Opera Thoughts #3

I have been writing a series of articles about the way we perceive, understand and experience opera in this country, inspired by the recent Arts Council England funding announcement which included the shock news that English National Opera, established in 1931 as Sadler’s Wells Opera Company by Lilian Baylis as an opera for ordinary people, is to close.

What follows is a number of posts that detail my personal involvement with this artform, and how I was introduced to it, as well as some reflections on the last ten years of my career in opera. Like many people working in opera, my career has been split between working in the UK and in continental Europe. The combination of a hard Brexit and the decrease in funding available for opera by Arts Council England has provoked an existential double-whammy. I have been reflecting on my journey here…

The Beginning…

I have been working professionally in opera since 2009 when I was invited by Christine Chibnall of Opera North to be the assistant director on Tim Albery’s revival of Don Carlos by Verdi, an opera I finally directed myself in 2022 in Germany. That felt like the closing of a circle: to stage as a director myself the work that first brought me into this artform, and – I suppose – the work that kindled my love for opera. Prior to 2009 I had very little knowledge of opera. Although I could read music, and had played the tenor saxophone in jazz bands at school and at university, I had long given it up, and my knowledge of classical music was essentially zero.

My late father, who was a devotee of Classic FM, had an LP of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. I remember playing this over and over again as a child. It was so familiar to me that now, more than thirty years on, I could so clearly remember the album cover that I was able to find the same recording online and even listen to it with the vinyl sound I remember. And you can too, if you want to:

I used to play the record and wave my arms around like conductors I had seen on television at the Last Night of the Proms. The mysterious glamour of their penguin-like suits, the way that with a wave of a special wand they could make music happen seemed – still seems to me today – like magic.

At the start of Junior School (I was eight) the new children were brought into the library. We were asked if we wanted to learn a musical instrument. Ever since I could remember I was absolutely obsessed with the piano – I used to play for hours on my own, pretending to play the piano, hearing the music I could produce in my head. I looked forward to visiting relatives who had pianos. I would play around on them until the patience of the adults wore thin. I was amazed by this enormous instrument whose workings were hidden inside like a kind of mechanical animal’s organs, the pleasingly cool smooth touch of its black and white ivory keys, the special velvet covered stool that could lift up and be used to store music, and, most importantly, how it could, simply by the pressing of buttons in a seemingly simple but bafflingly elusive pattern, produce any music imaginable. As a child, the piano seemed a logical instrument. There were only twelve notes, surely the number of patterns available was limited? If only I could press the keys in the right order, music would be produced. I kept trying, but I could not force the instrument to play the music I had in my mind.

I of course said in that assembly straight away that I would like to play the piano. The teacher asked if we had a piano at home. We certainly did not, but after my pleading, my father had brought me a two octave, battery-powered Casio keyboard from one of his business trips to Hong Kong. I proudly informed the teacher of this, but was told that it would not be sufficient. I tried to reason with my teacher – after all, my cousins had a grand (!) piano and we visited them every weekend – but she was not convinced. I have never forgotten the feeling of disappointment. I continued to play my imaginary piano and conduct my imaginary orchestra in their never-ending performance of Mozart.

During music lessons at school there was a lot of singing. I was always a keen singer and loved it. But I was constantly being told to be quieter because my singing was too loud. Because I was Jewish, my parents would not permit me to join the school choir which performed mostly religious music. So my father took me to the synagogue choir practice on Thursday nights where he and my uncle were enthusiastic second tenors. The choir master, a kind retired pharmacist called Jack, was very encouraging. As no women were permitted to sing religious music in the synagogue, a boy soprano was a valuable asset. This activity brought my late father a great deal of pleasure, but I found the repertoire and melodies limiting, the pace of rehearsal glacial, and the endless ‘bolbying’ (gossiping) boring and tiring. But what I mostly found frustrating was that although Jack would play the electric piano beautifully during rehearsals, the actual performances were always a capella, because the playing of instruments is considered ‘work’ and therefore forbidden on the Sabbath, whereas singing is devotion and therefore permitted.

Later, I discovered musical theatre. I had always loved plays, and we had many opportunities to perform in and even write and direct them at school. In a musical there was not only acting, but also singing and musical accompaniment. I was very enthusiastic. When I was 14 and finally old enough to try out for one of the school musicals, I attended every single audition for the show the English teacher had written about Lady Godiva. The musical was never staged so I didn’t get to find out how he would solve the difficulty of the naked woman riding through town on horseback given I attended an all boys’ school.

At Opera North I was plunged into a completely new world in my late 20s, and I immersed myself in it, borrowing scores from the library and CDs from the planning office. I ploughed my way through the great works of the Italian opera composers and it felt like a whole new world was opening up to me. In the very first music rehearsal for Don Carlos, conductor Richard Farnes directed Robert Winslade-Anderson and Julian Gavin as the Monk and Carlos in the first scene of the opera. I sat open-mouthed as this enormous sound washed over me, and I had the opportunity to observe at close-quarters the still baffling and no less magical work of the conductor. I could not understand how this sound was being produced, or how immediate the emotion was. They were singing in English. I didn’t know at this point that this was not the norm. I am quite sure that the initial effect would not have been as powerful if they had sung in Italian or French.

By this point I was an emerging theatre director. I went to the theatre three times a week, I had an encylopaedic knowledge of new plays, writers, musicals, the theatre world of the UK. I had studied theatre directing and been exposed to the work of a huge range of directors, writers, performers. But now it felt like something black and white was turning into colour when this music was created right there in front of me. The experience was totally overwhelming, and my life changed at that very moment forever.

The second life-changing moment for me was seeing the work – and subsequently working with, and being mentored by – the late, great Graham Vick in Birmingham. Graham took these enormous grand works of opera and presented them in factories and warehouses. At my first one, the men and women around me who looked just like ordinary people from Birmingham, since that is what they are, suddenly, without notice, started to sing the opening of Verdi’s Othello. I couldn’t believe what was happening. This sound was 360 degrees in the round everywhere you looked, then suddenly two enormous men in military uniforms appeared – Ronald Samm and Keel Watson – and they sang, again in English, the roles of Othello and Iago, just there, not in front of us, but in and amongst us, as we sat, shoes off, on a red carpet that stretched as far as the eye could see in a building so large I imagined they must have used it to build aeroplanes.

But I was soon to learn that opera was not normally performed in English - in fact, although it had been the custom even at Covent Garden (now unimaginable) to perform all works in translation until the 1960s, this was now considered old-fashioned and looked down upon by a lot of critics, a position that has hardened today. I have never understood the reason for this. Nobody complains because the National Theatre doesn’t play Chekhov in Russian…