THE WINSTON CHURCHILL MEMORIAL TRUST OF AUSTRALIA REPORT BY

WARWICK FYFE

THE WINSTON CHURCHILL MEMORIAL TRUST OF AUSTRALIA

REPORT BY WARWICK FYFE, 2015 CHURCHILL FELLOW THE 2015 CHURCHILL FELLOWSHIP To study Wagnerian Vocal Technique and investigate how the future of Wagnerian Opera in Australia can be safe guarded.

I understand that the Churchill Trust may publish this Report, either in hard copy or on the internet or both, and consent to such publication. I indemnify the Churchill Trust against any loss, costs, or damages it may suffer arising out of any claim or proceedings made against this Trust in respect of or arising out of the publication of any Report submitted to the Trust and which the Trust places on a website for access over the Internet. I also warrant that my Final Report is original and does not infringe the copyright of any person or contain anything which is, or the incorporation of which into the Final Report is, actionable for defamation, a breach of privacy law, or obligation, breach of confidence, contempt of court, passing-off or contravention of any other private right or of any law.

Signed

Dated:

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INDEX INTRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PROGRAMME BACKGROUND UK: LONDON GERMANY: BERLIN MUNICH DUSSELDORF USA: NEW YORK VIGNETTES OBSERVATIONS CONCLUSIONS

4 5 6 7 8 13 24 44 54 57 64 67 72

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INTRODUCTION My project involved travel to the UK, Germany and the USA in a quest for enlightenment as to how best to secure the future of Wagnerian opera in Australia and achieve highest possible performance standards. To this end I met with experts and professionals, conducting interviews and undertaking study with the very best people in the business. I was also an observer, attending performances and immersing myself in High Culture wherever I went. Needless to say it was a life changing experience and I look forward to sharing all I learnt with young singers and other interested parties.

“Artistic nations are also important nations.” Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I still can't quite believe I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship! It seems an extraordinary honour for someone of who, conscious of his own modest natural endowments (nevertheless cultivated to the best of his abilities), tends to feel pride on behalf of the truly remarkable and their works, rather than on his own behalf. I wish to register here my profound sense of gratitude by acknowledging those without whom my extraordinary adventure as a Fellow would not have been possible. Pride of place must go to Mrs Norma Leslie, my sponsor. Such philanthropy is what gives society strength and its dispensers deserve the gratitude, admiration and respect of all decent people. I cannot thank her enough. In the Churchill Fellowship organisation, I wish to single out Andrew Leake and Meg Gilmartin. Andrew was endlessly energetic and patient, always finding time to respond to my many queries. If unable to speak at the precise time I rang he would briskly declare his availability at another specific time and ring me back without fail then. His focus on the essentials cut though my verbosity like a hot knife passing through butter. Daunting as this was initially, it was sorely needed and deeply appreciated. His guidance at every stage of the selection process was a key factor in my ultimate success. Meg Gilmartin’s friendliness and clear, succinct advice made the administrative side of things as easy as could be. For this amelioration of stress, I thank her. There were, of course, many others in the organisation who provided assistance. They all have my gratitude. Sonia Jennings at Campus Travel had my complicated itinerary sorted out in a jiffy. Her cheery efficiency was greatly appreciated. Amongst the wide and wonderful family of Fellows, Ian Krimmer and Kevin Kitchen have my especial gratitude for helping me, a rank technophobe, get to grips with the technology I would be taking with me. Kevin happily rescheduled when the first session arranged to help me master my magic recording pen was a waste of time on account of the pen I’d bought having been a faulty one. What lovely men! I would like to put on record that all Churchill Fellows I’ve met, both those whose projects are current and those whose projects are historical, have been fine, admirable individuals. I feel quite abashed when I contemplate the work they’re doing, to think that I’m now of their number. I count both my referees, Stephen Mould and John Wegner, as dear friends. It was quite emotional for me to read their testimonials as to my worthiness for a Fellowship. Both men are heroes of mine. Stephen, as well as a steadfast, loyal friend, is also a polymath, a renaissance man, not only one of this country’s finest musical brains but also the most engrossing conversationalist on account of his wit and encyclopaedic knowledge, not just of music, but of art, literature and the humanities generally. John is quite simply a superstar and a national treasure whose stellar career is one of this nation’s great success stories and one in which a Churchill Fellowship played a key role. He is also one of the nicest, most generous and humane people you’ll ever meet. Hence the fact that he is so loved by all who revere opera and classical music generally in this country. I wish to express my profoundest gratitude to all my interviewees, teachers and coaches, I’ve consulted and worked with in the course of my project. As I’ve much to say about each of them in the body of the report, I shall confine myself to listing their names at this point: Donna Balson, Andrea Buchanan, Catherine Carby, Martin Cooke, Graham Cox, Wyn Davies, Joshua Hecht, John Heuzenroeder, Mark Lawson, Gaye MacFarlane, Anthony Negus, Robert Nemack, Kathleen Parker, John Parr, Deborah Polaski, Wolf Michael Stortz, Neill Thornborrow, Matthew Toogood and Richard Wiegold. For their help with all manner of practical matters relating to this fellowship, I’d like to thank Veronica and Nick Sanderson and their family, Linda and Ian Rowe, and Anthony and Neil Townson, and James Hancock. Most importantly of all, I would like to thank my beloved wife, Dr Ruth Frances, without whom I’d be literally nothing, for her love, unwavering, relentless support, hard work on every front and for the joy she brings me every day of my life; and my Mum, Helen Ann Fyfe, the best mother there ever was, whom I adore, and who I hope knows the infinitude of my debt to her.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Warwick Fyfe, Opera Singer (Heldenbariton) 25 Reid St MERRYLANDS NSW 2160 Ph: 0425 328 264 (Mob); 02 8812 7816 (LL). Email: [email protected] My Churchill Fellowship Project was focussed on Wagnerian opera. The impetus was my fear that this particular branch of High Art was under threat as a result of cultural decline and deteriorating standards in the area of singing pedagogy and education more generally. Determined to make the best possible direct contribution to the cause of Wagnerian opera via my own work as a singer, I arranged to work with the most eminent people in the field. My project was an extraordinary adventure taking in the UK, Germany and New York. The highlights were my lessons in Germany with the great Deborah Polaski, the finest living Brünnhilde; and my lessons with Joshua Hecht, an inspirational, singing pedagogy genius and world renowned singer from the Golden Era of the 50s and 60s. The revelatory quality of these lessons was increased as a result of the contribution of his wife Donna Balson at the piano with her incisive mind and extraordinary ears. I had some amazing coachings with Wolf Michael Storz and Mark Lawson at the Bavarian State Opera; and attended a performance of Götterdämmerung in Munich, with back stage access thanks to Martin Cooke. I cannot list here all the remarkable people I spoke to and worked with but I can say that each and every one of them contributed something unique to my understanding of the matter in question. Clear patterns began to emerge, allowing me to arrive at general conclusions as to the the best ways forward. I am a much better singer for this experience, but I am also far better armed to go into battle on behalf of this art form I love so much. Fundamental amongst the matters I wished to explore through my project was the importance of education and general culture to the highest possible level of achievement in Wagnerian opera. My instinct that any given branch of High Art, such as a Wagner opera, cannot exist in a vacuum was borne out. As well as places of direct and obvious relevance such as The Bavarian State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera New York and the Elgar and Holst museums, I visited all manner of galleries and other museums and these proved as relevant and enlightening as my forays into the heart of operatic practice. My favourites were often smaller or less well known; the Scharf-Gerstenberg Sammlung in Berlin, the Neue Galerie and the Pierpoint Morgan Library Museum in New York, (where I saw some original manuscripts by the greatest composers). MAJOR CONCLUSIONS Most broadly, the future of Wagnerian opera and indeed High Art generally, requires the embracing of a general, civilising education in the arts, humanities, history, philosophy which should form the foundation of any later specialisation. The more culturally rounded a singer is, the finer exponent he/she will be of his/her craft. The same holds true for the other half of the equation, namely: the audience. Another finding was that the nurturing of voices of Wagnerian potential has to addressed. These voices tend to mature later and there are aspects of today’s culture which militate against these voices staying the course. This problem, which fully explains the now generally lower standards than obtained in the 1950s and1960s, can be addressed, but there are no quick fixes. I shall disseminate and implement my these findings via my own performance practice (especially in The Ring in Melbourne later this year); work with young singers, masterclasses, tertiary institutions); and talks to interested groups, and hopefully, contribute to securing the audience base. 6

PROGRAMME 1. UK Nov London: Interviews / discussions with: Wyn Davies, Anthony Negus, Richard Wiegold, Catherine Carby, Andrea Buchanan. Visits to places of musical, historic and artistic interest, including the birthplace of Elgar (Malvern), Fitzwilliam Gallery (Cambridge); Durham Cathedral, Roman Baths, The Tate Northern Gallery, Imperial War Museum (North), Fenton House, Kenwood House, Knightshayes Tiverton, the Wallace Collection, the Wellcome Collection. 2. GERMANY Nov-Dec Berlin: Coaching / lessons with: Deborah Polaski, Graham Cox; Specialist German language lessons with Kathleen Parker; interviews / discussions withJohn Heuzenroeder, Gaye Macfarlane, Robert Nemack. Dusseldorf: Interviews / discussions with Neil Thornborrow, Matthew Toogood. Munich: Coaching with Wolf Michael Storz, Mark Lawson ( Bavarian Staatsoper); interview/ discussions and backstage visit with Martin Cooke ( Bavarian Staatsoper). Visited the Spielzeugmuseum. Attendance at performance of Goetterdammerung, Bavarian Staatsoper, Munich. Visits to places of historical, artistic and musical significance, including the Gemaldegalerie, the Berlinische Galerie, Scharf-Gerstenberg Sammlung, Naturkundemuseum, the Berggruen Galerie.

3. USA Dec Caoching / lessons with Joshua Hecht and Donna Balson (Horfstra University, Long Island, New York). Attendance at Performance of La Donna del Lago, Metropolitan Opera, NYC. Visits to places of artistic, musical and historical interest, including MOMA, Neue Gallery NY, Pierpoint Morgan Library Museum, American Folk Art Museum, Statue of Liberty, 9/11 Memorial. 7

BACKGROUND Some years ago, I was working on a Richard Strauss opera, Der Rosenkavalier for Opera Australia. Der Rosenkavalier is a work of great complexity. It is a masterpiece of High Art and therefore universal in what it has to say at the deepest level. It is an intensely satisfying piece to work on for anyone in love with Deutsche Kunst (German Art). There's so much in it, one could come back to it periodically throughout one's career and never come anywhere near exhausting it (so to speak). Alongside its universality, there are, at another level, all sorts of details which are tied, in terms of their capacity to have resonance to specific times and spaces. I was mindful of the amount of work we were lavishing on fine detail - work limited only by the available time - and I couldn't help pondering how much of this would be lost on our prospective audiences. The more I thought about it, the more much of it seemed to be in the nature of Druidic ritual. Take for instance one basic question: the language in which the opera is to be performed. Generally speaking, with the greatest, serious operas (and indeed with comic masterpieces of the first order such as Le Nozze di Figaro), the musicality of the language and the careful word setting of the genius composer seem so inextricably bound up and of a piece with the music (in the ordinary sense) that the desirability of performing in the original language seems incontestable. That's certainly my instinct as a performer. Nevertheless I was given pause for thought in the period immediately prior to the commencement of my project when I was working on a French opera which was to be performed in English. My landlady at the time, having decided that she would come to see the show, was pleased and relieved to hear that it was to be in English. I considered this in the light of my earlier rumination on the subject of the enormous amount of work which would seem to be lost on anglophone audiences, especially in Australia. Dare one consider the possibility that the benefits of immediacy of comprehension outweigh those of all this ivory tower stuff we lavish so much time on? My every instinct rebels at this. Yet consider the following: an Australian impresario in the nineteenth century actually wrote to Richard Wagner about his plans for performing one of works for the first time in this country. Wagner wrote back and made it very clear that in his mind it was obvious that his works should be performed in the language of the audience. I make no categorical judgement on this point. I feel in my every fibre the value of performing Wagner in the original. The most I'll say is that I think there is room for both approaches (and this applies to all first rate opera, not just Wagner). I think it'd be very interesting to see what the audience response would be, in terms of its tickets purchasing behaviour, to a season offering both original and English translation performances of the same operas. I doubt such an experiment will ever be undertaken in Australia. Of course, as performing artists, we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, idealists, and our sense of duty to these works of art is reason enough to take all this trouble. It's often said "if only one person gets it (whatever ‘it’ is), that's reason enough". Then there's evidence that the fruits of this striving for perfection will communicate themselves subconsciously to a less than ideally sophisticated audience. 8

Be that as it may, I'd also observed quite rough and ready performances lapped up for trashy reasons, such as a certain swagger on the part of the singer. Some ultra pragmatists might therefore say "why bother?" Interestingly, one of my hosts in the UK, when I was explaining to him that the role of Baron Ochs requires a specialist who can do a Viennese accent, said "How many in the audience would get that?" I'm not one of those ultra pragmatists. Nevertheless, I like to feel my efforts and those of my colleagues are counting for something and it does seem like rather weird ritualistic behaviour if most of it is going over audiences' heads, akin to religious ritual in an era when the laity weren't allowed to read the bible and the priest kept his back to the congregation. Anyway, I brought this up with the rehearsal director during a break. Der Rosenkavalier was written at a time when, if it was said of someone that he had completed his education, it could be taken as read that he was reasonably well acquainted with the canon of great literature, European history and so forth. This irrespective of specialisation undertaken at what we would call the tertiary level. Moreover, Der Rosenkavalier is steeped in a specifically Viennese milieu so that, as mentioned, Baron Ochs requires a singer who can do a Viennese accent, and there's nothing strange about the fact that a male role, Octavian, is played by a woman for an audience accustomed to conventions of Viennese operetta. The charm of it depends on these allusions to feather light popular idiom of operetta sublimated into a work of High Art - the ennobling of sentimentality into something epiphanic. I've been asked more than once, by people who are not stupid, "Why's a boy being played by a girl?". I raised these questions of the general level of culture on the part of antipodean audiences and what it means for a great work when it is in every sense very far from home with my rehearsal director. His rather defensive response was to say that he didn't think one should have to complete a reading list to attend the opera. Well no, but.. My project is, of course about Wagnerian opera, not Strauss. Wagner has always been my first musical love. These ruminations in connection with Strauss (and Strauss is unthinkable without Wagner) are readily transferable to Wagner. It was natural that while I was thinking along these lines I should turn my attention to Wagner, not just because he is my principle interest, but because he is self evidently the greater artist - one of the titans of music - but because his oeuvre is even more vulnerable. Not only because the same considerations apply to an even greater degree, but because there are a range of further considerations which apply to him uniquely. Principal amongst the latter is the performability of his works. This is the focus of my project. Famously, the opera Tristan und Isolde defeated those singers who first attempted to perform it. The physical vocal demands were unprecedented and the chromatic harmony utterly revolutionary and baffling. Nevertheless, within Wagner's life time these things were assimilated and appreciated. The work was so great as to take the whole musical world with it, changing everything forever. Serious music since Wagner is scarcely imaginable without Wagner. A breed of singers and conductors arose, equal to the demands of this repertoire. A point was reached where it was possible to perform these works as near to perfectly as could be imagined I this imperfect world. Enough singers of sufficient calibre were stalking the earth. Maybe it seemed this would go on forever. Well, sadly, after the sixties things went 9

into decline and the spectre of unperformability (for different reasons) has returned, perhaps book ending the Wagnerian era. So Richard Strauss is one of those composers "following on" from Wagner, not just temporally but aesthetically and in a very direct way. Certain roles in Strauss, such as Elektra, make vocal demands equal to those which obtain in Wagner. Wagner remains, however, the operatic summit in terms of the vocal heft and endurance. So the situation is much more acute. Voices at home in Puccini can make the transition to Strauss (ruling out certain specific roles), whereas they would be permanently barred from Wagner whose oeuvre contains role after role requiring voices of unusual weight. Vocal art did reach the heights necessary to compass this music but it is in danger of losing its foothold there. So the forces ranged against Wagnerian opera are on both sides of the pit. In short, on the side of the audience, the enemy is the general level of culture. On the stage, there's the same problem, subsuming also questions of the proper form of the operatic apprenticeship, and the physical, vocal demands of the repertoire. Finally, there's MY day job as a professional singer. How can I be a better singer of Wagnerian opera? So I've three points of focus: 1. Breeding a stable of singers in Australia equal to the demands of Wagner, obviating the need to ‘buy in’ talent. 2. What if anything I can do about the audience base? 3. How can I be a better Wagnerian? Regarding objective number one, I was always clear about how I intended to disseminate the knowledge gained in the course of my project amongst younger singers. Master classes. I've given masterclasses in the past at the request of opera companies and tertiary institutions. I've already discussed the prospect of masterclasses with a Wagnerian focus in the wake of my project with various of my contacts in the music education world. There is also the possibility of one on one instruction. There are obvious advantages though to the group approach. Knowledge can be shared in the moment with many people and it is my experience that breakthroughs and moments of illumination hit home that much more forcefully when there's an audience murmuring its appreciation and offering comments and encouragement. The subject has greater confidence that he/she isn't imagining it. I'm not interested in a purely technical approach. This is where I perhaps differ from others. I worry at the increasing tendency to treat tertiary education as just a means to a practical end. I prefer the older ‘temple of learning’ model and the reverence for knowledge this implies. I therefore am as interested in a student's attitude to High Art as I am in his/her technical prowess. It's vital that these young people grasp the fact that the various branches of High Culture cannot and must not exist in isolation from each other.

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The category distinction between High Art and popular entertainment must be confronted and understood. This has been blurred, in part as a result of well meaning political correctness which has as its motivation a determination not to devalue people's efforts (not to mention a horror of seeming elitist). Moreover, the minute this subject is broached, certain waters-muddying questions can be anticipated, for example "But why can't opera be entertaining?", or "Who gets to say what's High Art and what's entertainment?". This is unavoidable because self evidently Wagner, for example, can be entertaining, and first rate popular entertainment also involves enormous creativity and aesthetic richness. In other words there are grey areas and the categories bleed into one another. But it is still vital to maintain the distinction at the theoretical level - outside of time and space. There are various reasons for this. They function differently. High Art has an ennobling effect and demands something of the observer. Entertainment can be experienced passively and exists to beguile the passing hour. The value of one is absolute, fundamentally mysterious and requires of a civilised society that it be protected and preserved, like an endangered animal, irrespective of commercial considerations. The success of the other can be measured, for instances on the basis of ticket sales, the number of laughs extracted from the audiences or the length of the run. When these category distinctions are lost sight of, resources, desperately needed for High Art, can be diverted elsewhere on the basis of vague, ill conceived notions, having to do with relevance to ‘ordinary people’ or some such pernicious, vague nonsense. During the rehearsal period for my last show preceding embarking on my Churchill project, my brow furrowed when the director James Bonas described the opera we were about to start work on as a musical! I needn't have worried. In fact this director and I were in total accord but merely verbalised our ideas (and arranged them in our heads) differently. In practice, this business of its being ‘like a musical’ simply meant that we were trying to make it as accessible as possible by performing it in English and doing everything we could to clarify a rather opaque plot. (Actually though, the longer we rehearsed, the clearer it became that it wasn't just a case of this opera we were working on that was especially confusing but rather that the measures we were taking - super emphatic gestures so that the character being referred to couldn't be mistaken for instance - were necessary because audiences for opera – any opera - needed as much help as they could get if they were to understand, so that we had to allow for cultural decline by spelling everything out as clearly as possible. And yes we wanted to be entertaining - but this was seriously undertaken artistic project. It still partook of High Art. When it comes to admiring the work of performers in other disciplines, I've generally been most inspired and impressed by the work of first rate theatre actors. I've always found opportunities to work with top theatre directors and actors especially exciting. Anyway, I felt this particular production incorporated the best aspects of straight theatre. There was a constant buzz of creativity in the room. I think this, which for me was redolent of first rate straight theatre, is the explanation of his reference to popular entertainment, specifically musicals, because clearly what he wanted to avoid was the staleness of routine which can infect opera at its worst. He wanted something dynamic. Also, one of the most exciting exciting aspects of this production was something the great actor Mark Rylance encapsulated when speaking in an interview with Andrew Marr about his own latest production, to wit: the sense of the audience's being in the same space as the performers and 11

almost participating in the ritual. A creaturely closeness. In other words, a species of authenticity and earnestness of purpose linked with a type of theatre at the other end of the spectrum from those other forms involving a range of distancing elements, such as vast auditoria, seating a long way from the stage or high above it and so forth. Regarding the audience base, I will create opportunities to give talks. In the first instance, these will be for groups with whom I'm already a popular speaker. I have previously articulated my views about the state and trajectory of culture and the need for an approach to eduction based on the Germanic notion of Bildung (more of this later). I will locate what I have to say about my discoveries, made in the course of my project, in this broader narrative. Genuine opera lovers need to realise that they cannot assume Wagner will always be there and that they have to be actively involved alongside performers in its preservation. And so to my third point of focus: myself as Heldenbariton. My choice of mentors is determined by my hunger for the polymathic. I've no use for monomaniacs. People whose putative expertise is confined to purely technical vocal matters, who've never read a book worth reading or wondered at a great painting bore me. They don't understand art. One may as well take lessons with a canary. The technical aspects must be mastered but without everything else art is impossible. Interspersed with my work under the guidance of specialist teachers and coaches, all of whom are ‘cultivated’ people will be many visits to galleries, museum and other places of cultural significance. This is not optional. It's fundamental to my project and my beliefs regarding how these things work. I'm convinced that such successes as I've had in the past have been as a direct result of its always having seemed obvious to me that if one is to have anything to offer as a performer worth anyone's time and attention, one has to be a cultivated person - and time is short! There's so much to read and look at and listen to, so get on with it! Paying my respects to Sir Thomas Beecham

