It's been a hectic few weeks and a bout of tonsillitis didn't help. So from the tranquility of a plane-less Monday morning, in company with a snoring cat and a violinist practising Paganini downstairs, here's a quick update and some links for a catch-up.
First of all, because of a sudden, belated and unexpected lockdown (thanks, Boris...) everyone's carefully laid plans for distancing audiences at concerts went up in smoke and everything for November got cancelled. There's been a scramble to rethink, reimagine and reschedule. The Up Close and Musical festival at the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe has been moved to May, my 'Immortal' concert with Piers Lane for the Barnes Music Society has been rescheduled for 16 January, and the Nordern Farm performance has unfortunately had to bite the dust. There are a few other dates in the diary for June, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.
One of the events that I was most sorry to lose this year was the staging of the youth opera The Selfish Giant by the composer John Barber, for which I did the libretto. It was meant to happen in July. Now we are hoping that it will be able to enjoy a performance in some way, shape or form next summer instead. Like The Happy Princess with composer Paul Fincham in 2019, it's a commission from Garsington for their youth companies, and this time it is also a co-commission from Opera North. The story is a transformation of an Oscar Wilde fairytale. It is all about the beauty of nature, how much we need it, how much we need to be at one with it, and how completely stupid it is to build walls between different peoples and different generations. We need to work with nature and with each other to build a better world - because one day we will leave it, and then what is our legacy?
"Here in the garden, our haven, here in the garden, our heaven; here we can be who we're meant to be, where we find ourselves and are free..." When we wrote the piece we had no idea that this year the beauty of nature would become what would sustain our young performers who were indeed cut off from their friends, their schools, their rehearsals and their joy in singing together. They made a film about it, using some songs from the opera. It's called Our Haven and Garsington released it on Friday for National Children's Day. Here it is: https://youtu.be/jJK1Rc1DdFU
Meanwhile, the Zoom launch for 'Immortal' went off with much more zing than I'd thought possible. We had more than 50 attendees from all over the world, which was astounding, and the support of Joanna Pieters, who presented and interviewed, Simon Hewitt Jones, who produced, and Mishka Rushdie Momen, who played, was absolutely incredible. Although I was alone in the study, and Ricki slept in a chair behind me all the way through, I felt as if we'd had a real party. If you didn't see if and you'd like to, the whole thing is now on Youtube, here.
Soon afterwards, I found myself roped into a reimagining of an event for the wonderful Wimbledon International Music Festival, a favourite calendar highlight of mine here in south-west London. Normally the inimitable Anthony Wilkinson brings world-class music to live stages on his own doorstep, but of course this time everything had to be moved online and replanned for the format. You can see the lot for a small fee at their website - and yes, one should have to pay to watch music online, because making these things costs and otherwise there soon won't be any. The festival includes some amazing concerts such as a cello and piano recital of Beethoven by Raphael Wallfisch and John York, a typically thoughtful and eclectic programme from pianist Clare Hammond and a star highlight filmed at Wigmore Hall with Paul Lewis performing the Beethoven Diabelli Variations. If you think there's a Beethoven theme, you're right; the event into which I was parachuted was a discussion with pianist Piers Lane, actor/director/writer Tama Matheson and festival director Anthony Wilkinson exploring the magic of Beethoven and, beyond that, what the arts really mean to us, why we need them and where we go from here. All details here.
Next, a call from The Sunday Times. There's a new biography of Mozart just out, by the splendid Jan Swafford, the musicologist and composer who seemed to capture the nation's hearts when he appeared in the BBC series Being Beethoven. This latest book is 800 pages long, which I didn't completely realise until after I'd agreed to review it, but it is such a lovely read that I felt a bit bereft when I'd finished. The review was in yesterday's paper and is online (£) here.
Yesterday, too, I was on Talk Radio rabbiting about Beethoven and 'Immortal'. There's been an enthusiastic blog tour of book site reviews, and we're waiting with slightly nibbled nails for further reviews to appear in print. In general, though, I would advise any budding novelists to check in advance that their release date does not coincide with a very important American presidential election, because firstly nobody will have eyes for much else, and secondly nothing that you write will ever be able to match up to the bizarre reality unfolding in front of our eyes there.
As the divine Joni Mitchell sings, "something's lost and something's won, in living every day... I really don't know life at all."
Let's keep on keeping on, and remember the beauty in the garden.
To which end, I've just ordered 80 daffodil bulbs.
I reviewed the Aurora Orchestra's splendiferous performance of Louise Farrenc's Symphony No. 3 the other day at Kings Place. WTH is this piece not performed 30 times a year? It's simply wonderful - and the orchestra under Duncan Ward gave it a beautifully characterised performance. Plus a gorgeous new piece for cello and strings by Charlotte Bray and Angela Hewitt in a fine, glittering Mozart concerto, on a piano that took up most of the platform... Here's my review for The Arts Desk.
Taster:
Why does music suddenly disappear? It is all the more heartening when a work as excellent and enjoyable as Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 takes wing once more, but you do have to wonder what they were thinking in mid 19th-century Paris to allow such a terrific orchestral piece to sink and vanish. The symphony formed the second half of the Aurora Orchestra’s latest concert in its Pioneers series for Kings Place's "Venus Unwrapped" series, and very welcome it was.
Farrenc (1804-1875) was a highly successful and well-regarded musician in her day, known as a brilliant pianist and the only female professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Her third symphony, premiered in 1849, bristles with post-Beethovenian energy; the idiom is a little like Weber, but with a voice all its own, deftly written with never a note too many, plus a satisfying feel for structure and strong conclusions. The slow movement contains some enchanting ambiguity between major and minor, the scherzo fizzes and pounds and the finale is bright with contrapuntal virtuosity.
Scottish Opera asked me to write a piece for the programme of their production of The Magic Flute earlier this year. How sexist is it, really? There's been a lot of discussion about this, to put it mildly, so with SO's permission here is my article. Warning: it may not say what you think it's going to say. In either direction.
Julia Sitkovetsky as The Queen of the Night in Scottish Opera's production
All photos: Ken Dundas
Charges of sexism and prejudice flutter like outsize daddy-longlegs craneflies around the bright beacon of Mozart’s penultimate opera. Emanuel Schikaneder’s text - some of it - positively glitters with disparaging comments about women’s gossiping, weakness and pride. A woman must be led by a man, says the supposedly wise Sarastro. The villain-in-chief is a powerful woman – and she is vanquished. Why, then, would I still want to take Die Zauberflöte to my Desert Island in preference to almost any other piece of music, despite my supposedly feminist credentials?
