A Singer’s Life: Seattle Pt2

Seattle is situated at the very north-west corner of the United States, close to the Canadian border, looking out towards the Olympic Peninsula, recently made famous by the Twilight novels and films, where werewolves and vampires pitted their wits against the lowly humans of the region. In reality, the peninsula is a very beautiful area of forests and mountains, as is the hinterland behind Seattle, and one feels the very real freshness of the Pacific coast, far removed from what one normally thinks of as America. I took a trip up round the coast to Vancouver in British Columbia by train, and enjoyed the scenery immensely, particularly as it was one of the slowest journeys I have ever made.

Train journeys in the USA are now somewhat anachronistic, in this age of the car and the aeroplane. I discovered a few years later that trains are still used frequently in the east of the country and when I was working at the New York Met, I took trains to New Jersey and Connecticut from Penn Station and Grand Central, which felt almost normal. In Washington State, this was not the case. I had to pre-book my ticket to Vancouver and turn up an hour before departure to be allocated my seat. Now, as this was a cross border train, there was some sense in the idea, but the rigmarole of allocation was very slow. As was the train! It is a journey of about 140 miles and takes around two and a half hours to drive. The train takes four and a half hours! It is as if the TGV and the Bullet train had not been invented. My ticket was a return, but the return was not until the next day. I only realised this as I was crossing the Canadian border when the inspector checked my ticket. Fortunately, I had no rehearsal the next day, and I knew some friends of relatives who could put me up for the night.  

This trip revealed one of the extraordinary anomalies I kept coming across in America. The biggest, newest, most modern country in the world is still mired in tradition. It’s not ancient tradition, and most of it dates from the recent past. I offer a couple more examples: travelling around the States, one is accustomed to see everywhere, on the streets, in huge parking lots near the railway, hundreds of identical yellow school buses. These buses are the same model used in the 1950s, old fashioned, uncomfortable, slow, but they have not changed, because they like it that way. When you pay for anything by cash in America (becoming rarer now, I admit), you pay with a green note which is virtually identical whether it is worth 1 dollar or 100 dollars. This is deeply confusing and, in reality, crazy and impractical, but woe betide anyone who suggests changing things! The Constitution itself, that wonderful creation of the late 18th century, is severely out of date in the modern world, but it is the ‘Constitution’. It defines America, and any tiny alteration would result in chaos and outrage. This is why the famous “Right to bear Arms”, completely understandable in lawless colonial days, is so damaging and dangerous now. I was astonished, on one of my first days in Seattle, wandering into the park near my apartment, to see a notice declaring that the carrying and use of firearms was prohibited in this park. Hooray for that, I thought! This was a sign not imaginable in Scotland. My son, who had just left school, came to visit for a week, but I could not get him into a bar, let alone buy him a drink – 21 or over only. 

My trip to Vancouver was nonetheless very beautiful, if slow, and I enjoyed the comparison of two big cities, similar to each other but also very different. I could not have imagined that, only a year later, I would be back in the Pacific North West, on the Canadian side, singing La Roche in Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’ in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, only a ferry ride from Seattle, and that I would go back there three more times over the next years. 

In fact, when I sang Bottom in Britten’s opera ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in 2016, Fran and I took a seaplane trip from Victoria harbour to Vancouver harbour to meet our friend David James for lunch! David had flown all the way from London to see me sing, a journey of epic proportions. The two harbours are apparently the busiest harbours for seaplane activity in the world, and I was quite excited to be able to fly in this way. I found it particularly poignant, as my father had been a compass adjuster for seaplanes during WW2, although his seaplanes were the huge flying boats of the 1940s. I was struck, on my return to Vancouver, by the change in demographic which I noticed on the streets and on the subway. The enormous influx of immigrants from south east Asia to western Canada in recent years has meant that the majority of people there are now of Asian descent. 

Back in Seattle, I was particularly taken by the area round where I was staying. In 1962 Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, and as a beacon for the new exploration of space, it was decided that a major development would crown the event. Consequently, they built the 600 ft Space Needle, one of Seattle’s most iconic sights, as well as a monorail from the Seattle Center (the name for this ambitious building project) to the heart of Downtown. All the Sci-Fi films and TV programmes of the 60s imagined a complex network of monorails throughout the world, whisking space age people around cities silently and smoothly. Obviously, this never happened, except in Seattle where it is still working, and is enormous fun to ride on. It was one of the quickest ways of getting into town from my apartment, although the bus was much cheaper. In fact, most of the city buses were free during the working day, something I did not expect. Over the years, the Seattle Center has developed with a Science Museum and a Museum of Pop Culture integrated into the park, along with a fairground and a large fountain and paddling pool area. The Space Needle is a fantastic edifice, soaring above the city, with great views by night and by day. There is a revolving restaurant at the top, where you can sit and enjoy a very good meal while watching the scenery move round. I took my son up for dinner, and he is still raving about it all these years later. I remember we had enormous steaks! The Museum of Pop Culture is all the more important, as Seattle is the home of Grunge, a phenomenon usually associated with the early 90s bands, most notably, Nirvana, who grew up there. Apparently, the word is it was hated by all the bands associated with Grunge, with its evocation of yucky stuff on a shower curtain conveying a less than attractive image, even to the exponents of its very loud, heavily amplified sound. This is not my music of choice, but it is important nonetheless. 