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LONDON WYN DAVIES: DIRECTOR OF MUSIC, NEW ZEALAND OPERA. Wyn Davies is one of the finest men I know. He is humane, kind, thoughtful and a superlative conductor, who regularly conducts for Opera North (UK), the Halle Orchestra (UK) an the Buxton Festival (UK). His Flying Dutchman a couple of years ago was highly acclaimed in international Wagner circles. I was so pleased that our times coincided in London. We had a long and searching conversation. I was keen to get his sage advice on professional matters, particularly as regards my aspirations as a Wagnerian. He helped me reach decisions on several knotty conundrums. I also picked his brains on the question of Wagner in general. He is not the sort of man to toss off glib statements or treat such an important matter high handedly, so rather than attempt to answer as my questions on the spot, he took some of them on notice and provided responses in a follow up email. Here are some of his thoughts on various points: On ‘Dumbing down’ “There is a contention amongst some that the general dumbing down of educational standards will have the effect of reducing the size of the opera audience. But to balance against that is the greatly increased availability of opera to the public. It is now easy to brush up against opera almost accidentally and quite a few of those who do so find they like it." This is an interesting statement. I certainly detect many contrary indications. The attendance at say English Touring Opera performances in regional centres is very good indeed, when at the same time large scale performances in major capital cities struggle both critically and in their attempts to attract audiences. To be balanced alongside "increased availability" surely is our duty to art. Just because it's easy to find, say, a student level performance of popular opera excerpts which is not expensive to attend and doesn't demand much of an audience member who just wants a good tune, one would be wrong to think that all was fine and dandy and the future of opera in no great danger. What about a full scale production of Wozzeck at the top level? Back in 1999 I was in one such performance, and it was one of the finest productions with which I've ever been associated. And yet the theatre was more than half empty. So what about productions like these where the point is the intrinsic worth of the artwork itself and doing justice to it and nothing to do with populism? It's not enough to say "look there's some opera over there so things must be ok". One must enquire more closely into the level and spirit of the enterprise and where it sits in relation to the imperative to preserve the performance of the greatest works at the highest level regardless of commercial considerations. There's a great reliance on the part of increasingly desperate opera companies on a diminishing pool of what are considered to be sure fire hit operas. But this is a hiding to nothing because Boheme and Carmen etc quickly become thrashed to death and audiences’ and critics’ resentment at being fobbed off with these is discernible. With smaller but more creative companies like English Touring Opera, a focus on real creativity and a careful balance of mainstream and less frequently performed repertoire seems to be reaping results. 13

Are Wagner's operas too long? The very question is offensive to a dyed in the wool Wagnerian, but audiences' attention span cannot compete with fifty years ago, especially amongst the young, so the public may prefer shorter operas to those of Wagner, or opt for filmed Wagner only if it is served up in separated chapters, like a serialised Dickens novel. Some Wagnerians object to this as a matter of principle; should the time scale of the the operas be tampered with to cater for modern attention span? Will the future of Wagnerian opera depend on making his works more digestible? “I very much doubt it, because the visceral attraction of Wagner's music will always be a magnet for audiences . It has the musical equivalent of sex appeal which is irresistible, though Wagnerian gratification may not exactly be instant. The music packs its knockout punch whether or not the spectator is au fait with the psychology of the drama." I find this statement very pleasing. I can't improve on it. Abridgement is out of the question. The audience must be dragged up. There can be no question of Wagner’s works being dumbed down. The ‘Wagner Voice’ “The great English conductor of Wagner, Reginald Goodall maintained that a good Wagner voice was a well produced voice, period. It was not contingent on being "big". Stamina, a quality essential in the singing of Wagner, is not about decibels, it is a matter of technique and practice." Ok, point one: a good Wagner voice is a well produced voice full stop because good singing is good singing. Talk of national schools is mostly nonsense. The very greatest Wagner singers sing in same way as the greatest Verdi singers. It's at inferior levels of singing that so called ‘national schools’ become apparent: the Bayreuth bark or the anaemic English tenor. I think the point about big voices needs refinement. Clearly many Wagner roles do need big voices and I'm certain someone of Goodall's calibre wouldn't contend otherwise. But even in the roles requiring the biggest voices, Wagner singing is just as much about singing softly as it is about singing, I won't say loudly, as this perhaps contains the suggestion of forcing or braying, but rather I'll say amplitude and power. This is truth which, although I've been aware of it intellectually, has not always been sufficiently reflected in my own work so that, in my alacrity to give all my voice all of the time and show that I'm a genuine contender in this repertoire, I've not always provided enough light and shade in my work. This point was picked up on by others, for example Anthony Negus. It has been salutary to have this criticism echoed by more than one person and I'm confident it will have a positive effect on my performances when I reprise Alberich in the Ring in 2016. Singing softly is harder than singing at full tilt and requires greater technique. Because of this and the extraordinary stamina required (greater than for any other branch of the operatic repertoire), flawless technique is essential. Without it, careers are severely truncated. Wagner's is the music which can least tolerate and survive the decline of vocal pedagogy and the attendant impatience which sees young singers pushed out on stage ill equipped technically, because they conform to the debased requirements of a cult of youthful beauty. So yes, the key to Wagner is great technique and an understanding that the caricature of its 14

being all about loudness is wrong. But that's the point: how to get back to the technical standards and understanding of this repertoire which obtained in earlier times. The future of Wagner “His works have endured and will endure in recordings and concerts. But mounting productions of Wagner is more expensive than other operas because of the extra orchestral players needed, the epic nature of the settings and the rehearsal time required for long operas. Only the largest opera companies can afford to do them. Unless they are done, as is increasingly the case, in versions that reduce either the forces or the length of the original. Such enterprise has been championed in the UK by the Birmingham Opera Company (directed by Graham Vick and in brilliant orchestral reductions by Jonathan Dove) and in Longborough by Anthony Negus." The point here seems to be that society needs to place sufficient value on these works of art and be willing to pay to experience them. It needs to be brought back to an understanding of their absolute and intrinsic value and see it as self evident so that it shouldn't be demanded that it pay for itself. Of course the only solution is the only universal panacea which is true education. Ingenuity can achieve extraordinary things but there are in my view certain lines which cannot be crossed with Wagner. The dearth of properly trained Wagner singers (compared to the pool available in the Golden Age) cannot be addressed with amplification. Ever. Wagner cannot suffer cuts (certainly the Ring, Meistersinger, Tristan and Parsifal cannot). Wagner is not as amenable to scaling down as other opera. The skeleton orchestras used so effectively by first rate touring companies are a bridge too far with Wagner. But amazing things have already been achieved with ingenuity and determination by smaller companies such as Longborough. These are tough times but much can be achieved with creativity and passionate advocacy.

ANDREA BUCHANAN: WAGNER SOCIETY LONDON. Andrea Buchanan holds high office in the world of Wagner supporters. She is the Secretary of the The Wagner Society, London and a Member of the Board of the International Association of Wagner Societies (Richard-Wagner-Verband International). So I was delighted to be able speak with her while I was in the UK. Attentive readers will be detecting a pattern running through her comments and those of others. When I asked her what she felt were the main threats to the future of Wagnerian opera, she identified the following: 1. A lack of properly trained singers with the technique to sing and to continue to sing this repertoire successfully and in the manner in which it should be sung. This goes to the heart of my fears about singing pedagogy as it applies to Wagnerian singing specifically. These works simply will not tolerate imperfect technique or singers who are too green or overparted. The obviousness of this has been lost sight of in many quarters. 2. Funding. On this aspect of the situation, Andrea offered the following observations: "Wagner operas are very expensive to produce and while they often fill the auditorium, the ticket revenue does not cover costs. Funding for this art form, seen as eclectic and the 15

domain of the privileged few, is always in peril and the more so in these austerity ridden times". Certainly, opera is expensive and requires subsidy. But the same applies to so-called popular operas, particularly when staged as colossal outdoor spectaculars. Lazy thinking assumes that Wagner lies at the "difficult" end of the spectrum because a lot of punters have imbibed false notions about Wagner's being "long", "heavy", "boring" etc. No composer suffers more from ill informed, stupid, clichéd preconceptions. However, Wagner lovers countervailingly are the most fanatical and willing to travel for their injection of their musical drug of choice of any opera pilgrims. If you put on the Ring it will sell out. Full stop. If there's still a short fall, that's another matter. But it won't be a worse drain than other operas which are repeated ad nauseum. Then there's Australian anti-intellectualism which with its populist politician high priests stands with folded arms in the path of High Art and sneers. The gulf between the way in which in Germany the importance of higher things is taken as self evident and expressed in the form of monuments on every other corner to great thinkers and artists and so forth, and the way in which sport and low culture are celebrated ceaselessly in a sort of moronic inferno in Australia, is borne in on one every minute of every day one spends in Germany. Germany has its fair share of malcontents, don't get me wrong. I learnt this to my cost on a German train when my carriage was taken over by a crowd of simian drunks determined to everyone feel as uncomfortable as possible. But at least for now they are powerless to overwhelm Germany's true culture. 3. The third threat, or collection of threats, Andrea mentioned in passing, was that of misapprehensions about and misinterpretation of Wagner and his works. You'll note I've said "in passing" because for a Wagnerian a lot of these things are rather tired subjects. Firstly there's all that stuff about how people who've never bothered to acquaint themselves with it directly imagine Wagner sounds, all those caricatured notions of what the experience of attending a Wagner opera will be like. Then there's the posthumous Hitler connection. Wagner is rightly criticised for his anti-Semitic rants but his critics on this score hardly ever turn their attention to the many other anti-Semites amongst the great artists and if they do, still reserve by far their greatest vehemence for Wagner. Mitigating evidence in the world of action (as distinct from rhetoric) such as the fact that his most "sacred" work, Parsifal, had a Jewish conductor, Hermann Levi, are passed over. So caricature creeps into intellectual engagement with the works just as it dominates popular misconceptions as to how it sounds. Then there are all the obtuse, attention seeking efforts of directors putting their "stamp" on Wagner's works instead of serving them and from a position of deficient culture. I won't go on. 4. Another threat identified by Andrea Buchanan was that Wagnerian opera was seen as the domain of the elderly. In a sense that's undeniably true. Wagner audiences do tend to have a grey tinge. But whose fault is that? I'd point the finger at the conga line of politicians and education policy makers who've seen a broad grounding in high culture as dispensable over the last several decades, letting the treasures of real music, serious art and literature etc fall by the wayside as being insufficiently "relevant" (the worst accusation one can make of anything nowadays with the possible exception of being ‘inappropriate’) or, truth be told, too much bother. Happily though I can report that there are several young persons of my acquaintance who do have that glint their eye and will follow up one's suggestion re: books, paintings and music. All power to them. 16

I then moved onto a separate set of questions. I wanted to know if Andrea thought Wagnerian opera in Australia faced specific hurdles as a result of Australia's geographical remoteness from the wellsprings of European High Art and, if it did, what they were. She did indeed think there were Australia specific hurdles, to wit: The cost of getting the best singers to Australia and the willingness of such singers to travel so far when schedules are tight. I've certainly experienced more than once situations involving an international star giving back an engagement quite late in the piece. One suspects this is sometimes simply the case of the singer's seeing a gig in Australia as not being worth his/her while. Certainly one doesn't have to be in Germany or the UK for that matter long to realise that nothing in Australia, regardless of how magnificent, counts for anything whatsoever in the minds of opera folk in these countries. She also wondered if possibly the scene in Australia was characterised by somewhat insular and conservative audiences, which, if such were the case, would not be conducive to a sophisticated approach to Wagner and its survival in the repertoire of Australian opera companies. She admitted that this observation was based on what she had gathered from many of her Australian Wagner Society colleagues. One certainly cannot seriously argue that opera audiences in Australia are sophisticated. However I have witnessed plenty of unreasoning conservatism overseas too, for instance directors being vociferously booed for any deviation from a concrete thinker's notion of the literal. Moreover, I've heard the most trenchant, dug in views expressed (often employing the Royal Plural) in fora auspiced by Wagner Societies. To put it another way, in the midst of the ranks of Wagner's putative supporters are those advocating a path that can lead only to moth eaten atrophy. The next threat she adduced was "Funding, funding, funding"! Amen to that. Hardly Australia specific I would have thought though.. She also speculated as to the appetite for such operas in Australia, admitting up front she was on shaky ground here, not having had much direct experience of the Australian situation. Well the Ring was a sell out and will be again. Wagner pilgrims will always come to any of his operas. Quizzed directly however the powers that be will insist on Wagner's "difficult" status so that whether they're right or not becomes irrelevant because matters will turn out as if they were.

ANTHONY NEGUS: MUSICAL DIRECTOR, LONGBOROUGH WAGNER FESTIVAL. Anthony Negus is one of the sincerest artists I've ever met. In a business where colossal egos stalk the terrain, bashing into each other, and using sublime masterpieces as vehicles for self promotion, Anthony is totally at the service of masterpieces he prepares and conducts. I find his never ending search for new shades of meaning and nuance deeply inspiring. The results speak for themselves. He is the musical director of Longborough Wagner Festival which in relative terms is run on a shoestring and yet not only did they stage a full Ring Cycle - on a private estate - it was rapturously received; and if that weren't enough, they went on to do Tristan, the review of which was headed "Better than Bayreuth" 17

and singled out Anthony's conducting as the single finest element in the entire affair. I must relate one amusing (to me) episode which perhaps shines a light on his quietly reflective, ever pondering nature. After a long work session we had dinner together. I'm a confirmed carnivore but Anthony is vegetarian so we went to a no-meat Indian restaurant. My unrefined palate experienced it as bland rather than subtle but I've no doubt the fault was with me. Anyway in the course of conversation I was vouchsafed an explanation of his vegetarianism: Apparently sometime in the 70s he ate a duck. That night he dreamt about a duck and woke the next morning realising how ‘very wrong’ he'd been to eat the duck. And that was it. No more duck. Now generally, I find vegetarianism tiresome, but in this instance I found myself smiling with respect. I know it sounds silly but I think part of what I liked about it was that in was in no way just a case of just aligning oneself with some modish, prefabricated position but rather a philosophical stance arrived at thoughtfully for a specific reason. And this is reflected in the way he works on music (hence the point of the story). Everything is specific and thought out and yet still intuitive. No one is less likely to take a ‘that'll do’ approach. Here’s how we worked together. The sense of being on trial was soon dispelled as we settled into the work. It quickly became a collaborative search (with me as junior partner) for better and better ways of doing things. This is the best atmosphere to work in, particularly where the student is an experienced professional. The same applied when working with Joshua Hecht. He would say pointedly that although he was teaching me, we were colleagues. This was flattering certainly but its purpose was not flattery. Rather it was an acknowledgment of an important truth about our work and key to it's productiveness. With regard to Anthony, at an early stage of our work he adduced what he saw as a cultural difference between Australians and the British, to wit, an open spirited Aussie candour as contrasted with a British reserve, as an explanation for a shortcoming in my first go at the piece we working on, namely that there was insufficient light and shade and word colouring. I fear the soon to be dispelled sense of being on trial was also at work. In other words, I was trying to show my voice to a new pair of ears. His other way of putting it was to say I gave good value for money i.e. by giving lots of voice all the time - a rather deft way of turning a criticism into a compliment! When roaring away as Alberich, sharing a national temperament one of the characteristics of which is a tendency to give one's all most of the time, is not much of a handicap. When I essayed an excerpt from Wolfram however (which I selected specifically because I found it difficult), luxuriating in raw power was not an option. I'd thought it had gone quite well on the first run through (especially as I was quite tired by the time I got round to it). However we went back to the beginning, searching for something more. Apparently the idea of a natural Alberich attempting Wolfram was intriguing. An extremely cryptic comment was made about the Queen sitting down for an interview with Hitler...? The suggestion was that I should attempt to charm the imagined audience. I think I made some progress on this front but I'm not sure if it was enough. When back in 2007 I played Wolfram as a sort of nerdy Franz Schubert, strait jacketed by the conventions of the Wartburg. Put crudely, the chap with the beautiful soul who's never going to get the girl. His anal retentive stiffness and awkwardness meant that his attempts at charm were received as worthy and correct but not truly charming at the gut, intuitive level. But the request was that I charm. I'm more of an angular Nosferatu type nowadays so this was quite a challenge. However successful or otherwise I was, it raises this point: how far if at all should one wander from one's natural 18

Fach in the pursuit of a challenge? Or should one deviate not at all? My suspicion is that in Germany the advice would be not to deviate at all. Ever. We don't have a Fach system in Australia. That's the long and the short of it. This has upsides and downsides. For me personally it has meant I've had the privilege of performing roles which would never have come my way had I been born a German. But it probably also the reason, along with over work, for my vocal crisis in 2007. There'll always be matters of fine judgement. For instance I would offer Wotan in an audition in the UK but not in Germany. I think the greater flexibility in Australia would be a good thing if reined in a bit. As well as the dangers to young fresh voices, I've seen seasoned and revered senior artists known for their ability to cross Fach boundaries come a cropper when this has been taken too far.

Outside the Albert Hall, London.

19

RICHARD WIEGOLD: WAGNERIAN BASS While in London I was lucky enough to speak with Richard Wiegold, an internationally renowned Wagnerian bass famous for his performances in roles such as Gurnemanz in Parsifal and the Landgraf in Tannhäuser. His voice is of Stygian darkness yet he is the nicest and gentlest man you'll ever meet. When, with my head full of anxieties about cultural decline, I asked him what he thought were the main threats to the future of Wagnerian opera, his first response was very straightforward: amplification. He thought that we as singers must resist all moves in this direction. I couldn't have agreed more. I've been in situations in operettas where, because the lead role has been cast with a non-opera singer novelty performer, who cannot project and so needs amplification, we've ALL been amplified. It's my experience that real singers don't like this. The mic/sound person is much more frequently encountered than of yore. Then there are outdoor performances of real operas where unamplified sound is out of the question. This is fine when it's a free event because there's an understanding that though the sound is artificial, the event's free so a bit of compromise is okay. Then, however, we move onto ticketed outdoor operas where the price of tickets is the same as for proper indoor performances. These carry with them the implication that such performances with artificial sound are the real thing. This is in my view where danger starts. This is to approach opera as another species of popular entertainment and I think it's telling that performances of this sort tend to have a strong element of the circus about them fireworks, spectacle for its own sake without deeper meaning. Why bother learning how to project when someone can twiddle a knob and make your voice sound huge. I've already seen light lyric voices cast in dramatic voice roles in such spectaculars because the singer is popular and it is easier than finding someone intended by nature for the part. And if through amplification the cast can be evened out so that big and small, mature and developing voices are all pretty much the same (which could have the tendency to destroy people's incentive to learn their craft properly), why stop there? Orchestras are annoyingly expensive. Indeed, an impresario in America caused controversy a couple of years ago by proposing to use an artificial i.e. recorded orchestra for a full Ring Cycle! American orchestral musicians promptly threatened to black ball any singer who took part. A quarter of a century ago I 20

remember an opera power broker who shall remain nameless saying in a lecture I attended that some miking was coming to be seen as necessary. I could've chipped in and pointed out that it was only becoming "necessary" because people like him were elevating youthful beauty way above things like technical competence and vocal maturity in the hierarchy of values when casting. This also traduced the singers who got the false impression they were high status artists with nothing more to learn and a job for life only to find after a few years when inevitably they began to falter that they were eminently dispensable. So yes, Richard was right to adduce miking as a major threat. I moved on and raised my pet themes: the fact that, unlike when the works themselves were written, anyone staging these masterpieces cannot assume on the part of the audience an acquaintance with the canon of literature or the broad sweep of history so that things need to be doled out on a plate and kept on the level of childish simplicity. Richard responded obliquely by talking of what he strongly felt should be ‘the narrative nature of productions’. In his opinion, many directors had lost sight of the fact that opera in the main should be about telling stories. This was not the usual conservatism when it comes to opera which one frequently encounters whereby a simple dichotomy is identified: "modern" productions/"traditional" productions, the former BAD and the latter GOOD. obviously it is as absurd to talk of "modern" productions en masse as if they were all subsumed in some giant homogenous aesthetic as it is to suggest that every "traditional" production represents "what the composer intended". Richard is not guilty of such simplistic thinking and his statements are not expressions of reflexive conservatism. I verbalised the same idea by saying that my assessment of a production is largely based on whether it to be in the service of the work or of the director's ego. This is a broad statement but I think it covers a good deal of what we are considering here. An example adduced by Richard was the director of a Don Giovanni he'd worked on, who on day one of rehearsals announced that he "wanted to remove all supernatural and moral elements" from the show. Another was a director who, with disarming frankness said "I'm not interested in the piece"! All of this is in Richard's mind an aspect or function of what he refers to as the ‘Age of the director’. That we are in an age of ‘regi-theater’ (‘regi’ being an abbreviation of ‘regisseur’, meaning director in the theatrical sense and ‘theater’ being German for theatre) is an acknowledged fact and has been a locus of debate for many years now. The work of Wieland (especially) and Wolfgang Wagner from 1951 (the year of the rebirth of Bayreuth) onwards is in large measure responsible for this phenomenon, the effect of which is to elevate the director to a status equal to or even greater than that of the conductor. This carries with the danger of things tipping over into a situation where certain directors will see these masterpieces as being more in the nature of the means for them to express their ideas and putative genius rather than as supreme monuments of High Culture to which they, the directors, have a duty and responsibility. In other words, some directors think it's all about them. They don't see themselves as being in the service of the work. In general, conductors are more reverent with regards to the works. This may have to do, not just with their greater instinctive appreciation of purely musical greatness, but, hand in glove with this, their strong sense of the dramatic specifics of the music when it comes to narrative works, such as opera. This is critical with Wagner especially. It is truly said of Wagner's works that as much or more of the drama takes place in the orchestra pit as takes place on stage. With some composers, a tune's a tune so much so that they'd happily recycle music which seemed roughly appropriate to the dramatic situation. Not so with Wagner. By the time of his later 21

masterpieces, his approach had moved well beyond simply illustrating or commenting what was happening on stage to a point where a parallel drama, picking up at the point where the expressive capacity of words is exhausted, is being played out in the orchestra, in an embrace with the world-of-appearances drama enacted by the singers but open ended and inexhaustible, subsisting in a metaphysical realm outside time and space. Think of Tristan. So this is the least arbitrary music in the world and as such extremely vulnerable to the violence of high handed narcissist directors. I asked Richard if he taught, because I wanted to know how he approached teaching voices of Wagnerian potential which would only come into their own in middle age. He answered that he taught a little, but not much. As a Wagnerian however he could tell me that one of the most valuable things HIS teacher had taught HIM was when to say no. I wondered if he were an optimist and a pessimist about the future of the art form. He said he tried not to think about it because all he feels he can control is how well he sings. When we moved on to a free ranging discussion of some latter day casting anomalies, he volunteered that some casting choices in the UK were "excruciating", showing (if any further demonstration were needed) that these things are not endemic to the antipodes.

