What would you like to change in the world of opera?
I’d like to say something about elitism. Elitism in opera should stop at the edge of the orchestra pit. Elitism should only mean the highest standards of performance. Opera is not an elitist art form. Opera does not require anything special from the audience, in terms of education, knowledge, class or background. I think the idea that opera is demanding has been around only for the last few decades. The great operatic composers would have been apoplectic to hear that their work was only for posh or rich people.
There is nothing in opera as a product, in commercial terms, that needs changing. All that performers have to do is to be faithful to the composer and to do their job as competently as possible. What we then have to do is to make sure that audiences can afford to come and see it and that they are going to be comfortable coming through the door. There should be no dress code or other demands. My father, who has been dealing with music for many years, feels he has to ask what he is supposed to wear when he comes to see an opera. The preconception of a special effort still exist and it makes people feel awkward.
Remember Faust at Covent Garden a couple of years back? When you saw the set of Act One, you thought, “Wow”. And every successive act got more spectacular, the chorus, the ballet. You would have spent £100 without thinking. If that was your yearly budget for opera, it was worth spending on that show. It was good. And it was breathtakingly expensive. Opera is not elitist, not in the slightest. But it’s expensive. That’s a different thing. People are ready to spend a lot of money on something that’s really good. I don’t think opera is too expensive, when people are spending £50 on going to see a football match or £70 for a rock concert. You can see opera for £5 or £10 thanks to subsidies and sponsorship.
The work of art will speak for itself, you don’t have to worry about that. Some people come for the music, some for the costumes, some for the singing. What’s amazing about opera as an art form is that all these things are combined. Opera is the ultimate performance art form. It has everything.
The problem is that people feel intimidated by the doors of the opera house. "I would never go there, why would I go in there?" I think it’s the responsibility of everyone who works in opera, or is connected to opera, to propagate the idea that there is no snobbism involved, and to fight against it whenever we can. Otherwise opera will be dead in a generation. And that would be a tragedy because opera has so much for everyone!
How did your interest in opera begin? Was it in your blood?
My parents don’t have musical background at all. My mother is Irish and my father is Welsh. They’re both from farming families. There were singers in the family on either side, but not professional musicians.
I was very lucky to grow up in Wales. I never appreciated it until I went from the Welsh choral tradition to a college in England. People often ask why Wales produces so many singers. The language is thought to be one of the reasons but I would say it’s a cultural thing. I’m one of three brothers; my older brother is a doctor and he is automatically respected within the family and the community. In Wales, the same amount of respect and understanding is shown towards me as a professional singer. In England, when I say I’m a professional opera singer, I’m asked what my real job is. You’re never asked that in Wales.
Wales is a small and closely knit country. Everybody seems to know somebody who is an opera singer. You don’t have to fight against preconceptions that opera is not something that a serious person does. In fact, it’s the opposite. As a child you are expected to sing. In the Welsh choral tradition men have historically sang more than women. It’s something that men did. After a rugby match, in the changing room, there would be singing. The rugby team and the choir are the same people. The class choir at primary school I went to was the entire class.
In Wales, if you can sing, there is never an undiscovered singing talent. If you can sing, it’s discovered, because everybody sings. Quite often, when I was a teenager singing in choirs, a complete stranger who just happened to be listening to rehearsals would come up afterwards and say, "That boy can sing. Do you know you’ve got a voice there?" It is both about the singing culture and the interest from the man in the street.
The flipside of the coin in Wales is that because there is such an amateur singing tradition, if you have lessons, you are told, “Don’t have lessons, you’ll ruin your voice, you’ll ruin the natural talent you’ve got.” I remember a couple of people at school having singing lessons and the treatment they got. “Oh, are we having singing lessons, are we thinking we’re good?”
I sang with church choirs, the school choir and the county youth choir. There was a good county music system, where you went from school choir to county choir and from there to national youth choir. The Council also run a scholarship scheme. Anyone could apply for an audition with the county music advisers, and they’d award you a scholarship which paid for lessons, half-an-hour a week, at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, which was great, especially for singers.
I was very fortunate that the scholarship scheme existed - it would have taken a lot longer to learn - and that I was put with Beatrice Unsworth, who is a superb singing teacher for young singers. She is opinionated in the best possible way and she is not afraid to express her opinions. She said she couldn’t promise anyone a Covent Garden career at that stage but if I wanted to do that seriously, I had the voice for it to be worth considering. I think that at every stage of your career you need someone to say that what you’ve got is worth working on. This is because singers can’t hear their own voice. We rely on what other people are saying to us. We are vulnerable, especially at the age of 16 or 17. It is very important what an established singing teacher has to say to you. I still remember her exact words.