Our simplistic, reductive responses today tend to prove we haven’t evolved upwards from the Enlightenment era as much as we possibly should have. It’s problematic at best - and at worst, futile - to judge an 18th-century work by 21st-century values. Besides, the women in this enchanted Enlightenment singspiel merit a subtler, more nuanced and more thorough exploration. They are deeply bound up with the work’s structure, its symbolism, its balance, quirkiness and unexpectedness, to say nothing of its overall message about love, wisdom and enlightenment.
The chief problem is that the source of that wisdom - Sarastro and his order of priests - is also the source of the sexist assumptions that furnish the script. Entering the Temple represents the getting of wisdom; part of this, Tamino learns, is not listening to women’s supposedly empty-headed chitterchatter. Worse, as the opera progresses, the feminine becomes associated with the forces of night and darkness, in opposition to the blaze of sunlight that brings enlightenment.
Pamina in supplication to Sarastro...
Or so it seems. This is only part of the opera’s philosophic outlook – and it is continually subverted or positively contradicted by other elements of the drama. In the bigger picture of the magical, symbolic world Mozart and Schikaneder create, the duality of male/female, darkness/light is essential, because this, the implication goes, is how we and our world become complete. The one defines the other: without darkness, there can be no light. The opera’s mysterious unity in duality mirrors the priests’ evocation of Isis and Osiris, respectively the ancient Egyptian goddess and her brother-husband, who, let’s remember, are venerated in this temple together.
This lends symmetry to the characters. Papageno must find a Papagena, as lively and earthy as he is; Tamino and Pamina, seekers both, are soulmates. The Queen of the Night and Sarastro form a third couple, only this time opposites in both philosophy and voice type. But they function as a pair because they want the same thing: each wishes to save Pamina from the other. There’s symmetry, too, between the groups of opposites: the spiritual questing of the prince and princess finds a merry counterpart in the copious wining, dining and planned large family of the Papagenos, while the Three Ladies who tempt Tamino and Papageno with chattering are offset by the Three Boys who light the way with wisdom. Monostatos, a wild card, could be the exception that proves the rule.
Moreover, there are women in the temple. Besides the solemn choruses for men alone, Mozart also provides full choruses in both acts including sopranos and altos. This poses a conceptual challenge to any director; widely differing solutions can be found. In Netia Jones’s staging for Garsington, the females scuttle around submissively in grey headdresses resembling those of The Handmaid’s Tale. In Simon McBurney’s for English National Opera, the women are in business dress, matching the men: perhaps here, too, the masculine has its feminine counterpart.
Within this set-up, Mozart and Schikaneder overturn expectations time and again, with plot twists that would be hard to swallow if the characters did not - mostly - defy the fairytale-like setting by seeming so wonderfully real. The Three Ladies become harridans spreading fake news in Act II, but in Act I they save Tamino from the serpent, lust after the handsome stranger, bicker amongst themselves, then do the honourable thing and leave him in peace. Monostatos tries twice to rape Pamina, but even he receives a sympathetic aria, railing against the way others reject him for the colour of his skin. This opera’s racist element is even worse than its sexism, but these days Monostatos can usually be reconceptualised with imaginative staging and surtitling.
I'm not sure what's happening here, but it looks amazing
What of the Queen of the Night, the villain of the piece? She starts off as the most sympathetic of characters: a mother whose daughter has been kidnapped and who is desperate to rescue her. What’s more, it is she who provides the magic flute itself, and Papageno’s bells; and Mozart furnishes her with two of his most astonishing arias (designed for his virtuoso soprano sister-in-law, Josepha Weber). Sarastro has cruel words for Pamina about her, accusing the Queen of pride; if you think he’s calling her a “stupid woman”, you’re not wrong. Still, she does want to kill him. The blunt reversal of opinion that Tamino encounters as soon as he arrives at the temple – and the unquestionably sexist reasons for this provided first by the Speaker and then Sarastro – is therefore far from proven as correct. Today an increasing number of productions depict the Queen pardoned at the end and reunited with Pamina.
The most ardent contradiction of the opera’s sexist element is Pamina herself. Contrast her with Tamino. He can seem oddly passive. First the Ladies have to save him from the serpent; next he obeys the Queen of the Night; then he decides he got everything wrong and obeys Sarastro instead. But it is Pamina who makes the brave, independent decisions: to seek her freedom; to reject Monostatos’s advances, despite death threats; refusing to commit murder, however forceful her mother’s demand; and she would certainly have the gumption to take her own life were it not for the intervention of the Three Boys. She is supportive to Papageno - she even sings an abstracted love duet with him. And it is she who tells Tamino that his magic flute will protect them, and she who voluntarily stands by him and undergoes the life-threatening trials – not because she has to, but because she chooses to. Ultimately she is initiated into the Order alongside him.
Now, the Masonic references in Die Zauberflöte are reputedly so lavish that theories existed that the Freemasons murdered Mozart in revenge for revealing their secrets. This notion has been debunked. But as far as I’m aware, the Freemasons still do not admit women, even in 2019. And what, in wider society, of equal pay and equal boardroom presence? Don’t get me started. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge Mozart and Schikaneder too harshly when their vision is more progressive than the organisation that inspired them, and when our world still has so much to remedy.
This opera ultimately suggests that the path of wisdom is open to everybody, if we are willing to learn our life lessons the hard way. And in the end it is about love. A devoted couple undergoes ferocious attack by the elements; the joint powers of their love and their music see them through. Emerging, they sing together, as equals. If that isn’t the ideal partnership - for any persuasion of human relationship - then I don’t know what is.
A few sexist priests can’t take that away from us. Yes, there is sexism aplenty in Die Zauberflöte. But that is no reason not to let this work’s heavenly music and message of love and wisdom into our lives – my Desert Island included.
Having recently experienced from the inside just what it is like to create an opera (it's rather like building the world's largest cruise-ship), I've been thinking about The Ones That Got Away. The operas that were never written. The operas that composers longed to write, but were never able to because they couldn't get the copyright or couldn't get the commissions or died before they could even begin. Here are a few of the works that might have graced our stages, but don't.
Goethe, painting by Tischbein
1. FAUST, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Goethe loved Mozart's music and stated that he would be the ideal composer to transform his Faust into an opera. Other composers were a bit too modern for his taste. The first inklings of Faust were published as Faust - A Fragment, in 1790. Mozart died before any prospect of it could become even a bit viable. Don Giovanni is probably the closest approximation...
