A Singer’s Life: Victoria BC Pt1
It might surprise you to discover that for my next favourite place I, the great Europhile, have chosen a second North American location, and one only a few miles from my original choice of Seattle, namely Victoria on Vancouver Island in Canada. As I have written in A Singer’s Life, Victoria is one of my most loved cities on earth, not for its grandeur, nor its immense historical and artistic background, nor its breathtaking beauty. I adore Victoria, firstly for its people, and most importantly for its significance to me in my life and career.
I had been to Canada a couple of times before, twice to sing in Ottawa with Trevor Pinnock and once for a two-day trip to Vancouver from Seattle. Canada holds a special place in the hearts of most Scots, as there are few families who do not have some relative who emigrated to that northern country. From my family on the Scott side there are some distant relatives in, I believe, Thunder Bay, and on the Bannatyne side my maternal grandfather left in the Depression of the late 1920s to set up a new home in Canada, and never came home. As far as I am aware, he never remarried and I don’t have any lost cousins in Canada, but who knows?
In the early 90s, when I was working very closely with Trevor Pinnock, who was then director of the English Concert, I was invited by him to come to Ottawa, where he was also director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in the Canadian capital. His time there was somewhat controversial, as he was pre-eminent in baroque repertoire but less familiar with mainstream music. I was unaware of any controversy and had an absolutely marvellous time, falling in love with Canada and singing in two fabulous productions, a wacky dance-based version of Handel’s ‘Acis and Galatea’ and a concert performance of Bach’s magnificent ‘St Matthew Passion’. The Handel was in association with Opera Atelier of Toronto, run by the choreographer and director Marshall Pinkoski, whose elaborate productions of baroque stage works continue to this date. It was one of my first shows with Jamie MacDougall (well-known to readers of these articles), and I remember mostly that the stage was laid out in a grid system, and we could only move following set grid patterns. Spontaneity, as you might imagine, was frowned upon, but the singing was good.
I had no more acquaintance with Canada until when I was singing in Seattle in 2009, I decided to visit Vancouver. The previous article relates the story of my unusual trip then, but, as Fate will have it, I found myself on Vancouver Island less than a year later, catapulted into the first ever production in Canada of Richard Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’, when the artist singing La Roche, the Theatre Director, had to withdraw. I had recently sung the role in Germany, with some success, and my agent was able to offer me to Pacific Opera Victoria as a reliable exponent of this most enormous and difficult of roles.
As I have written elsewhere, this was the last opera composed by Strauss, astonishingly premiered in Munich in 1942 at the height of the Second World War when the Third Reich seemed unstoppable. It seems incredible that the 78-year old composer, who was certainly not a Nazi, could come up with a conversation piece in German lasting two and a half hours, discussing whether words come before music or vice versa in the creation of musical works, with utterly sublime music, at the same time as German warplanes were attacking cities all over Europe, Russia was struggling to resist German invasion, and millions of Jews and other groups hated by the Nazis were being systematically wiped out. Some critics have wondered just how Strauss could write something so intrinsically frivolous at such a time, but they misunderstood the composer. Hans Hotter, who readers will know was a teacher and mentor of mine, sang the role of Olivier in that first performance in Munich, and maintained that neither he nor Strauss were sympathetic to the Nazi regime at all, but that the composer was deeply committed to music, and saw music as his way of both ignoring the regime and transcending it. Other than coming out and opposing Hitler and Goebbels, inviting instant imprisonment and execution, it seems to me that the creation and performance of great music was the best antidote to the prevailing situation available.
As often happens with singers and agents, I arrived in Victoria after a long series of flights (Edinburgh-London-Vancouver-Victoria), largely unaware of just what a pickle the company was in. The original singer had withdrawn literally days before the start of rehearsals and, although hardly a modern opera, ‘Capriccio’ is not a piece which anyone can learn in a few days. Since it was, bizarrely, a Canadian premiere, there were no Canadians who knew the role, and since the raison d’être of Pacific Opera Victoria (POV) is to use Canadian singers unless it proves impossible to do so, they were in real difficulty. Enter BBS, a knight in shining armour! Not only did I know the role, but I had sung it quite recently in Bielefeld in Germany, to a German audience, and had worked tirelessly to be even better than the Germans in the cast with pronunciation and clarity of diction. It is also, if I may be so immodest, the perfect role for me: it needs a reasonably big voice to ride over the large orchestra, it needs a personality on stage which can dominate both the ensemble and the acting space, and it needs a singer of intelligence and wit, because the character of La Roche is the personification of intelligence, wit and enormous self-confidence! Of course, like all people who work on the stage, the appearance of self-confidence is more important than the actual physical reality, but that’s acting, my dear!
Strauss and his librettist (the conductor Clemens Krauss, who also conducted the premiere, with his wife Viorica Ursuleac as the Countess) produced an extraordinary opera which defies almost every operatic convention. There is virtually no action, no-one dies, there are no arias to hold up the action and it is almost entirely a long conversation about words and music, taking as its starting point Salieri’s dictum: “Prima la musica, dopo le parole” (First the music, then the words). A group of wealthy characters meet at the chateau of a brother and sister Count and Countess, in France around 1775. Countess Madeleine is torn between two suitors, a poet Olivier, and a composer, Flamand. The opera (originally two and a half hours without an interval, now usually split into two acts) basically relates the outcome of her dilemma. There is no conclusion, and we are left to speculate at the end what her choice might be. The opera opens with many of the characters listening to a new sextet, supposedly written by Flamand, actually a marvellous piece of chamber music showing Strauss at his melodic best. When it finishes to polite applause, my character La Roche, the theatre director and impresario, wakes up with the brilliant line: “With gentle music playing, one gets the best sleep”. La Roche was modelled sympathetically and accurately, apparently with little room to mistake the reference, on the great Austrian-born Jewish theatre director, Max Reinhardt, who had recently fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Sadly, he never saw ‘Capriccio’, as he died in New York in 1943 at the age of 70.
Here’s a fascinating fact. In 1935, Reinhardt directed a film in Hollywood of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, using Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play (including the famous wedding march), and featuring James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as a boy Puck, Olivia De Havilland (who only died in 2020 at the age of 104) as Hermia and Joe E Brown (of “nobody’s perfect” fame in ‘Some Like it Hot’) as Flute, the bellows-mender. It was banned by the Nazis both for Mendelssohn’s music and Reinhardt’s directing!
La Roche spends the whole opera defending the “theatre” and puncturing the posturing egos of most of the other characters. The only person he defends and eulogises is the actress Clairon, who arrives about a third of the way through the opera. She has come to rehearse Olivier’s new play, in which the Count has the leading role. The Count has engaged Madame Clairon, the star of the Court theatre at Versailles, as his partner in the play, both for her fame but also because he fancies the elegant 19th century underwear off her!
As you will know, having read my various articles on EMR, I am a huge fan of ‘Capriccio’, to the extent that I often ramble on about it too much, as I am doing here. Suffice to say that I think it is a work of genius, although it needs to be seen either in the language of its audience or with surtitles, that marvellous invention of modern opera. I once sat through a performance at Covent Garden, in German, with the magnificent Kiri te Kanawa singing the Countess without surtitles, and even I, who knew the opera, became bored, as the debates about words, music, theatre and their importance in 18th century France swirled round the stage!
Having written at length about ‘Capriccio’, Canada and me, perhaps this is a good point to stop, and break off until Part 2.
