A Singer’s Life Pt11

I thought in this part to write a little about contemporary opera. Now, don’t immediately rush to another site. I will be gentle!

When I started my career in the early 1980s, I always said to anyone who was listening that I would only ever sing music that I would want to listen to myself. To a large extent, I have stayed true to that boast, but when my agent phoned me a few years ago and said, “Now, Brian, you are becoming known as something of a contemporary opera specialist, so I have a proposition for you,”  I was taken aback, and somewhat dumbfounded. As I pointed out in the first of these articles, I never had any formal musical training in my life, and given that modern music is famous/notorious for being enormously complicated, this would seem to preclude me from getting too involved in this genre. However, as I look back over the years, I see that it was punctuated by forays into the world of contemporary opera (I do not include Benjamin Britten in this survey, although I probably should) and that composers such as Rudzinski, Glass, Adams, Bianchi, Ades and Dean, as well as Pärt and Maxwell Davies in sacred music, do feature prominently. In fact, quite a large part of my career has been spent singing 20th and 21st century music (if we include Debussy, Weill, Strauss, Britten, Janacek and Bernstein).

Other than Britten, my first real adventures in modern music were in the late 80s with Mecklenburgh Opera in London. This was a small company, the brainchild of John Abulafia, Anne Manson and Diana Hurst, which was dedicated to finding obscure operas and putting on small scale but high quality performances for a discerning audience. I first worked with them on “The Emperor of Atlantis”, an extraordinary work by Victor Ullmann, conceived and written in the Terezin Ghetto in Czechoslovakia in World War 2. It was a satire of Hitler and the Nazis, portraying a mad emperor who was bent on total war and total destruction. The personification of Death (me) intervenes and says he is going on strike in opposition to the emperor’s crazy schemes. No-  one can die and thus the emperor is powerless! Death only gives up his strike if the emperor promises to be the first to die, thus ridding the world of him and his ideology; brilliant stuff and brilliant music, combining Weill, jazz and Mahler influences. Amazingly it reached the Dress Rehearsal in Terezin, until the SS realised what it was all about and banned the show and sent all the contributors to Auschwitz. The final twist was that the singer who sang Death was the only survivor. He kept a score of his role and the whole opera was found in an attic in the 70s. Our production was the first in the UK.

After the performances, the BBC made a film called The Music of Terezin in 1992, which included clips from our company and accounts by many of the survivors, notably Karel Berman, who sang Death. You can watch it here.

After the success of Atlantis, Mecklenburgh turned to the surreal world of Bruno Schulz, a Jewish Polish writer killed by the Nazis in 1942, whose collection of stories, Street of Crocodiles, gave a subject to the Polish composer Zbigniew Rudzinski. His opera Manekini, premiered in Wroclaw in 1981, was translated into English from a direct translation (I don’t speak Polish) by John Abulafia and myself, and was put on in 1990 in London, with me singing the main role of Jacob, a Jewish tailor, who fantasises about creating new life, and in particular a whip wielding woman in a basque and fishnets (as you do!). It was generally seen as a success – a notable difference from now is that our show was reviewed by all the broadsheets (Times, Guardian, FT, Independent, Observer etc.) – but I’m not sure if it’s ever been revived. The weirdest thing was the original press photo shoot before we had started rehearsals: it involved John, myself and Anne Manson the conductor, along with Rosalind Martin, a young Australian soprano who had been cast as Magda Wang, the whip-wielding woman referred to above. The first time I met her, I had to cower under her whip (she was in the full gear) and then kiss her stockinged foot. Then we were introduced to each other!! All very “Love Actually”!

I was lucky enough to find myself singing Death (Der Tod) in a new production of Atlantis, in the original German, in 1993 in Liege, under the auspices of the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. This was a fabulous show, designed, directed and stage managed by a brilliant triumvirate of young German women, and was an immediate stand out success, which was seen later in Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, Lisbon and Sarajevo. The Sarajevo trip will be the subject of a full article in the future, as it was an extraordinary experience. Our last staging at the Monnaie was an extraordinary double bill with Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins with the great Anja Silja, also directed and designed by the German women and conducted by the fine American conductor and close student of Leonard Bernstein, Mark Stringer.  I assumed the role of the mother in the quartet of “the Family” with a full female body suit under my dress!

Various operas came and went for me during the 2000s and, in 2011, I was cast as the Father in the World Premiere of Oscar Bianchi’s first opera “Thanks to my Eyes” at Aix. The words were by Joel Pommerat, a French playwright and director, who adapted his earlier play “Grace a mes Yeux” into an English libretto. Pommerat is a legendary figure in French drama, but unknown to English speakers. Unfortunately, he was not himself an English speaker, so a lot of time was spent putting it into recognisable English. In addition, this was Oscar’s first opera and he was unsure how to write for voices. His style was frighteningly near my original template for not singing modern music, and the score we were sent was full of quarter and half tones which were impossible to play on the piano. Consequently we arrived at Aix for the first rehearsal unsure as to how to sing this music. The production team said “OK let’s sing through once and we can start staging it” and the singers said “No way, Jose!” However, 10 days later, we could at last start acting as well as singing, although I explained to Oscar that I could either sing the role with panache but approximately, or not at all. In addition, the actors engaged to speak the non-singing roles were French, and could not be understood, so a decision was made that they would speak their dialogue in French and we would sing in English (although again two of the singers were non English speakers, so that was also a problem). 