CATHERINE CARBY: WAGNERIAN MEZZO SOPRANO While in London I also managed to speak with Catherine Carby, an ex-pat Aussie based in London who recently made Wagnerian debut as Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde. Her achievement with this role was recognised in the many wonderful reviews she received; and this notwithstanding the fact that she has never much liked Wagner, having had a very long and distinguished career before deciding at last to dip her toe into Wagnerian waters. As a London based Australian with a long career in both countries who has now won acclaim in the Wagner field, she seemed to me to be unusually well placed to comment on what the differences between Wagner in Europe and Wagner Australia might consist in, and what the implications of these contrasts might be. Immediately she referred me to an article (reading which, I almost felt the journalist and interviewees had been peering over my shoulder when I'd been making my own jottings on the subject. 1 Could've written this myself! It's of course always rather satisfying and congenial to read something which expresses well what one already thinks. Or it would be if the substance weren't so bleak. In this article, the well known Mezzo Dolora Zajick comments "I've been ruining my voice for twenty years" . It reminded me of myself. I also came across another article which discussed Zajick and her own approach to vocal pedagogy. 2 It quotes Zajick as saying “You have to let a voice be the size that it is.” This put me in mind of all those years in my twenties of trying to sing the things people thought I ‘ought’ to be singing, based purely on my tender years rather than any assessment of my instrument. The article also contains a link to a useful interview with Zajick on YouTube. 1

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/arts/music/the-end-of-the-great-big-americanvoice.html?_r=0 2

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/praise-healthy-voices/ 22

Below is another quote from article reached from above link. “Dolora Zajick, age 63, sets the gold standard for what we think of as a healthy voice.” More than a few people remarked to me that her performances of Azucena in Il Trovatore this week defy the passage of time in vocal terms and are deeper than ever in dramatic terms. I concur. Zajick is fascinating on the subject of how to sing. She is very wise on the mysteries of vocal health and longevity which, to her, are not mysterious at all. Healthy singing can be—should be— done by singers in all vocal categories. Zajick founded and runs the Institute for Young Dramatic Voices in Nevada, which specializes in the coaching a development of singers whose voices are described as large or unusual. Zajick has observed that these voices “can be found across the full vocal range. Sopranos, mezzos, contraltos, tenors, basso profundos, and true basses can all fall under this definition. A true dramatic coloratura would also qualify. By their very nature, these voices tend to be oriented toward Verdi and Wagner, but some of these singers, such as basses and contraltos, also need specialized training in Monteverdi and the Russian repertoire.” I still think that the sound of a healthy voice (even in a singer who might have a cold or flu) is a miraculous experience. This interview is typical of how well Zajick understands the technique that makes for a healthy voice. I commend it to all singers as well as opera lovers interested in the mysteries of singing.

With Catherine Carby: at The Wallace Collection.

23

BERLIN

DEBORAH POLASKI: OPERA SINGER, KAMMERSANGER & WAGNER SPECIALIST Deborah Polaski is quite simply the finest Brünnhilde of her generation. Because she reached the top when she was very young for her voice type, she worked alongside representatives of the Golden Era who were still performing when she started out (an example would be George London) and yet, thanks to her faultless technique, is still performing today, her powers undiminished, to rave reviews at an age when most others would've already retired or be scaling back and choosing less demanding roles. I first heard her in 1993 when I attended the Bayreuth Festival. She was performing Kundry. I can honestly say it was, and remains, the loudest voice I've ever heard live. I once played a DVD recording of her performance of the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung to some Afghan refugee neighbours. The reaction was extraordinary, 24

particularly from the old lady who despite her lack of English made it very clear via her translator relative that she regarded what she'd just seen and heard as nothing less than a miracle. Polaski herself is mid- western American but is completely assimilated into the German Wagnerian scene. I should point out that it is understood that a Wagnerian dramatic soprano does not just sing Wagner. A thing called the Fach system dominates opera in Germany. It can be quite straight-jacketing because deviating from one's specific Fach, which is a sort of vocal subdivision, can sometimes be frowned upon or seen as a sign of existential confusion. Anyway, a Wagnerian dramatic soprano like Deborah will also for instance sing roles like Elektra in Richard Strauss's opera of the same name. This is a throat tearing role and she has done hundreds of performances of this and other roles in that league without suffering vocal damage. The voice passes through stages of maturity like the seven ages of man and that's natural and not a bad thing. It's factored in by composers. But vocal damage is a different thing and always the result of technical shortcomings and poor judgement unless it's caused by illness. The fact that this doesn't apply to Deborah speaks volumes regarding the solidity of her technique and the depth of her understanding. In the first lesson I elected to work on Klingsor’s Die Zeit ist da from Parsifal. We also managed to squeeze in a few minutes on Scarpia’s Tre sbirri from Tosca, applying some of the principles elucidated in the course of our work on the first place and vowing to continue to work on the Puccini the following day. Such was my excitement by the end of the hour and a half lesson that I forgot my magic recording pen and the special pad which goes with it! This was the occasion of considerable fretting. I’d approached the lesson with trepidation because I’d been wrestling with an especially persistent throat infection that had played havoc with my voice over the previous few weeks. Polaski was aware of the situation and was very careful. In the end she gently and masterfully guided me through the process in such a way that, having started rather gingerly (my confidence had taken a hammering as a result of the illness), by the end I was feeling strong and somewhat elated. I cannot possibly provide every last detail of how we achieved all the advances made in this session, not just because it would take too long, but because there’s a certain intuitive quality about much of it which produces a sort of singers’ parallel language, pellucid to us but, when written down, can look a lot like gobbledeygook to the general reader. Nevertheless, there’s a certain amount I CAN say. I (like many singers) have to resist certain instincts, especially when recovering from illness. Oversinging is never the solution. Blasting is something of a stress response which generally makes things worse with something of the quality of a boulder rolling downhill with increasing speed. The thing is to know when to cancel and be brave enough to do so. The other situation in which the temptation to oversing must be resisted is when one finds oneself in a new environment, a new theatre (figuratively speaking) of operations, where it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to give all of one’s voice all of the time in an attempt to bowl over people who've never heard one before and likely never will again unless one can impress them sufficiently to offering one a gig there and then in the few precious moments of, say, an audition. This is gauche, provincial and counterproductive and can result in one’s efforts being regarded as generally impressive but overbearing and off-putting. The Klingsor excerpt starts with a short recitative-like passage. After my first run through, Polaski immediately started getting me to take the foot off the throttle (so to speak). Apart from anything else, the really big and scary moments don’t seem nearly so big and scary if one has been at full tilt the whole time. Contrast is the essence of all such 25

expressive effects. She counselled against straight tone. Straight tone is a deviation from correct classical singing technique. It is either a sign of poor technique or a consciously ugly effect (or sometimes a function of fatigue). There is arguably a case for a judiciously sprinkled use of straight tone in a nasty Bösewicht character like Klingsor. But it’s always a debatable choice. Not all traditions are good. I wouldn’t like to say for certain why a certain amount of straight tone crept into my first attempt at the excerpt but I’m guessing there was probably an ignoble combination of fatigue and an unconscious, lazy copying of certain recordings combined with a dash of the above mentioned, to-be-resisted instinct to give all one’s voice all of the time. So the first thing we did was extirpate the straight tone and start concentrating on the meaning of the text. Every word and indeed parts of words were analysed. Why for instance had Wagner repeated the same words to the same notes, one iteration hot on the heels of another? And what were the interpretive implications and possibilities? Why had Wagner broken up a phrase so that the singer has to work hard to reachieve cohesion? Answer: to crank up the dramatic tension. In order to achieve a legato which carried the meaning forward, she had me thinking of (often rather spiky) terminal consonant clusters as actually belonging to the next word/syllable. This makes for much more beauty of sound and is much more sophisticated than a gruff resorting to vocal “effects” (and easy option which wears out its welcome quickly), because it provides much greater scope for nuance. And it makes it easier in the long run. These colossal operas and roles require prodigies of stamina; so it follows that every opportunity to make things easier for the vocal mechanism must be taken. Getting the vowel pure but forward and with enough space behind it is vital. Releasing surplus breath at the end of a phrase, breathing in on the vowel one is about to sing just before onset and no earlier, not “digging” or scooping up to high “money”notes in a misguided attempt to seem big and impressive - all these things are important for stamina and represent conscious choices for the mature and technically accomplished singer. I could go on but it seems to me that what matters is that I’VE understood and absorbed it all rather than than I tried to nail down every last fugitive concept in words for this report. Suffice to say, once we moved onto the Scarpia, I was a different singer from the one who’d entered the studio the best part of an hour and a half earlier. We proceeded immediately to expressive matters (those in practice these are inseparable from technical questions). I will certainly take away one almost philosophical point which we established: I wondered out loud if with the process of microscopic analysis and focus on tiny nuances there came a danger of losing a sense of the overall musical sense of the pieces we were working on, of not seeing the woods for the trees. I had in mind two things: firstly my preference for the Lieder singing of Hans Hotter (which strikes me as a model of perfection and which is full of nuance and subtlety but never seems fussy or too clever by half) over that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, which, though magnificent in its own way, lacks in its über intellectualism (for me at least) something of the direct appeal to the human heart which I find in Hotter’s. Secondly, there is the phenomenon I’ve observed over the years whereby young performing artists, be they opera singers or straight actors, will, with their heads full of dreams of being the next Olivier or Callas, over-egg the pudding, larding in all sorts of ill-conceived nuances and effects so that the lines are pushed out of shape like a ruined garment. What comes with maturity is the understanding that is necessary to let the words and/or music do their work without intruding oneself. An artistic demarcation dispute! I’ve heard future Sarastros for example deliver the spoken dialogue line “You will see how I will deal 26

with her” as “YOU will see how I WILL deal with her..” in an effort to put their “stamp” on the role. In a television interview, I heard Gregory Doran describe amusingly the way young Shakespearean actors will come out with things like “TO be …. OR not …to BE”. His point was that much of the job depends on being able to speak Shakespeare correctly. That is a technical, universally applicable skill which can and must be learnt and not some vague question of individual interpretation. Similarly, good singing technique is one thing. It is or ought to be the foundation of every singer’s craft. Forget talk of national schools of singing and so forth. These divisions relate to superficial matters and can be pernicious. The greatest singers, Italians, Germans, French and anglophones all sing/sang in the same way. This by the way was also mentioned in my first lesson. To get back to my qualm about the danger of not letting Wagner (or Strauss or Puccini or Verdi) do his job and over finessing and micro-analysing the text/music out of existence, Polaski resolved my intellectual dissonance (because after all the work we were doing was both fascinating and obviously right and nourishing) by saying that one had to get to grips with the microscopic detail before one could make the intellectual decision to adopt a broader approach. This at one stroke resolved the conundrum. That way the final approach has integrity. One has to earn the right, so to speak, to be simple by passing through a forest of complexity and emerging into the light at the far side. No cheating. No laziness. An analogy would be with the physical, technical aspects of singing. Put simply, one has to work extremely hard to make it seem easy! My second lesson (once again an hour and a half, which is a better length of time for detailed work than an hour and also meant we could cover the total tuition time budgeted for in fewer sessions thus freeing up a few more days for additional activities) focussed on the role of Alberich. When asked what I wanted to work on in this session I explained that logically, it seemed most sensible to start from scratch with Alberich’s Curse because it’s my “party piece”. I always use it in auditions and recitals but for that reason has gone a bit stale. It is vital I rediscover a sense of excitement and freshness with what has become my signature role. Oddly, it can be good to ventilate new pieces new pieces even at the risk of memory lapses or even if one is conscious of having by no means plumbed their depths because the thrill attaching to new repertoire can carry one forward as on the crest of a wave. So the trick with a piece which one has flogged to death but depends on professionally is to find a way to make it feel like new repertoire and hopefully thus exorcise that pervading sense of staleness. Well we certainly managed that. It was a case of back to square one! Interestingly, as the greatest Brünnhilde of her generation, Deborah had never had much need to concern herself with Das Rheingold (in which the Curse occurs) except in a general way because the story is set before Brünnhilde’s birth (or indeed conception! So there was an enjoyable sense of novelty for her too. Immediately we honed in on the words both in terms of meaning and pronunciation. She explained to me which were the key words and why and how best to emphasise them. She showed me how to milk every sentence of all its meaning. There’s a subtle art to creating an emotional connection between words separated by several other words and several beats/bars of music. Inextricably linked with this is the fine tuning of vowels. In most of the cases where correction was required, my e/i vowels were 27

too open or contaminated with diphthongs; but there were also instances of o/u vowels needing more depth and space behind them. She had me bare my upper teeth (not in a snarl) to fix a problem of constriction I felt when making vowels more closed (my habit of making vowels too open was the result of efforts to avoid a constricted, stifled sound, or, to put it another way, the shutting down of resonance on certain notes and vowels). The tendency to scoop was another bugbear I had constantly to battle with. This habit of trying to ‘big up’ the sound by digging into the voice in an effort to seem macho instead of trusting to pure, fine, classical singing, is a hard one to kick. But one really must be extremely parsimonious with the use of ‘effects’. To a sophisticated audience, over-reliance on them ought to be anathema. Really the burden of the work was to find a way to sing what is often an extended exercise in snarling and spitting as classically as possible. Then, one carefully, consciously and gently applies specific expressive gear changes based on a careful analysis of the text and music. One does not just flail about in a generalised fashion hoping it might come off alright if one just goes with one’s gut. As a working singer, one is often required to think on one’s feet, jumping in for a concert of popular arias or dealing with a situation in which a show has been turned upside down as a result of illness or whatever, and at such times experience counts and one can legitimately make use of one’s default shtick, so to speak. We in the business knowingly refer to what we do in these show-must-go-on situations as ‘busking’.. But that’s nothing to do with serious work towards some sort of ideal rendering of these sublime masterpieces. A cynical “that’ll do” attitude must be repudiated or opera performance forfeits its claims to a higher purpose which separate it from popular entertainment. One must however make a distinction between ‘shtick’ or vulgar effects and legitimate ‘tricks’ for solving technical problems which crop up frequently. For instance, rolling Rs much more than one would naturally in normal German speech is a nifty way of compassing certain intervals much more easily and producing a ringing terminal note. I was delighted to have passed onto me a very effective way of avoiding having the sound shut down as a result of an intrusive consonant, G to be specific, in the upper range. One simply substitutes a K for the G. It sounds exactly the same and one gets to the vowel much more quickly. Polaski apparently learnt that one from George London (an example of how in her one has a direct link to the Golden Era). Another trick emphasised in this lesson had to do with phrasing and therefore primarily expressive in its aims rather than just a way of making singing more physically doable. It involved mentally erasing the bar lines at certain points so that the short pick up notes immediately before the bar lines felt like the start of the phrases (which they are) rather than the “big” notes on the first beats of bars which we are programmed to see as the important notes because they’re on the strongest beats. This worrying about the small notes and letting the big notes look after themselves is one of those things separating the amateur from the professional and gives the phrases far more strength and integrity. Making the phrases work in a way that would have pleased the composer is a painstaking task involving an infinity of fine adjustments if one, for example, would maximise the effect of a climax. Wagner really was the greatest at climaxes so that when listening to his works one can readily imagine how a lesser composer would have done it. As performers, our job involves such things as resisting giving too much too soon and thus vitiating an effect later on. It’s elementary but because of performers’ natural enthusiasm needs to be constantly emphasised that the big notes won't sound nearly so 28

impressive if everything before them is loud. This was something we worked on both with the Alberich and with Scarpia which latter once again provided a contrasting codicil to the lesson. For the third lesson I announced I wanted to work on Beckmesser, specifically his prize song in Act 3. I covered this role in 2003 but had not looked at it since so that, particularly as we were taking a starting-from-scratch approach in these lessons anyway, it was effectively new repertoire. I’m keen to have this piece in my audition repertoire for various reasons and I’ve often found newly learnt pieces can work well because one is borne forward on a wave of enthusiasm, something which is at the other end of the spectrum from the previously discussed whiff of staleness emanating from some thrashed to death party pieces. All of the generalisable technical questions which were addressed in the first two lessons naturally came up in the third lesson. That sense of constant forward movement or forward trajectory in the sound, hard to explain to non-singers but palpable and conceptually clear to us, was especially relevant in the third lesson particularly in the last twenty minutes or so when we moved onto Iago (Otello) and needed to achieve maximum projection with minimum effort (a constant in Wagner too it need hardly be said). Deborah also gave me another ‘trick’: I was still not fully comfortable with how it felt compassing an upwards reaching interval once I’d consciously expunged all scooping. I was fearful of tension and a high larynx. To cure this, Deborah came up with an image just for me, which, though it immediately made intuitive sense to me, will seem completely esoteric to a non singer: I was to imagine a balloon in front of my face and when I went for the upper note I was to pull a bit of the underside of the balloon downwards. There are all sorts of reasons who this image works to do with elasticity and roundness.. Getting back to Beckmesser though, the prize song is an extremely complicated proposition. Deborah and Graham were in stitches at times as we waded through the crazy text. Beckmesser is extremely flustered and nervous but he still doesn't lose his big fish in a little pond arrogance. An anal retentive, arrogant bore, a German Pecksniff, he doesn't run away but brazens it out (we can at least admire his pluck to that extent), some part of him deep down simply refusing to believe that he, Beckmesser, could possibly be anything other than the most authoritative and admired of Meisters or that his superior artistry could possibly fail to be triumphant, despite his acute awareness of the fact that he has failed to make any sense of the song or even memorise it in a mechanical way (and incidentally, because what he ends up singing IS nonsense, it’s brought home to the performer just how hard it is to memorise gobbledegook). So, the singer performing Beckmesser as has to convey all his general character traits as well his acute mental and emotional state resulting from his immediate plight of having to perform a piece he doesn’t know and cannot sing (a common singers’ nightmare). So there’s hubris in general (so hardwired that it is incapable of ever being fully or permanently brought low regardless of how humiliating circumstances or events might be), fear which he is fighting a losing battle to disguise, and finally spiteful fury. So there are all these feelings and impulses and instincts pulling against each other within him like the different, contrariwise currents at different depths in an ocean. And that’s the singers job: to register the lot, or try to. Then there’s all the vocal technical stuff previously mentioned which always crops up. THEN there’s the subtle point that even though he ends up singing words which are ludicrously nonsensical, he can be assumed to be trying to sing them as if they DID mean something in a spectacularly desperate attempt at bluffing. And STILL there’s more: I pointed out that, at certain points, he makes Freudian slips (in the popularly accepted sense of that expression) when he, doubtless unconsciously, sings words which aren't QUITE 29

