Toby the Tenor

Some of my blog posts are for students and young singers who are trying to find their way onto the stage but I hope the same posts lift the lid on the strange world of opera for anyone interested.

Student opera singers start the training process by learning to sing Vaccai, a book of songs which double as exercises for developing breath control and the bel canto style of singing. Soon, students will learn the simpler arias from well known operas and, if they are at a music academy, they will start to string the rudiments of singing while moving and telling a story together in a scene with their fellow students.

It takes time to learn to coordinate, think and sing at the same time. At post-graduate level, singers start to think about complete roles they would like to learn. It’s important their teacher helps them find a role that fits their voice, their character and their musical ability – not all singers are technically skilled musicians, so learning a musically complex role might be beyond them.

Not many baritones are born Don Giovannis but the role of the Don’s sidekick, Leporello, is as interesting and as demanding as any role in the same opera. For most budding baritones, the effort it takes to study and learn a role is better spent on learning Leporello than the Don.

The first full role I ever learnt was Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. It was a fun and central role which required me to act in various guises. It was a good choice for me, being a light, high-lying tenor role while the comedy required me to think about ensemble play and timing. Almaviva became my stock-in-trade for the first ten years of my career.

Learning roles from frequently performed operas is a good preparation for a singer’s early years. The down side is that we tend to learn by copying the vocal mannerisms and characteristics of the singers well known for a certain role. When I was a student, all the baritones copied Thomas Allen and Thomas Hampson. Then Erwin Schrott came along and everyone wanted to perform it like him. If you want to develop your authentic stage persona, to find the real you in a role, learn a role without referencing someone else’s performance of it. I wrote the same thing in the auditions posts… be authentic, be YOU.

So much of what we portray when we sing comes from deep within us. It’s the nature of singing; we can’t hide who we are when we sing, so the more of ourselves we can put into a role the more believable and three dimensional we will become on stage. I remember approaching my first roles as if I had to fulfil their prescribed requirements. It’s a natural mistake to make because the performers we see taking roles when we are students are usually very accomplished performers who have sung roles many times and have countless stage miles on their professional tachometer. Copying them is a way to accelerate the process of creating one’s characterisation but it’s not a portrayal born of individuality, of thought, of authenticity.

Reading around the piece is a more robust route to building an interpretation of one’s own – it’s the fun part of learning a new role, anyway. Operas are nearly always based on literary texts – read the original. It sounds obvious but I am often surprised by how few singers read the original text. Herman Melville’s original novella of Billy Budd added reams of detail to the way I wanted to play Captain Vere. In preparing the role, I also visited Portsmouth to do a tour of HMS Victory to get a feel for life on a C18th 104-gun first-rate ship. I added to my research by studying the history of naval mutinies that kicked-off on board ships of the Royal Navy in the same period. I learnt about the strict discipline in the navy and the need for zero-tolerance public punishments that suppressed the powder keg of a ship’s crew’s animus towards its officers. The more I read, the more I knew how to be Captain Vere, caught in a dilemma between observing the rules of duty and trusting his instincts.

I had the same experience when studying Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s poetic source text reveals all the characters in exquisite detail. after reading the original, I knew Pushkin’s characters like they were my friends. I invested in Lensky’s proud vanity and his insecurity, working with the director Deborah Warner to find simple ways to show the audience who he was. The word for a person who writes plays is a playwright. It’s a great word, especially in the case of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky’s opera, because the plot and characterisations are intricately engineered to inform each other like clockwork. Such a drama is wrought, like a ship is wrought, enabling it to sail without being vulnerable to implausibility or doubt.

Deborah’s masterstroke in her production was to reveal Lensky’s pride and vulnerability when it was too late to excuse him for it. As he took his gun, he reached into his pocket and took out a wiry pair of glasses. Only at the last minute did we discover that he was out of his depth and horribly mismatched in the duel with Onegin. In Deborah’s version, the plot driver was as much Lensky’s ineptitude as it was Onegin’s ennui. It was a detail born of reading the source text and greatly informed my reading of the whole role.

C19th opera was as close to mass produced popular culture as was possible to find at the time it was written. It was written to shock, entertain and change its audiences by holding the mirror up to them. It is the duty of opera singers to think of ways to make operas as relevant today as they were when they were written. Unearthing the detail to inform a full characterisation takes time and is better done during the learning process, as opposed to the rehearsal process, to allow ideas to take root.

The first time I performed Death In Venice on stage, I arrived at the rehearsals thinking I would be wearing a linen suit, a hat and wandering around canals looking hot and bothered. The production team set about describing their concept on our first morning of rehearsals. No suit, no hat, no canals. Instead, I was to be Kurt Cobain and the story was a revisiting of his childhood as I, playing Cobain, spun out in the drug and booze addled final twenty four hours of his life before shooting himself. All my research was for nothing. I still think directors would be well advised to send out a treatment for their concept at least two weeks before rehearsals begin, allowing the cast to align their preparation with the creative team’s expectations. For some reason, no-one does.

The learning itself is a laborious task. Memorising is mostly graft. I have discovered my memory is most absorbent before 9am. I learnt Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, written in Sanskrit and set to repetitive music, by getting up early in the morning and drilling the text over and over again in 20 minute bursts, testing myself as I went. After a break I would repeat the process for another 20 minutes. I would do this for two to three hours every day for a month until I had memorised it all. Packing texts and music into your head is the beginning of the memorising process after which you have to familiarise the newly absorbed material. A colleague once said to me that he did not consider a role learnt until he could sing it while distracted, by which he meant if could sing a role while ironing or doing the washing up then he was confident in his memorisation of a role.

Once memorised, take it to be coached. An hour with a good coach who knows the opera and the repertoire is worth ten hours with one who doesn’t. An experienced coach will give you perspectives on a role that can only come from experience. The best ones will know where a singer can save their energy in order to be ready to give their all where it counts.

Early in my career, I had the luck to be cast as David in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg. It was to be Tony Pappano’s last production as Music Director of La Monnaie in Brussels before taking up the baton at Covent Garden. Tony was keen for me to be well prepared before rehearsals began and, knowing I was still young and inexperienced, took it upon himself to come to my flat in Highbury on three occasions at the end of long days of recording with Placido Domingo at Abbey Road Studios, to work on David with me. I still think of him sitting at my piano, schooling me in exaggerating the text as I sang, filling my David with his boundless energy and work ethic.

Tony’s generosity with detail and experience equipped me with a full and individual reading of David with which I could make the role my own. After Brussels I went on to perform the role in Geneva, Edinburgh Festival, the Royal Opera and twice in Paris.