2. WAITING FOR GODOT, by Pierre Boulez. The late French composer and conductor was widely rumoured to be planning an opera on Beckett's masterpiece, and I asked him about it in 2012. Indeed, the frail 87-year-old confirmed, he would love to write it if he were granted long enough on earth. Sadly, he wasn't.
3. Unnamed (I think) opera on a story by Ivan TURGENEV, by Johannes Brahms. In Baden-Baden,
Brahms was introduced to the Russian author by Pauline Viardot, the singer with whom Turgenev was obsessed for most of his life. Much socialising took place in the beautiful German spa town, Viardot's home, where she had a little theatre in the back garden, and Turgenev drafted a libretto for the composer. Unfortunately Brahms never set it. It told the story of a 40-something man who fell in love with a young 20-something woman, and it's possible Brahms took it a bit personally, since he had been pursuing his beloved Clara Schumann's daughter Julie about that time. Julie married a young man of her own vintage, but died tragically of tuberculosis soon afterwards; in her memory, Brahms wrote the Alto Rhapsody for Viardot to sing.
4. THE VICTORS, by Richard Wagner. It was going to be an opera on the life of the Buddha and Wagner sketched some ideas for it. But then he realised he had already written his Buddhist opera and it was Parsifal...
Fauré's sketch of Verlaine
5. THE BUDDHA. Again. This time, words by Paul Verlaine, music by Gabriel Fauré. The Princesse de Polignac, one of Fauré's most important patrons, wanted to bring the poet and composer together to create an opera and Fauré set about tracking Verlaine down. He found him in hospital, succumbing to alcoholism. They talked about making an opera on the life of the Buddha. Fauré sketched him. But Verlaine's commitment to his drink proved stronger than his drive to write a libretto. In the end Fauré played the organ at his funeral. Nevertheless, he set Verlaine's poetry in some of his finest songs, including the Cinq Mélodies de Venise and La bonne chanson.
6. HIAWATHA, by Antonín Dvorák. When Dvorák went to America to run the New York Conservatory of Music, he was charged (by its sponsor, Jeannette Thurber) with the task of inventing a national style of music for the nation. Researching possibilities, he became fascinated by Negro Spirituals and likewise by the story of Hiawatha, in the poem by Henry W. Longfellow. He aimed to turn the poem into an opera and sketched some material for it. For some reason the board of the conservatory had to approve his libretto. And they didn't approve it. And this stopped him from writing the thing. Some of the music ended up in his Symphony No.9, in which form it is now ubiquitously famous.
7. REBECCA, by Roxanna Panufnik, libretto by muggins, based on Daphne du Maurier. A few years ago we tried for but couldn't get the stage rights, which had been recently awarded to a musical. It was a little bit heartbreaking. Never mind... we ended up creating Silver Birch instead. We have plenty more ideas, and you know where to find us.
'Poldowski'
8. SILENCE, by Poldowski. Unlike the others on this list, this 'symphonic opera' was both written and published (in New York sometime around 1920). So where is it? 'Poldowski' was the pseudonym of Irène Régine Wieniawska, daughter of the violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski; after her marriage she was Lady Dean Paul. Her music is simply fabulous. Its non-existence today has nothing to do with its lack of creation.
9. DEIRDRE, by Arnold Bax, on an Irish story by WB Yeats. Fascinating stuff, this, sketched in part yet never fully realised. Read all about it here.
10. OSSIANE, by Marie Jaëll. A disciple of Liszt and a devoted pianist and composer, Jaëll was a 19th-century French musician unlucky enough to be born in an era when living for your art wasn't an accepted life approach for a young woman. She managed to do so anyway, though she seems to have suffered psychologically, and her music can be, to judge from what I've heard, a bit patchy. Still, this opera would be fascinating. It was written - but only extracts survive. The amazing Palazzetto Bru Zane has devoted a recording and accompanying book to some of her other works. More about her from the brilliant Song of the Lark blog here.
And last, but by no means least, the excellent Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, faced with new opera seasons in the US that look chiefly like Same Old with Some Stars, has tweeted her own ideal opera season: all of them splendid operas that happen to have been composed by women. Here it is, and hear hear to it all!
The other day I went to Pembrokeshire to do a Ghost Variations concert with Viv and Dave, and came back to discover that an intriguing Twitter discussion had been taking place about what's now known as 'the canon': aka standard concert repertoire. I'd missed the chat, so have been mulling over some of the points involving the music we hear in our concert halls, the notion of greatness, the value judgments on what is worth hearing and what is not, the judgments people pass on one another over having the "wrong" personal taste in music, and how we can change these matters effectively to make the concert world more inclusive.
One of the nicer things about reaching middle age is that one can develop a healthy perspective on change. It may look as if "we" worship great composers as deities (I'm not convinced we do, actually), that great music that is performed a lot is an immovable mountain range. As if nothing can invade those mountains if it is not perceived to be as good as the 'Hammerklavier' et al, and as if it's got that way because people in charge are determined to keep out anyone who is not a dead white male. But it ain't necessarily so. It's not immovable. It's not impossible to change things. It's quite doable, actually - we just have to wake up and do it.
If I look back on the musical world of my teens and student days, the "canon" has changed - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse - and it is all to do with changing attitudes, outlooks that morph into different states according to the world around us. Here are a few things that were definitely going on in the early 1980s when I was a teenage piano student and heading for Cambridge.
At the piano we faced paradoxes. Anything that was not "pure" was out. Transcriptions? Heaven help us! The only person I remember getting away with a Liszt transcription at the Royal Festival Hall was Daniel Barenboim, who played the 'Liebestod' as an encore sometime in the late 1970s. I tried to be suitably aghast that a great artist had devoted time to practising such a horror, until my piano teacher, who knew him, gently told me that probably he hadn't: being Barenboim, he could just look at it and know it. The point here was that I was about 13 and what the heck did I know? Nothing. I was just parroting attitudes I'd been absorbing by osmosis from people around me and, probably, Radio 3, which was on in the house from morning til night. Yet remove transcriptions, remove Liszt except the B minor Sonata which was a Serious Work In Sonata Form, and you lose a great biteful of the 19th century.
Meanwhile, learning Bach was vital. Bach holds the core of the technique a pianist needs - physical and mental - to play anything. But back then you weren't allowed to perform it. If you did, you were playing it on the Wrong Instrument. The "authenticists" would string you up by your guts if you weren't careful.
