A Singer’s Life Pt36

Over these past months, I have endeavoured to tell you, my readers, about my long career as a professional singer, about how we work, where we sing, what we do later in life, about my influences, about pitfalls, pratfalls and triumphs. I hope these articles have offered an insight into the everyday life of a singer, and to have shown both the mundanity of life on the road, and the majesty of it! I have been enormously privileged to spend over 40 years of my life, singing wonderful music (nearly all the time!), working with inspiring and generous colleagues, meeting people from all over the world, making friends, learning new languages and customs, visiting unforgettable places, and giving pleasure to countless thousands of folk I have never met! 

It is overwhelming to think of what I have achieved from relatively humble beginnings in Edinburgh, backed initially by my wonderfully supportive parents, and then by Fran, my inspirational wife, and later my children, Donald and Katrina. As they both make their way in the world, I can only hope that they have as fulfilling a life as I have had. The signs are promising, with lovely partners and decent careers, and I wish them the very best of luck. As I write these words, we are still engulfed in the Coronavirus crisis, and the prospect of a difficult Brexit looming in the New Year can only encourage misgivings. However, my mother, referred to right back at the beginning of these musings as a wise old owl, was the most optimistic person I have ever known, and I have inherited her attitude to the future. Whatever the stupid politicians and Fate throw at us, I believe we have the capacity to fulfil our own destinies and desires, if we believe in them. I don’t believe in supernatural or Godly guidance, but my experience over all these years has taught me that a basic adherence to decency and honesty goes a long way to achieving happiness and success in life. Frank Sinatra did it his way, Edith Piaf had no regrets, and as I look out of my study window at the sun shining on Edinburgh, and the leaves slowly beginning to turn golden, I can look back with some satisfaction at a life well-lived. I don’t mean to sound maudlin, and I hope for a good many years still to come, both professionally and privately, but writing one’s own memoirs does naturally lend itself to reflection and a little introspection. 

There are roles I wish I had sung (notably Gurnemanz in ‘Parsifal’, Claggart in ‘Billy Budd’, King Mark in ‘Tristan and Isolde’, King Philip in ‘Don Carlo’, even perhaps Boris Godunov), but there were so many others I did sing that I can have few regrets. There were a few places I never sang (Vienna, the Met -I understudied there twice, so I got near, the Liceu in Barcelona, San Francisco), but so many I did get to. There were a few conductors I would have liked to work with (Abbado, Barenboim, Haitink), but not many. I still wish I had met Fischer-Dieskau. These regrets, though, are few, and I have been lucky enough to achieve more goals than most. The last years have been a bit difficult, health-wise, but my fundamental optimism has kept me going, and the prospect of a successful reaction to my new CD, with the promise of another one next year, and the challenge of turning these memoirs into a book fills me with hope for the future. 

As for the future of opera and classical music in general, I have mixed feelings. The present gloomy prospects, with all the Covid restrictions and uncertainties attached to them, must, I feel, give way to hope and optimism. We will all get through this difficult time, and I am sure there are enough talented and far-sighted people who will take us out of our present woes and return us to the light. The human race is extremely resilient, and I have found that there are more positive than negative folk out there.  

My experience at St Andrews, with the students I have worked with, leads me to feel optimistic and there are many truly wonderful young voices starting their careers at the music colleges and opera houses all over the world. The future is in their hands and I am certain they will not let us down. 

My worries are more with the politicians and the media. I have written at length in these articles about how classical music, particularly in the UK, is under threat as never before by cynical manipulation of the public’s attitude to what they hear. In an attempt to open up our great music to a wider audience, I fear the media are in danger of destroying the very culture they purport to be expanding. By reducing celebrity to short term glory, they undermine all the hard work that singers have to go through to achieve success. By building singers up too quickly, they invite the inevitable failure that comes from a rushed timetable and a lack of preparation. Since the people who are creating these celebrities care little about them, their fall from stardom will not bother them at all, as the next one is ready and willing to be created. We, the older generation of artists, must ensure that the colleges and the media realise there is no alternative to hard work and learning one’s craft - voice production, acting, languages, stamina. If we can convince young singers that a 40 year career is both more lucrative and more artistically satisfying than a short success followed by inevitable burn-out, we will be helping to continue a centuries -old tradition that has brought delight, enjoyment and satisfaction to generations of opera and concert goers. 

How to continue this tradition is now the crucial factor in the future of classical music. The most obvious problem is how to grab the attention of the next generation. What is most apparent at any classical concert or opera in this country is the age of the audience. Grey hair (indeed white hair) and baldness are the norm. Looking down from an Upper Circle at the posh seats in the Grand Circle or the Stalls, the uniformity of head colour is striking and horrifying. “Twas ever thus”, you might say, and it is true that even when I was young, the age of the great majority of concert goers was 50+, but the percentage now is staggering. Often one is struggling to see any spectators under even 40, and this cannot be good for the future. 40 years ago, the majority of the audience in the cheaper seats was youngish, and full of enthusiasm, but now this demographic is largely absent. Clearly, this means that in 20 or 30 years, this audience will die out and will not be replaced. The tragedy is that many of the orchestra members and soloists nowadays are remarkably young and immensely talented but are not playing to their peers. 