nonsense in that they can be read as satirising him and his predicament. So there’s a hell of a lot to work through. I’d not looked at the last page yet so when we got to it we put the piece aside until the following week’s lessons and turned again to Iago’s Credo from Otello. I can't tell you how much easier than usual it felt by the end of the session! This was all a result of technical adjustments made by Polaski. It’s in the nature of things that one keeps coming back to the same points over and over regardless of repertoire. In the case of Iago it was the hoary old chestnut of reminding oneself that real strength lies in control and containment. Bluster and effects and constant loudness are a sure sign of insecurity (in several senses) and underlying weakness. The truly frightening monster merely has to flick his finger to kill. The fourth lesson was especially significant for me. My confidence was low that day, because I felt I was in a bit of a rut vocally. In these situations one tries to be objective and for example in this instance take into account a punishing schedule involving travel and interviews and singing without the opportunity for warming up or intervening rest following on from a period of illness. But it’s difficult. Singers are fragile. I’ve observed the once mighty fall virtually overnight (in fact this lesson was preceded by a brief informal chat of the whatever-happened-to variety). To one who has reached a certain age and has health problems which require management, any hiccup can seem a harbinger of doom. I opted to sing a favourite piece of mine: the Dutchman’s Monologue from The Flying Dutchman. The sign of a good teacher is when one feels stronger at the end of the lesson than at the beginning. In the course of the aforementioned chat, I said that what really impressed me were the singers in the dramatic repertoire who managed to have very long careers despite the colossal demands of the repertoire in which they excelled. Singers like Polaski herself as well as Hans Hotter and Anna Silja. The burden of the lesson was finding ways to take the pressure off the voice. As a way of keeping vulgar histrionics and over-singing at bay, she had me sing the phrases as if I were reading a telephone book. This by no means meant that she desired me to sing without expression. She wanted expressive contrasts throughout. What it did mean was that she wanted me to find the correct expression without thumping the voice. She was seeking more refined, sustainable paths. The substitution of K for G came up again but when I referred to it as a trick, she corrected me, not liking the word “trick” as it implied deviousness, but preferring “tool”. I was so happy to be singing with a sense of freedom, uncontaminated by hoarseness or effortfulness. Much was made of the correct both shape, exposed upper teeth and a focus on the eye teeth. Also (and this was immensely helpful), she made me exhale on the lead up to any given vocal entry and, crucially, breath in at the last moment on the vowel I was about to sing. This was something I was familiar with from days of yore when working on Italian repertoire. Unprepared Italian vowels sound ugly to the native speaker and require more effort. Effort is one’s enemy, especially as one gets older. In fact, at the beginning of the lesson she told me only to give 70%! The Dutchman monologue requires many octave leaps. This is hard to explain to non-singers but a vital aspect of executing these passages is keeping the high position when going down so that it is still there when one goes up again. We worked on this. For the last ten minutes I decided to sing something else to clear my head and selected the first couple of pages of Wotan’s Leb wohl from Die Walküre. Thrilling to be in the room with one of the greatest Brünnhildes while singing this! The first thing we did was to try to 30

make it intimate (which it is) rather than stentorian and bombastic. One must resist the urge to darken one’s voice in an attempt to be some sort of theoretical singer one thinks one ought to be. The only way is to sing with one’s own voice. I asked her to be frank with me and tell me whether she thought I was genuinely cut out for a role like Wotan. She said I was provided I didn’t shout and sang with my own voice. People have for years encouraged me to give a little less and not be so overbearing in my singing. But actually that is easier said than done. In these lessons with Polaski I believe I’ve found the path forward and the technique for doing what others have asked of me so often in so many different ways. Lesson five brought some breakthroughs. We returned to both the Dutchman’s Monologue and the Credo - and, surprisingly, devoted some time as a sort of coda to the lesson to Bartolo’s aria from Il Barbiere di Siviglia. After the lesson, Deborah sent me an email telling me I’d “worked hard and well again” that day and stressing “upper lip” and “relaxed forehead”. The “upper lip” comment refers to the exposed teeth with correct mouth shape not spread in a snarl - mentioned in connection with earlier lessons which became a sort of idee fixe in our work. This was so important in freeing up the sound. At one point on my music she has written “f (meaning forte) = free, not loud”. This freedom is vital for maintaining projection and power without putting strain on the vocal mechanism. A lot of singers crash and burn in their thirties when with middle age they can no longer muscle through the music. For a long career, taking every opportunity to minimise effort is vital. Just above the above mentioned place where Deborah has written her comment about forte meaning free, not loud, she has written “teeth” twice, in both instances next to a high E flat. Once again this has to do with keeping the sound free and minimising effort. It’s a reminder to resist the instinct to darken in a misguided attempt to seem more imposing. Although this teeth/mouth shape/freeing the sound thing had been addressed in previous lessons, we made particularly good progress in lesson five, so much so in constituted a breakthrough. One aspect of it which was reinforced was necessity of avoiding letting the mouth get too open when dropping from the upper range to the middle or lower range. This is an easy mistake to make when one is trying to keep the height in the sound and avoid “digging”. I wrote “small mouth” on my score at a relevant point. All the things mentioned in connection with previous lessons - phrasing, pick up notes at the starts of phrases rather than the “big” notes on the strong beats which follow them, expressive approaches flowing from the test, achieving variety and maintaining interest when faced with repetition etc etc - all these things came up again (as was only natural). An important discovery however which is deserving of mention had to do with my forehead. Over the years, I’ve been accused of sounding angry when I sing when that has not been my intention. At one point Deborah came over while I was singing and started stroking my forehead! She was trying to get rid of the furrows on my brow which often appear whenever any sort of intensity is required (and opera being the passionate thing it is, this is most of the time). Amazingly, the minute I let my forehead go smooth, my sound became much freer and more ringing. This was REAL progress. One of those moments when one thinks “I MUST remember this”. So, having worked through Dutchman, doing our best to avoid a sort of reflexively gruff sound and “effects’ and instead consciously sing against the blood and thunder quality of 31

the music in an effort to achieve a purer sound which is ultimately more impressive and a simpler seeming, but more painstakingly achieved, interpretation, we moved onto the Credo. Because the hour and a half lesson time had always seemed to run out to quickly, I insisted on picking up exactly where we’d left off last time rather than going back to the start. This forehead business now really came into its own. Iago is like the devil incarnate and in the Credo he is for a few moments not covering up his true self. So there’s darkness and evil aplenty and therefore any amount of inducement to furrow one’s brow! How to avoid doing so… Basically, I attempted to radiate a haughty, smirking arrogance - eyes wide, chin up - for most of the aria’s duration. Now brow furrows required! Deborah requested the inclusion of a smile in some high passages. This also helped. The difference was enormous. It was one of those remember-this-and-do-it-always moments. You see the point is that when one consistently achieves the ideal degree of freedom or something like it, one feels one can sing forever! That’s how operatic titans do it! But it takes time to learn and there are no short cuts. Somewhat surprisingly, we next looked at Bartolo’s aria from Barbiere. I’d mentioned it was my next role and that I was bored with it and with Rossini in general AND that I never relished the prospect because it was a wearing role to sing, because of its repetitiveness and relentless hammering of particular notes in the voice for page after page. She knew what I meant but was determined to try to make it interesting for me again as well as blot out the psychological associations I have with that role which are to do with fatigue and illness. Immediately (and in a very short time), she got it much freer, which made the thing seemed much less vocally wearing. She also helped greatly with reinjecting some intellectual interest into the preparation of the piece by looking at ways in which the endless repetition could be used to achieve expressive contrasts. Oh and there was another ‘tool’. Going from a G up to an E flat with the words “Ferma là!’, on the word “là!”, which is the E flat, she had me substitute an N for the L! I’d never have come up with that one! It helped though! The first thing to note about lesson six is that it was at 11.30am. All the others had been at 3pm. This had the potential to affect proceedings because how much food one has consumed prior to singing and how “woken up” the voice is, are always factors influencing performance. In the event, it had little effect. I’ve never minded singing in the morning as much as most singers tend to. I did perhaps leave my brain at home. I was thrown when in response to my ringing the bell a man’s voice answered. Assuming I’d pressed the wrong button I pressed again. Same man! Got up to her studio, and this anonymous gent was doing something in her office and a would be Lady, one of the three, from The Magic Flute was still finishing her lesson. Not daring to slip into the adjacent ante room, which had no intervening wall between it and the studio, I had nowhere to sit so hovered in the hall looking at the Wagneriana on the walls. I had deviated just enough from the established routine and omitted to start up my magic recording pen! The lesson, however, was, I am pleased to report, another cracker. I started with the ‘prayer’ section of the Dutchman Monologue, as I wasn’t convinced I’d fully assimilated what she had been trying to explain to me the day before. In the case of some A vowels, for instance, I found I could make an even brighter and therefore freer and more sustainable sound. It was like finding another gear in a car’s transmission! After spending quite a while on this revision, I suggested we work on Telramund’s aria from Lohengrin. Before leaving Australia, I’d considered this a powerhouse aria which was 32

still relatively “safe” and with which therefore I could easily impress. However, after a bout of illness combined with the rigours of being on the road, I’d started to struggle with it again so that my confidence was affected. Indeed, one of my main objectives with this lesson was the regaining of confidence. As previously, we endeavoured to find every available way to take pressure of the voice. We worked against the dangerous instinct to pile on the aggression instead of letting the music do its work. If one identifies the really important words and points them one tends to find it easier to sustain because they tend not to be on the “big” notes which are so strenuous to sing if one over eggs the pudding. The i vowel (i.e. “eeee”) is my friend. Deborah advocated branching out from this vowel as it is the easiest to sustain. Indeed, with the most open vowel, A (“aaah”), she had me “put some eee in it”. Which is actually possible. It’s all about keeping it forward and not letting it fall back. At my suggestion, we then moved onto Cortigiani! because I wanted to find ways of making it easier to sustain. I’ve been singing this since I was a beginner but now I’m middle aged and have lost a lot of weight, I cannot just blast my way through it with youthful vigour. I have to rise to its demands using technique. Once again, the i vowel proved the key. Time ran out and we agreed to pick this piece up again in another lesson. I had something specific I was determined to do in the seventh lesson. Having had a rough period in previous weeks as a result of a cough, without the opportunity for rest and recovery so that I’d got into a vocal rut, my confidence, despite our excellent work, was fragile. One of the ways this sense of fragility expressed itself was to engender in me an uncertainty as to whether I could sustain large slabs of music. Our work had been stop start. I rarely got very far before Deborah would call a halt in order to correct something. So I never knew whether I was back to being able to sing the whole thing in one go. I suggested we start with the Dutchman Monologue and that instead of correcting every mistake as it arose, she should hear me out, having made notes, and we could go back and correct everything when I was finished. She could see my point and that’s what we did. She flattered me by saying that if I were to sing it the way I had in an audition, any opera house would be mad not to give me a job. She was also impressed with how much I had retained and incorporated of what she had told me previously. We made the corrections and moved on. Apart from brief glances at Rigoletto and Wotan, the rest of the session was devoted to revisiting Scarpia and Alberich. We did the usual tidying up described in connection with previous lessons. With Scarpia, she encouraged me to think more like a baritone and less like a bass-baritone. In other words, I sang it straightforwardly, avoiding the temptation to manufacture sound, but not at the expense of characterisation. We looked for even more sneering arrogance. He comes across as far more evil if he seems in control and contained. Teeth gnashing, “evil acting” registers as weakness or melodrama which takes it away from the dramatic truthfulness that is really frightening. We tweaked several vowels to fine tune the sound and make it less effortful. My template was Tito Gobbi. I kept him in my mind’s eye. To optimise the sound on several notes, she came up with an image which will sound like utter gibberish to a non singer but made wonderful intuitive sense to me: I was to approach the note from above as if I were a skier on a steep ski slope. Judging from the gesture she use to explain this, which had a bouncy hook at the bottom, the image in questions was more that of a ski jumper. It worked. I no longer bore into the sound horizontally on “A doppia mira etc.”. That all makes perfect sense to me, however it seems to the reader. Moving on to Alberich… We hadn’t looked at him since the first lessons 33

when my concern had been that The Curse was getting a bit stale. Immediately before singing the Curse in this lesson, Polaski had wondered if I wanted to call it a day early, as I was clearly tired and we had just worked on a bit of Rigoletto which is the most strenuous role in my repertoire. No I definitely did not want to stop. I sang the Curse. Well, both Deborah and Graham seemed quite gobsmacked. I can’t remember the German expression of astonishment Deborah used but it was equivalent to our “‘struth!”. In a good way. This was nice. Apparently it was vastly improved since the last time we’d looked at it. More evidence I’d been paying attention.. We made some corrections and adjustments. Another “trick” (shh..) was to change “flu” in the word “verflucht” to (wait for it..) “fnu”. That’s not a typo. And yes it worked. We tightened up the vowels on “Wer ihn besitzt, den sehre die Sorge etc.”. Also, we emphasised some Rs by rolling them to free up the sound. Lesson eight was supposed to be our last but we’d decided we couldn’t forgo the opportunity of another just before my departure from Germany. Anyway, at the risk of boring the reader, I must report that in this last ‘official’ lesson, we worked on fine tuning Iago’s Credo, the Te Deum (Scarpia), and the Dutchman Monologue. Again. Deborah thought the Iago especially well suited to me, although she did note that whatever I happened to be singing at the time tended to seem to her to be exactly what I should be singing, in general! Quite a compliment. We worked on keeping intervals clean and vowels sufficiently closed. We also strove to improve the sense of connection between phrases separated by several beats’ or even bars’ rest. Breathing in on the correct vowel just before the onset of sound had been an idee fixe in the lessons to which in the eighth lesson we added the option of preparing an A vowel by actually breathing in on an E vowel as a way of brightening the sound as much as possible. This was helpful because I have a tendency to darken A vowels which I’m constantly having to resist. We introduced another sneaky N, this time into the Dutchman, so that “auf dem Land” became “auf dem Nand”. It felt weird but I just had to accept that both Deborah and Graham were saying it really did sound like an L when I sang the N. I also made further use of the ski slope image, to gratifying effect. With sustained high notes, especially climactic ones, we made sure that the notes in question continued to grow and live and not just lock in in a rigid, unvarying way. In the Te Deum, we sought to find a different colour for the Latin at the end from the one which had obtained for the rest of the aria, corresponding to the switch Scarpia makes at that point from his private to his public self. Funnily enough, the further I get into my description of my period of study with Polaski, the less there is to say because the way we worked was that certain key concepts became established which we returned to, refining work previously done and clarifying my understanding of the ideas in play. Between this lesson and the extra lesson there was to be a gap of a week and a half during which I had appointments in both Berlin and Munich so that there was a sense of completion of a phase of intense work. Both Polaski and Cox therefore felt moved to make summing up observations and they were as one in thinking that I had made colossal progress given the relative brevity of the time period involved. I therefore felt very satisfied that things had not only gone to plan but as well as I could possibly have hoped. Lesson nine was additional to those originally scheduled. I couldn’t miss this opportunity. Looking to the future, Deborah at one point asked if I’d be interested in working with 34

Günter von Kannen, possibly the greatest living Alberich and a friend of hers. This was a sparkling prospect but of course it wasn’t to be this trip. The point is that it’s thrilling and motivating to have access to people at that level. I would love to think there could be a future where Wagner in Australia was self sufficient so that not only would we rarely have to import (although some use of imported singers also would always be a good thing because being open to ideas and perspectives and approaches from outside is a good thing and builds bridges). I think in the real world, it’s hard to see a time ever coming when the singer’s pilgrimage to Europe, and for would be Wagner singers to Germany in particular, as an essential part of the process of refining one’s craft could ever be dispensed with. And why would one want to dispense with it? It’s so gloriously enriching! In Berlin alone I became drunk on art at the many galleries and as I walked along in the crisp Berlin air of an evening on my constitutional, the Wagner I was listening to over my earphones genuinely sounded better for being listened to in Germany! So philanthropy will always have job to do in sending worthy candidates to the other side of the world if our goal is the very highest standards here when those talented sons and daughters of Australia come home again. Of course many may choose not to come home. Or only come home occasionally. But the better things become in Australia, the more incentive to make more or even all of one’s career here. And maybe, just maybe, one day the rest of the world might take opera, and Wagnerian opera specifically, in Australia seriously and see it as counting for something, so that there’ll be an end to the one way street and a genuine, cross fertilising, exchange can begin. But back to the lesson… We actually started with Rigoletto. I wanted to achieve greater ease with Cortigiani! so that it would feel more of a piece with my Germanic repertoire. It has always been very high for me and particularly as I get older and more accomplished in the Heldenbariton repertoire, I have to find ways to sing it which don’t rely on youthful vigour which I no longer have. A half baked approach is no longer sustainable. I still am amazed that Rigoletto is placed in the Heldenbariton Fach in Germany. It is a good piece for me which I have sung many times but I would never have sung it alongside what I would consider the true Heldenbariton roles. This was my goal. To make it seem a natural companion of Dutchman or Alberich. Stopping me after the big, dramatic first couple of pages, Deborah wanted to see more evidence of my preparing for the high onset big notes. When making her criticism she said it was like I was shooting from the hip, which was a droll way of putting it. Then we tried to find solutions to technical problems by expressive means and via the words. My initial attempt, when I was focussed on technical matters was deemed impressive sound wise but not moving. This we managed to improve. There was the usual adjusting of vowels and the constant war on my tendency to darken. One must guard against the onanistic tendency to produce a sound that seems big and macho to oneself but is actually less impressive to the folk out there because it is a manufactured sound rather than one’s own voice. Truth is beauty in art after all! There was a top F to which this applied especially. I adjusted it from a fat open sound to a laser like, truer sound and the effect was immediate and good. Then there was the question of a portamento down from that F. The point about portamenti is to use them sparingly and judiciously in a carefully planned fashion, not randomly and erratically in a free for all. I worked on keeping the sound bright and pure as I came down via the portamento. It’s an exceedingly tiring aria to keep going back on so I eagerly moved onto Rheingold and the role of Alberich. 35

To achieve maximum coverage in the limited time, I suggested we start from the point I’d reached with Wolf Michael Storz in Munich. This final lesson took place after my Munich trip and a week after the previous lesson with Polaski; and indeed Deborah had observed how fresh my voice was compared to the last time she’d heard me, i.e. before Munich). It was really thrilling, even though she kept stopping me. I was really in my element. I adore this role! Once again, it was the cardinal points we kept coming back to: singing with my own voice, no manufacturing, no scooping, singing it properly and cleanly with a minimum of “effects” (which are rarely as “effective” as one hopes, a clean approach almost always seeming more powerful in the long run), keeping vowels bright and free. At one point she reinvoked her cuckoo clock image whereby one imagines the boney bridge of one’s nose opening like the door on a cuckoo clock as a way of focusing the resonance there (and in the cheek bones) and keeping the sound free. The sound must always seem to be going forward and never retreating into the body. This and every other purely technical question is inextricably linked with the text. One has to direct the phrases to key words and give every word its correct weight, optimally enunciated, vowels and consonants being given their ideal relative emphases. So much to think of! And yet so many of these details fall into to place if only one has properly absorbed the words and music. One’s understanding produces a very good result from a technical point of view automatically. If you can hear it in you head and feel it in your body you’ve a good chance of reproducing it without being independently conscious of every last technical adjustment in the moment of singing. At the end there was an almost celebratory atmosphere. Deborah said what an incredible thirteen and a half hours it had been. Nothing compares with this, in all the long years I’ve been singing, for sheer productiveness in a given stretch of time.

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GRAHAM COX: CONDUCTOR, COACH REPETITEUR Graham Cox is a Berlin based expat Aussie conductor and repetiteur of immense experience. He was for instance Christian Thielemanns’s assistant from 1998 to 2004 and Opera Vlaanderen’s German coach. I could go on. He was extraordinarily helpful to me with regard to all sorts of practical matters relating to subsisting in Berlin (transport, phones etc.). But of course it was what he had to offer as a musician who’s worked for a long time in the industry in Germany that drew me to him. We had some searching discussions about the major German opera companies and how they’re evolving. I was thrilled that he was willing and able to accompany for my lessons with Deborah Polaski. He of course is a distinguished vocal coach in his own right so that though these were unambiguously her sessions, he would make occasional observations which she would generally run with. To be the object of the attention and efforts of two such individuals simultaneously was heady if rather a lot to take in at times! In the course of our discussions, the subject of the advantages and disadvantages of the Fach system came up. In the end my view that Australia would benefit from a modified version of the Fach system was both strengthened and fleshed out. Shortly before leaving Germany we had a one on one coaching at Graham’s studio. We decided to apply the lessons learnt working on the German repertoire with Polaski to Cortigiani, the powerhouse aria sung by Rigoletto in the opera of the same name. It was a great surprise to me when I learnt that this role is considered a Heldenbariton role in Germany. To me it seems to belong to a very different category because of its high, punishing tessitura. I’ve performed the role many times and enjoyed success with it but I’ve never found it easy. Indeed it’s the hardest role in my repertoire. Cheek by jowl with the lower lying germanic baritone repertoire, I’d find it a daunting prospect so I wanted to find 37

a way of making it comfortable in a way which would allow me to perform it in the same time period as things like Alberich and Dutchman. Straight off the bat I was able to apply some of the lessons learnt in the course of my lessons with Polaski. Most importantly, I managed to avoid darkening the A vowels, which would’ve been fatal to any attempts to sustain the aria without strain. The other old habit which crept in and required correction was the tendency to approach notes from below. Graham made sure my onsets were clean and that initial consonants were on pitch. Then it was a question of finding enough different colours and tweaking certain vowels for correct length and emphasis. It was a brief but useful session which demonstrated to me that a role like Rigoletto can sit alongside other Germanic Heldenbariton roles provided one sings it in a disciplined way and avoids manufacturing sound.

