by Peter Hall
Glyndebourne’s charm at that time was its homely, improvised quality. My first impression was of huge trees, sheep, and buildings which had a half-used, half-finished country air as if they were occupied only in good weather. I felt out of place in my sports jacket and flannels. True, the dressed-up people wandering in the gardens were not particularly elegant: that was not possible in the early Fifties because of clothes rationing. Also, many supporters of Glyndebourne then were still ‘the county’, not lovers of music, but lovers of the occasion. The evening dresses of the ladies looked as if they were made from tweeds.
I dived into the gents loo with my cardboard suitcase, changed into a dinner jacket that was far too big, met Michael and our benefactor, and the magic of Glyndebourne, which was to last for the next forty years, began.
But my memory plays the same trick as it does with Stratford. I cannot recall the first production I saw there. The journey and the arrival is clear in my mind, but what was the opera? It has turned into an amalgamation of all those early performances that I saw: the John Piper Don Giovanni; the British premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Oliver Messel’s sets for Mozart; the singing of Sena Jurinac; the fizz and delight of Rossini conducted by Vittorio Gui; the excitement of hearing La Cenerentola, Idomeneo and Le Comte Ory for the first time. Memory is a blur of intense pleasure with no rain (which, I am sure, was regular) as the sun sets warmly over the Sussex Downs and we wander to Nether Wallop – a barn turned into a restaurant – for dinner and chilled white wine.
I met John Christie, the founder of Glyndebourne, and looked at him with awe. He was one of those eccentric Englishmen who achieve the impossible because it never occurs to them for a moment that it is impossible. He was upset in the Thirties when the government brought in legislation requiring cars to halt when approaching a major road. He wrote to The Times complaining that this was a slur on the skill of British drivers and calculated to bring the whole country to a stop. What was more in the national interest, he explained, was to accelerate when approaching a major road; it could then be crossed as quickly as possible. This was the mind that created Glyndebourne.
How and why did he do it? A rich man marries an opera singer, Audrey Mildmay, in the 1920s. Being a lover of music and of the Salzburg Festival, he decides to build an opera house in the garden of his Sussex estate. ‘If you’re going to do it, for God’s sake do it properly, John,’ says his wife. By chance he goes to a chamber concert in Eastbourne given by the Busch Quartet. He is introduced to its leader who advises him to contact his brother and a colleague, both of whom are thinking of leaving Germany because of the threat of Hitler. They are the conductor Fritz Busch, and Carl Ebert. John Christie has never heard of either of them. He has chanced on the leading German Mozartian and the leading German opera director. They come to Glyndebourne, the theatre is built, the festival starts. And Mozart’s operas are at last performed in England to their proper scale and in a way that reveals them fully.
The auditorium of the theatre intrigued me. Small, homely and unpretentious with a lot of wood, it seated only, I suppose, six hundred to seven hundred people in those days. Moran Caplat, the great general administrator of the festival and architect of its post-war glories, would play a game each winter of trying to pack in another seat or two. They brought in money. He reached over eight hundred by the end of his tenure. The surprise, however, was the stage, for this was of a size I had seen before only on the continent: it had enormous depth – so much so that when the curtains opened it took on a dimension which seemed far greater than the auditorium. This is, I think, an important factor in its design. Opening the curtains on a small stage can often contract the experience; but if the stage has the magnificent depth of Glyndebourne, the spirits of the audience expand.
John Christie was very proud of his stage. He was equally proud of the international nature of the productions it offered, insisting that the programme printed the nationality of every artist. He didn’t much like modern music. I think he found Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress unbearable. And I remember him pointedly staying out of a performance of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers. He said that, like the Glyndebourne cows, he was keeping at a safe distance from the noise. According to him, the cows came near only for Mozart.
In time, his son, George, succeeded him as chairman. George has the same ability as his father to pick talent, but is much more enterprising in his choice of repertory. He has also done wonders for the finances of the festival through sponsorship. As I write, he is bulldozing his father’s lovely old opera house and building a new, bigger one in its place. It is not a change I welcome. But George has a shrewd sense of the future. In the Sixties he helped me get seed money from the Gulbenkian Foundation in order to start the Royal Shakespeare Company.I
Considerable men such as John Christie and his son have one disadvantage: they encourage the English to believe in the amateur. But they themselves are not amateur; they only pretend to be. They have both been ruthlessly professional. And Glyndebourne itself is amateur only in the sense that everyone who works there is completely in love with opera. That, and its huge public success, make the place uniquely arrogant. Like a great public school, it thinks it is the best, even on the occasions when it isn’t. And if, as sometimes happens, an artist doesn’t quite fit in with its country house atmosphere, he or she is disdainfully labelled as ‘not Glyndebourne’.
