A Singer’s Life Pt31
I thought today I would write about some of the best and worst productions of opera I have seen and/or been part of.
I am going to start with a production of Britten’s “Billy Budd” which Fran and I saw at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden in 1979. We had never seen or heard the opera before and were unprepared for the visceral experience we were about to see. The production, by Basil Coleman, was originally seen in 1964 with designs by John Piper, and featured Robert Kerns as Billy, Richard Lewis as Vere and Forbes Robinson as Claggart, conducted by Georg Solti. Interestingly, the New Zealander Inia Te Wiata (the original Billy) was now singing the bass role of Dansker.
Over the years, the production went through many cast changes, and was filmed with the great Peter Glossop as Billy. By the time we saw it, Geraint Evans had taken over Claggart and Thomas Allen was Billy. Wonderfully, Richard Lewis was still there as Captain Vere (his line “I am an old man now” was particularly poignant) and Edward Downes was the conductor, a marvellous under-sung hero of Covent Garden. At this time, I had recently started to study at the Britten-Pears School in Snape where the original Vere, Peter Pears, was teaching. There I met Eric Crozier who, with E M Forster, wrote the libretto, based on the novel by Herman Melville, and so I was becoming steeped in the atmosphere of Aldeburgh and Britten. I knew that this was an iconic production, but I was unprepared for the intensity of the performance that night. The story of the sailor who is destroyed by the inexorable laws of the navy and the malevolence of Claggart, who is also destroyed in the course of events, is set to music of such power and magnificence that words are hard to find to describe it. The moment when the captain has to speak to Billy about his fate and the need for him to die despite being wronged, is brilliantly achieved by Britten, not by melodramatic singing or acting, but by a sequence of chords in the orchestra, loud, soft, overpowering, tender, with nothing to see on stage. It is one of the greatest scenes in all opera, and no one sings a note. The whole production, by Basil Coleman, was a triumph, and the cast was exemplary. Tom Allen was utterly credible as Billy, and his naive honesty and cheerful demeanour shone through, while Richard Lewis was able to convey the terrible dilemma of a ship’s captain when the worst he could do turns out to be the best. When Billy cries out just before he is hanged, “Starry Vere, God bless you”, despite knowing it is Captain Vere who has condemned him, one’s heart melts. Geraint Evans, who had been a low baritone for all his career, dropped down to the bass range for this role, and, despite his fame as a comic actor, was utterly credible as the scheming creature, the Master-at Arms, John Claggart, full of self-loathing and hidden desires. The huge supporting cast, all male and with a boys chorus too, was wonderful, showing Covent Garden’s splendid house singers to great effect, and I remember coming out of the theatre with Fran and just wandering the streets for 10 minutes, not speaking, simply letting what we had seen and heard filter through our consciousness.
After this experience, I learned Claggart’s big monologue describing his feelings about Billy and taking him to unseen depths of depravity, and often used it as an audition piece and in competitions. Indeed, when I won the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize in 1981, Janet Baker told me that my rendition of this monologue had tipped the judges votes in my favour. It is one of my greatest regrets that I never got to sing Claggart on stage, and in fact have never appeared in ‘Billy Budd’. The nearest I got was when I understudied Dansker for Glyndebourne when they toured their production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, a few years ago. It gave me a trip to New York, but I so wanted to sing in the opera. You can’t always get what you want, as someone once said!
I have already written about the ghastly ‘Peter Grimes’ in Nantes which must go down as one of my all-time worst productions, and I can’t really say I have appeared in many clunkers apart from that. My three operas in Bielefeld had their terrible moments – I have told about the idea for my arrival under the bed in ‘Rosenkavalier’, but neglected to mention that in Act 3 when Ochs is trying to seduce the maid Mariandel (the disguised Count Octavian) in a sleazy inn, the poor girl playing Octavian had to wear two huge balloons under her chemise, which were almost always at the point of popping, and that my grotty clan followers in Act 2 had to bring a live goat on stage, with all the imagined results, and that towards the end of Act 2 after the supposed fight when I am slightly scratched on the arm but act as if I am at death’s door, and then have to sing for about 15 minutes, my trousers decided to snap their elastic and I had to spend the entire long vocal episode hanging on to my waistband, while drinking wine, carrying on witty conversations and singing a low E!
