A Singer’s Life – What is Opera?
I fell in love with opera in my teens when I was at school in Edinburgh. I was a normal boy, interested in football and cricket; I enjoyed reading and was quite academic, and grew up listening to the Beatles and the Stones, Manfred Mann and the Monkees. I sang in the school choir, not very well, but I got pleasure from singing and making music with other lads. We had an enlightened music teacher who was also one of the founders of Scottish Opera in 1962, and those of us who had expressed an interest were supplied with tickets to go and see some operas, performed by Scottish Opera at the King’s Theatre. Towards the end of the 1960s, the company put together an entire Ring Cycle, Richard Wagner’s extraordinary tetralogy based on Norse Mythology, and when the whole cycle was performed in Glasgow in December of 1971, several of us were bussed through to see the four operas. I remember thinking at the end of each act that that had been the most wonderful experience of my life, and each act became more powerful and more thrilling as things progressed. It seemed all the more wonderful as the conductor, Alexander Gibson, was Scottish, and the King of the Gods, Wotan, was also Scottish, David Ward. These were people from my country and they were playing and singing this amazing music. One of my fellow pupils on this life-changing ‘operafest’ was Donald Runnicles, the world famous conductor, and he and I have often mused on the coincidence that he and I were both introduced to opera by the same teacher, at the same operas, at the same time.
Over the years, I found myself more and more fascinated by this amazing music, and learned more about the art form. I discovered many more composers whose operas I enjoyed and loved, and when I found that I had a voice which might be suited to opera, I trained and worked, and eventually became an opera singer myself. For over forty years I sang all over the world in operas by many different composers in many languages and worked with some of the greatest singers and conductors in the business.
The love and fascination came from the music in the first place, and if I was lucky enough to find a kindred spirit who could direct the performances in order to enhance the power of the music, the experience was heightened both for me and hopefully for the audience.
Two years after the Scottish Opera ‘Ring, in 1973, in my last year at school, the company performed Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and my memory of that opera was of one of the most mind-blowing evenings of them all. The minimal sets, combined with imaginative lighting, lent an ethereal magic to the tale of passionate love, betrayal and tragedy conjured up by Wagner, and the luxury of having Helga Dernesch (who had recently recorded the opera with Jon Vickers and Herbert von Karajan), David Ward and Norman Bailey in the cast was extraordinary. Even the average Tristan of Hermin Esser could not in any way diminish the effect of this great music on me. I was able to hear and see Jon Vickers himself singing Tristan (along with Berit Lindholm and Gwynne Howell, with Colin Davis conducting) at Covent Garden 6 years later, an even more astonishing experience (and still one of my top three opera performances as a spectator in my lifetime), and the memory lingers to this day.
So when I read in the EMR recently about the experience of Hugh Kerr, our editor, in Vienna, at the Staatsoper, one of the great opera houses of the world, where he saw a travesty of a production of ‘Tristan und Isolde’, I was horrified, and decided it was time to write about modern ‘Concept Opera’. Hugh’s review tells of a first act where all the singers were on children’s swings suspended over a beach, of a second act where the two lovers were suspended in separate boxes above the stage, and of a third act visually dominated by 50 naked men and women who walked slowly to the front of the stage where they writhed and squirmed, before walking back upstage.
We now live in an operatic world dominated by directors who seem desperate for controversy, alienation and distaste. It is not all-pervasive, but very prevalent. Wagner seems the most open for destruction, whether through his association with the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, or because for a lot of time in his operas, nothing much happens on stage, the action being related through the music and the words. Rather than let the singers do the work, many directors nowadays seem to be convinced that the music has to be overrun by action, visual effects or frankly irrelevant ‘stuff!’ Having retired from the stage due to an accident in 2018, I am relieved beyond measure that I don’t have to turn up to rehearsals to be told that the wonderful music that I am singing is going to be completely ignored in order to make some sort of obscure directorial statement.
How did we get here? I really don’t want to come over as some ‘Bufton Tufton’ blimp looking back on a golden age when singers stood down stage and ‘parked and barked’, as the old phrase put it. Far from it. I was lucky enough to be involved in some immensely beautiful and powerful stagings of operas in the 1980s and 90s, like John Cox’s brilliant updating for Scottish Opera of Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’, originally seen at Glyndebourne, and Jonathan Miller’s ‘Magic Flute’, set in an Enlightenment library, for the same company. I was a frequent performer (from 1987-1993) during English National Opera’s wonder days under the powerhouse triumvirate of Elder, Jonas and Pountney, appearing in fantastic re-imaginings of ‘Don Giovanni’, ‘Don Carlos, ‘The Mastersingers’ and, best of all, Jonathan Miller’s iconic Mafia ‘Rigoletto’. These productions all involved updating and a re-thinking of the original operas, but all were based on a clear and deep understanding of the music and the conception of the composers. I never had any problem singing and acting in these and other similar productions both here and in Europe, because they stayed true to the composer’s ideas. Any audience member coming new to the opera would have been able to grasp what we were doing on stage and why, and people who knew the piece were fascinated at how new ideas and thoughts could be introduced through the medium of the original work.