Straight from that, I moved to the Oxford choral tradition. Well, let’s just say, there were no rugby players in the choir. It’s a different thing and it took me a long time to get my head around it. To be honest, I don’t think I ever came to terms with that. My choral singing in Oxford was different. I just never understood the culture.
I studied physics at university and I kept singing as a serious hobby. I had lessons through college. Then I taught physics in a secondary school for two years. When I was 23 or 24, I thought that if I wanted to do singing as a serious career, I needed to do it then. Otherwise I would be risking waking up one day when I’m 35 or 40 and thinking what I could have done.
I took the plunge. I applied to various colleges and I went to the Academy for three years. I worked as a freelance singer for two years and then I went to the National Opera Studio for a year. In these two years I became aware of what it is that you need for the professional career to be a realistic prospect. The year at the National Opera Studio was fantastic. We got the new, beautiful building in Wandsworth, we worked really well together, everyone was very supportive of each other. I’ve been working ever since.
You’ve just done La Boheme at the Scottish National Opera…
Yes, I’ve just sung Marcello there. It’s interesting, it’s like climbing a mountain: you’re at one point of the mountain, you look at it, you think you see the top. You get there, you look up and you realise there is a lot more of the mountain. There are so many false summits.
All you can do is keep climbing. Until you reach the top of the mountain, you don’t know how far it is. There are times when you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing and whether it’s going anywhere. It seems so hard and the road seems so steep. But at those times, I remind myself where I was a year ago. Am I singing better? Am I doing things better? Am I further up the ladder than a year ago? If the answer is yes, then however hard it seems, I’m going in the right direction. I think you can’t control how fast you climb, you can just control whether you’re going in the right direction or not.
You are now singing in The Barber of Seville. Is that your first Barber?
Yes, it is. I know the character but not the role. I’ve done Mozart’s Figaro a lot. Even though they are very different vocally, I don’t think anyone should do one without knowing the other! Beaumarchais, we think, had The Marriage of Figaro planned when he wrote The Barber of Seville, so he knew where he was going. Certainly Rossini knew where the story was going when he wrote The Barber of Seville.
I also did the Paisiello Barber, last year with the Bampton Opera. It’s fascinating to do that knowing the Mozart. Mozart wrote his opera following Paisiello’s success and the influence is audible. When we first sung through Paisiello, I thought I could hear Mozart’s Act II finale. Except that Mozart was a genius and Paisiello wasn’t. It’s about subtle things: Mozart would made this bit longer and that bit shorter. It makes a big difference. And of course, Paisiello was still extremely popular when Rossini wrote his Barber. It’s interesting to see what Rossini has kept and what he’s changed from the Paisiello; it is very faithful to Beaumarchais. In fact, Paisiello is more faithful to Beaumarchais than Mozart. I like the original play so there a lot of things I love about Paisiello’s Barber.
The Barber is probably the highest tessitura I have ever sung. I’ve got a voice that goes all the way down. There are baritones who float their tops and have nothing in the middle; there are young baritones who go all the way through the range but are still sorting out their top and people think it’s a bass-baritone. That’s quite dangerous as you get cast lower than you should and it becomes a vicious circle; you can’t just get out of bed one day after five years of singing buffo or bass-baritone roles and suddenly start wacking up top Gs.
I found Rosini’s Figaro very difficult to prepare while singing Marcello in La Boheme. That’s a very different role vocally. If you try to sing them in the same way, you literally get through a page and a half. And you collapse. Your voice will not sing it. As soon as you weight the voice in the wrong way, it will not do it. What I did was to find the coloratura bits and say to myself that Rossini knew what he was doing. He didn’t write something that you cannot sing, so there must be a way of singing these bits. You find the way vocally and then you do the whole role like that. But it’s great: it’s like Rossini is giving you a singing lesson every day. I think it’s a good exercise, especially for baritones who tend to belt out things; it’s not possible in this music.
Where do you think your voice is going? What’s in the pipe?
I’d love to do the great Verdi roles eventually. Verdi’s always been my favourite opera composer, or one of my three favourites. His writing for baritones is unsurpassed. And he was very nice to us - he gave us lead roles, he wrote proper arias for baritones. Verdi roles are fantastic, they offer a great range of the emotional expression both as a singer but also as an actor.
