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SEEN
AND HEARD INTERVIEW
Graham Clark –
Still curious, still learning … and still going! An
Interview with Jim Pritchard (JPr)
So this is
only your second production of ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’?
Yes,
as the
only other time I’ve been in it was when I sang Hoffmann for
English National Opera in 1978 so it is a huge privilege to be
invited to do something like this particularly at the Royal Opera
House. I think it is a good piece and I now have four characters
rather than just one to perform and it’s marvellous. I can play
around with them in completely diverse ways. They are all short
roles obviously – the French expression is ‘grotesques’ – and they
are an Offenbach speciality. He liked to make fun of certain
people within Society. With his own theatre he used to find out
who was in the audience that evening and would change the singers’
text to comment on who was there. I have just been the ‘Fool’ in Reimann’s Lear in Frankfurt and in some ways it is the
same. In Offenbach the characters get given a name but in
Shakespeare they don’t. The ‘Fool’ has no family baggage but he is
still important because he says cryptic things that are pertinent to the moment. With Shakespeare they entertain us or
philosophise but of course with Offenbach they are only
commentators about what is going on.
What is your
idea about the four characters?
Well Andrès
is a clever little know-all, he is well-dressed and has a position
in society - somehow he has money though maybe he made it
illegally. Cochenille in the Olympia scene is one of Spalanzani’s
creations that is not working 100% - certainly not as well as the
doll, Olympia, but even she breaks down in the end. Pittichinaccio
is somebody else entirely and gets Giuletta at the end of the
Venice scene. At the end there is Frantz the old and doddery
servant. It is quite fascinating to portray these four different
people. I can call on characteristics that I see around me on the
street or on the underground or on a bus.
Although an
early important public performance was here at Covent Garden and
you were not too long ago back here as the Captain in
Wozzeck
you have not sung as often here as some other opera houses
throughout the world. Why is this?
Well don’t
forget that for many years I was a member of ENO. I have sung in
most of the world’s major opera houses but oddly enough I haven’t
been to Australia and it was an Australian, Richard Bonynge, who
got me into the opera business through performing in this opera
house.
Before I
came into music I worked for the Sports Council in England and
after a promotion in the mid 1970s I had flexi-hours and I took
singing lessons as a hobby with Bruce Boyce who was based in
London. I thought, 'why don’t I start singing in one or two choruses
in some of the festivals to broaden my knowledge?' When I was in
Wexford I was approached by somebody who wanted to represent me.
My initial reply was ‘No thank you as I have a fabulous job and am
only doing this as a hobby.’ When I was told it could be just for
extra work at weekends or when I was free I thought that would be
fine but I never wanted to be considered as a full-time singer.
Very shortly after that, I was asked to audition for Richard Bonynge. At the time I didn’t even know who he was until I was
told he was Joan Sutherland’s husband. The audition didn’t go that
well I thought, but a message came back a couple of days afterwards
that Richard would like me to sing at a gala for the Darwin
Hurricane Relief Fund at Covent Garden in ten day’s time then go
to Vancouver the following Spring to sing Camille de Rosillon in a
new production of The Merry Widow. I didn’t know what to do
but I certainly wanted to do the gala. Although it didn’t go as
well as I wanted to because of the big occasion,
Scottish Opera’s
Peter Hemmings heard me and invited me to audition for them. That
must have gone well because they offered me a full-time contract.
So that was how I started in opera.
I had been
working for the Sports Council for four years and to be truthful
had itchy feet. I felt that something was happening now in my
life and it was a chance I would regret if I did not pursue it.
The Sports Council were very good and said they would have me back
if it didn’t work out, so I went to Scottish Opera in 1975 as a
totally raw beginner and started to learn the business;
and that’s
how I came into it. It’s been a big learning curve ever since and
I’m still finding things out. I didn’t know these four Hoffmann
characters before I began to rehearse them, neither did I know
Narr in the Reimann opera I’ve just done,
and I recently sang Aegisth for the first time. I’m still finding roles in my late 60s
I can do for the first time and it is a great thrill
- and when I started never dreamt that could happen. I was a total philistine as
I hadn’t the training or the knowledge of people who had been to
music college so I had to learn by doing. Now clearly there will
be things that work and others that do not. There are some things
I clearly wouldn’t want to do again and in
which I fell flat on my face and
there are others which I’ve really enjoyed doing and have been
able to come back to several times and make it better each time.
The great
joy is to approach everything as though it is the first time.
Anyway, it is always a different situation and it’s never the same
twice. It’s a different opera house, different colleagues,
different conductor, different production and different costumes.
I love rehearsals and every time you do something,
you can find
something new : and even with these four characters now,
though
they have very little to say. But each time they sing something it
is pertinent and I have got to find the right pacing and precision
for it and that only comes from doing it over and over again and
trying it out while rehearsing.
I wonder
whether you have watched the DVD of this Schlesinger production.
