Tag Archives: reginald goodall

Three Tenors

Tired of Netflix, I took refuge, the other night, in YouTube and found myself binge-watching and listening to three of my favourite Wagnerian tenors of yesteryear – Jon Vickers (1926-2015), Siegfried Jerusalem (1940-) and Alberto Remedios (1935-2016), all of whom I saw performing in London in the ’70s and ’80s. I was a huge enthusiast for Vickers and Jerusalem even then, but have only more recently come to appreciate how splendid and exceptional Remedios was.

Great heroic Wagner tenors, such as these, are ever thin on the ground. They must be heroic in two senses at least – both stylistically and emotionally. They need voices resonant enough to convey the heroism of the characters they sing, and personal heroism in order to be able to walk onto the stage and sing the arduous roles that composers such as Wagner have written for them. Few can keep it up for long. They peak and they fade. I was lucky to hear and see all of them at their best.

Jon Vickers was probably the most extraordinary of the three. Indeed, he had one of the most extraordinary tenor voices of the 20th century, an elemental force that he could barely control (he’s probably loved rather less by those who know how singing works). It suited the operatic characters he inhabited, men struggling with feelings and faults that they, also, could barely control – Otello, Siegmund, Tristan, Peter Grimes, Canio, Samson – rough physical men, acting violently and impulsively.

Here he is as Siegmund (in Die Walkure):

And here as Canio (in Pagliacci):

He was also a profoundly religious man, and temperamental. He had his own strong views as to how a character should be portrayed and sung and, like Peter Grimes, he was averse to ‘interference’.  He viewed Wagner’s Tannhauser as blasphemous and withdrew from a Covent Garden production in the 1980s.

He also sang lieder, but to my ears and eyes he never sounded or looked quite right in the more domestic setting of the lieder recital hall, straining at the leash like a wild animal tamed.

So besotted was I by Vickers the singer/actor that I even wrote to him in the 1980s to ask for his autograph, which, courteously, he sent me. I still have it, scrawled across a photograph of him as Samson, in chains.

 

I was turned on to Siegfried Jerusalem by an article the great journalist Bernard Levin wrote in The Times in the early 1980’s after hearing Jerusalem sing at Bayreuth, hailing him as the yearned-for newcomer heroic tenor, possesed of a splendidly easy, heroic and burnished voice. There was certainly a dearth of good heroic tenors at the time. Peter Hoffman and Rene Kollo were already sounding strained.

Here he is, also singing Siegmund:

It’s a beautiful and eloquent performance. The sheer quality of his voice, the sound itself, is amongst the most beautiful I’ve heard. But in comparison with Jon Vickers it seems emotionally light.

So besotted was I by Jerusalem the singer that I wrote to the Royal Opera House to suggest they engage him more frequently. They replied, courteously, that he lacked the tessitura required for the larger Wagner roles. I think they were wrong about that. He sang Siegfried at Bayreuth and Parsifal at the Met to great acclaim.

 

I heard and saw Alberto Remedios in the ENO English-language production of the ring, conducted by Reginal Goodall, who was famous for making Wagner’s operas last longer than any other conductor.

Remedios was Liverpudlian through and through, his grandfather an immigrant from Spain. Semi-professional footballer, shipyard welder, laddish, I suspect, to the day he died, he possessed a naturally wonderful voice and an aversion, sadly, to learning roles in foreign languages – one of the reasons he never sang at Bayreuth (they also considered his voice too lyrical). I read somewhere that he had difficulty in learning roles in English, too, and on one occasion gave the flowers he was presented with at the end of an opera to his prompter.

Here’s his Siegmund (in German):

And Peter Grimes:

Listen also (on Spotify) to the last act of Reginald Goodall’s Twilight of the Gods. I’ve never heard Siegfried sung more ardently or gloriously.

To learn more about Remedios, you might watch him as he’s cornered by Eamonn Andrews for This is Your Life. You will marvel at how awful TV used to be.

 

They were three wonderful tenors, and though there are equally great Wagnerian tenors singing today (Jonas Kaufmann, amongst a few others) I miss these three particularly – and Jon Vickers most of all.

Singing is Just Saying

I spent the morning on Sunday at the Royal College of Music, at a Master Class on Schubert lieder given by the pianist Roger Vignoles. It was one of several events marking Vignoles’ 70th birthday, (though it seems an odd kind of celebration where he does all the work). He’s best known as an accompanist for singers, but he’s also a teacher at the College, and a soloist. My nephew, Frederic, studies the piano at the College and was taking part as an accompanist.

schubert

It was a long morning, without a break, and the seats were hard, but it was an inspiring and educative morning too – three hours of patient encouragement, explanation and constructive criticism that utterly transformed the performances, by five different baritones and sopranos, of seven of Schubert’s settings of Goethe. They were unhappy songs, mostly about unrequited love, depression, misery, loneliness, anguish, misunderstanding, hopelessness, grief and longing, indeed the full gamut of German angst. One after another the singers stood up and poured out their anguish. Three hours is a lot of anguish, especially without a tea break.

But if there was one thing that Roger Vignoles urged repeatedly, it was not to try too hard.

‘Be less musical,’ he said. ‘Don’t do too much. Don’t try too hard. Don’t feel too much. Let the music do the work.’

It was an informal event with performers and audience gathered on the stage. So informal, in fact, that the audience could even venture its own insights. A lady in front of me piped up with a very good point:

‘If you do too much with the song, you don’t leave anything for us to do,’ she said. ‘An audience mustn’t be told what to feel. We’ve got to listen and make something of it ourselves.’

It was a telling point. The more the singer expresses the meaning and feeling of a song, the less we, the audience, feel. It can be the same with emotionally extrovert music. Reginald Goodall, the slowest Wagnerian conductor in the entire universe, particularly avoided acceleration during the liebestod at the end of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, even as Isolde rushed towards her own death, and it was all the more effective because he let the music do the work.

I also remember listening to a well-known long-retired singer talking about his career (so long-retired and so long ago that I’ve forgotten his name). It was one of those ‘An Evening with…’ events at an arts festival. He spoke about how often he was persuaded to sing ‘Ol Man River’ as an encore. So often that almost no song bored him more, though it always brought the house down.

‘So full of feeling,’ his admirers would say. ‘But I was actually thinking about what I’d be eating for dinner,’ he told us, to much hilarity.

Not that singers and actors should be completely disengaged, as he was. Performers should be acutely conscious of their audience, more so than of their own emotions, and they must sing to the audience, tell them things. Singing is saying. But the fact is, a song can move an audience even if the singer is thinking of his dinner.

Roger Vignoles mentioned something David Mamet, the writer and director said – that the actor’s job is just to ‘deliver the text’, no more than that. Singers, too, must deliver the words and the notes, but as simply as possible, without overindulging in interpretation and characterisation.

Not that he could have meant this quite literally. After all, an actor delivering his text as a Dalek in a strident monotone wouldn’t, I think, be effective (unless it’s ‘Exterminate’), but I know what he means. Delivery should be simple and natural. Too much work, too much musicianship, and the song becomes the performer’s, not the composer’s or the poet’s.

David Mamet says the same of writing:

‘A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.’

It’s a lesson that applies to nearly everything we do. Don’t wear too many bright colours. Don’t add too much flavour to a soup. Don’t use too many adjectives. Don’t plead too explicitly when you’re selling. Don’t argue too passionately in front of a jury.

Leave something for the audience to do, to think and to imagine.