A Singer’s Life Pt30

I thought I might write today about some of the interesting things I have been asked to do on stage over the years, and also some of the things that didn’t go quite right on the night.

My first years in the profession were at Scottish Opera and the two crazy modern operas I wrote about back in Part 2. In Venice and Rome, as a Magus, in Castiglioni’s “Oberon”, I had to wear a ridiculous wig and beard and stand on stage with my colleague, Magus 2, waving our arms about in a magical way and singing incomprehensible gibberish, which had once been the delightful poetry of Thomas Campion, the Elizabethan writer, to music of awful weirdness. Welcome to the wacky world of modern opera!

At Scottish, I was very much the new kid on the block, probably rather too full of myself, having won the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize, featured heavily in the BBC Schwarzkopf Masterclasses, and having arrived straight from college and my experiences at the Fenice and in Rome. I was at this stage a promising young singer aged 26, with not much experience as a professional and even less expertise as an actor! I was engaged as a company soloist, basically to sing small and medium sized roles, understudy bigger ones and learn my trade. It was a great learning curve, and I benefited from excellent advice from my more senior colleagues, who despite what they might have thought of this over-confident youth, were unstinting in their help and friendship. I was able to find out much about stagecraft and many of the tricks of the trade in this period, and I got to sing with some great singers and conductors. Singing smaller parts, I learned how to pace bigger roles by watching the stars at close hand – for example how Norman Bailey sang unflaggingly throughout the enormous role of Hans Sachs in Wagner’s “Mastersingers” and how Alberto Remedios was still able to sing wonderfully in the same opera as Walther at the end of 5 hours; how John Rawnsley could pace himself through the exhausting role of Rigoletto and still have the big high note left at the end; how Margaret Marshall could sing the role of Pamina in “The Magic Flute” so beautifully every night; how Ian Caley could float the high tessitura of Nadir in “The Pearl Fishers” so perfectly. I watched as some singers sang for ages lying on the floor and with no lack of power or beauty. Incidentally, as a bass who never got the girl (or indeed even a look in at the girl – damned tenors and baritones!), I never learned how to do that lying down and singing thing. I am still lost in admiration at my higher voiced colleagues who had to do this repeatedly but remain content that I didn’t have to learn. I have always tried to persuade directors that my voice sounded better from a standing position, preferably downstage and preferably unencumbered by hats and other muffling gear and have mostly managed to get away with that for over 40 years!

One of my first difficulties with a director was early on at Scottish Opera, when the controversial American director of ‘Rigoletto’ decided that I, as Monterone, the wronged father of one of the duke of Mantua’s conquests, needed to be strung up on a chandelier after being mocked by the courtiers and Rigoletto, the jester. Having stormed into the room to denounce the duke and the jester, and having been insulted over and over again, Monterone is ordered to be arrested. As tension mounts, the unhappy father issues the damning curse on Rigoletto which he will take to heart and which will cause so much grief. The director decided that it would look more dramatic if I was hoisted into the flies attached to a chandelier to issue the telling curse, and so, during the conspiratorial ensemble of chorus and soloists, and surrounded by chorus, I was strapped into a hoist attached to the chandelier, and at the appropriate moment, raised up about 20 feet. This involved a very speedy fitting into a safety harness, tied tightly round the groin area, and a manoeuvre of some skill by the technical crew to get me up in the air. It would have been hard enough if we had had time for this, but there were only a few seconds available, and I was forever in fear that the harness would slip into a place that might result in my curse sounding a couple of octaves higher than intended! It never happened but it was always on my mind, although it actually took my mind off the fact that I was hanging high up in the air. It did look spectacular, nonetheless.

Many years later, in Germany, I was singing the huge role of La Roche in Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’. I had appeared in the classic John Cox production when at Scottish Opera, which set the action in the early 20th century rather than in the original 18th century, a stroke of genius which made the story much more relevant to a modern audience. This is actually a very common directorial trend in recent decades, and generally, I approve of it. If singers are dressed up in tights and wigs et al, it is very difficult to escape the feeling of a dated art form. I have heard a lot of complaints from friends about modern opera always being updated and why can’t we see it as it was meant to be and why can’t the singers just stand there and sing? My response would be that it would be really boring, both for audience and actors, and that it is not possible now to go back to the static ‘fat lady’ syndrome. You cannot be successful in opera now without the ability to act, especially as many of the performances are filmed in close up. People lament the lack of ‘stand and deliver’, but it would be dreary in the extreme, and also tedious for us. Why bother with staging and costumes, if the singing is the only thing, especially as nowadays we have many fine singing actors? On the other hand, gratuitous changes to the plot or story to fit in with some spurious need for the director to be different is even worse, and we see far too much of that these days. In opera’s heyday in the 19th century, the singer was king or queen, and then it became a conductor’s art form. Sadly now, it is almost exclusively the director’s opera, and often designer’s opera or dramaturg’s opera, to the extent that a lot of publicity about performances often excludes the singers entirely!