I have
deliberately not, although
I have bought it and might put it on after the first or second
performance. I don’t want to be conditioned by someone else’s
approach and it has been great to be confused and baffled as we
have gone through the rehearsal as to what I do next. It’s been a
challenge each day. The revival director,
Christopher Cowell, is extremely well prepared and we’ve been putting it
together very carefully. It’s been analysed, broken down, stopped
and started over and over again, so although it is a revival he has
gone back to what was John Schlesinger’s original vision as far as
possible and recreated that. The choreographer
Eleanor Fazan, has
been in on rehearsals all the time and she remembers what the
original impetus for the various things was. We’ve been rehearsing
for three weeks already with about two more to go and that is a
lot of time for a revival. Very often some of the big opera houses
would throw something like this on in three days and
it can
founder but we have had the luxury of being able to really produce
it. Tony Pappano has been there almost from the beginning so there
have been lots of music calls and lots of proper preparation. We
break it down, we analyse it and try and get it right. Offenbach is
not as easy as some may assume since it is not what I call ‘skit
and dance’ operetta; it's semi-dramatic opera and has a different
dimension to it.
You have
worked with Tony for many years haven’t you?
Tony was a
répétiteur when we did the Ring in Bayreuth in 1986 with
Daniel Barenboim and indeed he was his main assistant right from
1988 to 1992 so we worked intensely on the Ring for five
years and they were golden days.
You were in
Bayreuth for 16 seasons from 1981 to 2004. How did you first get to
sing there?
My first
Wagner was Balthasar Zorn for Scottish Opera and when Hans Hotter
came to Scotland for a masterclass I was asked to study David from
Die Meistersinger with him and from that I was asked to
audition at Bayreuth. I went to Bayreuth to sing David without
knowing anything much about Wagner and my knowledge of him grew by
seeing all the operas during my first four summers there. I saw a
tremendous range of productions and performances of the Wagner
repertoire and it was when I saw Solti’s Ring in 1983 that
I felt Mime and Loge were roles I could do something with. I was
asked to audition these for Wolfgang Wagner and I was subsequently
invited to sing them in the Barenboim Ring. In the case of
my Wagner, Bayreuth was my training ground and everything has
snowballed from there. David Syrus, head of music at the Royal
Opera, was working at Bayreuth at this time and I had a lot of
study with him in the early days on Die Meistersinger and
then on the Ring; and then Tony Pappano came in 1988 for the
Ring and we have worked intensely since. From then I have
since been in more than 250 performances of Der Ring des
Nibelungen.
I see you
will be singing Mime again next year in Los Angeles.
Yes,
I’m
going to have one more go and couldn’t resist it. It’s been my
bread and butter but the role is incredibly demanding and
interesting and as with all classical works there is so much one
can find in it. It’s a brand new production by Achim Freyer whom I
know but have never worked with. Jimmy Conlon is conducting and he
came to Scottish Opera when I was first there in 1976 to do
Macbeth with Vishnevskaya and that’s how far back I go with
him! It is about my 21st or 22nd Ring production
-
I’ve lost count - but the Ring is the Ring and what
more is there to say? I never tire of it.
For many of
us your Mime in a dress for Richard Jones here at Covent Garden
was unforgettable.
It was an
interesting idea because there is an unwritten story of what
happens at the end of Die Walküre ; we do not know what
happened when Sieglinde gave birth to Siegfried. Did Mime kill
her? Was the baby thrust into his arms and was he forced to take
him? Did he even see the birth? Did he snatch the child and kill
Sieglinde? We don’t really know. For 16 or 17 years he has been
carrying out this deception with Siegfried ‘Ich bin dir Vater und
Mutter zugleich’ (I am your father and your
mother). Finally Siegfried has realised something is
wrong but for a long while Mime had got away with it and wearing
the Sieglinde’s cast off dress was actually very valid as well as
being very spooky. I thought that was a really fabulous production
and for me the best thing was those final moments when Mime thinks
he is winning. He has the poison in his hand and now I sang ‘Nun,
mein Wälsung, Wolfssohn du!’ (Now
my
Wälsung,
you Wolf's son)
and ripped off the dress. It was
wonderful.
You recently
put on a dress again as the Witch in
Hansel und
Gretel for Welsh National Opera and will sing the role again
next year in Japan.
It is very
bizarre and I’m not sure it is right for a tenor to do it to be
perfectly honest, but that’s why it is fascinating. I think the
bizarreness of hearing a male voice singing ‘Hocus pocus’ is very
strange. My grandson hated seeing me as the Witch when he was
younger. In a sense that is the point of the piece as the Witch is
supposed to be a hideous scary person and it is not simple
pantomime. It is slimy, nasty music with extraordinary sounds;
it seems as though it should be funny and jovial when in
fact it is utterly demented.
You talk
about things that have worked and mention things that haven’t.
Can
you give an example of something that didn’t work well for you?