I have written about the flying chair and the War Tribunal for Richard Strauss while I was singing my 20 minute monologue in ‘Capriccio’. I could also cite the first scene of ‘Falstaff’ where I was asked to yell at Dr Caius, and my two worthless acolytes Bardolfo and Pistola, while sitting at a table apparently on a beach near a burger van where my space ship had crash-landed – this allowed for a bit of jollity with a ketchup bottle (don’t ask!). The scene when Falstaff has to hide in a laundry basket went quite well (despite a lot of clambering, which at the age of fifty five was hard work) but trouble came each night in the wood in Windsor Great Park at Herne’s Oak when I had to wear a stag’s horns on my head to meet Alice Ford in the final set-up of the piece. It’s a brilliant scene as Verdi demonstrates Falstaff’s excitement at the assignation combined with great fear of the supernatural things going on, as the bell tolls midnight. This was all destroyed by the inability of the designer to come up with a headdress with horns that would stay on!! They tried all sorts of ideas but never found an appropriate solution, and since the horns are an essential part of the story, they could not just cut them, so, rather like the trousers in ‘Rosenkavalier’, I had to hang on to the blooming thing throughout, which was, as you can imagine, somewhat difficult. Nevertheless, we got away with it and the show was a huge success, although singing the role the next year in Canada with Pacific Opera Victoria in a fantastic production by Glynis Leyshon became one of the highlights of my career, and counts as one of my favourite productions.
Singing with the cream of Canada’s opera singers with the fantastic Tim Vernon conducting was a sheer delight and Glynis and I got on like a house on fire from day 1. Our conception of the character was exactly the same, and I had an enormous amount of fun in one of my special places! I also received one of my best ever reviews: “BBS is impressively versatile and makes us understand why people might be charmed and forgiving of this old rogue. His vocal range matches his physical range, including magnificent bellows of self-adoration and dudgeon to funny falsetto and quasi-spoken bits”. Hooray for the reviewer of the Times Colonist, a wise and perceptive fellow!
The most dreaded phrase in any German opera house is the ‘Konzeptionsgespräch’ (Conceptual Discussion). This little beauty of a word is found on the planning schedule for the first day of rehearsals and strikes fear into most singers. We turn up on the first day, having learned and memorised our roles, to be introduced to our new colleagues and, after the introductions, the director comes forward, usually with a small model of the set with tiny figures and bits of cardboard scenery, and proceeds to tell us of his/her concept for the opera. The word infers a discussion, but sadly these days, the singers sit in glum silence as all our hopes for an excellent few weeks rehearsal melt away, as we discover that we will be singing our roles in a lunatic asylum, another planet, a beach or a forest. It’s not always like this, but, particularly in Germany, with its hundreds of small opera houses and archive of literally thousands of previous productions, innovation is everything, regardless of what the composer has written or what the words imply!
However, occasionally, and actually rather more often nowadays, as the staff are beginning to take control back from the lunatics, it can all go right. One such production was the magical ‘Marriage of Figaro’ I appeared in at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2001, directed by the wonderful film and theatre director, Sir Richard Eyre and conducted by the mercurial Marc Minkowski. Richard had updated the story to Edwardian times, still in a society where masters and servants co-existed uncomfortably, and his handling of the cast and the clever use of character, prompting a reviewer at the time to write of the “leaps of joy and irony”, made the whole experience one of the highlights of my career. Singing actors of the calibre of Veronique Gens, Camilla Tilling, Magdalena Kožená, Laurent Naouri (a fine baritone with whom I sang many times in France), Jennifer Smith and Jean-Paul Fouchecourt (the brilliant little French character tenor) were all able to work with Richard to produce a stunning evening of opera, and the thrilling playing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra under Minkowski was world class. Playing in the open-air auditorium at Aix on balmy Provençal nights was truly delightful.
At the same Festival ‘Falstaff’ was playing in repertoire, directed by a very famous German director, who appeared to remove the events from Windsor to the Wild West in Edwardian times. I thought it was terrible, although there was some decent singing, particularly from Willard White as Falstaff, but most French critics preferred the nonsense of Falstaff in the Prairies to Figaro in perfection. Critics eh?
In fact, I sang in another production by the same director of Cavalli’s early opera ‘La Calisto’ with the splendidly eccentric Rene Jacobs as conductor later on, in Lyon and Montpellier, and I must say it was one of the most magical shows I took part in, full of invention and wit.
This is the trouble with opera productions – you can never please all of the people all of the time. Many audiences want to go back to the days of large singers standing at the front of the stage, wearing tights and wigs, while others yearn for the weird and the tacky, the more outrageous the better. As usual, I find myself somewhere in the middle, craving good acting and believable characters but hating wholesale destruction of the composers’ wishes. And yet, and yet, it is all subjective. Recently I went to an opera production as an audience member, and had to leave at the interval, so sloppy was the production and the feeble handling of the singers and chorus. Yet, the next day saw wondrous reviews, and friends whose views I trusted said it was one of the best productions of the work they had ever seen. Who was right? Both or neither, who knows?
