Warlord and now rock god ...
Genghis Khan
If you happen to be visiting Ulan Bator in Mongolia, you could apparently catch a popular new rock-opera, Chinghis Khan. Like its hero, more familiarly known as Genghis Khan, it has swept all before it. I just hope it's better - how could it possibly be worse? - than a notorious 1956 movie, The Conqueror, in which John Wayne played the Mongolian warlord. This led to one priceless exchange in which, after Susan Hayward's Tartar princess had lunged at him with a knife, Wayne riposted "You're beautiful in your wrath!"
But the popularity of Mongolia's big rock-opera, humanising a man who murdered around 40 million people, raises a fascinating question: does music have the capacity to sanitise monsters? I'd say, on the historical evidence, it does. The first opera based on a historical subject was Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea in 1643. The work itself nakedly rejoices in its amoral heroine's rise to the status of empress of Rome. One of its big duets also has Nero celebrating the death of Seneca with wine and song. Villainy triumphs and, even today, audiences come out feeling they have had an uplifting experience.
Modern musicals and rock-operas have also played their part in glamorising evil. Chicago, still packing them in, is a tuneful tribute to a murderess. And the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice show, Evita, which takes as its heroine Eva Peron, is about to be revived at the Adelphi. There is little doubt that Eva Peron had charisma or that she and her husband, Juan, did much for Argentina's workers. But the Peron regime also bankrupted the country, destroyed the supreme court, took over radio stations and newspapers and borrowed the techniques of Franco, Mussolini and Stalin. But, hey folks, it's only a musical so what the hell?
The moral seems to be that in any form of musical entertainment - be it straight opera or rock opera - you can get away with murder. And, much as I love The Producers, the idea that you could offend a mass audience with a Hitlerian musical now begins to look a bit dated: indeed a recent edition of the satirical spoof, Forbidden Broadway, pointed out just how many New York musicals depended on a re-creation of 30s fascism. So maybe the Mongolians, in suggesting that Genghis Khan wasn't such a bad chap after all, are not doing anything revolutionary. In fact, you could say they're simply dedicated followers of decadent Western fashion.