As for contemporary music - a few doughty souls played some, but thereby hung a whole sackful of problems. You could tackle Boulez, but it might take you ten years to learn the Second Sonata, or there was Stockhausen and Cage, but they were a little bit scary too, and chances were that your teachers wouldn't know what to do with them, let alone put stones and stuff inside the piano to "prepare" it, so they probably wouldn't set them; or you could play the Messiaen Vingt Regards or the bird pieces, but they just weren't enormously trendy. I learned one of the Vingt Regards, as it happens, for my BMus recital - we had to prepare a full-length programme and the examiners would ask for half of it about a week before. From my list they chose Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy. Leaving behind Bach (of course), Schumann, Fauré and the most challenging thing I'd ever learned in my life, the Messiaen 'Premier communion de la Vierge'. Ligeti hadn't yet written his Etudes, not Philip Glass his, and I had a friend who wanted to do her thesis on Steve Reich and had to fight the faculty for the right to do so. It's so long ago that I can't remember whether or not she won.
Those were the days in which the arrogant public-schoolboy first-years would stride around the faculty declaring "Prokofiev's rubbish" before photocopying their nether equipment (this was before mobile phones), and if you dared to think Rachmaninoff was any good you'd be laughed out of town (another problem back in the piano studio in London). You'd also be laughed out of town if you preferred Pablo Casals to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, or if you were a woman and you wanted to compose music. Oh yes indeed.
And historical inevitability determined that if you did want to compose music, you could only write serialism - or, once again, you'd be laughed out of town. Historical inevitability had a lot to answer for.
What everyone forgot about historical inevitability was that time moves forward. It only ever moves forward. It does not and cannot move backwards, however much certain groups would like it to, and neither does it stand still. The historical inevitability of historical inevitability is that historical inevitability as a concept was bound to become obsolete.
Things change. But they only change when we change them.
One thing that changed because people changed it was the nature of orchestral programming - and not always for the better. A large swathe of music that used to appear regularly in concert programmes has vanished. When did you last hear Mozart's Symphony No.29 in an orchestral concert? Haydn's No.102? Schumann's Second, Beethoven's First, Schubert's Third, a Bach Suite? There is a vast wealth of repertoire that is assumed to be in the "canon" - being by dead white men - that is of sterling quality but is hardly ever played because thinking has changed. Somehow the notion has got a grip on us that this music has to be played by only period-instrument specialists. It's one way to hear them, sure. But how did it ever become the only way?
It's become a problem, because it's pushed that repertoire into a ghetto, where it's in danger of gradually disappearing from view altogether. Now it needs to be brought out and given a good scrub-down for the 21st century. It may take Simon Rattle himself to change this and bring these fabulous pieces back into the concert hall where they belong. I once asked for a piano score of The Magic Flute for my birthday so that I could play it myself - I'd given up hope of ever hearing a performance of it again that was listenable. But I recently watched on the Digital Concert Hall Rattle's concert of the last three Mozart symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic and it was heaven. Now hope springs eternal.
There's nothing wrong with playing Mozart, Haydn, Schubert etc on original instruments, of course. It's an admirable thing to do, fascinating and educational at best. But it should never have happened at the expense of playing them on anything else. Why not? Because the audience misses out.Because the larger audiences plod dutifully to yet more Mahler, yet more Shostakovich, another anniversary of X, Y or Z, and they no longer know Schubert 3. Authenticity, as I recently commented in my 'Hammerklavier' piece, is in the soul. No amount of original instruments will help you if that isn't the case. And if it is, then the instrument doesn't really matter.
Today playing Bach's Goldberg Variations is a badge of honour for any pianist. Rachmaninoff is adored the world over, as he always was, but he is also appreciated as a composer of splendid technique. Liszt transcriptions pop up regularly. And nobody I run into these days could possibly consider Prokofiev rubbish, because it patently isn't. How had people ended up thinking that way? They'd been taught to. They're trying to please parents, teachers, peer groups, etc, often by trotting out opinion that they don't even realise is "received".
Change happens because people make it happen. Musicians make it happen, by having the courage of their convictions. In the case of the period-instrument movement, and the Women Can't Compose people, this did, I'm afraid, involve in the 1980s a certain amount of bullying, which is what I consider was done to me and my friends in the Cambridge music faculty in one way or another. But out in the wider world, it wasn't necessarily so. A small handful of pianists went right on playing Bach on the piano and simply ignored the critics and the handwringing. They have won. The beneficiaries are the audience and the next generation. If you've missed Beatrice Rana playing the Goldberg Variations, don't miss it any longer - you're denying yourself a whopper of a treat.
More changes. When I did my dissertation in 1987 almost nobody had heard of Korngold except my supervisor, Dr Puffett, who had a brain the size of both the Americas, and the person who introduced me to Korngold's music, Eric Wen, who did too. Today Die tote Stadt is becoming standard opera repertoire almost everywhere except Britain. And the Violin Concerto is much played because violinists hear it, love it and want to play it.
Likewise, nobody had heard of Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Hans Gál, Miklos Rozsa, Mieczyslaw Weinberg and many more. A whole generation of composers that was murdered or driven into exile by the Nazis. Devoted musicians and researchers have thrown their energy and resources into resuscitating this music and those voices are now starting to be heard in earnest. Recognising that some who turned to film music did so not out of choice but necessity, to save their own and their families' lives, has been an important part of this, because having escaped racial persecution, those exiles soon found their work buried alive because they were writing The Wrong Things. Film music? Gasp! Insupportable!! Oh please. Otherwise they'd be dead. Did anybody bother to notice?
The current wave of composers-buried-alive to emerge are women. Not only those writing today, but those appearing out of history. Francesca Caccini. Fanny Mendelssohn. Pauline Viardot. Lili Boulanger. Rebecca Clarke. Louise Farrenc - and these are the better-known names. Indeed, just the other day, I heard someone talking about Farrenc with the remark "Of course, she's known...", which was a startling but fantastic piece of news to me. But how many of us have heard the music of Grace Williams? How much do you know by Elizabeth Maconchy? Get out and hear some - it is simply wonderful. Just think about it: why should we have to go to Mahler 2 yet again, listening through the angst for new nuances, when we could be discovering all of this? People are making change happen - people like the Southbank Centre, like Radio 3, like Bangor University (the conference in September was terrific and full of all-but-unknown musical marvels). And the music will win through because it is good. And it will stay with us, with people wondering "Where has this been all my life?"
