to Kensington Palace at the time, I wandered along to the gardens, completely bewildered by the scale of the automaton mourning, thousands of people quietly emerging from the tube and walking silently, flowers in hand, towards the palace. I felt like an observer, griefless, outside of the loop, watching this display and seeing the ocean of blooms running all the way from the palace to Kensington High Street.

In the context of Diana’s death, it all struck me as a peculiarly British display of guilt, but I was aware of how the soap opera of the royal family has always provided a strong sense of identity for the nation. Wandering the edge of the flower-line with a couple of colleagues, we all gently laughed at a comment one of us had made, and were instantly set upon by a furious passer-by who believed we were being disrespectful. It wasn’t the moment to go toe-to-toe with the mourner over what a lot of people saw as the hypocrisy of the grief, but, if I am honest, I didn’t feel it was my place to point it out anyway.

There are countless examples of this disconnect, of a lack of ‘affinity’, but while I admire much about the UK, the things for which British people feel pride I do not share in, because pride is a possessive concept. I’ll avoid the philosophical oddity of feeling proud of things your accident of birth had no role in creating – like beautiful countryside – but I sense the UK is itself setting fire to many of the societal qualities that once distinguished the country. At the new King’s coronation, republican protestors were arrested before they’d even done any protesting, which ignited a blaze of objection on social media from people concerned at the authoritarian behaviour of the police. Others felt that to protest at such a moment (is there a better moment for an anti-monarchist to protest?) was robbing the public of their enjoyment of the day. Nevertheless, many of us, including royalists, were gravely concerned at the curtailing of an inalienable right Britain had done so much to defend over the years, and at which other countries gazed longingly. It appears that England, in particular, is having a crisis of identity which in turn is fanning the flames of mine.

I have always just accepted a lifetime of...