Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history

‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks… estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly Anglicised, Sunday-best ‘Michael’ at odds with the sly, sinuously Italian ‘Volpe’ – fox.

The scene where the elderly Nicola cuts his young grandson dead in the street is pure Puccini

Fast forward 50 years and this particular fox is well and truly in the hen house. Volpe is a boy done good: a leading figure in the UK classical music establishment, the founder and former CEO of Opera Holland Park, a trenchant voice in broadsheet opinion columns, now with an OBE pinned to his lapel. His first book, Noisy at the Wrong Times (2015), retraced the unlikely path that took him, a bright, mouthy, belligerent child from ‘a two-roomed slum’, via the enlightened state boarding school Woolverstone Hall (the ‘poor man’s Eton’), to a successful career in the most elite of arts. Now his second book gleefully complicates the neat narrative of success the first seemed to offer.

Volpe is clear about the book he set out to write: ‘empirical’; ‘scientifically and socially important’; a dispassionate examination of nationalism and identity in the wake of Brexit, complete with ‘data and interviews’. Thank goodness that isn’t the book he wrote. The only time Do I Bark Like A Dog? approaches arm’s-length is when it takes a run-up to a dramatic punch. Otherwise it’s up close and often startlingly personal.

You can feel the tension between Volpe’s tidy ‘English’ ambitions and the Italian-accented result: a family epic that roams and leaps between generations, ‘easily diverted by melodrama’ (of which there’s plenty). But rather than obscure the underlying fault lines in his project, Volpe uses them to help chart his political and human terrain.

Not all immigrants, he reminds us, are created – or treated – equal. Those who ‘pass’, especially those who have spent longer abroad than at home, occupy a strange no man’s land of selfhood, unclear which is the costume and which the skin, performing authenticity as much as illusion. Volpe interrogates this duality keenly, wryly aware that the Italian part of his identity is rooted in ‘what amounts to a few months of experience in Italy as a child and a young man’.

But who wouldn’t be irresistibly drawn to a family with so extravagant, so cinematic a history? There are secrets, disguises and even a faked death – Volpe’s grandfather Nicola, summoned to view the bodies of his abandoned lover and illegitimate baby, only to find them both very much alive. And there is a very real death, courtesy of Great Uncle Michele, whose illicit love affair led to a shooting and urgent escape to America in the 1920s.

The story of Volpe’s mother Lidia, pulled from the wreckage of a miraculously unexploded shell during the second world war, jostles for space with tales of Uncle Rolando, who left home to become ‘a minor celebrity and star of the circus trapeze’. Only as an adult did Volpe learn that his handsome, athletic uncle did not run away to his new life. He was sold by his parents.

Quieter, but even more pervasive, is the description of Nicola disowning Lidia after his son – Volpe’s ‘father of no consequence’ – walks out on his family. The scene in which the elderly Nicola cuts the young Michael dead in the street is pure Puccini. But without the tunes to soften the focus, the cruelty is stark.

Il dolce e l’amaro – the sweet and the bitter. Volpe balances Italy’s darker notes with acid-bright anecdotes, mischief uppermost in descriptions of family meals (‘full of chaos and emotional banditry’), arguments (‘an art form, a dance…operatic, balletic and frenetic’) and misadventures.

The two come together in Lidia. This small woman looms large over everything, all exuberant Anglo-Italian obscenity, bleach and determination. She is quick to chastise her sons and fierce to defend them; a single mother raising four children in poverty and a foreign country; a proud Italian who never wanted to return home. She is the still point at the centre of Volpe’s whirling world, ‘the only real “ever-present”’. It’s a vivid portrait that sings and grins and scolds.

This memoir may not be the book Volpe set out to write, but it’s a more interesting one. Fact blurs with well-worn family fictions and self-deceptions to create a heightened everyday, as prodigal and richly, grubbily human as the verismo operas Volpe has championed on stage. Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Gianni Schicchi – they’re all here among Volpe’s wayward sons, absent fathers and feuding families.