What about the issue of racial diversity? There is nothing, but nothing, to stop great violinists from learning the concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the African-British composer who worked himself into an early grave in Croydon in 1912. It's an absolute beauty. Philippe Graffin recorded it ten years ago, in Johannesburg. Tasmin Little has recorded it. Others have too. It needn't be a rarity. If you don't think it's as good as the Bruch, fine, but so what? That doesn't mean we wouldn't enjoy it. And you might get a surprise. You might find that actually it is as good as the Bruch. You just didn't expect it to be.
Meanwhile, heard anything by the Chevalier de Saint-Georges? Tremendous stuff. Influenced Mozart. Today Errollyn Wallen is one of the finest composers in Britain and her music should be totally mainstream. These are just the three most obvious names - imagine the amount of music out there waiting to be played, heard and enjoyed. And this, too, is starting to change - but only because people woke up and did something about it. Chi-chi Nwanoku has created the Chineke! orchestra and Chineke for Change foundation. The Kanneh-Mason family has captured the hearts of British music-lovers - don't miss cellist Sheku's debut album, which is coming out this month.
And perhaps the thing to question is not the "greatness" of the music of "dead white men" - nobody is going to take Beethoven away from me, thanks very much - but to remember to look at things in context, with healthy perspective, with curiosity and an open mind, without blinkers. And not to remove that music, but to add to it. Not to say "No, but..." but "Yes, and...". Not to regard long-established "greatness" as a prerequisite for exploring music - I mean, Beethoven's early piano sonatas are great music, but they're almost never played in concert because people assume the late ones are greater (when did you last hear Op.31 No.3? It's amazing!).
The whole issue of expectation, of music competitions, of ambitious teachers, of commercial power, all these things have a big role to play in what becomes standard repertoire, what promoters think they can sell. That needs a piece to itself. Everything is connected, though - every level of what makes the musical world turn has a profound effect on every other level...
So the "canon" is not an immovable feast. But it does take some effort to shift it. Things can and do change, when there's the will for it. What happens now will be change for our own time. In 20 years things may look very different, and they'll be changing again, assuming humanity still exists.
Even if his characters sometimes lose their heads, the powerhouse German baritone Michael Volle has no intention of imitating them. You'll find he has strong shoulders, feet firmly on the ground and a velvet-lined juggernaut of a voice. I was lucky enough to hear him sing Hans Sachs in Meistersinger at Bayreuth this summer, and this season he is back at the Royal Opera House to sing Guy de Montfort in Verdi'sLes vêpres sicilienne and, later, Jokanaan in Strauss's Salome. My interview with him earlier this year originally appeared in the Royal Opera House Magazine and I'm rerunning it below with their kind permission.
Volle as Montfort in Les vêpres siciliennes
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH
Michael Volle is very proud of his head.
The one in the cupboard, that is. “Since 2008 in each Salome performance here, my head is used,” he declares, “because I
did the first run with David McVicar.” When Strauss’s searing masterpiece is
revived at the Royal Opera House later this season, Volle can reclaim his model
cranium: he returns as Jokanaan, aka St John the Baptist, whose decapitation is
the febrile princess’s revenge for her failure to seduce him.
For the leonine German baritone, 57,
Jokanaan offers a challenge through sheer intensity. “In Strauss’s big, big lines,
everything must be perfect. And you must be a prophet,” he says. “I would never
have been able in the early years to sing Jokanaan, or the big Wagner roles: you
need the experience, you need the breadth, you need to have been on stage playing
a very strange character. He is in his madness, he is confronted with this strange
young lady and her demands and he loses his security. It’s not a long role, but
a very strong: you stay like a rock, but then it takes your energy, the fight
with the unknown planet of this young woman.”
Jokanaan, the Flying Dutchman, Hans Sachs,
Wotan: the roles that Volle sings are often larger than life, each in its own
way, and Volle himself is a gigantic personality, somewhat resembling an
imposing yet genial German version of Jack Nicholson. His voice, with its vast
capabilities in both quality and magnitude, reflects that strength of presence,
yet can also be as meltingly beautiful as it is dramatic. Wagner, Strauss,
Verdi and Puccini could eat up all his time. Yet his lasting inspiration is
something very different: Bach and Mozart.
BACH TO THE FUTURE
The youngest of eight children of a priest,
Volle grew up in Baden-Württemberg, near Stuttgart, steeped in first-rate
church music. “In Stuttgart you could visit on one day six or seven church services
with six or seven Bach cantatas, because it was part of religious life,” he
recalls.
Because of that background, he insists, he
cannot do without Mozart and Bach: “But the crazy thing is, nobody offers me
Bach any more.” The expectation, he grumbles, is that a Wagner and Strauss
voice cannot possibly suit those composers. “It’s ridiculous!” he expostulates.
“I’m so fortunate that I did recently with the Akademie für Alte Musik in
Berlin the three bass solo cantatas of Bach and we recorded them in concert. I
do a lot of Bach because I need it. No
Christmas time without a Christmas Oratorio; no Easter without a Passion.”
As for Mozart, he remarks with satisfaction
that following a Wagner rescheduling last winter, he found he had the chance to
sing one of his favourite roles, Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, in Paris, with his wife, Gabriela Scherer, also in
the cast as the First Lady. “What could be better than that?” he beams.
Perhaps having half a million Youtube views
could run a close second? Last year Volle was invited by an ear, nose and
throat specialist in Stuttgart to be filmed singing inside an MRI scanner,
which duly captured astounding images of the physical mechanism of singing. The
video went viral (see above). “I don’t do social media, so I knew nothing about it,” he says.
“Then my wife told me I’d become an internet sensation.” Wasn’t that a little alarming?
“I would not get a job from the way I sang in that video,” he laughs, “but it
was fun.”
It’s often said that Volle has had a “slow
burn” career, a phrase which also makes him laugh, but is not far off the mark.
“Boys always develop more slowly than girls!” he quips. “I only started to
study aged 25 and in 1990 I had my first opera contract. I was on fire,
wondering why some other people got roles... But 27 years later, I’m very happy
it took all that time, because I had the chance to develop and grow up. I
believe somehow in a ‘plan’ for your life – fate, if you like. For me it was
perfect, because I was never forced to do anything that could have killed my
voice. I was able to grow with the right parts at the right time, and I’m very
grateful for that.”