How has this happened? There are a number of factors at work here, I think. Perhaps the main change is that, with the democratisation of education these days, the teaching of classical music has been downgraded in the schools. The desire for inclusion, both culturally and socially, has resulted in a society where excellence is prized less than diversity. I went back to my school recently and was astonished to see in the Music School that there were wall racks of guitars and electronic instruments where once there would have been classical instruments. Now, I am glad that the teaching of music is no longer limited to playing records of Brahms, Mozart and Elgar to a largely bored group of teenagers, but I fear that, as usual in the modern era, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. In a desire to combat elitism, we now downgrade musical genius and the transformational power of the emotions involved in listening to and playing the great music of the Western tradition. Indeed the idea of a great Western Civilisation is now anathema to many in the education system, and we are now forced to believe that, somehow, we should apologise for it, and treat it as almost worthless in our relentless search for diversity. Instead of adding to the sum of our creative imagination, by showing the worth of other civilisations and cultures, complementing the Western tradition, we now are saying that classical music is too difficult and elitist to be worthwhile, and is not fit for purpose.  

I feel that it is up to us, the performers of this music, and the audience, to fight for the survival of High Art on principle, and not, through the medium of cultural awareness, and opening up to diversity, to apologise for it.  We must be prepared to shout from the battlements that this music is deeply important to everyone, and I think that we must be ready to act as cultural missionaries in a modern world where mediocrity is promoted, and excellence scorned. Otherwise, the future for this art form is bleak, as we are channelled down ever narrower paths of homogenous and bland music, reducing our listening to short bite-sized chunks of easily digestible fare in the spurious hope that somehow, we will want suddenly to tackle, on our own, the more difficult menus that lie just outside our grasp.  

As if this were not bad enough, a glance at any amateur choir will reveal that practically all the men are over 50, leading to the obvious conclusion that choirs will die out very soon. I have had conversations with many choral societies about this, and their view of the future is very bleak. Boys are not taught to sing in a classical way nowadays, other than cathedral choirs in England, and even there, girls now form an increasingly large part of any group of choristers. There seems less problem in getting girls to sing in choirs, although more and more they feature in rock choirs and light music groups, but if we lose the tradition of male voices singing together, there is no future for  this bedrock of classical music. You can’t perform Messiah or the Bach Passions or Carmina Burana without tenors and basses! 

However, I cannot end this section of my memoirs on such a sad prospect, and, following my mother’s lead, I don’t propose to do so! 

I had the great good fortune to be brought up in a warm and loving environment, where I was encouraged to follow my dreams and desires, to search for knowledge and enlightenment through education and curiosity, where no one was better than another person, and where friendship was the goal and suspicion and ignorance were discouraged. My father was simply the nicest man I have ever known, complemented by my more wary mother (her difficult childhood, being orphaned at 12 and brought up by drunken relatives, made her naturally more careful!), who, nonetheless, was warm and full of optimism. Their love and encouragement allowed me to go to an enlightened school (for the time, although the teachers still beat recalcitrant pupils with leather straps – unbelievable now!) which taught me that nothing was impossible, and that the well-educated child is not one who can only pass exams – though we did that too – but who learns how to be a responsible, caring citizen. We were taught that the only privilege we had was education. Everything else had to be worked for and earned. 

Having been lucky enough to go to one of the world’s great universities, at a time when the state paid for me to go there, I made sure I took advantage of its many positive elements, along with having a great time. I met my wife, Fran, there and formed lifelong friends, and continue to sing its praises, not least as Professor of Singing! 

If you can remember back to Part 1 of these memoirs, when I decided to start in the 3rd person, a mannerism I quickly dropped, I wrote about my beginnings as a singer, and my career ever since has always followed the same basic path. I describe it as someone approaching a closed door, politely asking for it to be opened and passing through. A little further on, there is another door, and the same procedure takes place, and then another one. Sometimes a door remains closed, and one has to reconsider and look for yet another one elsewhere. Having gained entry by politeness and friendliness, it seems to have been a pattern that works, and I have tried to adhere to it throughout my career. There have been a few closed doors, and one or two setbacks, but, generally, I have no complaints. We have been blessed with two wonderful children, who I hope have learned from their parents and grandparents, and who show every sign of continuing the tradition of enlightenment and kindness we have tried to promote. Neither have shown any interest in becoming musicians, and I have no complaints about that, for indeed, my talent and voice seem to have sprung from nowhere. My father could do a decent Bing Crosby imitation, but that was it on the family vocal tradition! 

However, observation of my children, their friends and the students at St Andrews lead me to believe that the future is in good hands, and perhaps that is the best hope for the continuation of Classical Music and Opera. Beauty and harmony exist everywhere we look in nature, and it seems impossible to me that this wonderful music that I have sung (and continue to sing – look out for more concerts and CDs!) will disappear. We need to be vigilant, and those of us who have any influence need to shout out to the Philistines that we are not giving up, but I am sure that, in 2120, people will still be listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi, and Mahler and Bruckner, and Monteverdi and Tallis, and that there will still be little boys and girls who want to grow up to be an opera singer. 

I have had a fantastic career as a singer and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. There are still avenues I want to explore, and I hope you can join me on the way. I have come a long way from the day when I was leaving school, and a well-meaning family friend asked me what I planned to do with my life? “I want to be an opera singer”, I said. He smiled and said, “but what to you want to do for a career?” You know the answer!