Glyndebourne: Folie a Deux or Menage a Trois?

photo of Glyndebourne by Wolfiewolf

George Christie was the son John Christie who founded the Glyndebourne festival. A recent Times obit (“George Christie Dies at 79;  Steward of His Family's Opera Legacy,” NYT, 5/13/14), described how George “inherited the quixotic, patrician yet endearingly provincial cottage industry his father created...and squired it to modern, international renown.” The article goes on to comment on George’s “worldly pragmatism that was a conspicuous counterweight to his family’s eccentricity, for even by the standards of English oddity, the Christies gave him much to counter.” And what did this oddity consist of? To some extent it was his father’s preternatural attachment to his mother, a singer for whom the one time Eton master, had built the opera house, on the two thousand acre estate he’d inherited. But John Christie was not only content in sharing and promoting his wife’s passion. The Times describes how the opera house was “born of a marital sympathy seemingly unrivaled in the annals of matrimony.” The obit goes on to relate how when on their honeymoon in Salzburg, Mrs. Christie required an appendectomy, she woke up to find that her husband had had one too. Plainly John Christie was demonstrating a mutant form of couvade, the anthropological term for males in certain cultures who experience sympathetic symptoms of pregnancy. John Christie himself died in l962 so he never had the chance to read Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, the Melody Beattie bestseller published in l986. And it’s unlikely that reading such a book would have had any effect on either him or his wife. There is another term from the annals of psychology which describes George Christie’s parents. They were a charming folie a deux whose legacy was turned into a creative ménage a trois.

Codependent Yes More

Photograph of Hendrik Ibsen by Gustav Borgen

Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring For Yourself  is one of the bibles of the recovery movement and it reflects a sentiment that's a product of an age in which the jargon by which some relationships end is an assertion of psychic real estate, “I need my own space.” Everyone wants to be free to maximize their potential (it’s virtually an epidemic) and dependency is looked at as a straightjacket that inhibits individual growth. But actually dependency can be loads of fun. If Codependent No More sold millions of copies, the anti-Christ for dependedaphobes might be CoDependent Yes More. One of the basic tenets of such a volume might be that being entwined and enmeshed produces shared memory and experience. Today many married couples live separate lives. There are many couples who see each other less than people who simply date. Everyone is so busy fulfilling their potential that they have no time for each other. Nothing is deemed more horrible than one person sacrificing their chance to be the person they always wanted to be for the sake of the relationship. But is being the person you always wanted to be always so great. As far back as the l9th Century, Henrik Ibsen realized that self-realization could be a two edged sword. A Doll’s House shows the negative side of co-dependency, but Ibsen seemed to become chastened by his own experience. Later plays like The Master Builder are ambivalent towards the search. Striving for greatness, which can be the obverse of self-hatred, is not always what it’s cracked up to be. Solness, the creative who is the hero of Ibsen’s Master Builder who seeks to build “castles in the sky,” also resembles Icarus whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.