As Montfort, with Bryan Hymel as Henri
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH
Covent Garden audiences might be forgiven
for thinking, though, that Volle specialises in characters whose fate is distinctly
darker: not least, he is reprising the role of Guy de Montfort in the forthcoming
revival of Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes.
The opera begins with Montfort as a soldier raping a dancer, who then bears his
child – the opera’s hero, Henri. Later, as governor of Sicily, Montfort longs
for his grown-up son to accept him, but ultimately he, along with the French
occupiers of the island, comes to a sticky end.
"THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE PROFESSION"
As Montfort
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH
Montfort might not seem the easiest
character to identify with, but one vital element of the role was uppermost in
Volle’s mind when Stefan Herheim’s production was premiered in 2013. “My fourth
child was born in 2012,” he says, “so I was very involved in being a father.
This is a central conflict in Vêpres,
between Montfort the elder statesman and Montfort the father. He wants to be a
good father and he meets his child, who rejects him: this big scene at the end
of the first act is very intense.
“I am happy that for the past 20-25 years
opera singers have had to be actors too,” Volle adds. It so happens that his
brother is an actor: “He says often that if you feel close to a role, it must touch
you in some inward way. This is the gift of being an acting singer, or a
singing actor: you can try to be somebody else, something quite different from
your private life you are paid for it, and you can sing!” Volle gives a giant
bellow of laughter: “This is an incredible profession – I love it.”
FIVE AT ONE BLOW
This summer one summit of Volle’s
repertoire approached in a special form: he sang Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Barrie
Kosky’s new production for Bayreuth [our interview took place before this, in the spring]. “For me Sachs is the one and only role that
is above everything,” he says. “The singing is so difficult – but it is so wonderful, because you have not only to
sing five characters, but to act them too. Sachs is the wise man, the jealous
man, the artist, the shoemaker, the mastersinger, and this is incredible.” He
was looking forward to working with Barrie Kosky for the first time, too: “He
has incredibly good ideas and I think we will have a great time.” [Author's note: looked good to me.]
And having a good time, he reflects, is vital. “I am glad to be at a level now at
which I can say no to offerings,” Volle reflects. “This can be the least
family-friendly job in the world, because if you do an opera you are away for
weeks at a time. Family is everything, so I do sometimes say no. Singing so
important to me, it is a part of me, but it could be over tomorrow. Then what
do you have?”
Les Vêpres siciliennes opens at the Royal Opera House on 12 October. Michael Volle sings Montfort, Bryan Hymel reprises the role of Henri, Malin Byström and later in the run Rachele Stanisci perform Hélène, Erwin Schrott sings Procida and Maurizio Benini conducts. Booking here.
The American tenor Michael Spyres has taken an impressive and unusual highway through the operatic world. Hailing from a musical family in Laura Ingalls Wilder's little town on the prairie, he is 38 yet has already tackled 64 different roles, from baroque to bel canto to Berlioz. He is convinced he has sung the latter's Faust more than anyone else alive. And it's not exactly that he doesn't like Puccini, but...
Michael Spyres as Mitridate at the Royal Opera House. Photo ROH/Bill Cooper
JD: Michael, lovely to meet you. How are
you enjoying Mitridate?
MS: The role itself is absolutely incredible.
People don’t realise, simply because it’s not done enough in repertory, but
it’s so difficult. As a character
it’s comparable to Otello, or to any of the truly great characters in the
repertoire. The real Mithridate was one of the most mythic people who ever
lived. He was 72 when he died and he thwarted the Roman army for 39 years –
which is 39 years more than most people ever did! He was a famous polyglot and
spoke 22 languages: he owned the Black Sea and everything around it, there were
22 different regions and he made it a point to learn all the languages.
There’s also a word in French and high
English – “mithridisation” and “mithridatism” – which means to take small
amounts of poison in order to be immune to it. He believed that if you take
small amounts of poison every day then as you get older you do become immune.
One of the main dangers for kings was patricide or death by poisoning – nearly
everyone died of poison! – so he grew up in a strict regimen of taking poison
every day so he would be immune. But when the Romans were finally
defeating him, he tried to poison himself and couldn’t die from that, so he
either stabbed himself or had a friend do it so that the Romans couldn’t. He was
this epic, amazing person and even if some of his story is exaggerated nowadays,
it doesn’t matter; he was a real king and was able to hold off and defeat the
Roman army.
(Here, a different interpretation: Save Pontus, Change Europe)
JD: Mozart’s portrayal of him is
extraordinarily sophisticated.
MS: From the beginning you get to see the heart
and the beauty of him, but in the recitatives you can also see this cunning,
brilliant man who would pit people against each other. In his first aria, he
says: “Thank God I’m back home – I thought I’d never see this place again. It’s
OK to lose but I still hold my head high…” And you find out just afterwards, in
the recitative, that this is totally a ruse, because he’s sent false information
to his sons to test if they’re loyal or not. In the recit you hear him say he
faked his own death just to see if they were traitors. Wooah!
About half way through you start to see his
inner turmoil and the anger he feels because he knows he’s ageing. He
died when he was 72 and usually kings died when they were about 30, killed by
their brothers or their sons. But the way Mozart and Metastasio wrote the
character, based on the Racine play, it shows he’s an old man used to
conquering everything, but the worst thing for him is not losing the battle but
losing his heart, losing his love. You see this throughout the opera. He’s
scared, just like all of us, that nobody’s going to love him again…
There’s a
wonderful scene between him and the queen in which she says, “Yes, I’ll go to
the alter as your slave and do whatever you want.” He's so incensed: “So I
have to drag you to the altar – you don’t want to marry me, you’re just going
to do it out of spite?” And you see this crazy rage and jealousy in him. But
then at the end he gives his sons freedom and says that at the end of his life
he wants to be again the great lion that he is. “Please marry her, and I’m
sorry I’m a terrible person, but I’m showing you how to live. This is how a real
person should live - no regrets…” At the end he says “I can die happy now because
I’ve done what I need to” – and he just dies. I can’t think of a more complex
character. You’re a god among men, a god personified. Hoffmann or Otello would
be comparable, but there’s only a handful of characters who run the gamut of
what a Shakespearean character is and this is definitely one of them.