ROBERT NEMACK: UNIVERSITAT DER KUNSTE, BERLIN Robert Nemack is a Berlin based freelance theatre director with a particular interest in opera and great experience in the field of Wagnerian opera specifically. He also teaches in his field at the Universitat der Kuenste, Berlin. We met in the stimulating surroundings of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, a place which perversely can leave one with a feeling of dissatisfaction because of the sheer impossibility of seeing more than a tiny fraction of its dizzy-making wonders properly in a single visit. I was keen, obviously, to get his views about the future of Wagner and High Culture generally. I revisited my theme of the possibility that for a busy practitioner in the High Arts in Germany, a country where in the tourist shops alongside the silly T-shirts and jokey fridge magnets there are for sale busts of Kant and Goethe, and the place of High Culture looks assured and eternal, threats to High Art globally might easily seem remote or non-existent. Robert was not only aware of these trends but thoughtful on the subject and able to dilate on it in a way which bespoke prior contemplation. He skewered the central problem straight off the bat. Education. There’s no other way. Thought being able to go into a low brow souvenir shop and buy a bust of Kant might encourage complacency in others, Robert was able to adduce plenty of anecdotal evidence that the first signs of cultural degeneracy are in evidence. If one imagines the nation as a single organism, it’s a bit like being in the early stages of cancer without knowing it. Australia, on the other hand, is definitely symptomatic. I told him of my experiences of giving masterclasses where singers in the third year of their degrees didn’t seem to know much about opera and how this suggested to me a disturbing cultural shift towards passivity and a losing sight of the fact that some things take much time and effort and that specimens of art don’t exist in a vacuum. Perhaps even that the self esteem movement had thrown up a crop of idle narcissists who didn’t realise they actually had to do anything at all, in order to achieve marvellousness. He matched this by telling me of how his father, in the post war period when they were attempting to turn Germany into a civilised country again after its descent into barbarism in the nazi era, in the course of pursuing his civil engineering studies, was required to study Proust! (It was while studying Proust that his Dad met his Mum, but that’s another story.) In my opening rant, I’d referred to the Germanic distinction between Bildung (a general, civilising grounding in the humanities and history which conduces to producing solid members of society regardless of their specialisms) and directed or vocational learning, a verbal distinction we sadly lacked in the anglosphere. Here in this story of his family he provided a perfect and pithy example of 38

this. To be the best civil engineer one can be, one needs Proust. That was then. Now, he told me, there was in Germany a situation where “unnecessary” subjects, such as literature, art, classics etc., were to receive no more financial support. They would have to be pursued at one’s own expense. Only subjects with a business, economic goal would be supported. This historical trajectory was clearly in his mind an occasion for bitter irony. He told me of ideas he’d had to abandon for productions in Australia which he’d pitched to the powers that be. I almost had to pity him, so aware was I of the futility of trying to get the brilliant ideas he was describing adopted by those he’d approached. He also told me of a conductor colleague suggesting to the same person a production of Der Rosenkavalier and being told no one was interested in that sort of thing. Rosenkavalier! Then there was the question of the phenomenon of the blurring of the categorical distinction (so important at the conceptual level) between High Art and popular entertainment and all the pernicious effects flowing from it (which I discuss elsewhere in this report), on which subject I read an article, to which my wife directed me, a couple of days later and immediately shared with Robert. Here is the link, for those who are interested:: http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/when-opera-not-opera-preview-divorce But there are creative opera companies, usually operating on a shoe string budget, which are still interested in doing art for art’s sake, for whom the work is what matters, not (principally) the box office - although in practice, these groups are so enterprising and clever that they get the box office anyway! As Robert has worked in Australia, he was qualified to make comparisons between Europe and the antipodes. He well remembered the bulk of the newspapers’ being given over to sport and business and the small, dispensable niche which art occupied. I told him how when yet more cuts were announced to the ABC (which increasingly seems determined to ape the commercials), the boss, in his wisdom, decided that the one thing which had to go was the nation’s ONLY radio programme devoted to poetry. There it was, doing no harm and giving pleasure to many, a symbol that some things just have to be preserved because they’re important for reasons other than those which have to do with money and populism, and now it’s gone. Puff! What’s the point of the ABC if it’s decisions about programming are made on the basis of the same considerations which are decisive for the trash media who are only interested in profit and will stoop to any level to increase it? Says it all really. My second meeting with Robert was more of a social occasion. Nevertheless, my trip to Munich having taken place between the two meetings, we talked a fair bit of shop. I described the Götterdämmerung I'd attended at the Bavarian State Opera. He gave me a lot more information about the individuals involved. Of particular interest was what he was able to tell me about the director of that production and his straight theatre pedigree. I've always particularly liked working with good straight theatre directors but it comes with risks flowing from ignorance of the practical necessities when it comes to opera. Frustratingly, although it ought to be someone's job to explain that whatever its other virtues a particular set design won't work acoustically, hardly anyone ever does. And if they do, it's to late in the process. Robert told me of a close to home example of exactly this phenomenon which had a bearing on opera practice in Australia. The director of the Götterdämmerung I'd seen has apparently had a deservedly high reputation as a theatre director but his Ring Cycle has received very mixed reviews. Indeed the same reviewers have liked some sections but not others. But there was no overall critical consensus. I was interested to hear what he had to 39

say about a Henze opera for children scored on the basis available instruments. This seemed incredibly positive work. There is much done in the area of opera for children in Australia but this sounded slightly different involving as it did and effort to develop the children themselves down more sophisticated musical paths while their brains are young and malleable. He also confirmed the views of others to whom I'd talked about the attitudes of managements and the lack of self confidence which produces a reluctance to engage foreigners who don't already have German gigs on their CVs (a sad indictment). Once again we discussed in a wouldn't-it-be-great spirit his ideas of things operatic projects he/we could do in Australia. One doesn't want to dampen anyone's enthusiasm but I didn't feel he really, as a person immersed in such a rich cultural life in Berlin, had a sense of the point to which things have sunk in Australia. After our meal out he regaled me with chunks of Berlin history and his memories of divided Berlin. A thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Outside the Brecht Theatre, after a meal with Robert Nemack.

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KATHLEEN PARKER: OPERA SINGER, SPECIALIST LANGUAGE COACH I was lucky enough while in Berlin to undertake some German language study with Kathleen Parker. Kathleen is a successful singer herself having performed such roles as Senta in The Flying Dutchman in Germany; but she also has a sideline in teaching German, specifically to singers who need to direct their German language study towards the business end of functioning as a singer in Germany. So as well as studying the language in general, we did many role plays, where she would pretend to be various functionaries one could expect to encounter in German operas houses and so forth. The study of vocabulary placed a special emphasis on the terminology encountered in the course of the business of staging operas. These role play exercises constituted a de facto exploration of the culture of the German opera world. Each arena has its own customs and norms and it pays to try and learn a little of them if one wishes to avoid faux pas! JOHN PARR: STUDIENLEITER, STIFTUNG OPERA BERLIN; DEUTSCHE OPER BERLIN John Parr is the Studienleiter, Stiftung Oper Berlin, Deutsche Oper Berlin. His is also an old friend and colleague of John Wegner. Parr was head of casting at Karlsruhe when Wegner was there. Wegner recommended strongly that I try to arrange to work with Parr and he was right to do so. We worked briskly, covering a lot of repertoire in a short time. I found his views as to my correct Fach illuminating and indeed gratifying (seeing as he included Wotan amongst the roles he considered possible for me!). Discussion of the Fach system and where I sat in relation to it led naturally to his ventilating his views and insider knowledge regarding the German opera scene and the Realpolitik which obtains therein. I’ll not retell all of that part of the discussion as it isn’t strictly germane to my project. Suffice it to say that in Germany the mindsets and received notions of how things are done are unassailable. On the one hand, this creates barriers which are absurd and self defeating in terms of their raison d’etre. On the other hand, one tends to know where one stands! Anyway, we worked on Alberich, Wotan, Dutchman, Klingsor, Iago and Beckmesser.

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JOHN HEUZENROEDER: OPERA SINGER, BERLIN It was a joy catching up with John Heuzenroeder in Berlin. He and I went to school together and amazingly both ended up as opera singers. At a certain point however, he took himself overseas and forged a solid career in Germany. He has sung in many places and performed a wonderful variety of roles and as such was perfectly placed, being an insider who was once an outsider, to give me a realistic picture of how things really are in the German opera scene, whatever the official “line” might be. It was in spirit a social occasion. Dinner actually. But anecdote after anecdote revealed something to me of the way things ACTUALLY work in the German opera scene which I wouldn’t otherwise have known, and which I accordingly filed away mentally. Afterwards, I was able to mull over the implications were of the differences revealed between the way things were done in Germany and how the same things were approached in Australia. Here’s one example: Although we don’t use the word ‘Fach’ so much in Australia and the vocal category distinctions are not so rigid, the fact that Wotans sing Rigoletto in Germany and that this is considered right and proper is noteworthy. This is significant for me because I cross between Wagner and Verdi and have often wondered if I really ought to be. I won’t trawl through our whole conversation which was as I said basically a social occasion and as such not electronically recorded. But it felt in some ways as useful as some official interviews. With John Heuzenroeder.

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GAYE MACFARLANE; OPERA SINGER, BERLIN Gaye Macfarlane is an expat Australian singer based in Germany who has also established herself as an agent. In speaking with her I gained many insights into the workings of the German opera scene. Certain points which had come up repeatedly in other interviews were further driven home by what she had to say. An example would be the utter irrelevance of Australian achievements and honours in the minds of potential employers in Germany. As a singer who’s shifted her career from one country to the other and moreover become an agent so that she’s constantly experiencing these attitudes on the part of managements, she’s acutely aware of these things. It has become clear to me that we Australians must guard against any tendency, subconscious or otherwise, to allow the attitudes prevalent in other countries to dictate or affect our sense of self worth. If people in Europe can’t summon up any interest in Sidney Nolan, Judith Wright, Patrick White, Arthur Streeton, David Williamson etc, and couldn’t care less about what a Helpmann Award might be; if it’s always to be a cultural one way street, well, frankly it’s their loss. Feeling aggrieved, feeling that one’s Australian achievements are meaningless because they literally don’t exist in the minds of Germans is a complete waste of vital energy and must be resisted, but it is certainly hard to be philosophical at times. KATHLEEN PARKER: SOPRANO, GERMAN LANGUAGE COACH. Kathleen Parker is also an expat Aussie based in Berlin. As well as being a singer whose repertoire includes Wagnerian roles such as Senta, she has a sideline in teaching German, especially to those who wish to engage with the German opera scene. I went to see her to brush up my rusty German with special reference to the sorts of conversations I would be having with the various professionals I would be meeting during the German leg of my project. We had some interesting conversations about the life of an expat opera singer in Germany, for example talking about the two edged sword aspect of versatility in a country dominated by strict notions of Fach. These discussions, conducted in a free flowing fashion, were a brilliant way of practicing my German.

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MUNICH

Festpielhaus, Munich WOLF MICHAEL STORZ: BAVARIAN STAATSOPER I really don't know where to start to describe my work with Wolf Michael Storz. He works at the Bavarian State Opera and has vast experience at the top level in the Wagnerian world. He has for instance worked extensively at Bayreuth and currently collaborates closely with Maestro Petrenko, the Staatsoper chief, who had conducted the performance of Götterdämmerung I'd attended the evening before our first coaching. It was so intense and there was so much to take in, it was almost bewildering. The coaching took place on hallowed ground, to wit: in the National Theatre, Munich, home of the Bavarian State Opera. No place apart from Bayreuth is more closely associated with Wagner. Ludwig II, whom Wagnerians revere second only to the Master himself on account of his having rescued Wagner and made it possible for him to complete his mighty life's work, was of course King of Bavaria and several of the great masterpieces had their premieres in Munich. At the end of the first session, which lasted over two hours, I immediately varied my schedule so as to allow me to book in for another the following day. We worked on Alberich. I started with the Curse. Having allowed me to sing it through once without interruption, he complimented me lavishly before going back to the beginning and tearing my performance apart! At a vocal technical level, he didn't appear to have any criticisms; so there was no intrusion on Polaski's main theatre of operations. It was language and psychology that we focussed on. As far as nuts and bolts are concerned, one error I kept 44

making (and this had come up in the work with Polaski) was not to sustain the first part of some diphthongs long enough before transitioning into the second part. This seemed to be an Anglo thing. Then he surprised me by demanding more air in certain consonants, so much so that to my ear they seemed to be tipping over from voiced to unvoiced. Every man and his dog knows that in German the letter S (at least at the start of a word) is pronounced like the English Z. So it is to say the least disconcerting to have a German telling one to make radical expressive adjustments which have the effect of, so to speak, turning it back into an S again! And it didn't stop there. With the phrase "So segnet in höchster Not", in which you'll note the first two words begin with S, not only did he have me pump more air into the consonants, he also required a breath between "So" and "segnet"! Extraordinary! Well, thought I, don't knock it till you've tried it. Of course it worked a treat. I'd never have thought of it. Herr Storz quoted a mentor of his as saying that tremolos in Wagner always relate to sex. This affected the way in which I approached the section beginning "Dem Tode verfallen" etc. Of course Alberich has renounced love by this stage and his sexual drive and relish is diverted into another channel as he contemplates the doom in store for his antagonists as a result of his curse. More broadly, it was the use of the language, the focus on the meaning of the words and the psychology underpinning them which was the primary focus. Aesthetic fruition depended on these considerations. He began by talking broadly on the subject of the differences between Italian and German operas. In Italian operas, there there tends to be a hero, a woman and a rival for the woman who is the villain and the hero's antagonist. Plots play themselves out fuelled by the imperatives of hot Latin blood and southern notions of honour. Rigoletto is an exception to the Latin pattern in the way the plot's mechanism functions. In German opera however, fertilised by German philosophy and conditioned by a reflective, cerebral, inward looking mentality, quite different from the very human straightforwardness which obtains in Italian opera, the hero or indeed the villain tends to be a loner or outsider and at war with himself rather with some flesh and blood opponent. The same is true in the other narrative arts. The real battles in German stories are battles with the self, whatever happens on the surface of events. The principal point is not some great confrontation between separate individuals. Moreover, though some characters are absolutely evil, there are evil characters who extort our respect despite ourselves. Alberich's merciless tyranny over the hapless Nibelungen ought to disqualify him from receiving our sympathy or respect. But Alberich does engender in one that thrill or shudder of respect which comes when someone has truth on his side and is its mouthpiece. Wotan is tricky and duplicitous where Alberich tells it like it is and cuts straight to the heart of the god's hypocrisy. Alberich takes a cataclysmic decision in rejecting love and importantly doesn't for a second thereafter resile from it or do anything other than accept fully its consequences. There's a comparison with Klingsor (but we don't feel the same grudging respect and even sympathy we feel for Alberich because we do not see the back story played out before us) in that in both cases there's human fallibility and a falling short of the ideal we can relate to. Klingsor wanted to be a Grail Knight. But he was unable to keep erotic thoughts at bay and was therefore beneath contempt from the point of view of the high minded members of the group to which he yearned to belong with their mystic rituals and noble exclusivity. He wanted to belong so badly he cut off his own genitals to suppress his natural urges. A hopeless act. Certain that he'd never a Grail Knight, 45

his pent up emotion soured into hatred. Classic in group out group stuff. (Satan, the fallen angel, also springs to mind.) In Alberich's case, there's a child like innocence and candour in the Rhine Maidens scene. These piscine women treat him cruelly in a way any man who was once a boy teased in a school playground can relate to. This already puts us, or some of us, on his side. But these nasty creatures (whom I once heard a colleague defending in a way that suggested to me he'd bought into the whole innate Nordic superiority, biological determinism, 19th century mystical claptrap) get more than they'd bargained for. The granite like determination with which he renounces love and claims the gold with no possibility of back tracking is profoundly impressive. Then comes hubris leading to his being tricked out that for which he'd paid such an incalculable price. It's when he has nothing left whatsoever and is told he is free, a notion he receives with crazed, bitter contempt for what does freedom even mean when he has literally nothing. It's at that point that he achieves real grandeur by subjecting Wotan to the blast furnace of truth and a horrifying word picture of the future as he lays his ineluctable curse. The authority achieved in that moment can leave an audience paralysed and tingling. For the singer it is a daunting responsibility. It is very easy to lapse into generalised evil dwarf acting. One can fancy one is being terribly clever and effective by employing all sorts of effects and doing a lot of scowling and teeth gnashing. Teeth gnashing all in good time. One has first to achieve a subtler understanding of the character's psychology. Otherwise all the histrionics seem superficial and jejune. At those points where the text is backwards looking, referencing the lovely thing which was lost, Wolf sought from me a vulnerability as of a child imagining cuddling a lost comforter toy. A much greater sense of vulnerability, grievance and accusation was achieved leading into an all the more shocking pronouncement of sentence of death on all future possessors of his lost treasure. When discussing in general this instinctive respect we sometimes have for evil characters and the conundrum this involves (how can we feel anything but loathing for someone whom we see running a brutal subterranean slave labour concentration camp and yet we do), Wolf brought up current affairs analogies involving America and the Middle East and the affording due process, regardless of what people have done. He admitted he was wading into controversial waters. I have strong views about these matters and I flinch whenever confronted with a line of argument which seems to be tending in the direction of minimising the ghastly excesses of mass murderers and explaining away atrocities out of a sort of reflexive western self hatred and determination to see everything as America's fault. And I didn't want the coaching time soaked up by a discussion best thrashed out on a separate, perhaps social, occasion. So I tried to bring it back to the psychology and the opera in hand. One thing about it, Wolf is incredibly intense in the way he conducts a coaching. He would leap up from the piano in the character of Alberich, spitting, pleading, accusing. It was so exciting! It was also an example of that difference between Wagnerians and non-Wagnerians. What we experience as intensity and as being thrilling, others experience as an invasion of personal space, too much, like being hugged by someone you don't feel you know well enough. Wagner is not genteel! After the curse we went back to the top and the Rhine Maidens. So the process of putting the role back together again, which is painstaking and involves a constant war on lazy, too obvious interpretations and an interrogation of every instinct to see if it's really sound, begins.

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In our second session we continued with Rheingold. The subject of the erotic tremolo erotic, not sex, as Wolf hastened to point out, correcting me - came up again. I had him remind me of the name of the Wagner guru from whom he'd got this concept (it was Richard Trimborn, for the record). Again and again we came back to the idea of the necessity of showing process rather than making statements. Thinking in these terms makes it so much more true to life and interesting. It is at the other end of the spectrum what Wolf referred to as bad verismo acting, declaiming with a confected, prepared earlier emotionalism. By focussing on the words and the process in the moment, one can represent those ambivalent moments of transition and the ever shifting, mutability of a character's thought processes. As a person feels his way through a real life situation, there is an "asking" quality to his contemplation of things and his decision making. What should I do? What do you mean? How could that be? Is it true? That tentativeness is intrinsic to real life. One does not go around with a pre-fabricated response to every eventuality which comes out pat and with confidence on cue. So even with statements which seem straightforwardly declamatory, a certain ambivalence and hint of uncertainty can add subtlety and power by making the characterisation more true to life. This was a quality we constantly searched for. An example would be the phrase beginning "Ihr schmälich schlaues lüderlich schlechtes Gelichter!". Instead of being merely angry and gruff, a sprinkling of that questioning quality over the aggression makes it far more interesting and true to life. The sul fiato technique was a tool we used regularly to make phrases more expressive. The degree to which he had me emphasise vowels, for instance the letter L, felt extraordinary at times but the result always bore him out. The section in scene three beginning "Schau, du Schelm" we worked on intensively, calibrating the abrupt, unpredictable outbursts for maximum effect. Later, the suppressed intensity he demanded for "Zögert ihr notch? Zaudert wohl gar?" was so great, it was borderline apoplectic. We discussed the significance of question marks and exclamation marks in Wagner. A crescendo through the words they follow is generally warranted. He pointed out to me that weird things, such as odd rhythms and word setting always have some particular significance which must be understood. An example of the forensic detail of our work is the phrase "Der Welt Erbe gewänn' ich zu eigen durch dich?". It took many goes to get that little word "dich" to Wolf's satisfaction. There were points where it was important to feel like I was driving the orchestra even though I can't actually do that. Maximum effect also requires sometimes one gets from initial to terminal consonants in certain words as quickly as possible, meaning the vowel becomes microscopic. And yet at other times all depends on creating a sense of length in vowels attached to very short notes. I could go on and on but suffice it to say that I was overloaded with wonderful information which served to enthuse and inspire me. My work with Wolf was extraordinarily stimulating. His hyperactive, jumping jack in the box style of working was a joyous affirmation of life and of love of this essential work.