On the other hand, the care in preparation and the time given to the work are exceptional in opera; as indeed are the standards of drama. Nowhere else are the needs of the stage given as much importance as the needs of the music. The conductor and the director are an equal partnership – a tradition which has continued for sixty years and which has given Glyndebourne a history of opera performances unmatched anywhere.
From those very first seasons that I went to with Michael Birkett, I believed I had a date to work there one day.
Chapter Two
My first opera production was at Sadler’s Wells in 1958. It was the premiere of John Gardner’s The Moon and Sixpence, based on Maugham’s novel. The whole experience immediately fascinated me. Here were entirely new disciplines. For a start, singers arrived having already learnt their words and music. They did this not out of consideration for the director or the conductor but because they simply would not have time to get the notes into their heads during the short four weeks of rehearsal.
Stanislavsky has harmed the theatre by spreading the doctrine that words should be learnt during rehearsals. His argument, it seems, is that you damage your instincts by learning before you know exactly what the words mean emotionally, or what the physical situation will be on the stage when they are spoken. I doubt this is true. It is of course much harder to learn the words (or the notes) out of context, but I still think it helps to be prepared. In a play, there is usually about a week of rehearsal wasted while the actors thrash around trying to remember their lines. And during that week they are inclined to take out their frustration and tension on anything – the play, the writer, the director, their partner – rather than their own faulty memory.
Happily, there is none of this in the opera world. If the piece is a standard part of the repertory, the role is known backwards anyway. And if it is a new piece, the fear of not knowing the words and notes means that they are thoroughly drilled-in long before the first rehearsals.
Received opinion is that the diva goes her own way and will do nothing on the stage which she has not done before. I disagree. Singers are not hard to direct. They are indeed so used to doing what the man with the baton tells them, that they are equally obedient to the director. They will do precisely what he asks. The trouble is that they rarely do anything more – unless they are actors as well as musicians. The magic of working with a good actor is that he takes the suggestion of his director and transmutes it into something complex, subtle and human. The bad actor, or the average opera singer, does just what the director has said; nothing more and nothing less. The suggestion
remains inert, simple and dead.
Great actors make a director’s suggestions seem better than they are. Great opera stars such as Janet Baker and Maria Ewing can do the same – simply because they are superb actors as well as superb singers. Average singers are like circus performers – concerned with their physical selves rather than emotional truth. They want to sing and sing well; it doesn’t need to mean anything.
If actors do not preserve the tempo, give the cue, maintain the pace, create the atmosphere, it is impossible for the play to work. More to the point, it is impossible for each of the individual performances to work: actors depend entirely on each other. Singers need not. In opera, I discovered, it is all too possible to ignore everyone else on stage with you. As long as you are watching the conductor and keeping ‘in’ with the orchestra, you need never look at your colleagues. Eye contact, which is the very stuff of an actor’s being, is something foreign to singers, for it tends to place them in a bad position so that the voice goes into the wings. It also takes their attention away from the conductor.
I insisted from my very first opera production that the singers, like actors, played off each other. Paradoxically, their singing became better, the drama more alive and the communication with the audience more eloquent.
It soon became plain to me that I loved working with singers. I observed that a phrase of music could be made to convey almost any emotion. You could play against it or with it; you could even treat it ironically. The emotional support of the music meant that singers could communicate the most complex things if only they could be persuaded to do very little.
Doing less to convey more was the constant problem with The Moon and Sixpence. Sadler’s Wells Opera in the Fifties was filled with a rumbustious crew of Welsh ex-miners and raucous cockney girls. Very few of them were actors. Why should they be? They were there because they had been born with a voice. They all thought that acting was a matter of grandiloquent gestures and emotional moves. They were terrified of standing still. Whenever there was a pause from the business of singing, they would fill-in. After building up to a huge climax, instead of letting it rest and have its effect, they would feel the need to strut downstage a couple of paces or wave their arms in the air.
I also noticed that the act of singing produces the most incredible tension in the body. All that air being forced through a tiny pipe creates muscular constrictions and forces the singer into unnatural postures. Relaxation is the essence of communication in any live performance. Even if a performer is playing a tense man, he must not be tense himself. This is the most difficult challenge. The tension of singing must allow the rest of the body to be relaxed, so that the audience can be let in and be able to associate with the singer’s emotions and understand his or her thoughts.
I encouraged the astonished singers in The Moon and Sixpence to gesticulate and move as little as possible. Relaxed, still figures, with the music apparently welling up out of them created by their emotions, was my ideal. And the production, when it opened, did seem to work. John Hargreaves, for instance, a redoubtable Sadler’s Wells baritone, much given to throwing himself round the stage, turned in a restrained and haunted portrait of the Gauguin figure. His colleagues and his public were amazed. I am not making undue claims for myself. His talent was his and remained his. But he had accepted how delicate operatic acting could be and he had successfully expressed it.
