Has Gladys hurt the Opera House’s feelings?

Coincidentally there is a brand new computer game Buildings Have Feelings Too! coming soon. About to be launched on PC, PlayStation4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox it is being promoted and reviewed with gusto. I mention it because we know that our city (have there ever been so many busy cranes decorating Canberra’s skylines?) is abuzz with building and demolition. Buildings Have Feelings Too! sounds like just the game for thinking Canberrans to engage with. Pro-development and anti-development Canberrans (the latter always sending seething letters to The Canberra Times) could play the game against one another.

“Imagine a city where buildings can walk and talk to one other,” the game’s creators enthuse.

“Each one has its own aspirations, hope and fears. Buildings Have Feelings Too! is a city management game with character. Players must grow their city whilst making sure the individual buildings thrive …”

“As players progress they are able to grow their city, allowing for multiple neighbourhoods, busy finance hubs, bustling theatre districts … [Issues of] electricity supply, noise pollution and transport add more complexity and challenges for players.”

For planning-sensitive Canberrans this game sounds like the bee’s knees.

Meanwhile, I pricked up my ears when, on 2GB with Alan Jones, the Prime Minister spoke up for the use of the Sydney Opera House as a “billboard” to promote the Everest horse race.

He accused that only the “precious” could possibly be offended by it. Was I being precious? Yes, I think I was. A little.

But it occurred to me that the gulf between the arts (as represented by the Opera House) and horse racing is not as great as the ultra-precious have raged. In recent days some of the outraged have seethed (in the manner of genteel folk upset by the smell of horse poo) that something so vulgar as horse racing is not fit company for something so refined as Utzon’s exquisite building.

In fact, some the world’s great artists have seen in horse racing a peculiar beauty and drama and have thought it a super subject deserving of a painter’s attention. Those artists have included Edgar Degas, as beguiled by the art form of horse racing as by the art form of classical ballet.

Then, too, although I am not as distinguished a building-whisperer as Frank Gehry I know the Opera House quite well and sense that it is not nearly as outraged by recent events as are the precious expressing outrage on its behalf.

I am a breathless admirer of the Sydney Opera House. As well as agreeing with Paul Keating that it is “more art than architecture” I am an opera and classical music fanatic and have spent umpteen enraptured hours there.

And one feels sure that opera (so human, so sensitising), works the same neurological-empathetic wonders among opera-goers that literary fiction has been shown by research to work among its readers. That research shows that reading literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. Thank you Mr Dickens. Bless you Ms Austen.

One feels sure that this is also true, with knobs on, of opera and of opera-lovers, for sung emotions have a special power to wriggle into our hearts and minds and make us better people. Thank you Mr Puccini. God bless you Herr Mozart, especially for The Magic Flute with its reminders that magic happens and that true love will always rise above life’s worst trials and malignancies even when one’s foes are as malignant as that opera’s evil Queen of the Night, the Alan Jones of Mozart’s melodic masterpiece.

I’m not as qualified a building-whisperer as Frank Gehry, but my sense is that the Opera House has strong self-esteem and a quiet pride in its uniqueness and its achievements. I think I hear it saying that it no more cares about having a fleeting few minutes of a horse racing promotion projected on to it than any of the noble castles of the world care about the fleeting visits of a pigeon to their timelessly craggy battlements.

“Yes,” I hear it gaily say, in English but with a strong Danish accent, “a temporary prime minister, whose name escapes me for the moment has called me a ‘billboard’.”

“But that insignificant little Liberal philistine and his teensy career are little, wriggly, fleeting things. But I may well stand here on this dream site for centuries, doing altruistic good for mankind by being a venue for soul-restoring fine music.

“Transient politics and current affairs don’t interest me. There was a crowd here on Tuesday night chanting ‘Shame, Gladys, shame!’ But I neither know nor care who Gladys is or what it is she should feel guilty about. Whatever it is it will only be a mini-guilt compared with the gigantic guilts portrayed in grand opera. Take for example Wagner’s Parsifal, in which …”

But here, sensing that the dear, articulate building is likely to go on for ages, it is time for this brief column’s virtual fat lady to sing to you that this is all we have room for this week.