A Singer’s Life Pt12
Today, I thought I would tell you a little about the great singers I have learned most from during the years of my career.
I will start with perhaps the greatest of them all (although arguments could be put forward for them all), the marvellous Hans Hotter. Interestingly, before I met him, my reaction to his voice was slightly ambivalent. As I was growing up in my teens and discovering opera, I listened with rapture to Wagner’s Ring Cycle on the Decca label conducted by Georg Solti. It had been released a few years before, and set standards of performance and recorded sound which, frankly, have never been even equalled, let alone surpassed. The Wotan on these recordings (the King of the Norse Gods and main protagonist in the first two operas) was Hans Hotter. By this time in his career (he was in his 50s), his voice, though still wondrous, had lost some of the youthful lustre which had made him famous, and to my unsophisticated ears, sounded rather unfocussed. What I did not appreciate was that, even with slightly reduced splendour, his interpretation of the role and his use of the text was magisterial and profound.
Hans Hotter
I heard around this time (early 70s) the fantastic Scottish bass, David Ward singing Wotan in the first ever Ring Cycle put together in Scotland, conducted by the great Sir Alexander Gibson, and was overwhelmed by his singing. We were unbelievably lucky to have Ward singing in Scotland at that time (he sang mostly at Covent Garden) and I think he was one of my chief inspirations to follow in his footsteps. My only meeting with him though, was after a performance of Das Rheingold in Glasgow, and it didn’t go well. As I mentioned in Part 1, my music teacher at school, Richard Telfer, was one of the founding fathers of Scottish Opera in 1962, and he arranged for a group of us from school to go through to Glasgow to see the Ring. He knew that I was interested in singing and arranged for me to meet the great man after a performance. I stumbled shyly into the dressing room to find this huge man (from Dumbarton) obviously shattered and well into a restorative whisky (possibly not his first?). I mumbled my congratulations, and Richard pointed out that I had a nice voice and was keen to become a singer. “Ma Goad, man,” he said, “you dinnae want to get into this …. ing business. It’s murder!” As you can imagine, that was not what I wanted to hear, and I walked back to the minibus with mixed feelings. Fortunately, I wasn’t put off by this negativity, and carried on. Strangely, many years later, when I was rehearsing the role of Arkel in Debussy’s ‘Pelleas et Melisande’ in Strasbourg, the Swedish director was using the recording conducted by Pierre Boulez which featured David Ward singing my part to learn the opera. His first comment when I told him that Ward had been my compatriot and quasi mentor was that I sang it much better and with better French! (He was right about the French at least).
It was only after about a decade, that I heard, on recordings from the 50s and 60s, the true magnificence of Hans Hotter’s voice and artistry. It is my firm belief that there has never been and never will be a Wotan to equal him, and that his other Wagner and Strauss roles are the benchmark for future generations. I first met him in Vienna at masterclasses organised, I think, by Guildhall, one summer in the early 1980s. His personality was as big as his stature. He was at this time about 72, and still a fine figure, well over six feet tall and with a large head (where much of his resonance came from – John Tomlinson is similar in this regard, although a smaller man). We worked only on German Lieder, no opera, and he rarely demonstrated for us (which was a shame). I remember in particular a long session on Brahms Four Serious Songs. These were written late in Brahms’ life and are set to biblical texts, beginning with depressing gloom about man’s destiny and futility, reaching a nadir with the words “Yea better is he than both they (the living and the dead) which hath not yet been!”, moving through a meditation on death being of more comfort to the weak and needy than to the man of wealth and prosperity but ending with the great cry of St Paul “And now there remains Faith, Hope and Love, but the greatest of these is Love!” Hotter’s recording of these songs with Gerald Moore is earth shattering and one of the great recordings of all time, and when Hans, who really enjoyed working on these songs with me, decided to let us hear how he sang the above words, the whole room shook and one felt as if a God had appeared in front of us! One of my most prized possessions is my copy of these 4 songs, with an inscription to me by Hotter. I visited him on a couple of occasions at his home in Munich in the years that followed and learned immeasurably from this great artist. I remember in particular that he told me he would have given up all the Wagner roles (which he adored) just to sing Schubert songs. The endless fascination of scaling his huge voice down to the subtleties of Lieder gave him immense satisfaction.