I took away from this first experience two overriding disciplines which have guided me ever since: that economy of movement and complete relaxation can transform acting in opera; and that you always have to work first from the music, not from the words. The tempo, the tone, the atmosphere, even the timing, are all given by the music. The task in rehearsal is to find the emotion which can make the music the end result – and the inescapable expression of that emotion. The words are secondary.
Chapter Three
In 1958 I saw at Covent Garden the Visconti production of Don Carlos, conducted by Giulini, with a cast that included Tito Gobbi, Gre Brouwenstijn, John Vickers and Boris Christoff. It was the greatest operatic experience of my life. From the time of this terrific production, David Webster began to succeed in his attempts to make Covent Garden an international opera house. I hoped I would be part of it.
In the early Sixties, Georg Solti, who had recently been appointed music director, asked me to do a production there with him. With infinite sadness, I had to refuse: the demands of the RSC in those years were all-embracing. Solti yelled at me with his engaging mixture of Hungarian charm and hysteria. He said it was my responsibility, no, my duty, to work at Covent Garden. I was flattered, and also captivated by the sheer exuberance of the man. He spoke of music as if he was eating it.
In 1965, I was able to do Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron with him. This began a new chapter in my life, for since then I have done over forty operas around the world, eight of them in collaboration with Solti.
He is a man of formidable energy and concentration; and his determination to get the best out of the people working with him creates an electricity, a tension, which can have the most extraordinary results. It is hard to be indifferent to a Solti performance. Even at its worst, when it is tight and overemphatic, it produces a tingling anxiety. At its best, it is genius.
Like most other conductors, he is obsessed with making the singers look at him rather than at each other as he exhorts them from the podium. Consequently, a Solti production can easily become a circle of performers disposed round the stage staring like frightened rabbits at the maestro. Given this, it is surprising that he is such a great collaborator. But he need only be reminded that true acting depends on human contact between the protagonists and he defers immediately to the director.
I suppose Moses was my most exhilarating experience with him. But we did a thrilling Tristan und Isolde, and he taught me something I shall never forget: an understanding of Wagner’s time. It is not like the time of other mortals. Everything in Wagner’s world takes longer because it is more intense. His music exists in a hallucinatory, slowed-up tempo – the kind that comes upon us when we are in acute crisis, as when the car moves with dreadful inevitability towards the crash. In The Ring there are long, long scenes in slow motion; then, in two minutes flat, the world turns upside down. The feelings are eternal; but the action when it comes is quick and apocalyptic.
Moses and Aaron was my debut at Covent Garden. It was so fearsomely difficult that we had seven weeks of rehearsal, a vastly long time for an opera house. Philosophically, the piece is one of the key works of the twentieth century. Its theme, the debate between the inspired, dogmatic prophet and the pragmatic politician who does what is possible rather than what is right, raises profound questions. The score is unfinished, yet has a strange completeness of its own, matching the irresolution of the dilemma.
The libretto, Schoenberg’s own, had been newly translated into English by David Rudkin. It seemed very contemporary. The strength of an ideal set against the ability of the propagandist to sell it. Will the public accept the truth if it is not palatable? As well as being philosophically rich, musically the opera is extraordinary. Despite all its twelve-tone disciplines, its sounds are sensual and lurid, a post-Wagnerian miracle. And in the demands that it makes on stage, perhaps the grandest grand opera ever written.
The production was certainly the largest I have ever done. Over three hundred people thronged the stage: dancers, singers, a double chorus, acrobats, actors. There was a menagerie of animals: goats, sheep, horses, Highland cattle. At the dress rehearsal a camel teetered down the precipitously raked stage, causing the whole of the Royal Opera House orchestra to flee the pit in consternation. The creature then shat copiously. He had to be cut.
I did ask myself, once or twice, where in all this was my belief that less meant more? But we were, after all, presenting an opera about excess and the danger of excess. It was essential to conjure that up on stage. In one notorious scene, we had to create an orgy of blood and lust around the Golden Calf w
hich finally led to the virtual insanity of the tribe. Large ornamental penises, painted garishly and decked out with muffs of goat-hair, were designed to be strapped to the performers’ middles. I kept asking for these in rehearsal; they did not appear. In the end I discovered the designs were under lock and key in, of all places, the desk of the director of Covent Garden. David Webster, ever an English gentleman, had hoped somehow that the penises would go away. He asked me sadly whether I really wanted them. I said I did. Reluctantly, but without argument, he unlocked his desk.
I have always felt that nakedness in the theatre is a basic truth: like earth, air, fire or water. It should therefore be used responsibly and for a purpose. The ungoverned lust of the orgy round the Golden Calf could be expressed only, it seemed to me, by some degree of nudity. The Lord Chamberlain still functioned, so we had to be careful.