MARK LAWSON: BAVARIAN STAATSOPER I was terribly lucky to have the opportunity to work with Mark Lawson. Such is his busy schedule that I might well have failed to coordinate with him. He is on the staff of the Bavarian State Opera and also has worked extensively at Bayreuth. We focussed exclusively on the Dutchman Monologue for our coaching. I admit to being quite impressed with myself after the first run through because notwithstanding my having already worked 47

for over two hours that day on Alberich with Wolf Michael Storz, my voice was fresh and I had ample energy and vocal power. He was impressed. We went back to the start. The opening recit is critical in terms of establishing the character. It is also, pragmatically, important to get it right if one is considering ever using it for an audition because it lasts a couple of minutes and is very exposed so that it is very much subject to the depredations of nerves. This means that in the unforgiving circumstances of an audition, one could easily rule oneself out almost from the outset. Once a panel loses interest it's hard to retrieve the situation. No matter how confident one is feeling however there is much work to be done because there are many gear changes and different colours which need to be achieved with little margin for error. We went through it carefully making sure every phrase had a sense of direction towards a key word. Mark also required me to concentrate on the dissonances which are so expressive in the opening recit and not start to "correct" them unconsciously. For example "dein TROTZ ist beugsam". Whether one is singing this tricky opening section or the rest of the piece, it is at all times important to find opportunities for contrasts and different colours, otherwise it becomes monochrome and begins to pall. One must always also be careful to mind the basics. For instance, without realising it, I was starting to voice the S in the word "Als" (a big no no". This was probably a by product of my attempts to achieve a good legato in the prayer section. Legato is vital here and naturally in other sections as well, but it must be achieved without resorting to ugly, unidiomatic portamenti. He had to pull me into line when I started "hitting" notes, which is a rather callow way of trying to achieve emphasis and intensity which is quite rough on the voice and therefore to be avoided. In fairness to me, Wagner does put accents over every note of certain phrases, but there are other ways of achieving what Wagner intended: clear rhythms, strict tempo, allowing the music to do the work, thus avoiding over-egging, clean onsets and proper emphasis of consonants. In other words, all the stuff I'd been working on with Polaski. Overall, this session had a more straightforward, business like, tidying up atmosphere than the questing, idealistic, intensely psychological and multi-faceted sessions with Storz, but actually, that was what I needed at that time of day. One needs to approach one's work in different ways at different times to achieve different things. One mode won't suffice. It's thrilling to dive into one's work in an immersive way like a poet of the romantic period or a great method actor, grappling with it with Werther-like intensity; but there's also a time for the dotting of Is and the crossing of Ts and attending to vocal/musical hygiene with professional business-like clarity. My work with Lawson and Storz combined beautifully with my work with Polaski to create a wonderful whole. Flitting regularly between the three of them like butterfly unable to decide between his favourite three flowers would I sense be an extremely productive modus operandi if it could be arranged on an ongoing basis.

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MARTIN COOKE: BAVARIAN STAATSOPER Martin Cooke is a stalwart of the Bavarian State Opera chorus as well as a soloist in his own right. He is heavily involved in the pastoral care of young singers visiting the Bavarian State Opera. An Australian, he ought to be considered one of our greatest exports. Despite being of soloist calibre, he decided, mindful of his responsibilities as a family man, in his thirties to opt for the stability and security of a permanent position in the chorus of one of the greatest opera companies in the world over the chanciness of a freelance solo career. His decades of experience are a gold mine. He is also a good citizen of the opera/classical music world, going to really extraordinary lengths to make those coming to Germany to try their luck welcome, providing experiences they'd otherwise not have such as backstage tours and when possible free tickets to the opera. He's also offered hospitality when possible and arranged performing opportunities for young musicians such as the SBS Youth Orchestra. His selfless contribution deserves official recognition. I think an Australia Day Honour is warranted. Many Australian musicians, such as myself and many other singers I could name owe him a real debt of gratitude. Despite living and working in Germany and having his immediate family there, he is still an Australian, keenly interested in the affairs of his home country. During the first break in the Götterdämmerung performance I attended, Martin invited me backstage to meet other performers. Then we went off to a corner to discuss the show. Although generally impressed with the singing and the orchestra, I found one casting decision wholly inexplicable. I also found aspects of the production disgraceful such as yet another set (I've seen this so many times) which undermined the singers' efforts to be heard. That the musical aspects of great operas are regularly this treated in such a high handed way drives me to distraction. My observations set Martin off. But time was limited and I had to return to my seat. A couple of nights later we met over dinner to discuss the state of opera and its future. He views opera both in Australia and Germany with sadness. What I had to tell him about the scene in Australia bore out what he'd been able to glean from afar. There are problems which exist both in Australia and Germany but there are other problems which would seem to be endemic to each country respectively. In Australia, there's much dumbing down and crass populism in pursuit of the lowest common denominator. Treating opera like low brow popular entertainment rather than High Art and indeed the allowing of popular entertainment to push true opera off the schedules of opera companies. In Germany there's a decadence which produces a species of extreme regi theatre where the work of art is made the servant of the director's ego rather than being itself the focus of the enterprise and the thing in relation to which the director regards himself as a servant. Regular features are a fatuous topicality in productions which limits the work and destroys its universality, coups de theatre which have more to do with directorial attention seeking than any attempt to elucidate the work's deeper meaning, and a disrespectful attitude to the fundamental, inalienable aspects of the work, so that the music is disturbed by the noise of some asinine stage business that contributes nothing. Another symptom of the state of things, according to Martin Cook, and also Wolf Michael Storz, is a lack of self confidence on the part of the powers that be revealing itself thus: a person whose whole career has been elsewhere gets an audition at the Bavarian State Opera and sings really well but fails to win a gig because those on the panel don't trust their own eyes and ears and are put off by the lack of gigs at lesser but still good German houses. Another singer, less accomplished, comes along armed 49

with credits from other German houses and is employed despite being a lesser artist. This is another version of the casting out of habit rather than on the basis of objective evidence I also have seen in Australia. That people who lack the self confidence to trust their own eyes and ears are occupying the top positions is a worrying sign of cultural degeneracy. But there is still much that is good and indeed great in both countries. There is therefore still much to fight for.

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG : BAVARIAN STAATSOPER My attendance at a performance of Götterdämmerung at the Bavarian State Opera, though of the directest relevance to my project, was also in the nature of a treat to self. It is such a colossal chunk of Wagner's oeuvre (its first act alone runs longer than most Italian operas in their entirety) and it contains some of my all time favourite stretches of music: Siegfried's Funeral Music (which originally converted me to Wagner), the Rhine Journey, Hagen's Watch and Call to the Gibichung Vassals, the Waltraute scene and the shattering, overwhelming Immolation Scene.

There was also an extraordinary coincidence: I was addressed by name in the second interval and looking up saw Christopher Cheong, who was one of the organisers of the Mahler's 8th Symphony performance in Singapore in which I'd been a soloist earlier in year, and his friend Benedict Sambali Ng. They were on holiday. The lucky ducks were also to attend Hansel und Gretel on the following night. As seasoned musicians, they were 50

wonderful interlocutors so that the forty minute interval was well used. It was gratifying also to be chatting in a foyer where all the wall space was covered with oil paintings of great musicians. Then there were the marble busts. Thankfully there is somewhere in the world where these great individuals are treated with due reverence. Back to the performance. Over the years I've been a great critic of the cowardly, high handed approach of critics. As practiced by most of them, it is an ignoble profession involving being devastatingly hurtful to performers from a position of callous impunity. The earnest, committed efforts of months or even years are swatted away with disgusting, ad hominem glibness. Performers are largely the instruments of others. So I'm not going to specific about performances of the singers unless it's complimentary. I apologise if this seems unacceptably limiting. With directors, my attitude is somewhat different. They have greater power and autonomy, and for me, as a species they divide into those who see themselves as servants of the works and those who see the works as being in the service of their own egos. In other words, I deal with them on a case by case basis. The orchestra under Petrenko was magnificent. But when the curtain rose, I wilted. Clearly we were going to be subjected to a trite commentary on current affairs, to wit the European refugee crisis. Just as I'm not keen on "setting" overtures with stage business because the primary purpose of an overture is to create a generalised emotional state such as to make one optimally receptive to what is to come so that by "setting" it one makes it about specific business and thereby limits it expressively, this trite larding in of current affairs was for me profoundly inimical to this masterpiece's universality. It was almost impossible to resist the sense of shrinkage from the infinite to something the size of a TV screen on which one might catch the evening news. It was faux profound. Doubtless he thought he was being clever having the extras one stage, the ones playing the refugees, grimacing open-mouthedly on the stinging, pang like chords. The poor Norns, who had a legitimate role after all, had perforce to pick their way through all this surplus humanity as if their scene, like in a weird dream, had been transferred to some heterodox venue where they just had to make the best of it. Like trying to bake bread in a swimming pool. So then we moved on to Siegfried and Brünnihilde. This was merely awkward. A bunch of people had the thankless job of holding a whole lot of planks vertically to create the performing space, the idea being that for entrances and exits they plank holders could turn their planks in a door like motion. In practice this was impossible to manage seamlessly. It looked clumsy but just managed to avoid descending into slapstick. The Rhine Journey had an amusing children's pantomime two dimensional boat. There was a sea of humanity who attempted to render the Rhine by pulling their jackets over their heads and performing a corporate undulation. I thought two things: our sea of humanity in the Melbourne Ring was much better, and Grahame Murphy (our choreographer) would've made a much better fist of the corporate undulation. Actually there was a third thing. I was absolutely outraged at all the extraneous noise from the feet of the sea of humanity which was allowed to besmirch the glorious music of the Rhine Journey. We reached the Gibichung Hall. Clearly the director wanted us to know he'd read his Shaw and knew about the critique of capitalism imbedded in the work (actually the meaning of the Ring evolved of its twenty six year composition so that it's actually about a great many things on any number of levels, but I've 51

not the scope to go into all that now). So we had corporate symbols aplenty and the glassy interior of some modern temple of commerce and just in case there was anyone in need of its being rammed home even further, the word "Gewinn!" was projected repeatedly onto the walls. Brett Easton Ellis does this do much better and his novels are his own self contained works, he isn't foisting his ideas on somebody else's creation. Clearly there was a favourite prop: a rocking horse in the shape of a Euro symbol (€). Gutrune was required to rock back and forth on this at every opportunity in an ever so erotic fashion. The singer who performed Gutrune was actually superb, rising above the morass in which she found herself. As to the boys.. I could imagine the costume fittings and their thinking to themselves "Not another bloody suit...". I've had this experience so many times. Regardless of period or character, one arrives in the costume department and is confronted with yet another business suit, usually cheap, nasty and uncomfortable. Hagen was a magnificent singer but even his work was undermined by a set which should have been vetoed at the planning stage. Even if this "concept" had been deemed the greatest ever in visual terms, the powers that be were duty bound to insist that the real thing be acoustically viable, indeed that acoustics should be fundamental to the design. Instead, the set was too deep so that the sound had nothing to reflect off and matters weren't helped when the singers were required to sing on a gantry far above the stage. I was very impressed with the Gunther. Gunther, like weak characters in general, is hard to play, and despite having a hell of a lot to sing, often doesn't register very strongly so that one comes away with the impression of its being a relatively minor role. This Gunther was certainly weak - indeed I laughed out loud (no one else did...) when he shook hands with Siegfried and collapsed in a heap at the strength of the hero's superman handshake. But notwithstanding his dutifully executing any number of exhibitionistic directorial excesses, he managed to do something very clever. Rather than trying to render weakness by employing the thankless method of holding back and pulling punches (which would, as it often does, have produced a merely nondescript result), he played it positively. He made Gunther's weakness a function of that character's positive indulgence in vice with its enfeebling effects. The result was a Gunther who was a major player alongside the other character on whom attention generally devolves and who usually take the laurel. Superb work. After a baleful Hagen's Watch, slightly diminished only by the hostile acoustic environment and through no fault of the singer's, we had the Waltraute scene. I really must single out the singer of Waltraute for special praise. Once again, here was a performer rising above the context over which she had no control to produce a hauntingly superior performance. Clarion sound and compelling acting. I don't have much to say about Act Two. We had the Gibichung Hall set throughout with its above described acoustical infelicities. I wondered how, given the updating, they were going to deal with the question of a spear for Siegfried and Brünnhilde to swear on. A selfie stick? In the event they wore anachronism and a spear was produced. ‘Smart’ phones were also much in evidence, eagerly used to take photos of the accusations and counter accusations of Brünnhilde and Siegfried and the reactions of the other principals, and brandished in an infinitely inane, cretinous fashion during the Call to the Gibichung Vassals. The use of iPhones in the Melbourne Ring was much cleverer and more intellectually integrated. 52

One musical thing which made a favourable impression on me in Act Three was the tone which Siegfried adopted for rendering the Wood Bird's voice when recounting the tales of his youth. I'm not saying it's the only way of doing it but it was a fascinating chance from the usual stentorian, heroic tone, singing the Wood Bird's notes but employing the hero's trademark vocal style. In this instance, he sang with a teeny tiny voice on the scale of a small bird. His line tinkled across the surface of the orchestra's music. I'd never heard this before and was spellbound. Sadly, shortly thereafter came moment of real fury for me. Siegfried's Funeral Music was the piece of music which first introduced me to Wagner and is one of the supreme masterpieces of Western High Art. At a certain point, this director caused an extraordinary amount of stage noise by requiring reams of paper to be thrown about and dropped from above, effectively killing this sublime music. It was hard to suppress my emotions and settle down to take in the rest of the performance. The Gutrune Scene was a wonderful little point of stasis and beauty. The immolation came and went with poor Hagen required to singing "Zurück vom Ring!" straight out front with no possibility of any plausible concomitant physicality so that all he could do was sing his line and walk up stage and off. Interestingly, at the end, Gutrune was rather touchingly made the focus. She deserved it for her remarkable performance. Instead "slumping lifeless to the ground" as Wagner women tend to be required to at the ends of operas, a group of people gathered round her in a sort of group hug. After all the larger than life characters had departed the scene, this representative of ordinary, fallible humanity was gathered up in a loving, comforting gesture. I was moved. You might think that overall I had a bad time, given all the above criticisms. Not so. It was a glorious afternoon and evening. The individual performers did some marvellous things and the orchestra was sublime. Wagner won. As always. Oh, and in keeping with the spirit of the occasion I bought a fist full of CDs in the foyer!

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DUSSELDORF MATTHEW TOOGOOD: DEUTCSHE OPER AM RHEIN, DUSSELDORF Matthew Toogood works on the music staff at the opera in Düsseldorf. He is a conductor, coach and recitalist of note. Meeting with him constituted one of my twin motivations for visiting Düsseldorf (the other being an interview with Neill Thornborrow). His view of the trajectory of operatic high culture was one characterised by a qualified acceptance of the creeping phenomenon low brow offerings finding their way into the schedules of opera companies PROVIDED there was a balance that meant serious opera would always have a place. I ventured that the situation in Australia involving opera as circus and real singers being laid off to make way for musicals could be interpreted as a tipping of any putative balance. It is also perhaps difficult to perceive "signs of the times" when one is constantly at the epicentre of high cultural endeavour. Hence the worrying complacency or plain failure to think about such matters I've come across frequently amongst practitioners in the field of High Art. Toogood, thankfully, is well aware of the state of culture beyond his immediate professional environment. Indeed I was delighted, when I brought up the subject of the nurturing of big voices, to find that he too had had thoughts of setting up something of a pedagogical nature back in Australia to help young people with larger, later maturing voices. I expressed a strong interest in being involved in any such activities.

NEILL THORNBORROW: DUSSELDORF I'll admit it. I was a little overawed at the prospect of meeting Neill Thornborrow. Here was a serious man. Our friend in common, John Wegner, had assured me he was a lovely personbut the tone of our communications (politely formal, no first names, brief and brisk as of a man who isn't interested in wasting time) combined with my awareness of his position as one of the top German agents (and erstwhile pianist) with a special place in the Wagnerian world involving direct relationships with the Wagner descendants over decades caused me to feel acutely that my piddling questions were an irritating irrelevancy so that at any moment he might say he didn't have time for this. It didn't make me feel any more relaxed when he refused my polite request to be able to record the interview. But actually he is a very nice man and although I felt self conscious and never fully relaxed he never manifested impatience and was generous with his time. There's a sense of entering an inner sanctum when he showed me into his office. The Wagneriana, already splendidly evident in the waiting room went up a gear in the office. Original art works abounded. The items related not just to Richard Wagner but to Siegfried (Wagner's son), Friedelind (one of his granddaughters) and others. Some of our conversation, though fascinating, was not strictly germane to my project involving as it did anecdotes, practical professional matters having to do with the differences in the ways agents operate in Germany as compared with elsewhere, my personal professional situation and so on. The bulk of the time, however, was devoted to the subject which I brought with me of the trajectory of Wagnerian opera.

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Portrait of Siegfried Wagner, in the studio of Neil Thornborrow, Dusseldorf At first, Neil chose to express it in more zen terms than I could countenance with my sense of urgent anxiety by characterising the situation as one of change rather than decline. He spoke of managements nowadays wanting someone who looked like Claudia Schiffer, in her twenties with a voice that could sing Brünnhilde and stated baldly than in his opinion, Bigit Nilsson were starting out today, she wouldn't get a job. Just as I was starting to blurt out that that was the point because that person doesn't exist (even if one were to considers such a package desirable) so that that way lies the prospect of Wagner becoming unperformable, he cut in with a series of statements that gave voice to my ever crystallising views on the subject. Tapping his head he said that it was what was "up here" that mattered and identified education as the key to what needed to happen. He agreed with me that an empty vessel singer cannot be expected to produce anything interesting and may as well be a parrot. It was as obvious as him as it was to me that young people want to go straight into the "top echelon" (to use his expression) and don't seem to realise that doing things properly takes time. And so on and so forth. Along with his comment about Nilsson, he also came out with an anecdote indicative of a corruption of values in the German opera world. A forty year old soprano came to audition for him. She sang Dorabella better than he'd ever heard anyone sing it before. And yet he had to tell that if he sent her off to audition for Dorabella she would without doubt be passed over for a younger singer even if that younger singer were a QUARTER the singer she was. As that was her Fach, he was basically telling her she'd missed the boat. One has little choice but to deal with the world as it is and forget about the world as it ought to be. I explained to him how in Australia in the time I've been a professional opera singer, things have changed so that operas like Wozzeck and Lulu, in which I've performed in days of yore, are pretty much unthinkable nowadays and that now things are weighted entirely in 55

favour of popular operas, "spectaculars" and musicals. He Immediately started making statements of the obvious about the greater popularity of such things and then went on to describe how popular repertoire could be used to finance art for art's sake works. I tried to explain that that was my point. We USED to do that in Australia because it was the obvious solution to the perennial dilemma of how to perpetuate that which has absolute value but is not commercial. Nowadays, getting board approval for anything non-commercial is a huge problem. There are those on whom the argument that a place must be found for some things, whose value is not measurable in terms of box office, is lost. That's the problem. I'm all in favour of doing forty Bohemes to pay for four Wozzecks but alas we are not doing the second bit! He said he couldn't comment on things in Australia. When one is in the thick of things in the German opera world, surrounded by people approaching their work with the requisite seriousness, it must seem like it will go on forever. Neill Thornborrow certainly said in as many words that Wagner would, in his world, always be there. But as indicated, he went on to identify all the things which are white anting the art form. This seems inconsistent to me. In the case of those in the business who are too preoccupied with their immediate tasks to turn their minds to such things which, if they think of them at all, must seem to lie in the never never, analogy would be with the denizens of affluent suburbs not bothering themselves with the breaking down of society in its poorer margins (a subject I'll mention in passing which is beautifully dealt with in the films of Michael Haneke). I said as I was leaving that though I could well imagine that at the centre of things it must all seem eternal and as such safe, I thought it would be interesting to come back in twenty years and see how things were even at the wellsprings of High Culture. Things could be very different. He didn't demur.