Well
certainly it was the Italian repertoire that
I started with and ran
from as it was not right for me. Rodolfo was the last Italian
tenor role I sang. I came into all this, as I said, as a
philistine. My mother loved Italian music and my teacher schooled
me in Italian technique and was besotted by Tito Schipa, Carlo
Bergonzi and all the really good Italian tenors. The more I did
Italian opera at Scottish Opera and ENO I realised the tenor
characters were a little bit vacuous and rather two-dimensional,
apart that is from Rodolfo who is a real male chauvinist. For
Italian music you need red wine and sunshine in your voice and I
did not have that. So I turned down Jonathan Miller’s Rigoletto
and Arthur Davies came from Welsh National Opera and did it and I
swapped with him to do The House of the Dead. It was a
watershed for me. Since then I have found more of the
psychologically challenging people I prefer performing,
in North
European music than Southern European music.
Also I found
coloratura hard to do too as it didn’t come naturally and although
I did Cenerentola a lot of times it was never easy for me.
Certainly those things were never right for me and one of the
great secrets of any job is to find out which things work best for
you, concentrate on those and make it work – this not only applies to
being a singer it also applies to any walk of life.
Do you still
take the opportunity to do masterclasses?
Yes,
as much
as I can and the Opera Studio has just asked me to do one between
my performances here in December. In fact, I
loathe the title
‘masterclass’ because it immediately starts hinting at a hierarchy
and can intimidate a student or make the teacher who is supposed
to be the ‘master’ assume a posture of some sort. I just call them
classes and we are learning together, trying things out together
as working situations. So I don’t really teach. I try to help the
singers to have the confidence to express their intuition. They
must of course have a technique but I never work on technique. If
they crack a note while we are working it doesn’t matter because
they won’t do it twice, as next time they’ll find a way round the
problem. I never use the word ‘no’ and never put anybody down. I
try to give them the chance to express themselves. It is always
very interesting that the more you do it,
the more time is spent
just speaking the text. I like to see how the imagination is
ignited and sparked; it is often good if they can go away and
think more about it and maybe come back in 3 or 4 months and have
another go. I work on the grey area between learning a role and
doing it.
During the
two months I recently spent in Frankfurt I had
two Loges and a Mime
come to me who I didn’t know before and they wanted to go through
these roles with me. It is a joy to help the next generation and
see what they can come up with. There is no one correct way of
doing these pieces and to see someone young approaching this music
for the first time is extraordinary because often I get new ideas
too from this.
I have heard
you talk before how important a deep understanding the text is to
a singer. Can you say more about this.
As I have
said that in the classes I do I spend a lot of time talking about
the text and personally even for the Hoffmann here,
I have been
going to the French coach to talk through my little phrases and
the little aria I have to do to find the appropriate nuances in
the text. After all we are telling a story. The composer has
written specific text to music and even if it is a Handelian aria
with repetitive phrases there is a specific reason for the
construction of the text within the music and I am keen to explore
that. I find if singers do explore the text more,
it makes for a
difference in personality and performance and this is what I try
to do in my classes.
I remember
the late Horst Stein in Bayreuth when we did all those Die
Meistersingers because he was singer as well as a conductor.
He
schooled me a lot in the expression of the German language. When I
had all that time in Bayreuth with Barenboim there was the luxury
of time on our side,
so there was a lot of rehearsal time for
Siegfried and many musical sessions with Barenboim. In the
first scene, Siegfried wants to know who his mother was to an
enormous amount of music that dwindles to nothing and Mime tells
him his mother died when he was born. Within 15 hours of glorious
Wagnerian music he says ‘Sie starb’ (She died)
with almost no music at all
and immediately afterwards there is the Siegfried
leitmotif since at
that moment he was born. We spent a lot of time talking about how
can you tell someone your mum died in childbirth. Is it a
beautiful moment or a horrible, extraordinary or frustrating one?
Do you sing it as one continuous ‘Sie starb’ or do you pause and
sing ‘Sie …. starb’. There is no one right answer but there are
millions of possibilities and this is the joy of the job.
I wish you
much more joy in the future, what are you looking forward to?
I hope to be
possibly back here at Covent Garden next season. There is also a
new opera I am in discussion about but can’t say much at this
point. I’m still learning new music in my late 60s and have still
the curiosity for something different; the curiosity to repeat
things I’ve done before and the hope
that I can find another answer for:
and
the curiosity to extend myself and find out more about the
business, particularly the individual operas themselves and about
character and about personality. I haven’t lost that yet and I
hope I never will. It’s been an incredible ride. I love coming to
rehearsals and one of the best things is to be able to rub
shoulders with extraordinary talent. The people I work with are
amazingly good and I am always thrilled by their knowledge,
understanding, intuition, ability and sheer expertise. I have
never asked for a role in my whole career and I am hugely grateful
for things that have been thrown my way. The job between
performances is a holiday and the travel is a joy. I never dreamt
when I was 24 or 25 this is what I would be doing now. I’m still
going – I’m 67 – and I’m still clinging to the wreckage!
© Jim
Pritchard
Performances
of Les Contes d’Hoffmann begin on 25th November and the last
performance is on 13th December.
Visit
www.roh.org.uk
for further information.