In the mid-80s, he was invited to the Edinburgh Festival to give some public masterclasses, and I got in touch with him when he arrived. I assumed he would be inundated with requests to grand dinners and functions, but he told me, from his delightful apartment just off the Royal Mile, that he was largely alone, and rather bored. I arranged for him to give me a lesson at my old school, and surprisingly emboldened, asked him to dinner with Fran and myself at my parents’ small house in the west of the city. They were away on holiday and we had it to ourselves, so you can imagine the excitement we felt at the prospect of one of the greatest singers of the 20th century coming for a meal! We gave him Scottish smoked salmon, followed by Aberdeen Angus steak and then a Scottish dessert, Cranachan, made of cream, raspberries, oats and whisky, all washed down with a white Burgundy and a fine Claret, with a small whisky at the end. His stories were marvellous, from hearing Callas entertaining the German troops during the war (he was never a Nazi, and famously only shook hands with Hitler, rather than giving him the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute in their one and only meeting) to tales of Bayreuth after the War, and an interesting critique of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the only contemporary in any way near his stature in musical history. I heard DFD several times in the 70s at the Edinburgh Festival and idolised him. His ‘Winterreise’ with Daniel Barenboim in the early 70s was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. It was fascinating to hear Hotter, who admired DFD greatly, lamenting his over-attention to diction, often at the expense of pure sound. Titans both!
The last time I met Hans was after one of his final performances (in his 80s) when he spoke the Narrator’s part in Schoenberg’s mighty ‘Gurrelieder’ in a concert in London. This is a gargantuan late Romantic piece for enormous forces and Hotter’s rendition of the poetry was still all-encompassing, especially when at the most heightened moment, he sings rather than speaks the text. It allowed me to have some tiny idea of how his Wotan must have sounded. He was a bit confused after the concert but his lovely wife of many decades, remembering me from my visits to Munich years before, reminded him of our work and he remembered. This was a life enhancing and deeply moving end to our acquaintance, never to be forgotten.
Sir Peter Pears is the other great artist I would like to write about today. I first became aware of his voice at school, aged about 13, when our English teacher played us a gramophone record of “This ae night”, one of the Border Ballads set to music by Benjamin Britten, as part of his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. The terrifying words and other worldly sound of Pears has remained with me ever since, and I consider him one of the great British singers of all time. Of course, in his privileged position as Britten’s lifelong partner, he did have some of the finest music written for him, but his artistry was immense. I now regret my schoolboy stupidity as we sniggered about the two of them, even calling anyone slightly fey at school a Benj! Different times!
Sir Peter Pears with Brian Bannatyne-Scott. Roger Vignoles at the piano.
I heard Peter live for the first time when he sang the Evangelist in a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Edinburgh (an earlier incarnation of the one I sang in later) with Herrick Bunney and first worked with him in the late 80s at the Britten-Pears Summer School at Snape Maltings near Aldeburgh. Britten had died only a couple of years before, greatly to my regret, as I would love to have met him, but the whole set up at Snape was overlaid with reverence for Ben, and Peter, though now fairly old himself, was looked on as the custodian of the memory. It could have been slightly creepy, and indeed when I first went there, I felt uncomfortable. However, as time passed, I became more at home and the Ben legacy less overwhelming. Eventually, it settled for me into a marvellous place to learn, to study and to sing, as various famous artists associated with Ben and Peter were brought in as coaches and teachers. At first, it was Nancy Evans, Eric Crozier, Rae Woodland and Bryan Drake who were the most visible with Peter around all the time with masterclasses and private lessons. I remember sessions on Bach and Schutz Passions which were fantastic in their exploration of these wonderful composers.
Peter’s individual lessons were always interesting, although truth be told, he was not a particularly good teacher. He didn’t really know how he did it himself and could not actually explain how I might sing, especially as I am a bass and he was a high tenor. However, when he reverted to demonstration (the exact opposite to Hotter), he was wonderful, and that haunting voice I had first heard as a 13-year-old in the same room was mind-boggling. When we worked on Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, Britten operas written for Peter as the main singer, he was utterly fascinating, and his many stories were vastly entertaining. He also still had an eye for a good-looking young man, and I think that kept him young. It was an extraordinary set up at Snape, apparently relaxed and easy-going, but actually very well run and organised, and it has, in the concert hall there, where we often performed, one of the best acoustics in the world. I made many friends there and learned a great amount about what it takes to be a singer and working with Peter was an invaluable part of that.
Next time, I shall write about two of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century, with whom I also had the great fortune to study, Galina Vishnevskaya and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Here are a couple of music clips which give you an idea of the artistry of Hotter and Pears:
Hotter sings Schubert’s great song Aufenthalt and Pears sings the haunting This Ae Night.
