‘Rennie Mackintosh, Vasari, Handel and Me’ – smaller historic venues

The TV show, Only Connect, would probably be stumped trying to find a connection between Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect and designer, Giorgio Vasari, the Italian Renaissance painter, architect and historian, and George Frederic Handel, the Baroque composer. The link, albeit tenuous, is me, because I have sung in a house designed by Mackintosh, a palace decorated with frescoes by Vasari, and the house in which Handel was born.

In 1980, I was invited to sing one of my very first recitals of Franz Schubert’s song cycle, ‘Winterreise’, in the drawing room of Hill House, the magnificent villa high up on the hill in the West of Scotland town, Helensburgh. I had performed the cycle at the Guildhall School of Music in London earlier in the year, with the precocious Jeremy Sams as accompanist, and we had recorded it there. I have transferred this precious recording on to CD and my digital library, so we can still hear that 25 year old, newly-married bass-baritone and his wonderfully sensitive accompanist perform Schubert’s and Wilhelm Müller’s tragic journey through the snowy wastes of early 19th century Germany. Poet, soldier, scholar, imperial librarian, Müller wrote a book of poems in 1824, ‘Poems from the posthumous papers of a travelling horn player’, which were discovered by Schubert in 1827. There were two sets of twelve poems, and for various reasons, the order was changed by Schubert to the order we know now, following the tragic, lovelorn poet as he journeys through a winter landscape away from his unfaithful girl, who has left him for someone wealthier. It has been said that the cycle charts a journey from despair to oblivion, and indeed it is not a bundle of laughs, and when we add in the fact that Müller died of a heart attack at the age of 33 in 1827, never having heard the composition that would preserve his memory for ever, swiftly followed by Schubert himself the following year, aged only 31, and largely unknown, the story of ‘Winterreise’  takes on an even more tragic aspect.

However, to perform the cycle is a marvellously cathartic experience, and a good performance can take the listener to a different level of existence, beyond sadness and misery, beyond earthly love affairs, and into a place of serene stillness and beauty. It’s similar to the reaction after a fine performance of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ or ‘Peter Grimes’, when you glimpse something greater than the tragedy of the story, transported by the magical genius of the music, and tears flow neither from pain nor joy, but from something ineffable and unfathomable.

These were my feelings as a teenager when I heard ‘Winterreise’ for the first time at the Usher Hall in the Edinburgh Festival, performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Daniel Barenboim, one of the great concerts of my lifetime, and the spark which kindled the flame drawing me back to this extraordinary song cycle over and over again through my career. I won’t pretend that the ‘Winterreise’ I performed with Jeremy in 1980 in the Hill House was anything like that Usher Hall recital, but the experience of singing in that beautiful, eccentric house in Helensburgh brought home to me the amazing genius of that young Viennese composer, apparently at the beginning of a great career, and yet destined to die without hearing much of his work performed. Who knows what he would have gone on to write, but at least we have a decent oeuvre left for us to enjoy.

Hill House was designed and built by the powerhouse couple, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret, for the publisher, Walter Blackie, in 1902-04, in the innovative Art Nouveau style. Both the inside and the outside were designed by the couple, and the house is a triumph of architecture and interior design. The drawing room was frankly a tad small for even a young singer like myself, and I fear the front rows must have been overwhelmed by sound on occasions, but the local newspaper considered it a great success, and it marked an important stage in my embryonic career. Jeremy Sams, of course, went on to become famous as a translator of operas, and as a fine director both of plays and operas, and in fact, I met him several decades later at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where he was directing his own English translation of ‘Die Fledermaus’.

A few years after the Helensburgh ‘Winterreise’, I was invited to Rome to sing two Bach cantatas in a palazzo decorated with frescoes painted 400 years before by Giorgio Vasari, one of the shining lights of the Italian Renaissance. The Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, close to the Piazza Navona, was built in the early 16th century by Cardinal Raffaele Riario and became an important centre for the administration of the Catholic Church. In 1546, Cardinal Farnese commissioned Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine polymath, to decorate the Great Hall of the palazzo with frescoes, in the new Mannerist style. An apocryphal story relates that Vasari boasted to Michelangelo that his work in the Cancelleria had taken only 100 days to complete, to which Michelangelo is said to have replied on seeing the finished frescoes that “It shows!” In 1707, a later cardinal, Ottoboni, engaged the composer and violinist, Arcangelo Corelli, as Master of Music in the palace, and he lived there until his death in 1713 at the age of 60, fêted and honoured throughout Europe. Corelli’s music is now acknowledged as a vital turning point in Western music, establishing the sonata and concerto forms, along with the pre-eminent status of the violin in orchestral music. He was acclaimed as the ‘New Orpheus’.