Museum Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf 56

NEW YORK

Warwick with Joshua Hecht

JOSHUA HECHT AND DONNA BALSON: HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY LONG ISLAND Joshua Hecht is a living treasure. He is endearingly coy about his exact age but suffice to say he is old enough to have worked alongside the great singers of the Golden Era, counting amongst his close personal friends people such George London, Cornell MacNeil and Leonard Bernstein. To list every superstar with whom he has collaborated would take up far toO much space. Here are just a few: Placido Domingo, Joan Sutherland, Erich Leinsdorf, Leontyne Price, Karl Böhm, Lily Pons, Beverly Sills etc.. I could go on. Most significantly, his OWN singing teacher was Rosa Ponselle so that his musical pedigree stretches back well beyond a human span to another era of vocal greatness. Quite dizzying really. Joshua’s wife, Donna Balson, is a consummate musician. Donna accompanies his lessons. She is an established singer and a superb pianist, able to sight read extremely difficult music. She once learnt the title role in Lulu in three weeks - a mind boggling feat, to those who know the work! Joshua talks jocularly of their having one brain. The serious aspect of this is that, given Donna's much younger than Joshua, her complete understanding and assimilation of his musical brain means his life will be effectively as long as that of a 57

Galapagos tortoise. With his brash, salty humour, Joshua is a charismatic character and a fascinating interlocutor. We have many interests in common and are in complete accord in our belief that in order to be the best singer one can possibly be, one must strive to become a cultivated person. As a young man he took a degree in literature so that he and a can for example usefully refer to Proust and Joyce in the course of our work. He was a drinking pal of several of the Beat Generation of US artists. I asked him if he had ever met Norman Mailer (a hero of mine). The answer was yes. "What was he like?" "A pain in the ass!" My lessons with Hecht with Donna Balson at the piano were extraordinary. She was an equal participant in proceedings. Both are professors at the Hofstra University in Long Island and that is where we worked. We started with The Flying Dutchman. Where with Polaski I'd always been being asked to brighten vowels, especially A vowels which I've a tendency to darken, Hecht, typically, had is own jaunty catch phrase to deal with this: "Take yer hat off!" What he was wanting was for me to brighten the sound and free the sound. It became like a periodic bird call in the room - "Take yer hat off!" In the opening recit section of the monologue, Wagner requires the singer to drop down to a bottom G before the music changes into the aria proper. Depending on one's voice type (and certainly in my case, given I'm more of a baritone than a bass-baritone), this note can sound a little weak given its importance. Joshua suggested singing the previous phrase "bis eure letzte Welle sich bricht" softer as a way of balancing things out dynamically so that the final phrase no longer sounds weak but is all of a piece with that which precedes it. This worked very well. Exactly the same thing came up later in the main body of the aria at the point where the Dutchman sings "Dies der Verdamnis schreckgebot". The second iteration of these words drops very low so that it behooves one not to sing the first iteration too loudly. Another thing which came up again having been worked on in the Polaski sessions was the placing of consonants, with proper emphasis, on the pitch of the following vowels (as opposed to scooping or digging). In one case, an R being merely flicked, the question of the pitch of the consonant didn't signify. The breakthrough however came when Donna observed an undesirable explosive quality following the initial consonant of notes I'd stepped up to having been careful to pitch the consonant on the correct note. The pent up breath, held back by the consonant, would explode forth when released with the vowel. I found this difficult to correct until she demonstrated. A penny dropped. I respond well to demonstration. Donna also used demonstration to correct my approach to the semi quavers in the prayer section. I've always felt a little awkward when registering the difference between the quavers and the semi-quavers. It tends to feel jerky. Her demonstration of the correct legato quality which still honours the correct rhythm was extremely helpful. Another thing which Hecht is extremely good at dealing with is information overload. It's partly a question of manner, which is a difficult thing to describe, but the point is he realises there's only so much a singer can think about in the moment of singing. One can feel like Kafka's beetle trying to learn to walk when attempting to reproduce all the things one has recently been told in the name of singing technique. The way these things can permeate one's consciousness so that obsessiveness is never far away is perhaps illustrated by the face that I'd just had a dream in which I'd frustratedly declared to Polaski that I just simply couldn't reproduce all the technical advances we'd 58

made every time I opened my mouth to sing. It's just too hard to get it all right always. Indeed in a pressure situation it can be quite dispiriting to find oneself reverting to older, superseded approaches. Hecht is good at the psychology of all this. I always say that one has to be able to short cut to the correct overall feeling, leaving as little as possible to conscious effort and "making" things happen. Knowing me to be a relatively accomplished singer and confident that much of the work will have been assimilated, Joshua will encourage me to sing a passage without thinking about technique (thereby minimising conscious technical inhibition) but just trying to sing expressively. This has the effect of neutralising bad tension and getting the thing back into the body. Basically, my body knows how to sing even if I'm not sure that my brain does! We did some absolutely marvellous work on the role of Wotan. Wotan's Farewell "Leb wohl" from Die Walküre, as well as being an iconic moment of utter glory in the Ring Cycle is also a convenient piece for putting to the test the full gamut of Wagnerian vocal technique tools because it is so full of contrasts. It also comes from a role which is an aspirational one for me. Several people have said they can hear it in my voice. It is the greatest of all roles really (for a man of my voice type). I doubt I'll ever get to do it. I'd have to overcome the psychology of others so that they could imagine and want me in the role. And Rings don't come around that often in the neck of the woods where I'm known - and known specifically as an Alberich. Still, I could name a few singers who've done both roles and I believe I could. To begin with, the surging orchestra and massively orchestrated Valkyrie motive just before the vocal entry mean that every instinct tells one to sing with a massive, stentorian tone. This urge must be resisted. The sound will be big but as Polaski and others have said, in this repertoire especially, dynamic markings are more expression indicators rather than actually being about volume as such. One can achieve a pianissimo colour while still in point of fact producing quite a lot of sound. The first half of the Farewell, despite its agonised passion and the weighty orchestral texture, is actually very intimate. It is a private moment of intense emotion between father and daughter. I remember hearing the great Sir Donald McIntyre (who has sung this role at Bayreuth more times than anyone else) perform Wotan in Walküre live in the Sydney Opera House when I was very much younger than I am now. I was waiting for this great culminating stretch of music. I remember being struck by how gentle and intimate it seemed in his hands. We made real progress in this section adjusting the colour so as to minimise any stentorian tendency. "Take yer hat off!" ejaculated my mentor several times before we paused in order to find a way of optimising the A or O vowels on the top notes. This was when an interesting thing happened. Joshua told me to flatten the back of my tongue. I've never been convinced that this image has been correctly assimilated by me. Surprisingly, Donna (a singer of distinction herself) chipped in to say this way of thinking about the correct technical adjustment had never worked for her either. I asked her how then she went about it. She said she concentrated on allowing the back of the tongue to sit on the lower molars. This clicked for me because I remember advising a lot of young singers to take this 59

approach when I gave masterclasses a few years ago. She said she'd seen many young singers take like a duck to water to the flattening the tongue approach but that she'd always struggled with it. The fact that she and I had a problem with it when many other less experienced singers assimilated it instantly she put down to differences in the tongue length. Possibly. Who can say.. Joshua reserves the tongue sides on lower molars for E and I vowels. Works a treat on high notes. For me and Donna it has wider usage. That's the difference. Another way trick for optimising the vowel on a high note is to sing it once with a straight tone. This works because it's impossible to cover a straight tone. Having thus established the correct shape one can then sing it properly with healthy vibrato. When one works with one person intensely, it can temporarily take one's focus away from the basic tenets of one's ongoing work with another person. My work with Polaski had a great focus on high, bright, forward resonate with images involving the cheekbones, the bridge of the nose being like the opening flap on a cuckoo clock and a laser like sound with everything in that front part of the face which protrudes through the hole in an MRI (her image). This had taken my attention away from a fundamental Hechtian tenet. But first I must explain how we came to revisit it. Just as an elephant looks very different from different angles, aspects of vocal technique can be approached in different ways so that the thing in question and the solutions to the problems pertaining to it seem very different and so require very different imageries. One student will respond to one way of approaching it, another to another. In this instance it was a question of breathing. There's a lot of nonsense taught out there by swarms of alleged singing teachers about breathing. How some of these constantly regurgitated ideas ever got a foothold is anybody's guess. Probably something from the bel canto era was misunderstood or corrupted in translation, and was passed on by a distinguished singer (their eminence being no guarantee of that person's being a good teacher!) to a distinguished student and so on, so that it became a sort of pervasive false wisdom. Joshua believes in breathing into the chest (as opposed to imagining breathing "low" or "supporting down and out" or any of that nonsense - and don't get him started on soft-palateraisers! It closes the throat for heaven's sake!). I was trying to sustain the second part of Wotan's Farewell. Very demanding. He wanted my to raise the sternum as I breathed in. The problem with this for me was that this always feels like a postural adjustment rather than a function of the dynamism of breath. Truth be told, I've tended to think more of the sides and backs of the rib cage as being like bellows. This seemed to stand me in good stead for roles like Amonasro. The problem with this is that there's a danger of hunching over which is bad. I've heard of singers consciously going for a gorilla posture and I used to think there was something to that but I'm afraid it's wrong. I thought on one of the runs through that really working the muscles just below the sternum had worked well. After all, I've many times heard teachers tell students "that was good but you had to work didn't you!". The idea of "having to work" feels virtuous. The problem is that with increasing age one cannot rely on youthful vigour and besides, these roles are so huge and demanding, the minimum effort way must be found at all times if they're to be performed optimally and the singer is to have a long career. Donna felt we had to sort this out because the work out of the sub-sternum muscles wouldn't be sustainable. So back to the sternum. I was honest about the fact that what he 60

was asking for felt like postural adjustment rather than breath dynamism. Taking this on board, he changed tack. He had me think of the "pouches" inside the base of the neck. By focussing on the base of the neck with its connection to the chest below without losing the connection upwards to the forward resonators, the problem was solved. I felt grounded and safe again and reconnected to a basic Hechtian tenet of which I'd lost sight as a result of an extended period of focussing on different things. When he laid hands on me while I was singing, my sternum was now revealed to be behaving correctly. As I said, this all took place in relation to the lyrical, achingly beautiful and very difficult to sustain second half of the Farewell. Many's the time I've wondered at how the greatest of all Wotans, Hans Hotter, made it seem So effortless. For one of the runs through, Joshua asked me to mark it. I knew what he was up to. He wanted a more caressing tone. He wanted to head off my tendency to give 100% all the time. But Donna wouldn't allow us to start without clarification. I'm literal minded enough to take his request that I mark literally. She knew this. I pointed out that when marking I drop high notes an octave and I assumed he didn't want that. The problem was that in my previous go through I'd been dropping my larynx in an effort to produce a rounder sound. An attempt at a "Lieder voice". Joshua had said Hotter's trick was to sing it like Lieder. But in thinking about Hotter I was automatically and unconsciously trying to produce his tone (an impossible thing to do, his cavernous voice having been much darker than mine). In the event, I tried again with a "Lieder voice", but MY Lieder voice. No dropping the larynx. No manufacturing. On Joshua's instructions I kept my mouth small and concentrated on making beautiful sounds. I was quite proud of the result. We also did a little taking-the-hat-off work on Klingsor. It's not necessary for me to go into details as all the things we did were versions of the adjustments made in relation to the other repertoire which I've detailed above. I will mention the anecdote he told me relating to his days as a Klingsor. He liked the role because one could turn up late and leave early. The Amfortas would cross his path on his way out, having attended to his Act 1 duties, to get in a few games of squash while Hecht was busy with Act 2, and then pass him again as he returned for Amfortas's Act 3 bits and Joshua was heading home. It's that sort of connection to Wagnerian opera of the golden era which I can only get from someone like Hecht. There are very few still alive. There are probably none who can also teach at his level. He combines an extraordinarily long memory and a treasury of life experiences (this is the man who rubbed shoulders with the stars of the Beat Generation, rolled his eyes at Norman Mailer's boorishness in late night Manhattan haunts and knocked about with Bernstein - and that's before we even get to the great singers!) with a pedagogical genius. I'm so lucky to know him. And one mustn't forget the incredible Donna Balson. With her presence, a lesson becomes a supercharged experience.

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LA DONNA DEL LAGO: METROPOLITAN OPERA While in New York I took in a performance of La Donna del Lago at The Metropolitan Opera. In high spirits, I bought a fist full of Wagner CDs at the Met Shop. A Rossini opera wouldn't have been my first choice, but it was the best of what was on offer during the period I was in NYC. I was trying to think if I'd ever seen a serious Rossini opera live. I've certainly never been in one. I saw William Tell on the television once, and have listened to them on CD but, no, my live Rossini experiences have all been comic. Anyway, I steeled myself for the endless cadential figures which all sound the same and the musical diarrhoea of melisma signifying nothing (except technical virtuosity). In the event however I actually really enjoyed it. I wasn't emotionally affected but I was charmed. The melodic invention is deft and very lovely. The lightly stylised production was traditional enough to allow me to waft back to the stand and sing, diva-power era of Italian opera. I couldn't see the faces from where I was but the acting was natural and physically expressive. The singing was very fine (with the exception of one role). I was especially impressed by the vocal perfection of the performance of the singer playing the incognito King as well as the mezzo playing the pants role of the lover. The latter avoided the potential absurdity flowing from her very female physique in a male role compounded by a bottom enhancing kilt etc by the power and finesse of her artistry. I was aware of a colossal contrast between this experience and that of attending Götterdämmerung in Munich. Readers will remember all the reservations I had about that. The thing was that seeing this undemanding production of an undemanding Rossini opera altered my view at the level of overall impression and with hindsight of the Munich Wagner performance. Certainly it's a temperamental thing but I found myself yearning for the seriousness of the enterprise in Munich. In the Rossini one was aware that the whole affair was to a large extent a diva vehicle. The moment the diva appeared there was a huge round of applause and never mind the music. This had the charm of the old world customs appertaining to opera - lorgnettes, chatter throughout, peering at the titled folk attending rather than at the stage, performers bringing their own costumes - the last remnant of that world (there was perhaps another: the very audible talking of an elderly couple nearby). 62

This treating of opera as an aristocratic divertissement is very far removed from a vital engagement with it as serious art possessed of a higher purpose. The Wagner production was in my view deeply flawed and suggestive of a high handed attitude of the part of a director who was under a misapprehension as to his place in the servant/master relationship between himself and Wagner. But it was still full of ideas, even if many of them were bad. There was still a cultural assumption that this was a serious, important and necessary enterprise; that a masterpiece like Götterdämmerung is essentially inexhaustible and amenable of an infinitude of interpretations. The performers too, the reader will remember, achieved wonders working within the parameters of the production inflicted on them (who knows what they thought of it.. A professional always treats whatever it is and whatever his objectives views about it might be as if it were the greatest and most important thing in the world) which in turn bespoke a serious mindedness on their part. In the Munich Wagner production, one's mind, even when rebelling at aspects of the production, was fizzing with literary analogies, musical assonances, all sorts of philosophical and historical references, films, plays - you name it! There was so much packed into the production and performance. By contrast, this Rossini was a divertissement and vehicle for vocal display with no real cerebral component to chew on - or get cross about! It was INOFFENSIVE. And being a serious opera, there weren't even any (intentional) jokes. Actually, the Druids were pretty funny. One wallowed in the tunes and the masterful musical craftsmanship of Rossini with one's brain switched off. At least it would've been switched off were it fact for the fact of my being a singer because my mind, with little else to engage it, turned in a volitionless fashion to vocal technical matters. As a fellow professional, I was very impressed indeed with the technical facility on display. Alas, I find vocal technique in itself a dull subject. Necessary to master but dull. It's the aesthetic component that engages me and on this level in relation to La Donna del Lago, all I could do was take off my Germanic hat and try as hard as I could to enter into the spirit of the thing and enjoy Rossini's splendid (except for the endlessly samey elements!) for the wonderful thing it is.

Outside the Metropolitan Opera, NYC. 63

VIGNETTES: FORAYS INTO CULTURE. A fantastic manifestation of the interdisciplinary mentality which I keep going on about and without which true High Culture cannot exist is the Wellcome Collection in London. It's a giant cabinet of curiosities combining art, medical science and anthropology. Here are some of the things I saw, including a life mask of Beethoven!

In the Times of 7 September I found an article in which the actor (not the scientist), Brian Cox, said that young actors are so uninterested in the roots of their craft that the probably wouldn't know who Laurence Olivier was! This is very much in line with the cultural amnesia I've discovered amongst young singers studying at the tertiary level whose ignorance the great singers and the operatic canon can be astonishing. I had the opportunity to discuss this situation with distinguished British Wagnerian bass-baritone Michael Druiett. In his opinion, the situation in Britain is very similar in Britain, with regard both to young singers' ignorance and the narrowing of repertoire as a result of decreasing funding and dumbing down. Nevertheless, he spoke enthusiastically of the premiere of a Philip Glass opera in which he'd been involved. That this should happen as part of a company's ordinary season as opposed to in a festival is encouraging. One of points made repeatedly by Fellows on the night of the Churchill Fellowship Ceremony dinner, and the following day at the fire station both in speeches and in one on one conversations was that it is important to have a good time and include sightseeing and so forth in one's Churchill project schedule. Because of the nature of my project and my notions of what constitutes relaxation and recreation, my extra-curricula activities are almost always grist to the mill. It's a fundamental belief of mine that cultural omnivorousness is vital for a serious performing artist. I won't describe every gallery and 64

museum visit but here as an example is a photographic record of my visit to Fenton House in Hampstead (the extraordinary historic musical instruments, not to mention the plethora of gorgeous specimens of the plastic arts including a painting by one of my favourite painters Walter Sickert depicting a performance of La ci darem from Don Giovanni): Other UK cultural feasts were devoured at The Wallace Collection, Kenwood House, Chatsworth House and Estate, The Tate Liverpool, Tatton Park, The Imperial War Museum North, Brockhampton Estate and the enthralling Elgar Birthplace Museum, and the Holst museum. At a small museum and municipal gallery in Buxton I found these evidences of the provincial cultural life of yesteryear. I was particularly interested in the advertisement for the Mechanics' and Literary Intistitute, redolent as it was of an era before people had the idea, encountered so frequently today amongst the young, they'd they'd sprung fully and perfectly formed into the world, making self improvement something which could be dismissed as a tiresome prospect. On the contrary, Mechanics' Institutes (something my wife has described to me in connection with her Yorkshire forbears) were a marvellous thing and a function of a widely accepted notion that time away from work could be used for something much more productive than passively experienced, mindless entertainment. To ordinary, humble folk, the need for ongoing self cultivation was obvious.

These people understood the notion of the Onus of Intelligibility even if they didn't call it that. Of course, in many an Australian country town one will see humble edifices of a certain age declaring themselves in low relief to ‘Institutes’ or ‘Schools of the Arts’ or something similar, but, significantly, they tend to be used for other purposes nowadays. People would rather squander their evenings watching television programmes about people vying to cook the best souffle or tarte tatin.

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In the course of my travels, I visited Durham Cathedral. This is a truly awesome edifice. It provided a species of illustration of my nebulous views regarding the importance of context/environment both for making religious belief easier and, by an analogous process, for making the beauty and absolute value of high art plain. This also involves a cross fertilisation whereby the juxtaposition of aesthetic entities produces an experience, the profundity of which is not just the sum of the experience of the two but something exponentially greater. So I was wandering around, gazing in wonder at the glorious Piranesean vaulted spaces and Brobdignagian columns and thinking how one doesn't have to be religious to experience a sense of the numinous, when the organist started practicing for Evensong and I found myself in an emotional state which guaranteed that these few moments would stay with me for life as being something like transcendent. The cultural overload in Germany was extraordinary. Moreover, everywhere the interdependence of the different branches of High Art was manifest. I won't list all the places of cultural significance I visited but suffice it to say that I made sure every spare block of time was filled with cultural nourishment. Of the many galleries I visited, the Gemäldegalerie required two long visits and I still felt I'd only skimmed the surface. Also, I was delighted to have stumbled upon the Sharf Gerstenberg Sammlung. It was chock-ablock full of my favourite non-old master artists. I'll leave it there as to say too much would be beyond the scope of this report.

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In New York, although I went to the MOMA, which is a monster gallery like the Metropolitan, I'll mention two smaller, sublime museums. The Neue Galerie, which contains works by my beloved German political expressionists from the inter-war period (as well as the mega-famous Klimts which are less to my taste) and the Morgan Library and Museum. The latter (for a change!) wasn't crowded. It's like heaven. The library has to be seen to be believed. I saw original manuscripts by Schubert, Brahms, Mozart and others as well as literary manuscripts by Dickens, Thackeray, Hemingway and King John!