But I’ve always been well-advised and I’ve always been weary of asking my voice to do something that it can’t do. Fingers crossed, it’s getting to the stage now when I can start looking at certain Verdi roles.
I’d love to be able to sing Verdi but if my voice won’t do that, that’s fine. I make a polite request now and again, to see if we can do it. It’s been my ambition since I was 15 or 16. When you’re 15, you can’t go and wack out a Rigoletto. Well, you can, but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be even thinking about it, because it might not happen.
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Who is your favourite composer?
My three favourites are Mozart, Verdi and Britten. Which is not to say that I don’t love Puccini. My slight issue with Puccini, though, is that he manipulates you as an audience - and you can’t fight it because you can’t argue with great music. He’s so good at setting up an emotion. The only comparable composer, in my opinion, is Janacek - just two bars and he grabs you. When I’m watching a Puccini opera, I’m so drawn into it and moved by it that just watching the cover run of La Boheme in Scotland left me in tears. Already at the end of Act One! But afterwards I was thinking, “The sly old dog. He’s tricked me again…” Then you look back at it from the intellectual point of view and you think, “This happened and that happened, yeah, yeah, yeah…” Puccini works on the emotional level and I think that’s what he aims for, your emotions rather than your intellect.
Funnily enough, I was listening to Wagner, and I thought that Wagner is not an intellectual composer at all. He pummels you into submission. I remember the first time I saw Tristan und Isolde. You hear the Liebestod a lot out of the context, and you think it’s very nice. But at the end of an evening of Tristan you feel you’ve lived with these people for years. Seven hours in the theatre is a physical-emotional commitment, just to sit there for that long. And by the end, when you are in no state to fight Wagner, to fight his music, he comes up with the Liebestod. It’s not just that you’re in tears, but your whole insides melt and turn into water, because he’s doing such amazing things with your emotions. Then, three days after, when you think about it rather than feel it, you think, “What was that about?...”
Verdi, by contrast, works intellectually as well. Verdi and Shakespeare are such a perfect combination. They work intellectually, but also emotionally and morally. I’d never say that Verdi is better than Puccini. They do different things, they set out to do different things.
Mozart is different. Verdi and Puccini reached maturity. I feel sorry for Mozart, especially whenever he has his anniversary year. Because what they say is “early Mozart”. There is no early Mozart at all. It was something he wrote when he was twelve, which I’m sure other composers did at school, but that stuff was burnt, thrown away, and we never hear it. Everything we have by Mozart is early Mozart. It makes you think what he would have done at 70.
I think The Marriage of Figaro was the peak of what he was doing in his twienties. He reached the summit of what he was doing operatically with Figaro. Idomeneo doesn’t count because there are no baritones in it! (he laughs) Had he lived to be much older, we’d view Cosi fan tutte, Figaro and The Magic Flute as transitional operas. We don’t know what they were going towards. Of course, they were great works of art in their own right.
I think he knew how perfect Figaro was. Don Giovanni does something interesting: it combines the comic and the serious. It’s quite conventional in the middle but then the first scene and the last scene are something different, something new. That’s why I think it’s a difficult piece to stage.
Cosi is theatrically beautiful, because there are only six elements in it and he’s just criss-crossing the relationships of these six people. It’s wonderful in its own right, but what was he working towards? Where would it have gone? It’s unfair to judge Mozart on the same terms as we judge operatic composers who reached maturity. I don’t think he’d have been outdated and old-fashioned at 70. You don’t have to know much about him to know that wouldn’t have happened.
What’s hot about Britten?
I love singing in English. And I love hearing good singing in English. I think that singing is about communication and the immediacy of communication you have when you are singing to an audience in their native language is something magical. I think operatic composers would have been quite perplexed about singing to an English-speaking audience in Italian. Britten’s love of the English language and the precision to set it to music is amazing. You look at his music on the page and it looks very complicated, with the quintuplets and quadruplets. But when you speak the line to yourself, understanding the intention behind it, you notice that it’s actually the way you would deliver it keeping in mind the meaning.
What was he first opera you saw?
I grew up watching Welsh National Opera at the New Theatre as a teenager. The production of Billy Budd, probably 15 years ago, was very exciting. The same production has just been revived at ENO. The first opera I saw was WNO’s touring production of The Marriage of Figaro. I also saw Simon Boccanegra at WNO when I was quite young. Interestingly enough, these three are my favourite operas. These things stay with you. You form an idea of what opera is quite early on.
