A Singer’s Life: Preparation Pt2
“Hi Brian, we’ve had an inquiry from the Theatre in Bielefeld again. They are interested in you maybe singing La Roche in Strauss’s ‘Capriccio’ next year. What do you think?” This phone call from my agent sometime in 2007 was one of those life-changing moments when you think: “At last! Yes!” However, that is just the beginning of a very complicated procedure which will eventually result in you turning up for the first day of rehearsals in a foreign city, with lots of colleagues who you don’t know, mostly speaking a language you understand but are not fluent in. Daunting, but exciting nonetheless.
In this case, the first question I normally consider was redundant. That question is: what is this role, and would it suit me? I had first come across ‘Capriccio’ in the early 1980s when I was a company principal at Scottish Opera. The company was to perform the opera in the production by John Cox, previously seen at Glyndebourne. John, who at this stage was the General Director of Scottish Opera, had had great success with this production, updating the action to the 1920s, an era when the world was recovering from the carnage of the First World War but before the awful Depression and the rise of Nazism and Bolshevism; in other words, in an era where it was possible for aristocratic types to spend their time discussing the finer points of whether Words or Music come first in artistic endeavours. The company, before the invention of supertitles, was to perform the opera in English, since a three hour discussion piece, with almost no action, was unlikely to appeal to a British audience in German. A super cast had been assembled, including my good friend Ian Caley, who had sung the original performances at Glyndebourne, as Flamand the musician. Scotland’s own Margaret Marshall was to sing the Countess, and the renowned Strauss expert Norman del Mar was the conductor. This was the Scottish premiere of the opera, and I, at the tender age of 29, was to understudy the enormous role of La Roche, the theatre director, modelled on the Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt by Strauss and his librettist Clemens Krauss in 1944. Frankly, I was much too young to sing such a huge role, but I learned it diligently, and on tour in Liverpool I went on when the original bass, Stafford Dean, was indisposed. I suppose it was a success of sorts, and I certainly felt drawn to this fascinating character. A few years later at Glyndebourne I understudied the role again, in German this time, but never went on.
Consequently, when I was asked to sing La Roche in Bielefeld in 2009, I knew the role and was confident that I could do it justice. The challenge was to sing this role in this opera with a German cast to a German public in German. Never one to shirk a challenge, I decided I must be clearer and more understandable even than the Germans in the cast! I had some experience of this, also at Bielefeld, a couple of years previously, when I had sung the equally huge role of Baron Ochs von Lerchenau in Strauss’ ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, and had scored something of a success. My finest moment was at the reception after the first night, when one of the sponsors asked me what part of Austria I came from? Ochs has to sing in a Lower Austrian accent, using dialect words, and I had succeeded in fooling this northern German into thinking the opera company had engaged a real Austrian for the role. The pleasure I took in revealing that I was actually from Scotland was exquisite!
Having had my success in ‘Rosenkavalier’, it was heartening to be invited back to sing La Roche, although in a way even more daunting. To sing such a role in an opera about words, which is basically a musical discussion, with a cast of Germans, was quite an ask. It was fortunate that the two main female leads, the Countess and Clairon the actress, had both sung with me in ‘Rosenkavalier’ as the Marschallin and Oktavian, and so we knew each other very well from that show. In addition, the conductor was the same, the Musical Director of the Theatre, Peter Kuhn, with whom I had enjoyed a great relationship, although it was not until the end of my third engagement at Bielefeld, when I sang Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, that I discovered that he spoke excellent English. We had always spoken in German, and I just assumed that perhaps he was from the old East Germany, and had Russian as his second language, rather than English, like most of his West German compatriots. Apparently, he is from Hannover!
Returning to the preparation needed to sing a role in an opera, although I had sung La Roche before, it was a long time ago! The Liverpool performance had been in 1984 and the Glyndebourne cover in 1990, so there was no alternative but to relearn it. If the reader will allow another tangential moment, when I understudied La Roche at Glyndebourne, I was found accommodation in a nearby village, with a delightful old chap called Anthony Buckeridge. He lived in a splendid rambling house, and very kindly let me use one of his spare rooms for the duration of my visit. We got to chatting, and it transpired that he was some sort of writer, so he was around for most of the time, working in his study. I thought no more about it until I happened to mention his name to a friend in London, and, as jaws dropped from a great height, it was explained to me that this nice old man (he was nearly 80) was the author of the Jennings Books, a series of children’s novels, which had been read by every small boy in England at this time, and related the fictional adventures of J C T Jennings at Linbury Court Preparatory School. As a small boy in Scotland I was blissfully ignorant of these tales of life in a minor public school, and was probably the only lodger Anthony entertained, who knew nothing of his work and renown. He died in 2004 at the age of 92, and I was always sad that I was never able to explain my apparent disdain for his magnum opus, coming as it did from ignorance and certainly not dislike!