Fortunately, one of the world’s greatest modern music orchestras, the Ensemble Modern, based in Frankfurt, was engaged to play and the production took place in the beautiful Jeu de Paume Theatre, opened in 1787. It was a triumph in the French press and roundly dismissed by the British press. However, it must be said that we had enormous fun putting on “Thanks to my Eyes” and despite my reservations about the difficulty of the music, especially for the two amazing sopranos, we enjoyed most of the creation process. The opera was revived in the same production the following year and we took it to Brussels, Paris and Lisbon. Whether it has seen the light of day since, I know not!

In the mid 2010s, I found myself in Strasbourg singing Hubbard the Meteorologist in John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic”. This is an opera about the creation of the first atomic bombs that would be exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the political, military and philosophical arguments and disputes that arose at the time in the wastes of the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos. A lot of the libretto comes from John Donne, the Bhagavad Gita, Baudelaire and US secret documents of the era. However, my great though short aria as Hubbard was largely a weather forecast, set to music. It was an interesting piece, directed by an American choreographer not highly skilled in opera direction with an international cast of Brits, Americans and Scandinavians but with the crucial role of Robert Oppenheimer (originally played by the fabulous Canadian baritone, Gerald Finley) sung by a well-known German baritone. He was best known as a German song specialist and had neither the voice nor the mastery of English required, so it all felt a bit flat. My old Edinburgh schoolmate and now international conductor, Donald Runnicles, had conducted the original performance in San Francisco in 2005 and perhaps with him, it might have made more impact. At least Strasbourg is a beautiful city, with great cuisine and wine!

My next major collision with contemporary opera came when I was contracted as understudy to the legendary John Tomlinson at Covent Garden in Thomas Ades’ new opera “The Exterminating Angel”. I won’t get into my views on this opera, as the critics seem to have liked it a lot more than me, but I will say that the style of writing which has several singers, notably sopranos, singing way above the normal range, is not to my taste. No words can be heard and an already crazy story (it’s based on a Surrealist film by Bunuel) is rendered incomprehensible by such writing. A blessed relief was that my role (The Doctor) was at least singable, although unbelievably difficult. This is my main criticism of Contemporary Opera – why does it need to be so hard?? It’s hard both for the singer and the listener!

A weird coda to this story is that a year after I had understudied the Doctor at Covent Garden (and mentally assigned the score to the waste bin of my memory), I was asked at short notice to fly to Copenhagen to fill in for the singer playing the Doctor, who had lost his voice. Fortunately, I only had to sing at the side with my score on a music stand while the voiceless bass mimed the part. Still, between the first and second performances, with a lot of help from the young English conductor, I managed to sing a lot more of the right notes at the second go! Now, as you have found out, I am not musically well-trained, but I am bright and would hope to be as accurate as possible in everything I sing. This however, was fiendish – no tunes, no harmony and no help from the orchestra. At least, Copenhagen is a beautiful city, with great cuisine and beer!

I am going to end on a high note – stand well back!

In the autumn after Copenhagen, I was cast as the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, the Player King and the Gravedigger in Brett Dean’s new opera Hamlet for Glyndebourne Touring Opera. I had never sung at Glyndebourne before, and was delighted to be part of this wonderful company. The opera had been premiered in the summer season with the same legendary John Tomlinson playing these roles. I have known John for a long time. He is one of the nicest people you could ever work with and a truly Herculean performer with perhaps the loudest voice I have ever heard. His Wotan and Hans Sachs, and his Boris Godunov, are famous throughout the world, and he has come a long way from his roots in Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire! Even now in his 70s, he is performing regularly. So it was rather daunting to take over his roles at Glyndebourne on tour. We rehearsed and gave the first performances in Glyndebourne itself, a country house in deepest Sussex, and were enormously fortunate to have the wonderful young English conductor and composer, Duncan Ward in charge. He was completely at home with Brett Dean’s complicated score, and had the patience of a saint. One or two of us in the cast were getting towards the veteran stage of our careers, and obviously found the music difficult. However, Duncan and the music staff helped us to get to grips with it, and this time, I found the complex music hugely rewarding. Maybe it was helped by some of the finest text in the English language, and also because Brett knows how to write for voices, but this was one of the most satisfying experiences I have had in recent years. My only problem was that, in the Ghost scenes, John had gone topless in the summer with graveyard chalk smeared over him. I was not happy with this for me, and so we compromised with me wearing a sort of chalked up vest. Frankly, it was the best solution both for me and the audience!

Hamlet was very successful and very popular, but I fear for the future of the art form if this proves to be the exception to the rule and only a tiny elite audience will turn up to watch new works. John Adams may turn out to be some sort of saviour, as, just before the Coronavirus lockdown, I attended a sold out performance of his opera “Nixon in China” by Scottish Opera at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. It was modern but harmonically approachable. Nothing else will survive for long, I fear.