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OBSERVATIONS The thoughts I'll ventilate in the next paragraph are somewhat abstruse, speculative and tentative (apologies in advance!). I'm not religious. My sense of the numinous is sublimated into my appreciation of art. In the course of my travels I attended a Bach organ recital in a beautiful church with some people who were active parishioners of the church in question. As I listened to this glorious music , especially when we got to the sublime Prelude and 67

Fugue in C minor BWV 546, , my mind turned to the subject of the effect of context on both religious belief and the appreciation of art. I've for many years been pondering of the exponential intensification of the aesthetic response which can occur when two things of an aesthetic nature are experienced simultaneously. Put crudely, the experience is more one of X x Y than X + Y. The metaphor I use is the creation of a circuit by the connection of two points which causes a light globe to illuminate. It might be Albinoni's Adagio playing as my Dad's coffin was carried from the church or the Dies Irae accompanying the opening credits of Kubrick's The Shining or reading an 18th Century novel with Couperin on the Hifi. Anyway, as I listened, it seemed to me that there was a related phenomenon having to do with the effect of environment on one's capacity for belief. In the course of my reading of biographies, memoirs and published diaries, I have noticed that some people, whom one might suspect, based on their rather earth bound proclivities, their education and general outlook, to be resolutely secular, turn out to be regular church goers. I've also heard of people declaring themselves to be atheists but culturally Anglican - which I COMPLETELY understand, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying now. I think that certain environments and cultural contexts make religious belief easier. The ancient church architecture and sense of, say, Anglicanism, being a cultural given which affects everything mean that religious belief doesn't seem so paradoxical in an era of modern science and one's reason is that much less able to undermine faith inculcated during childhood. Architecture, stained glass and Bach: the intoxicating effect of this cocktail start to seem much more real and present and significant (in the moment) than the scientific world view. The sense of history and cultural belonging can reinforce this, making it seem that church involvement is simply a normal and perhaps indispensable part of one's sense of self as a civilised member of British society. Taking these thoughts further, it seemed to me (by analogy), that it would be easier for someone who'd grown up in Germany to believe in the self evident value of Wagner. Basically what I'm doing is spelling out what I mean when I say that Wagner is especially vulnerable in Australia because of our geographical remoteness from the wellsprings of European High Art. We have no European baroque cathedrals in Australia in which to listen to Bach. We don't have examples of, or monuments to, German Kunst literally built into the physical environment. Of course all is not lost. Wagner (and Bach) can be performed anywhere and be epiphanic. All I'm saying is that it's possible a certain level of experience might be missed here in Australia, so that the value of European High Art and its concomitant indispensability might not be taken as self evident. I've seen evidence of this. On an episode of Q and A, an audience member (she didn't sound stupid despite what she had to say) demanded to know why we should be bothering with Dickens in Australia because it wasn't Australian, comprehensively failing to grasp the eternal and universal "relevance" of great works of art. Happily, Miriam Margolyes was on the panel and took up the opportunity to challenge this notion. More recently, I was recently chatting on this general subject area with a member of staff at the English Touring Opera. She told me that English National Opera had been heavily criticised for "self indulgence" because it staged The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (I've anglicised the name because ENO perform exclusively in English)! That such attacks should pass muster as being all well within the realm of reasonable debate is truly shocking to me. 68

End of world stuff. An OPERA company has the temerity to do Mastersingers! Heaven forfend! This sort of reverse snobbery and inability to see or acknowledge the intrinsic, absolute value of such a supreme masterpiece smacks to me of self consciousness and insecurity originating in an inadequate education, a lashing out, no different really from the "they don't teach you that at university" (although combined with different sense of self, so that those making the accusations of "self indulgence" flatter themselves that they are sophisticated in other words we are talking about one's existential sense, conscious or unconscious, of one's class - and are basing their criticisms on nebulous, democratic notions, whereas the true reason for their attitude, lurking at the base of their brains, is an awareness that, not having had the benefit of an education modelled on the Germanic idea of Bildung, five hours of Wagner would be beyond them and show them up, if only to themselves, as philistines). So even in the UK where High Culture has much older and deeper roots, insanity is nipping at the heels of High Art. But to return to the Australian situation.. With these sorts of views (the ‘irrelevance’ of Dickens etc.) abroad (and I've heard populist politicians giving voice to them), rearing their ugly heads in public fora, one sees the need for vigilance and a proactive approach to preservation of High Art as a necessary part of our national life. Getting back to that level of meaning which is perhaps dependent on cultural context and environment: one of course has one's imagination, but for this to provide appreciable compensation, one's "inner garden" must've been properly cultivated. In other words: education. I don't just refer to things being drummed into pupils at school. This is inadequate on its own. The habit must be inculcated of constant self improvement - which is NOT a chore - so that one for instance is always reading a good book. The conversational gambits "Read any good books lately?" or "What are you reading at the moment?" should always be able to be answered adequately. While in the UK I accidentally ended up watching a brief interview with Charles Aznavour (I was waiting for the news headlines!), in which he was keen to register the fact that at 91 years of age he still reads for a minimum of an hour and half every evening for the purpose of self cultivation. If a popular singer can see the importance daily cultural nourishment if he's to be the performer he wants to be, surely we who are involved in the High Arts should be able to see too. That it's essential if we hope and aspire to be first rate performers and civilised human being to boot ought to be obvious. And let us stamp out this idea I've heard that "It doesn't matter what they're reading as long as their reading". The same distinction applies to books as applies to music, film, TV etc etc. There is idle diversion, to be enjoyed sparingly like yummy low nutrition junk food, and that which provides intellectual nutrition. One cannot experience or perform such works in a state of intellectual isolation. There are so many resources and many of them are free or near free. Excellent state library collections, art catalogues with large photographic plates, the Gutenberg Project, superb documentary series on DVD and TV. I really don't understand monomaniacs. An interest in a branch High Culture it seems to me at the gut level necessarily involves SOME degree of interest in all the others (and in history). But I find myself frequently encountering people whose ONLY serious interest is in singing. There cannot be nearly so much osmotic absorption of European High Culture in Australia for the reasons outlined above so the 69

mutual illumination of one experience by another which opens the way greater levels of aesthetic pungency has even less chance of occurring spontaneously. So read, look, listen!

Certain contexts and environments make it easier to believe (thought this while at organ recital gazing at beautiful stained glass window). Analogy with its being easier to believe in the self evident value of, say, WAGNER in Germany than in Australia. My theory about setting up a circuit between two points. Music beside art or with film. One fertilises the other creating a deeper, more pungent experience. In Oz, we have no ornate baroque cathedrals in which to listen to Bach for instance. That circuit, mutual illumination can't happen. One has one's imagination but for this to compensate adequately one's inner garden must've been properly cultivated.

The problem of big voices, which tend to mature much later, is that of being passed over if favour of glitzy ‘packages’ who fizz out after a few years, so that there's a risk of those people with big voices becoming discouraged and abandoning their career, is one which is clear to those few who have healthy instincts and expertise. But the tide of this decadent world is against them. I was lucky enough to be able to persist. I was interested to read of the usefulness conventional paths being challenged. This reflects my own experience. What really made a difference for me was jumping in at the professional level as soon as possible, making a mess of it and trying to do it better in future while all the time keeping my eyes and open, learning as much as possible. I'm not elevating this to a universal principle. The university/Conservatorium/opera studio path may provide just what some of these young, big voiced singers need. In my own case, however, a general arts degree including literature, history and as much high culture as possible would have provided more of what I needed in the long run. All the things my opera course attempted to teach me I learnt better on the job once I had a toe in the door professionally. Moves to coordinate opera courses with the activities of professional opera companies seem to me very welcome. It's in the real world that the true learning takes place. I was lucky because my secondary college was superb for anyone with an arts/humanities bent so that all my adult interests were seeded then, and my personality meant that I pursued all these cultural interests of my own accord once I'd left school. Then, having been heavily involved in amateur and pro-am shows in my youth, I got work (chorus and solo work on an opera for children) with a professional company (The Victoria State Opera) very early on. There was a certain amount of bloody minded persistence on my part, while now forgotten young singers around me were feted. Along came young artist programmes which were intense and exhausting and, because they required one to do everything and anything, caused vocal confusion and occasional floundering. But I survived and was gathered into the profession as a fully fledged professional. But I was still doing roles from every Fach I could even vaguely reach and this sort of versatility, though it can make one quite an attractive prospect as a general factotum workhorse, is dangerous. When the voice rebels at being pulled in all directions, it's rare for compunction to be shown on the part of opera companies and a singer will generally just be discarded. I duly had my vocal crisis but managed to come back from it. So, as I say, I was lucky and am still here.

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I persisted under my own steam with my general cultural education. I also persisted despite the fact that I was no natural singer and was committed to a less than ideal opera course. My blundering ineptitude did not stop me from getting early professional experience (my bull in a china shop enthusiasm eliciting a sympathetic response from audition panel). I managed to find JUST enough work and was supported by my wife during the long period when many flash in the pan small voiced singers were being raised aloft. A particular artistic director whose priority was voices rather than looks gave me a chance in a big role and I enjoyed success. I came through the long period of being too versatile and came back from a vocal crisis thanks to a surgeon who was prepared to operate on my cords. Then finally I came into my own. I was the right age for the roles I was meant to sing and I knew a thing or two about how to do my job. But any one of the above mentioned hurdles could've spelled the end. I'm sure there are many might-have-been first rate Wagnerians who are not singing. There ARE ways - one might call them repertoire paths - which allow of a bridge from youth to maturity and the possibility of Wagner. But the will to do things properly and the necessary support are scarce.

In the garden at the birthplace of composer Edward Elgar

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CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS It is true that for the foreseeable future, much of the detailed work - minuscule refinements of language, scholarly decisions regarding musical matters - will, in a sense (but only in a sense) be "wasted" so far as the majority of audience members are concerned. But this work must continue. It is vital for the following reasons: if we lose our idealism, we've lost the battle. Sure, this is live theatre with all the practical realism that involves. But it is also High Art, so that it must be approached with reverence and in a spirit of constant striving for perfection (in the knowledge that true perfection is unattainable) inspired by the sure and certain knowledge that these are supreme masterpieces, of absolute, not just relative, value. If we are to take the hard path and embrace the universal panacea of education as being the solution, we have to inculcate the necessary habits into our young singers and wait for them to achieve something like true serious mindedness and for audiences to catch up. Persistence, humility and serious mindedness - it needs to become obvious again to our young people that these qualities are indispensable to the achievement of real success. They need to realise that some things, generally the best and most important things, take TIME. There are no short cuts (c.f. Andras Schiff). Success and achievement are not winning the lotto, getting on the television and being a ‘celebrity’. They need to understand that great art and all those things which can provide the most enriching, intellectually nourishing and profound experiences in life tend to demand something of one. There is an onus of intelligibility and that onus rests with oneself. Someone who's only interested in being passive in the face of great art - who perhaps speaks of liking to let it ‘wash over him / her’ , who has a short attention span (and could be mistaken for taking a pride in it), letting drop comments about Wagner's being boring, someone who sees no category distinction between High Art and popular entertainment - does not understand that they function differently . Such qualities and attitudes bespeak the trivial mentality of a person who's useless to the cause of High Art. Any influence he or she might be allowed to have will be pernicious as he or she will advocate dumbing down, opera as circus or defacto musical - or strip show. Moreover, hisor her short attention span is especially fatal when applied to the focus of this report: Wagnerian opera. It is essential that young people start listening to the great recordings. That so many of them should be so apathetic about it when they've ostensibly devoted their professional lives to this field of endeavour is baffling. I have observed that in some cases, fault lies with the teachers. There are out there in the conservatoria and music schools mixed in with the first rate teachers and academics people who are simply not serious. There are all sorts of reasons for this amongst which would be the fact that declining academic standards and the decline of vocal pedagogy are no new things, so much so that a good many teachers are the products of non-serious training. It is essential that young people understand that if they are empty vessels - if they've no culture, haven't read anything, haven't concerned themselves with High Art, take no interest in history etc etc - nothing interesting can come out of them. One cannot fake or fluke High Art anymore than one can bang away at a typewriter and fluke a Shakespeare play. But while resisting the urge to boot them up their backsides, one should consider that they've likely been traduced by the self esteem movement (the idea that 72

you're intrinsically wonderful whether or not you or anyone else can adduce any reasons for saying this) and possibly teachers who themselves have trivial minds and are incapable of seeing the obvious. So in conclusion, let us be clear: the long, arduous path is the only path. But it is also the satisfying and joyous path. There's a Newtonian quality to the equation: the authenticity and integrity of the process times its scale and duration equals the success enjoyed in the long run. The satisfaction this entails at the level of the individual and the cultural enrichment of society which should constitute our goal far, far outweigh any short term, quick fix solution to be got, via passively experienced exercises in idle diversion served up by the dumbing down ringmasters. Of course there is nothing wrong with a spot of mindless amusement. The problems start when out of politeness (heaven forbid we should ever suggest something is in some absolute sense plain better than something else) or philistine stupidity, the difference between high culture with its universality and civilising influence, superficially involving the same elements, is lost sight of. The line between a Fellini masterpiece and a formulaic low brow action film, the success of which can be quantified easily on the basis of box office, the difference between a Thomas Mann novel and a banal airport novel, between Wagner and a commercial musical, must not be allowed to be washed away in a tide of sluggish apathy. As noted above, the success of popular entertainment is quantifiable and relative. High art is valuable absolutely. It is also universal so that a great novel by Tolstoy or Proust will have more truth than many a collection of "facts" to be found in an average work of history. Moreover, because of their universality they naturally arrange themselves into canons about which the best minds eventually reach a rough consensus. This should be a naturally conservative process. Otherwise many babies get thrown out with the bath water (I think of what had happened and was happening to education when I was going through school). The most revolutionary and experimental truly great artists all learnt the rules before they broke them. Joyce, Picasso, Wagner. They were also cultivated people and were the product of Bildung at a time when what it meant to have completed one's education was understood and when it seemed obvious that it was a prerequisite to specialisation. Bring this back to singing specifically: I am firmly of the belief that a course of general studies in high culture and history should be a large and mandatory part of any course in singing/opera. The other, monomaniacal path leads only to a greater or lesser degree of mediocrity. Pretty but meaningless sounds, a glittering surface with a howling voids just behind it. Straight theatre actors provide an interesting contrast. If they're worthy of the name, their whole lives are their preparation. Theirs is not a discipline where all seems to hinge on a mechanical physical skill like coordinating the muscles necessary to sing a top C or stand en point. If they don't take the long path via their senses, if they don't cultivate their inner gardens, they have nothing. Of course young singers are able to pull off fine performances full of youthful enthusiasm and precocity. Nevertheless, one has seen many a youthful opera performance full of that sort of wooden limbed, glazed eyed acting which is the product of a combination of being transfixed by vocal technical considerations and a lack of engagement due to ignorance or apathy. For the aspiring actor this could never be an option. Where a young tenor might get away with much on account of being one of a rare breed with the top notes, an actor cannot. 73

I suppose one might say a matinee idol type might get by on his looks but if that's all he has to offer then he's not a real actor. My comparison is with real actors. I have seen young actors achieve outright miracles. I suppose I'm wondering if something might be learnt from straight actors. I've learnt a very great deal from working with straight actors and theatre directors. I was delighted to hear Sir Derek Jacobi give voice to my views in his documentary on Garrick when he said that what he (Jacobi) did was more craft than art. Jacobi was being modest but the fact is we performers are basically craftsmen. Sir Anthony Sher too, in an interview on the BBC, emphasised the primary importance of craft, specifically with reference to the speaking of Shakespeare (the point came up when discussion turned to the unwelcome phenomenon of mumbling amongst younger actors performing the Bard's works). There are a tiny handful of performers who are artists. But even as humble craftsmen, we need the tools of our trade and it would be helpful if young singers could be brought to see a certain level of intellectual cultivation beyond the narrow confines of singing as being an essential tool of the trade. To narrow it further, young singers of Wagnerian potential - those who seem to have in embryo the vocal heft - must be identified early. They must be given to understand that for them it'll likely be a longer gestation period as their voices will probably be at their peak for Wagner at a later age. Meanwhile, their mandatory programme of general education in the humanities should contain specifically Wagnerian elements. For example Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, the ancient sagas and how they relate to Wagner. Of all singers they MUST listen to the great recordings of the past. Some casting decisions nowadays defy comprehension and can only have been made and accepted both by the performer and the audience in a state of blissful ignorance of how things are meant to sound. What to do about the people making these decisions and the audiences meekly accepting them is a much tougher problem. Education remains the only solution but the scale of the task is daunting given the state things have reached. One can achieve things with individual young singers. They need to be guided through a course of repertoire which will lead them in due course to their Wagnerian goal. They will after all have to earn a living singing other repertoire before they reach Valhalla. I would sound a note of caution with regard to the whole "hasten slowly" ethos: I've observed over the course of my quarter century long singing career (push it up to thirty if you include my amateur efforts), I've observed two approaches, seemingly at odds with each other, operating in parallel. One is more or less constant, the other has burgeoned at certain times depending who the power brokers are at any given time. The fluctuating phenomenon is the one whereby, for all sorts of trashy reasons such as elevating the body beautiful above all other considerations, young singers are put into roles which they're either not ready for or will indeed never be suitable for. In the worst case scenario the voice is wrecked. I've seen this happen more than once. So that's one end of the spectrum. This is a BAD THING! It bespeaks a cultural decadence where even the singer is a throwaway item. The other phenomenon, which is a constant, is the cautious approach of ‘you must never even think of singing so and so for years yet’. Whilst certainly preferable to the previous approach, it is often taken too far. I prefer an attitude of carefully calculated risk taken of the crest of a wave of youthful enthusiasm. Neither retreating into porcelain fragility nor turning 74

Kamikaze. For instance I won second prize in the Met Auditions in my early twenties singing the Dutchman monologue. The adjudicator as she gave me the prize said "Not too many Dutchmans for a while". I had sung an excerpt and received praise from the audience, press and judges. Then TEN YEARS LATER I did the WHOLE ROLE in the Sydney Opera House. Now one of these self important, you-must-not-even-dream-of-singing-thatyet merchants, would've had me bore myself to death singing something others could sing better because young singers must only ever sing Mozart or something. Instead I harnessed my burning enthusiasm and achieved something. The problem is that this version of the hasten slowly philosophy is debased as a result of having remained unexamined. It's just an idea people regurgitate and drags behind it, like cans attached by string to a wedding vehicle, it a whole lot of other ideas which could do with close reexamination. Examples: ‘always include Mozart in auditions’. ‘Always have five contrasting arias including one Mozart, and at least one aria in each of the following languages: Italian, French, German and English’. Oh, and ‘make sure one is baroque and one is twentieth century’. ‘Clever singers could pop in a Russian one’. NO VOICE CAN DO ALL THAT EQUALLY WELL! So some young singer of Wagnerian potential might miss out on a place in an opera course because he or she is made to blunder through some Handel aria in the name of what is really a version of political correctness. I would say, in close consultation with a trusted mentor, choose repertoire you feel comfortable with, repertoire by means of which you feel you can best demonstrate your abilities and communicate your enthusiasm. It's that properly channeled enthusiasm wish impresses people and gives them confidence that you've something to offer. Stretch yourself with things in your lessons which you don't yet find comfortable but develop a sense, with the help of your advisors, of what shows you to your best advantage now, what you'll master some day and what's a hiding to nothing and should be abandoned as a practitioner and experienced only as an audience member. You must sing as if what you're singing is the most important music, the most important poem in the world. Otherwise stop and do something that does interest you. In the abstract, the hasten slowly approach, tempered with calculated risk, is ideal, and I've seen it work in the real world, but not when in practice it boils down to a series of dreary motherhood statements and mindlessly applied received notions. The long path to Wagner can for instance take in Bellini whose works, superficially so different, have an odd affinity with Wagner’s works in vocal terms. Start to bring in carefully selected excerpts from Wagner as the principal way of stoking the fire of enthusiasm along with books and OLD RECORDINGS. But all this assumes the correct identification of a voice of Wagnerian potential in the first place. It always amazes me that O du mein holder Abendstern is given to young baritones as a matter of course, even when it's clear that their only hope of a career is in high light repertoire. It's a really hard aria and actually harder for the young singer who might one day genuinely aspire to the role because when that day comes he will need a heavier, darker voice than the bloke crooning through the aria in the eisteddfod. The WHOLE role being very heavy and strenuous and permanently beyond a light lyric voice. Yet these things go on year after year in a sort of zombiefied ritual. The German Fach system does seem a little restricting but it does avoid such idiocy, and the wastage of vast amounts energy involved, and which is so dispiriting. I would suggest 75

a slightly more relaxed version of the Fach system so that singers felt, so to speak, licensed to be themselves rather than trying to be everything to everyone. I've wasted a lot of time and energy and angst trying to make the latter approach work. If there's one thing I've learnt, it's not to waste my time trying to second guess audition panels. Sure, there are situations where it's a bit more tactical if one is aware of specific roles in the offing. But venture too far from what you really want to sing and it becomes pointless. You can never anticipate all the private prejudices of everyone you'll sing for so don't worry about it. So from here on, I will do all I can to carry out my allotted tasks as a performer with the utmost sincerity and artistic integrity and in the process consciously channel all I've learnt throughout this project into my work. I see myself as being in the service of the work. The work is not a vehicle for my talents although it functions in that way incidentally. I will work with young people, especially those of Wagnerian potential. I will not just be telling them to spread the back of the tongue on an e vowel or open that ö vowel etc (although I will be doing that too). I will see my special task as being to give them a sense of the scale of the task and its interconnectedness with all high culture. Most of all, I will try to get them to look up from and over the tangled thicket of the means (knotty questions of technique etc.) and gaze with respectful and continuing enthusiasm on the shimmering goal. The goal of rendering and doing what justice we can to these sublime masterpieces. What to do about power brokers is a tough one. All we can do is stick to our guns regarding what we know to be true, hoping for a trickle up effect, and lobby for higher education standards. I can, however, reach the audience base via my talks to various music societies. I know I've a knack for this. You can be sure my findings will be thoroughly ventilated in such fora. Thank you again for this most amazing opportunity!

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