Billy Budd is an all-male cast. Boccanegra has only one female singer. In Boccanegra you suddenly realise you’ve been listening to an opera of male voices until the soprano sings her aria, Come un’ora bruna. Boccanegra is an incredible piece of writing, with the oboe motif that you think Verdi is going to use a lot, but he doesn’t. It seems to tell you that life doesn’t repeat itself. If something is beautiful, you have to appreciate it when it happens, because it may not come back. Verdi uses the female voice to break the male voice texture. It happens at dawn – and her first note is like dawn breaking.
Britten’s operas are also so inherently theatrical and dramatic. To me, it’s very important; I acted quite a lot before I sang. Opera has always been more alluring to me than concerts. As much as I love them, I always feel there is something missing. When Britten is sung properly, I’m not aware that people are singing; I’m just listening to a story being told. As a singer, you are very aware of singing, but on occasion, when I see Britten done really effectively, the music is like a sound track in a film, it purely carries the action and the emotion. You are just following a story and the music is serving it.
Which of Britten’s operas do you appreciate most?
It has to be Billy Budd, because of the atmosphere it creates and because of its clarity. I like clarity. Peter Grimes is great, although it’s slightly weak on the baritone role front (he laughs). The Rape of Lucretia is interesting; a lot of people find it boring but I think they don’t quite get the ambiguity of her feelings. Britten wrote it in very different times, although it wasn’t so long ago. The actual story is set in a very different time morally. But I think you understand that Lucretia is fighting against her status as a victim. Everyone is a victim of something. Everyone has an excuse. But she is not looking for an excuse. She is ready to forgive and accept. For us today it’s probably difficult to comprehend. It’s not often played that way. The Roman idea what was noble and what was right was different. You could say that we know so much more than those people, that we have learned over the centuries. We haven’t. If you try to impose our modern view on things from the past, you blur the message.
Tell us about the connection between opera and physics. Is there any?
There is the old concept that the mathematical part of your brain is the same as, or very close to, your musical brain. I would say that the relationship is about cross-disciplinary skills in both; in physics it’s a mix of maths, science, philosophy and imagination. Probably the role of imagination is the most direct link.
It’s very interesting about physicists who have been blind from birth. In terms of conceptual things, subatomic or galactic, all invisible to us, blind physicists tend to have far less problems imagining them. Because they don’t have to relate them to visual things. We have difficulties thinking of an atom being a billion times smaller than we can see, because how can you visualise that? Our imagination is very visual, whereas physics demands conceptual imagination.
I think it can work in music, and especially in singing. I’m a very visual learner myself and I know where we are by relating to where it is on a page of a vocal score. But I don’t think it’s ideal. As a singer, you are communicating non-visual ideas so you should not imagine them visually. That’s probably the link between physics and opera.
I taught physics for three years and there is a more direct link between teaching and opera. Teaching is performing: standing in front of the class and giving a lesson, drawing people into a world which is unfamiliar to them, introducing them to new concepts.
And I think once you’ve stood in front of a class of 35 fourteen-year-olds, no audience in the world can possibly strike any sort of fear into you (he laughs). It’s comparable to the stage fright you experience as an opera singer.
Actually, it’s funny how many physicists and scientists you can find in opera among singers and directors!
What do you do when you’re not working?
I wish I had more time outside opera. But I’m not complaining! (he laughs) I like watching sports, especially football and cricket. I play cricket and golf. I spend time with my family, which I don’t get to do enough. Technically, I live in Cardiff, but I haven’t been there this year for more than two days. I love spending time with my parents, brothers and nieces. I catch up with friends. I’m enthusiastic about cooking when I have the time but I hate following recipes, which probably comes from the time when I was a physicist and in the lab everything had to follow very specific instructions.
What do you think about talent?
I’m interested in the relationship between people and their talents. As singers, we are lucky…. It’s frustrating that we are late developers, that the age when our career is beginning, a ballet dancer’s, or gymnast’s, or footballer’s career is finishing. Actually, I think it would be the perfect combination to be a professional footballer first, and then an opera singer. When you retire as a footballer at 30, you’ve just reached the age to become an opera singer. I can’t think of a better combination! (he laughs)
If someone is given a natural talent, there’s an obligation to the talent. But there is also a balance to be struck between mental and emotional well-being. You do not have to be a slave to that talent. As a human being you have the right to live a life that makes you happy and fulfills you most.
VIEW Paul’s page HERE.
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