I had met the American musician, Miles Morgan, in 1986 at the Bamboo Organ Festival in the Philippines, where he had conducted me in Rossini’s ‘Stabat Mater’, and we had got on so well that he invited me to come to Rome the following year to sing with his Baroque group there, in a couple of Bach Cantatas, notably the great bass cantata, ‘Ich habe genug’. I arrived in my apartment beside the Piazza Navona and discovered to my joy and surprise that we were performing in the nearby Palazzo della Cancelleria. Turning up the next day for the first rehearsal, I found myself in the very room in which Corelli had given many concerts for Cardinal Ottoboni, decorated with frescoes by Giorgio Vasari. The musicians left their instruments, and I left my coat, in an ante-room also painted by the Florentine master, whose skills I was not prepared to condemn for hasty completion as Michelangelo had done. It was a wonderful experience, and one of my first with a period band, playing at Baroque pitch on gut strings and with authentic oboes and horns. This was soon to become my world, as I spent the next ten years or so performing all over Europe, and further afield, with great ensembles like the English Concert, Les Musiciens du Louvre and Concerto Vocale. The leader of Miles’ Ensemble, Walter Reiter, became an important member of the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock and we performed together many times, along with his lovely soprano wife, Linda Perillo from Canada.

Indeed, it was with Linda that I made my debut at the Halle Handel Festival in the former East Germany, 10 years later, in a wonderful production by Anthony Pilavachi of Handel’s ‘Tolomeo’. George Handel was born in Halle in 1685, where, in 1922, the Handel Festival was founded. Although he found fame and fortune abroad, notably in London, Handel’s childhood was firmly located in the Duchy of Magdeburg, at that time recovering from the depredations of the Thirty Years War, which had ended in 1648. His father was a barber-surgeon (an uncomfortable juxtaposition to modern eyes), originally of modest means but ambitious, and the young Georg Friedrich Händel, as he was baptised, soon came to people’s attention as a precocious musician, skilled at violin, harpsichord, organ and oboe. After a short period as organist at the Domkirche in Halle, he went on to work in Hamburg, and then spent some time in Italy, meeting up with same Cardinal Ottoboni at the Palazzo della Cancelleria who had made Corelli his Master of Music. Handel clearly was influenced by the compositions of Corelli, and almost certainly knew him in Rome. Soon the young composer found himself in London in 1712, where he settled and found fame, composing and playing for the English aristocracy and the new Hanoverian King George I, formerly Elector of Hanover, crowned in 1714. George spoke limited English and was pleased to have a compatriot like Handel around him. Soon the young composer was famous all over Europe, and he became one of the most renowned composers of his time.

His fame has lasted down the centuries, and the Handel Festival at Göttingen was founded in 1919, followed by that in Halle three years later. I have sung in Göttingen, although not in the Festival, but I was invited to the Halle Festival three years running, singing ‘Tolomeo’ twice, as well as ‘Judas Maccabeus’, ‘Acis and Galatea’ and a solo recital in the Handel House.

It is the Händelhaus that concerns us today, and it was a particular privilege to perform in the house where the young composer spent his early years. In 1937, it was purchased by the City of Halle, and became a museum in 1948. The Handel tri-centenary in 1985 saw considerable extension work and after the fall of Communism in 1989, the whole place was cleaned up and modernised, tastefully. It now serves as the hub of the Festival with a restaurant and frequent concerts. I had met some young Leipzig musicians through the Festival, and had joined their ensemble, the Chursächsische Capelle Leipzig, to sing Polifemo in Handel’s early Italian work, ‘Aci, Galatea e Polifemo’ in Leipzig. The success of that performance led to an invitation to sing in a solo recital of Handel and Purcell bass music with the Capelle, firstly in Schloss Rheinsberg, north of Berlin and then in the Händelhaus in Halle. Both of those concerts were memorable, the Rheinsberg one recorded by Deutschland Radio Berlin and preserved on CD, and the Halle one particularly important to me as it took place in the very building in which the great composer had lived. The beautiful little concert hall looks out on a most delightful courtyard in the middle, where parties are held during the Festival, and there are few nicer places to quaff wine and beer on a summer’s evening than there. 

As I write this at the beginning of March, the very idea of sipping wine on a balmy summer’s evening is almost too delicious to contemplate, and I look back 25 years later to a very happy memory, deep in Germany. We are very lucky as singers to be able to perform in historic buildings, usually in grand opera houses, but sometimes in smaller places like the ones I have written about today.