Returning to the Bielefeld contract, my agent had contacted me about the role well in advance, and so I began my relearning procedure, which will serve as a fairly standard template for the whole process. Too much time had passed for me to remember much about the role, other than that it was enormously long, and that, after a couple of hours of dialogue and argument on stage, La Roche has a quite fabulous 15 minute rant about the nature of the theatre and the inadequacies of the various worthies with whom he has been disputing. This huge aria, which I had hardly come to terms with in 1984, was now within my grasp as a mature artist of 54, and I determined to do it justice.
My learning process has remained much the same throughout my career, regardless of the size of role or the language involved. The reader should be aware that, due to the nature of the art form and its history, very few operas were written in English, and so, as professional singers, we have to be able to learn and remember screeds of words in a variety of languages. Most common are Italian and German, but I have performed, in addition, in Czech, French, Russian and Spanish. I am often asked if I understand what I am singing about, and the answer is yes, although I am only fluent in French, Italian and German. I can speak these languages, to a degree, in conversation, but it must be said that I speak them considerably better after a few glasses of wine, although perhaps less cogently! In Britain we often have to perform in English translation, and I spent several years singing with English National Opera at the London Coliseum, singing exclusively in English.
I will generally start my preparation with language work. I tend to do all this work myself, using dictionaries and translations from recorded box sets. Anything in French (my best foreign language), German or Italian, I will prepare myself, as I know how these languages are constructed. For the more obscure repertoire, I will usually go once or twice at an early stage to a language coach. I have been lucky in the past 20 years in Edinburgh to have worked with the Czech consul here, Paul Milar, who has become a friend as well as a coach. He is a remarkable man of high culture, who has often helped me with Russian repertoire too. His own father knew Leoš Janáček in Brno personally, so I feel I have a direct connection with that composer. Normally, I don’t even begin to look at the music until I have a good grasp of the libretto, and for an opera like ‘Capriccio’, which is literally all about words, this is even more important.
Once I know what I am singing about, the process of learning the music begins. Although by no means a contemporary music specialist, my repertoire does tend towards the more cerebral composers. As I have pointed out over the course of these memoirs, my taste is not for the operas of the Bel Canto period, and indeed I seem to have found myself having to learn roles which involve learning thousands of words. In the last two decades alone, I have had to learn and memorise Wotan, Ochs, Falstaff, La Roche, Bottom, Pogner, Hagen and Arkel, none of which roles have the merest hint of Bel Canto repetition! In addition, I have sung in several really contemporary operas, like ‘Dr Atomic’, ‘Thanks to my Eyes’, ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Exterminating Angel’! There are no shortcuts to the learning process.
For each role, I set aside a period of time, even before I sing a note, when I will go through the vocal score and mark up every beat in every bar. Consequently, my scores are full of bars divided into 1, 2, 3 and 4, if I am lucky, and further multiples of beats if unlucky! Why so many contemporary composers are obsessed with weird time signatures, I have no idea, but they make our lives terribly difficult. If they also decide that any suggestion of tonality and harmony are for wimps, they then seem to take huge delight in writing parts that are almost impossible to sing. This is not always the case nowadays (thank God for Arvo Pärt), but sadly all too frequent.
The high Romantic composers just wrote lots of notes, but thankfully in a cocoon of tonal warmth, permitting a learning process which was hard but fruitful.
Having marked out each bar (and I really, really recommend any young singer to do this), I then move on to learning the notes, usually with a mixture of me sitting at the piano finding the notes on the keyboard (without harmonies), and then working with a professional coach (normally, a pianist who works with singers) to find the necessary combination of words and music to move on to the next stage. For most repertoire, this is a smooth period of study, working together to create an individual account of music that is reasonably well-known. I prefer to work with a coach who will guide me through a role without imposing his/her views too firmly. Usually I have done enough groundwork at home to come to a decision about how I want to sing the role, and what I need from the coach is encouragement, and above all an idea of the accompaniment I will expect to hear when I start to rehearse in situ with the cast and director. Not playing the piano at all (and I really can’t play at all!) has never been a major hindrance in my career, and often I think I have saved a lot of time that I might have wasted, trying to play the accompaniment myself.
It is worth pointing out at this point that all of this process, the language work, the note bashing at home, the work with a coach, is unpaid. If a specialist language coach is needed, if the music is so hard that I require a note-finding session with a coach, and when I need the services of an interpretive coach, all of these services necessitate an outlay of expense which is not reimbursed by the management who have issued my contract. Very occasionally, if the music is extremely hard, a contract will specify paid coaching sessions, but this is very rare!
On this depressing note, I will stop for a bit, and in the third part I will tell you about the next stages of the preparation process.