I did appear in one or two disastrous productions abroad, notably a shocking ‘Peter Grimes’ in Nantes, and a dreadful ‘Beggars’ Opera’ in Rouen, but by and large, my experiences were good. It has become the norm to eschew the traditional ‘men in tights and wigs, and women in crinoline’ productions seen in the years before I started, and make-up is much more subtle now, along with new approaches to lighting. One of my earliest pieces of advice, from the great Scottish bass, Bill McCue, was always to find your light. This came from the era when stages were lit with spots set in position from the start, and so, if you didn’t ‘find your light’, you were singing in darkness! Nowadays, with modern lighting techniques, the light will find you! Deo Gracias!
As Hugh has found, both in Vienna this year and Berlin last year, the home of modern ‘Concept Opera’ is Germany and Austria, countries where I have rarely sung, since they largely operate a repertory system, which precludes many guest singers. I did sing in Bielefeld in 2005-09 on three occasions, and came up against the dreaded ‘Konzeptionsgespräch’, the director’s speech on the first day of rehearsals about his/her concept of the opera. This can occasionally reference the composer’s ideas, but rarely, and often results in despairing looks among the singers as we learn what liberties are about to be taken over the next 6 weeks of rehearsal with roles we love and adore. Even then, I was reasonably lucky that my directors were not actually demented and had some decent ideas for the operas. Mind you, when the director told me that my first entrance as Baron Ochs in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ would involve crawling through a dank and dirty tunnel before emerging through a trapdoor onto a huge bed, I told him that this would not be happening, and that I would come through the door as specified by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s librettist. I had less success in persuading the director that the first scene of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ should take place in the Garter Inn rather than a crashed spaceship beside a sausage stall! And, although the idea of staging the deliciously wordy ‘Capriccio’ in a TV chat show environment was a pretty good idea, I was less enamoured that, whereas the Theatre Director La Roche is usually discovered in an armchair snoozing through the opening sextet, I spent the 7 minutes of the sextet suspended in a chair 30 feet above the stage, prior to being lowered to stage level for my first utterance, the precursor to one of the longest roles in opera. I tried to explain that this was not ideal preparation for one of the longest roles in opera but was told it would look great. Great!
This was all 15 years ago, and it would appear to be pretty tame stuff compared with what is expected nowadays. Added to these woes is the ongoing controversy about the merits or demerits of performers using make-up to change appearance. I don’t want to step into this particularly muddied water, except to state that performing a role on stage is just that, acting a role. I have played murderers and gigolos, old men (when I wasn’t one!) and women, because I am an actor, and that’s what actors do. I didn’t need to murder anyone to get a feel for the role or go through childbirth to find out how to act a woman. Where will it all end?
The same question needs to be asked about opera productions. Looking on from outside now, I am mightily relieved that I don’t have to suffer any Konzeptionsgespräch. I really don’t know how I would react if a director told me at the beginning of a rehearsal period that for the next six weeks up to the First Night, my role would involve sitting on a swing for 55 minutes. I had a hint of this style of directing when, a few years, ago, I was singing the role of Uncle Salvador in De Falla’s ‘La Vida Breve’. My part was not enormous but involved a lot of interaction with a mezzo soprano singing the role of the Grandmother. From the beginning, I was told that, although my conversation was with the Grandmother, I should not refer to the woman beside me, or engage in the conversation that the librettist and composer had given us. I was to sing straight out to the audience, and our discussion, although taking place musically, was not actually happening. The production as a whole was very powerful, with lots of blood and angst, but no characters interacted with each other on a physical level. This was part of a Double Bill with Puccini’s ‘Gianni Schicchi’, which was brilliantly directed, and extremely funny, and so I decided to stay schtum with the De Falla and enjoy the Puccini. But really, I should have queried the concept from the beginning. I have evolved as an actor over those forty years from a naive rookie to, I believe, a pretty good actor, and all my training and evolution has been towards the goal of making operatic acting natural and believable. We all know that people don’t walk around singing at each other, but I have worked immensely hard to produce on stage a persona which is credible and real, and which will involve the audience with my feelings and emotions. If I have to ignore everything I say, converse with non-existent characters, and conform to someone else’s idea of why I am there, what is the point of me being there at all? I have deliberately spent the vast majority of my career singing operas where the characters are believable real people and have steered clear of those works in the repertoire which are largely a progression of arias, duets and ensembles, repeated over and over to show off the voices on stage. This is fine for some, but not for me. Nowadays, there seems less and less opportunity for the actors to express themselves, and a dread conformity with the overarching concept of a director, who often has no experience of the lyric stage, and has trained as a designer, choreographer or film director.
Within the context of a short article, I have had to generalise to a large extent, for which I apologise, but I believe that my concern is important. If singers are forced to abandon all their instincts for the stage and for the music to fit in with a fixed idea plucked from nowhere by a big name director in the pursuit of controversy and notoriety, there must be a fear that the art form will dwindle and decay. I think that we must, as lyric artists (the French refer to us as ‘Artistes Lyriques’, which I love), try to take our art form back from the directors. We know, from available feed-back, that most audience members don’t want to see opera turned into an incomprehensible farce, but we need to convince managements that it is time to reassess their priorities. It’s not retrogressive or old fashioned to ask that opera be restored to the singers for whom it was written, and that Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ or Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ are advertised as such, rather than those of some fancy director with a concept dredged from their own psyche!