JD: Mozart was only 14 when he wrote it –
what an astounding thought…
MS: Mozart had three major influences: Mysliveček,
JC Bach and another I only found out about because I did an obscure
baroque opera in Lisbon called Antigono,
by Antonio Mazzoni. I did the modern revival a few years ago and we made a
recording. The only time people had ever heard it was three performances
in 1755 – it’s an incredible piece, but it was lost because of the terrible
fire in 1755 in Lisbon. When Mozart, aged 12, was travelling through Italy with
his father, Mazzoni taught the boy counterpoint in Bologna. Antigono was almost
the same kind of story as Mitridate – it’s a formulaic thing but a large
character. But the fact that Mozart was able to write such touching and
beautiful music was just beyond compare. To anyone who thinks it fails in comparison
to his later works I’d say: no, it’s something completely different. You can’t
compare it and you shouldn’t, because it’s raw, amazing emotion. Some of his
duets, Aspasia’s arias and the vocal writing with the recitatives – there’s
nothing like it.
At the last full rehearsal before we went
on the stage, Graham Vick, who’s one of the greatest directors I’ve had the
pleasure of working with, got us all round and said: I want you to realise that
26 years ago I premiered this here, and now I see this in a completely
different light and I see the absolute genius of Mozart – this little boy who
was shuffled around and hauled out by his father all over Europe. You can see
the animosity in the letters, you can see his wish to be just a normal boy –
all the angst and the problems between father and son is written into the music.
He was a mature being already at that age, because he was forced to be and he
had the genius to do it.
JD: Your particular type of tenor is
something unusual and special. What was your path towards finding your true
voice?
MS: Everyone finds their own path, but I had a
different path than anybody! I started as a baritone. And I wanted to be Mel
Blanc, who was the voice-over person for all the Loony Tunes cartoons. When I
was young I’d imitate everything, all the time and growing up I sang with my family
every kind of music there was – church music, bluegrass, folk. Then when I was
in college I made money by doing commercials and I was a radio DJ and I would
do commercials in different characters – and then I started getting into the
idea that “Oh, you can make a living being an opera singer, that’s weird…” Obviously
I couldn’t do what they were doing, so I thought “I’ll just take the recordings
and start imitating the best”.
The big thing happened when I was 20 years
old – and it was with this production of Mitridate. In my two years of vocal
study, 18-21, we had a VHS of this production and I heard Bruce Ford for the
first time. I didn’t know you could sound like this as a tenor. I’d never heard
a sound like it – it’s like a baritone, but it’s obviously a tenor role, and
that’s what I want to do. Low notes were the easiest things in the world – high
notes, ugh, they were so hard! But this was totally different from anything I
heard in Verdi and Puccini.
In the US, everyone said you can’t make a
career out of this, you just cannot – and that’s still true if you’re in the sticks.
So I decided that if I really wanted to learn to sing I needed to go to Europe
and try to figure out this weird baritenor kind of repertoire. It took another six
years of auditioning to think OK, I can do this weird trick of different mixed
techniques, so I started doing a lot of Rossini roles.
Michael Spyres. Photo: Dax Bedell
JD: It sounds like it wasn’t an easy
beginning?
MS: I was in Vienna for two years at the
conservatory, and it’s a very Mozart-heavy town, so it was an invaluable
experience. That was the first time I got to sing these arias in public and I
crashed and burned. It was so hard! I was 26 and it just didn’t work. I went
back to the drawing board and started doing lots of Rossini again. This is my
third time doing Mitridate in the last year and only now is it starting to feel
good and right.
This is one of the most difficult fachs of
tenor, because you have to do a real mix of baritonal and tenor sounds, but you
have to keep it up in the extreme highs, the same kind of colour as a baritone
but not using the full voice. It’s a voix
mixte and it’s really tricky to navigate and very technical, but you don’t
want people to know you’re doing it! So that’s how I got into it: years and
years of practice and failure and finally things started to click. And now,
depending on repertoire, I change my technique. You have to, because it was
written for different people with different techniques.
JD: Next up, you’re singing Berlioz’s La
Damnation de Faust at the Proms?
MS: There’s a huge misconception about Berlioz!
He was a big admirer of the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, he admired Rossini and you
can hear it constantly in his music. Everyone thinks of Berlioz as these
unimaginable, gigantic pieces that are ultimately verismo – and it’s absolutely
false. In order to sing Berlioz, you have to be able to sing full voice, high,
and get over the orchestra, but the majority of his writing is for a lyrical
voice. He had Nourrit, who was known for doing a lot of voix mixte and had various kinds of colour-changing sounds, not
full-voice high Cs. He had him in mind for Benvenuto Cellini. But Nourrit was
having vocal problems and tragically then killed himself that year and Berlioz wrote it for Gilbert Duprez instead. But a work like Lélio is so lyrical and
beautiful, I can’t imagine some Puccini singer trying to sing it: it’s all
lightness and is based completely on the text.
There’s a great quote from Berlioz. He used
to say: “Above all, resonate”. He meant that both literally and figuratively. I
sang the Grande Messe des Morts in this massive cathedral that it was intended
for [Les Invalides], and in there Berlioz had realised that he needed more
people, it was too big a place, so the choir’s about 180-200 people and the
orchestra’s 120. I had friends at the performance and they said when I opened
up and started singing they could feel the sound resonating.
Berlioz was this great artist and dreamer
but although he had a giant ego, it was all about the art for him and he connected
everything to the text. He believed in art permeating society and being an
infectious thing, but it always has to be for a reason, it’s not just
superfluous. He was unlike anybody else and I love him!
JD: This isn’t entirely your Proms debut?
MS: I did the Beethoven Missa Solemnis with John
Eliot Gardiner two years ago. I’ve never done solo stuff there before, though,
so I’m excited. I love the Proms because it’s an awakening of classical music
for ‘everyperson’. I’m not saying that opera isn’t an elitist thing – because
it is, as it takes so much money to be able to put on an opera. But the coolest
thing about the Proms is that for many people this is their only possibility
that they might see something that’ll change their lives. So that’s why I love
the Proms. And I’ll give ‘em a good show, because now I’ve done Faust more
than, as far as I know, any other living person. I could conduct it with my
eyes closed – but all I have to do is sing, so it’s great! I love the piece so
much, mainly because I did the production with Terry Gilliam in the original
French in Belgium and that changed my life.
JD: What’s it like to work with Gilliam?
MS: He’s a madman and he’s wonderful! He seriously
reminds me of my uncle. We’ve kept in really good touch. We’re very much of the
same kind of mind – we’d start talking and still be there four hours later. We
have similar ideas and that’s also why he’s taken a liking, like me too, to
Berlioz. There are so many accounts of Berlioz being a true artist – ‘I don’t
care what you think of me, I’m going to do this because the art demands it’ – and
I’ve done that many times in my life. Of course I’ve failed – but I’ve
succeeded too!