This short digression is relevant to that production of ‘Capriccio’ in Bielefeld, as the director had decided to impose her idea that, although the whole point of the opera is the great question of what is most important, the words or the music, she felt it was necessary to investigate Richard Strauss’ supposed ambivalence to the Nazi regime, an ambivalence completely refuted to my mind in Hans Hotter’s memoirs. Hotter was no Nazi, and he maintains that neither was Strauss! Anyway, during my long and difficult aria towards the end of the opera, the audience’s attention was taken from my “marvellous” singing by a sort of war crimes tribunal on a raised set behind me where an actor dressed up as the composer was being interrogated. Brilliant.

In addition, at the very beginning of the piece, when the Countess is seen listening to a beautiful piece of chamber music by her favourite composer who happens to be a potential lover, the director had me strapped into an armchair lifted into the flies above the stage and behind the proscenium arch, hanging there for nearly 15 minutes prior to singing one of the longest roles in opera. As the sextet ended, I was lowered on to the stage, so I could make my first comment in the piece “with lovely music, one can sleep very contentedly”. Normally the character is portrayed on stage in the armchair, asleep. What benefit the director imagined for me to be sitting 20 feet up breathing in the dust behind the curtain and getting generally nervous and uncomfortable, was unclear!

I wrote in one of the early articles about the nonsensical production of “Peter Grimes” in Nantes, which still ranks as the worst I have been in, but several others came close. However, I have never walked out of a production in my career, although I have watched some for which I would not have stayed for the rehearsal period. Similarly, I have never been badly injured on stage, although I know at least two friends who have had potentially career ending accidents, which have led to legal action. I have, however, been involved in one or two productions early on in my career, where I now would have said a firm “NO”. In an otherwise fantastic production of Wagner’s Ring, I and another colleague, acting the parts of the giants Fafner and Fasolt, were told/asked to wear stilt boots making us about a foot taller than normal. We were given Gandalf staffs to lean on, but when we were asked to climb up and down sets of stairs built into the stage wearing these boots, I suggested that this was a bit much. Any slip or fall would have meant that we would have had to support our weight in falling with our arms, which would almost inevitably have resulted in a fracture. Realising that my colleague was less wary than I was, the director asked him if he was comfortable with this arrangement out of my earshot, and when he, stupidly in my view, concurred, it was the easiest thing for the director, in front of the rest of the cast, to make it look like I was a scaredy cat, and mock my fears. Consequently, we had to don these boots over a period of months in many performances in various unusual venues like sports centres and town halls.

At the end of ‘Götterdämmerung’, as Hagen, I had to dive after the lost ring into the same pit section of the set I had had to climb in and out of in ‘Rhinegold’, landing on a specially hidden mattress. It looked great and was very effective until one performance where the local stage crew had not been told about the mattress. The stage was dark and full of smoke as I leapt into the unknown, sadly finding not a mattress but a few metal lights. I was extremely lucky not to suffer more than a few bruises, but despite the huge success of these performances, I never worked with that director again...

This story brings to mind the, I hope, true story from many years ago of the singer portraying Tosca in the eponymous opera who, at the end, leaps from the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome to her death. Usually, she landed on a large mattress but one night, for some reason, the stage crew had installed a trampoline instead, and the audience was rewarded with the sight of the not inconsiderably sized lady bouncing back into view!

As I have got older, I have felt much more relaxed about telling directors that I was not prepared to do something on stage. Once again in Bielefeld, as Baron Ochs in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, I was about to make my entrance in the First Act. Prior to my arrival, we see the Marschallin and her young lover, Octavian, in the aftermath of a night of passion. As they are enjoying coffee, there is much excitement outside the Marschallin’s boudoir. The couple think it is the return from hunting of her husband, and are in a panic, but come to realise that it is her country cousin coming for a visit. Lackeys try to prevent my arrival, as they have been told to admit no one, but, with much bluster, I arrive at the door and force my way in: “Obviously, her Grace will welcome me!” I exclaim, in a loud voice. Now, normally, the Baron crashes through the door and declaims the above. It’s a wonderful moment. However, in this production, the marital bed was half the size of the stage and enormous with it. The director decided he wanted me to crawl from backstage under the bed and come out of a trapdoor in the middle of the bed. So, he wanted me to go on hands and knees through all the dust and grime of the stage, in darkness, find the trapdoor, push it open, struggle with all the rumpled bedclothes, stagger to my feet on an unwieldy surface, and sing a big high note, prior to a scene of extreme difficulty both musically and linguistically.

“I’ll come through the door”, I said!