Norman Bailey: A Personal View of a Fine Singer
Scottish audiences were very fond of the fine baritone Norman Bailey, who has just died in America at the age of 88. He first sang with Scottish Opera as Kurwenal in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in 1973, returning for Macbeth, Hans Sachs, Sharpless, The Dutchman and Oroveso.
He was born in Birmingham in 1933 but emigrated with his family to South Africa and Rhodesia, where he received his education and musical training. Having studied at Rhodes University, he taught there for some time, before moving to Vienna, where he completed his studies with Adolf Vogel, Julius Patzak and Josef Witt. Patzak, in particular, was a very famous Austrian tenor, who sang alongside Hans Hotter in many productions in Munich before and during the Second World War, and who can be heard on the recording of Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ with Kathleen Ferrier, conducted by Bruno Walter in 1953.
Norman’s first professional roles, after his debut in Vienna in an unlikely role in Rossini’s ‘La Cambiale di Matrimonio’ in 1959, were in Linz, Wuppertal and then Düsseldorf, before making his debut as Mozart’s Figaro at Sadler’s Wells Opera in London in 1967. He became a stalwart of that company, singing first Sachs and then Wotan in the famous productions conducted by the legendary Reginald Goodall. He soon started to appear at both Covent Garden and ENO, singing such Wagner roles as Dutchman, Wolfram, Kurwenal and Amfortas, and Don Pizarro, Di Luna, Scarpia and Kutuzov (‘War and Peace’). In the old German system, very like Hans Hotter, he would have been placed in the Fach of Heldenbariton (heroic baritone), often loosely described nowadays as Bass-Baritone, in my view a misnomer since the Bass element is very limited. In later life, he took on several bass roles as his voice naturally darkened, as did Hotter. It was fascinating to work with these two titans of Wagnerian singing and observe the similarities and differences between them. For me, Norman was always a baritone, and his whole persona related to that world. Hans however was, I felt, a bass manqué since, despite his magnificent top, he sounded more comfortable in the bass repertoire, which he took on in later life. I find it extraordinary that he created the role of Olivier in Richard Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’ in 1942, a real baritone role, and yet, in 1957, he recorded the role of La Roche (along with a cast the like of which is now hard to imagine, including Schwarzkopf, Gedda, Fischer-Dieskau, Ludwig and Wächter), the role that I have sung on and off throughout my career, a proper bass role, high but sonorous. Norman would never have sung La Roche.
However, the roles he did sing were definitive. If perhaps his recording of the Dutchman in Wagner’s first successful opera, ‘Der Fliegende Holländer’ is slightly lacking in charisma, it is still a magnificent piece of singing. From the first note, we are aware of the Dutchman’s loneliness, as he roams the seas looking for redemption in a faithful woman. The great climactic moments at the end of his aria, in his duet with Senta and at the end, where he thinks himself betrayed again and consigned to another seven years of fruitless wandering across the oceans, these moments find Norman at his best, firm of sound and rock-solid in his ability to tackle the biggest, highest notes. The authority with which he sang the Dutchman, and also Wotan, remains my greatest memory of this fine singer, his technique allowing him to sing even the biggest phrases with apparent ease.
The subject of technique was one we talked about a lot in our many sessions at his home in Croydon. I had been singing frequently at the London Coliseum with ENO, mainly in medium-sized roles like Monterone in ‘Rigoletto’ and the Commendatore in ‘Don Giovanni’, but the management were hoping that I would progress to bigger roles. The technique I had acquired from my 15 years with Laura Sarti had enabled me to get so far, but particularly in that enormous theatre, the Coliseum, there was a worry that I might struggle to fill the space with a firm enough sound over a long evening. I had always sung plenty of Lieder and was beginning to sing Baroque music at a high level, and so was using lots of different colours in my voice. These varied colours were less important at the Coliseum, where the main requirement was carrying the voice over a big orchestra into an auditorium seating 2,359 people. The largest theatre in London needed heft, and so the management at ENO decided that I should go and study with the singer with the most carrying power in my voice type, Norman Bailey. It was a very generous thought and showed an appreciation of how they might mould me for bigger and better things with the company. It was not their fault that my voice and my technique were so different from Norman’s that, despite working together for about 2 years, I didn’t really develop in the way we and they had hoped. In retrospect, I can see now that we were so different in so many ways, both in temperament and style, that it was never really going to work. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together though, and I learned an immense amount about singing, and some of the roles we studied, but it took another 8 or 9 nine years before I discovered Tony Roden, with whom I still work, who unlocked the mysteries that lie within my voice. In many ways, the experience of not really progressing with Norman and my parting of the ways with ENO, was the making of the second half of my career, which took me all over the world singing Baroque music, and latterly allowed me to sing much bigger parts in theatres of a more manageable size. Throughout all the lessons with Norman, he proved a most delightful and honourable teacher and friend. As I was beginning to sing more and more Baroque music, the need to fill a huge theatre in London became less important, and indeed, I was looking for more flexibility and not less, and so we decided, amicably, that we had reached the end of our professional journey together. We stayed in touch, but our lives took different paths. When he moved to Idaho in America at the age of about 70 with his much younger wife, Kristine, I think he spent a good part of his retirement in a very happy cocoon of contentment.
My abiding memory of this great singer was his assumption of the role of Hans Sachs in Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’, a long, long role of great warmth and dignity, which fitted Norman perfectly. From the argumentative Guild member of the first act, who is at pains to show to the other Guild members the folly of the decision to award a human being the daughter of the head of the Guild, Veit Pogner (my role, eventually) as a prize in a singing competition, to the warm humanity of the intelligent cobbler of the second act, and to the noble doyen of the people at the end, Norman conveyed, both by his singing, but also by his acting, a degree of character study rare in the world of opera. That the megalomaniac, anti-Semitic, womanising monster that was Wagner could create this deeply humane figure at the heart of the story is one of the wonders of music. That this quiet, reserved man with the gentle South African accent, could bring this magnificent character to life on stage, and sing it unflaggingly for hours on end, is one of the wonders of our generation, and I was proud to know him and consider him my friend.