As Faust in Gilliam's production
JD: The production was brilliant, but quite
controversial, involving a concentration camp…
MS: To me it’s one of the most poignant
productions I’ve ever been a part of. I have many friends and colleagues who
say ‘Oh, opera’s going in such a bad direction, all these director things that
kill the production’ – but you have a choice to take that or not, and we have
to do the projects we believe in. I’ve been fortunate that out of my 64 operas
I’ve done, there have only been two or three that I haven’t been really
thrilled about.
JD: You don’t mind ‘Regietheater’, then?
MS: It depends on the director and the ideas.
I’m a director myself, I have my own opera company in the States that I run
with my family. We’re basically the von Trapps – we put on the shows, my
brother helps run the company and my sister’s a Broadway singer. I take it very
seriously, I can see when a director is just doing something for their own ego and
I choose not to be around those kinds of people.
It’s a difficult thing, being a director. Today
they’re in a weird position where these are major decisions, it takes huge
amounts of money to put on a project and everybody’s under pressure to do a
brand-new, original idea. Many people have an idea, but it doesn’t necessarily
work with the music. Many directors are not musicians to start out with –
they’re dramatists, which is a great concept on paper, but if you have to listen
to a piece for four hours and you don’t take into account the audience – you’re
gonna die! So I’m fine with any project as long as it’s well thought out and it
makes sense with the music. Because the whole reason you’re there is because of the music.
It’s gone crazy in certain places. I won’t
name names, but there was one instance where L’Italiana in Algeri was being
produced and the director wanted to have his name bigger on the poster than the
composer’s name or the opera’s title. Fortunately the festival director said no.
That’s how crazy people get!
JD: Do you see yourself moving more into directing
in the future?
MS: Yes, absolutely. I’m so inspired, the more
I read about the origins of opera. From Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first opera,
until the late 19th century, all singers were actors and directors. Nowadays
things are so specialised that people say “I’m just a singer” and some don’t
even act! It’s completely the opposite of what it should be. All of us need to
be acting, dancing, singing, learning as much as we can. That is why opera
created this wave of art because it was the first artform where everyone came
together, with the idea that we’re all part of it, we all need to be able to do
a little bit of everything.
Michael Spyres
That was the great thing, growing up in my
family. We built our own amphitheatre. We built the stage first and everyone
sat on hay bales. I’m from a famous little town called Mansfield, Missouri – it
was the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House of the Prairie books. Because of the books, we have
many visitors come through there. My mother wrote a musical about Laura Ingalls
Wilder when we were growing up and it’s now in its 28th year. At its biggest we
had about 120 people involved, which was 10 per cent of the town! So I’ve grown
up around this and I’ve been so vindicated reading about the origins of opera, what
got me into opera and how it split from its origins.
JD: The idea that you can do just do one
thing and the world owes you a living, that’s going nowhere fast…
MS: Of course! And people are tired of that.
One of my favourite futurist speakers is Michio Kaku, a fantastic theoretical
physicist. A big subject now is what’s going to happen when people become obsolete
in jobs. In the next 30-50 years half the people are going to be cut out
because of robots, so what’s going to happen? What are the jobs that will be
left? You’ve got to be an artist, a musician, someone who comes up with new ideas.
For a long time everyone wanted to have a good stable job, but now people are
being replaced by robots. But a robot will never be able to be an artist or a
musician – that’s what’s so exciting.
JD: I hope you’re right!
MS: They can try! But we are such complex
creatures in music. You can hear a piece that’s done by a robot and it doesn’t
feel right, it’s just algorithms. That’s why I’m so excited about the future of
music and art. I feel I came at the right time because by the time I’m in my
later years more and more people will be coming to art, because that’s where
the ideas come from. The same thing applies to the computer programmers – they
have the technicality and the vision for what needs to be done. Opera is
basically the computer of the art world.
JD: You sing, you act, you direct: are you
also tempted to write an opera?
A few years ago my brother wrote a
libretto, my mum helped – we took the music from The Magic Flute and created a
story based on Alice in Wonderland to take to all the kids in the area who’d
never seen opera before, in 32 schools that were among the poorest in the
community. Yes, someday I want to write an opera – that’s what I’m leaning
towards.
JD: What about future roles to sing? Any
big dreams?
MS: I’ve basically done every role I wanted to
do, except Verdi’s Otello. I’ll do that someday – but like Kaufmann, I’m smart and
I’ll wait. I’ll wait until I’m 50 for that, so I’ve got over a decade – but the
other dream roles are Monteverdi’s Orfeo and a lot of Rameau and Gluck, great
epic works on Greek stories. But modern opera for the most part is not as
appealing to me as a singer.
I like Puccini. I love Puccini. But it’s
like he put down pure gold on paper and if you want to do him justice you’ve
got to do what he wrote – and if you live within the characters that he wrote
there’s not a lot of freedom. I’ve taken a lot of flack for saying that – people
say, ‘Oh you just don’t like Puccini because you can’t sing it’ – but actually
I can sing it, I just don’t like it, because I believe in doing what
the composer wanted you to do and for my character there’s very little in Puccini
that I find interesting as an actor and singer. I love it when other people do
it, but for me personally I get angry because I want to do my own thing, but I
shouldn’t – he wrote it so perfectly and beautifully that it’s just right! So
that’s why most of the verismo period doesn’t appeal to me – there’s not enough
freedom for me,
As far as dream roles go, I’ve done most of
them and I know it’s crazy to say that. But I’ve done 64 already and I’m 38:
operas from modern to the earliest stuff, and a range from the lowest operas
written for a tenor voice to the highest, so I’ve lived out all my major
fantasies as far as roles are concerned. Now I’m just looking for true content and
characterisation. I find many of the more obscure things much more rewarding.
I’d love to do Die tote Stadt – that’s
a dream. I love Die tote Stadt – Korngold
was one of the greatest. The same with Massenet: he came on the heels of
verismo and was able to marry the two, and Korngold did the same thing. Korngold
is so overlooked, just because he went into film. But have you listened to his
film scores? They’re better than anything! Come on, you can’t write better than
that.
JD: You just made this Korngold biographer
very happy! Thank you, Michael, and toitoitoi for the final Mitridate.
And – as Loony Tunes would say – that’s
all, folks!
The final performance of Mitridate is on
Friday 7 July at the Royal Opera House – booking here. Michael Spyres sings
Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust at the Proms on 8 August – booking here.
