A Morning with Sir John Tomlinson
Stockbridge Hub 1/3/25
As part of Clea Friend’s week of Wagner’s tetralogy of operas, ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, at the Stockbridge Hub, the eminent bass, Sir John Tomlinson, was invited to speak about his relationship with one of the greatest roles in the whole repertoire, Wotan, the King of the Gods.
I have known John for over 30 years, since I sang Varlaam to his Boris Godunov at Opera North, and understudied him in the title role on tour and at the BBC Proms in the Albert Hall. This was the start of a long period of several decades in which I often understudied the great man, particularly at Covent Garden, culminating in the role of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father in Brett Dean’s ‘Hamlet’ at Glyndebourne in 2017, when John sang in the Festival proper, and I sang on the autumn tour. He is nine years older than me, and still singing, and has just had a great personal success at Covent Garden last month in Turnage’s opera, ‘Festen’.
His voice is colossal, with extraordinary resonance, and although vocally somewhat diminished now at 78, his speaking voice demonstrates a richness and a clarity which is unique. There was absolutely no need for a microphone this morning, as he chatted about his career as Wotan, and read from a text he had written to prepare for his first Wotan at Bayreuth in the late 1980s. The Stockbridge Hub has been streaming the Harry Kupfer production of the Ring, in which Sir John sang Wotan, all week, and his explanatory text was fascinating, albeit slightly wordy, stretching to nearly an hour. John’s mellifluous Lancashire vowels (he was born in Oswaldtwistle) took us on the journey from before the curtain goes up on ‘Das Rheingold’ to the dying embers of ‘Götterdämmerung’, as the God meets his end, as Valhalla burns down, and is then flooded out by the redeeming waters of the Rhine.
During the twenty year period when Sir John was the finest exponent of the role, in Bayreuth, Covent Garden, and in Berlin, I was also singing the role, albeit in reduced form, in the version by Jonathan Dove initially created for the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, in the first Longborough Festival in the Cotswolds, from 1997 to 2002. I also studied in the early 1980s with the greatest Wotan of them all, Hans Hotter, whose magisterial performances at Bayreuth in the 1950s have never been surpassed. My final link with the role was that, in 2002, I sang Fafner alongside Tomasz Konieczny’s Fasolt in Limerick and Symphony Hall, Birmingham in concert performances of the Ring with the Youth Orchestra of Ireland. Tomasz is now the Wotan of choice at Bayreuth!
After John’s fascinating insight into the character of Wotan through the reading of his preparatory notes from 1986, he thrilled us with a rendition of the first half of Wotan’s great monologue from Act 2 of ‘Die Walküre’, accompanied at the piano by Clea’s father, the distinguished conductor Lionel Friend. This is a moment of deep introspection in the opera, after Wotan’s cunning plans to recover the ring have been shattered to pieces by the inexorable logic of his relentless wife, Fricka. In a state of total shock and depression, Wotan tells his favourite daughter, Brünnhilde, the story of the ring and the mortal danger it still holds for the continuing existence of the gods in Valhalla. Like the tetralogy itself, the monologue starts on one low note and expands outwards and upwards until Wotan threatens to explode himself, in a huge outburst of desperation and angst. These are deep secrets, and Wotan explains that, although speaking to his daughter, he is really only speaking to himself. Sir John sang only the first half of this magnificent peroration today, but the subtlety of his interpretation, and the superb resonance of words and music in the hands of this master singer, left an indelible mark on all who were present. In my own modest way, I used to love singing this monologue in performance, as time seems to stand still as the story unfolds, and Wagner’s technique of musical motifs, combined with the weight of the words in the text, inform the audience both of the actuality of the present but also the underlying meaning of each action that has taken place, and how it will affect the future.
Stunned by the majesty of Sir John’s interpretation, we needed a little respite, and Clea opened the event out to a question and answer session. There were some very interesting questions about contemporary productions, along the lines of the discussion I had with Dr Michael Downes in our EMR piece a few weeks ago, and also some fascinating questions about opera in translation and how singers deal with complex texts.
Two hours had passed in a flash, and soon we were tumbling out into the March sunshine, after a fantastic morning with a true gentleman and a consummate artist.