The Cascade Mountains to the east of Seattle form a beautiful backdrop to the city, and the city is surrounded by water, Puget Sound, an arm of the Pacific to the west and Washington Lake (freshwater) to the east, before the Cascades. The Cascades form part of the rim of fire which extends down the Western seaboard of north America, interconnected volcanos, some still active and some dormant, which soar above the general level. I was aware, early on, of a huge mountain to the south of Seattle, which one can see clearly from many parts of the city. This is Mount Rainier, a 14,411 ft active volcano, named in English after George Vancouver’s friend Admiral Peter Rainier in the early 19th century, but originally known to native Americans as Tacoma. I was happily referring to it using the pronunciation of the Prince of Monaco but was swiftly told that it rhymes with veneer (none of that French stuff!). My son and I hired a car and we drove half-way up this impressive mountain, with its eternal snow-cap. It was heartening to know that it had not erupted for some time, but a different trip a few weeks later down to Portland, Oregon, revealed the precarious nature of this view. We passed the blown up remnants of Mount St Helens, the next big volcano in the ring, which famously erupted in 1980, killing 57 people, and losing over a thousand feet of altitude in a lateral explosion, leaving a mile wide horseshoe crater. It is an awesome sight. Another worrying feature of the Pacific coast of both the USA and Canada is that, as you drive along near the sea, there are multiple signs warning of tsunamis, and telling people to flee upland at any given notice! Our little rump of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, a tenth of its original height, and now happily extinct, made me very glad not to live in an earthquake and volcano zone! 

As I wrote earlier, the production of Wagner’s Ring in Seattle was based on the idea of transferring the action to the Pacific North West. Since the scenery of the Cascades is essentially the same as Wagner’s concept of the Nordic/Germanic prehistoric landscape, it was possible to allude to the sort of mountains and forests of Teutonic mythology which had inspired Wagner in the first place. Some would call it deeply traditional, with its spears, swords, tunics and hunting horns, but, actually, what is wrong with playing the work as originally conceived? I have always argued that a production can fit into any concept imposed on it, provided that the action, and the acting, is true to life. The contrary is also true, that a production may look as traditional as possible, but is not boring if the acting is genuine and the characters are credible and honest. 

I have been in some utterly ludicrous productions, updated, misconceived, contrary, whose only good point was a sense of excitement and innovation, but which were overwhelmed by the imposition of a conception totally at odds with the composer’s intention. Very often, I found myself completely unable to play the character, because the concept was so all-important that the individual players were simply pawns in a director’s chess game. On other occasions, notably in Jonathan Miller’s brilliant ‘Rigoletto’ at the London Coliseum, the concept freed the actors from the straitjacket of conventionality, with mediaeval costumes and jester’s gear, and allowed us to play characters in a completely credible Mafia whodunnit. 

Many years ago, Fran and I saw a production of ‘Boris Godunov’ at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, which was brilliantly sung, but acted as if put on by a Townswomen’s guild on a night off. 

Suffice it to say, that the production of the Ring at Seattle in 2009 was a triumph of modern acting within a traditional framework. It wasn’t perfect, as the director was a micro-manager who gave the singers little scope for personal interpretation, but the quality and experience of the main players succeeded in controlling his control, as it were. It was only when one of the understudies went on, my colleague singing the other giant, Fasolt, that the director’s control freakery got out of hand. We had all rehearsed separately in cover rehearsals, and knew what to do in fine detail, but when this unfortunate chap went on in a performance, the director called him in the next day for hours of staging, down to tiny aspects of movement, and position on stage. Instead of commending my colleague on his brilliant performance the night before (it is immensely scary to go on as an understudy), he berated him for being 10 centimetres from where he should have been, and for missing one small cue. I’m afraid he lost my respect at that point, and I was much relieved that I didn’t have to go on for either of my roles. Mind you, my non-appearance set in motion the extraordinary sequence of non-appearances that were to follow over the next 5 or 6 years. After Seattle, I understudied twice at the New York Metropolitan Opera and once at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, each time getting my visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” and each time being paid a large number of US Dollars. I have to this day never appeared on a stage in the USA; I have yet to make my US debut, and frankly it’s not going to happen. However, that summer in Seattle was a memorable one, indeed one of my most memorable contracts in 40 years, and the experience of watching some of the finest singers in the world in music that I have loved since I was a teenager, in a part of the world I adore, sets it apart as a very special time in my life. It was also a fantastic antidote to my original dislike of the USA, and reminded me that, although not hugely enamoured of American politics, I was able to see that most Americans are kind, helpful, genuine human beings, living in one of the great countries of the world.