Interview, Dame Janet Baker

Today is the birthday of one of the great singers of the twentieth century, and to mark the occasion I've been revisiting some of her finest recordings as well as the extended exclusive interview which she gave me shortly before her eightieth birthday in 2013. Filmed in the Bechstein Room at the Wigmore Hall, it's been available on our YouTube channel for several years, but I thought it might be worth sharing as a transcript for those who prefer to read rather than watch! Read on for Dame Janet's reflections on her own vocal training and career, life after retiring from public performance, and how the demands of the profession have altered in the thirty-odd years since she hung up her lyre as Orfeo…

It's over three decades since you retired from operatic life - could you tell me a little about the role which music plays in your life today?

I’m very much a listener these days, and I do a certain amount of teaching – coaching, really, with established singers who come to study a particular role. I’m not really involved with the young people or with technical problems: it’s more about exploring roles and particular pieces of music, which I find absolutely fascinating.

What about your own listening experiences and attending performances – are you still an active opera- and concert-goer?

Yes, I am. I enjoy opera - I can relax in the opera! I don’t really like to go and listen to things that I’ve been deeply involved with in the past: I’m quite sensitive about things like the St Matthew Passion, for instance. I was very fond of that and it meant a lot to me, in a different way from most pieces of music, so I haven’t listened to a performance of it since I retired!

Who do you especially admire from the current generation of singers - particularly the mezzos?

I admire a lot of my colleagues, and I’ve just been fortunate enough to see Joyce DiDonato at the Royal Opera House doing Rossini (La donna del Lago) – of course she’s absolutely at the peak of her career, and to sit in the opera-house and listen to that voice and artistry is a very great pleasure. She’s a complete artist, faultless, and it was heaven just to sit in the house and listen to her and her colleagues…to realise that the standard of singing that we call the highest still pertains, and that there are still people who can produce these kind of sounds, together with that kind of artistry. But there are always young people coming up with great talents, and the exciting thing there is to see someone with a potentially great voice grow and mature, see them grasp the opportunities that are around these days and really blossom. There’s a great deal of talent around, always, but to come to the peak of performance is quite a rare thing; it still happens, of course, and it’s particularly nice when you’ve heard a young voice actually achieve that. It’s really quite difficult to assess singers when they’ve just left college: they’re very much in the thrall of mastering technique in their early twenties, so the other things that one looks for are bound to come later and are often learnt on the job, through watching more mature singers and thinking ‘Well that’s the way that’s done!’. It’s a marvellous process to go through, and I did it myself, working at places like Glyndebourne – as a greenhorn find yourself on stage with the most amazing performers, seeing how they use language, how they act…the learning never stops!

You didn’t go through the formal training route yourself…

Indeed. I had a Viennese singing-teacher, and I think I missed certain things from not being in a conservatoire – the group experience, and watching other singers your age and what they’re doing, that's a very important part of the learning process - but on the other hand having one-to-ones with my teacher two or three times a week was a very fast-track process and in that sense I was terribly lucky that I formed a good basic technique quite quickly.

The kind of training my teacher gave me was so concentrated – I would go for a lesson perhaps three times a week, and she would never allow me to practise on my own! On a day when I wasn’t having a lesson with her, she would send me to one of her advanced pupils so that I would do my exercises and warm up the voice and work under supervision. That way you form habits much more quickly – good habits, one hopes! – and I was very lucky to find the person who suited me. And that isn’t always the case – people make mistakes, or don’t understand a particular voice… All [vocal] teaching’s essentially the same thing - but it’s couched in different terms, and you’ve got to find someone who speaks to you in a way that you can understand and reproduce.

Having solidified that basic technique early on in your career, did you then find that you had to adjust things further down the line as the voice filled out, or moved upwards or down in terms of tessitura?

I think that probably depends on kind of repertoire you sing: in the opera-house one has to cut one’s cloth accordingly, and I'd say I chose my roles very carefully. I do think some voices mature quite a lot as they grow older - but I didn’t find that particularly myself, because the kind of roles I chose (from Glyndebourne onwards) were very much suited to the type of voice I had. But I was always singing a very wide range of [non-operatic] repertoire, so I had the experience of using the whole of the voice from top to bottom in other kinds of music (as mezzos do and it’s very interesting and rewarding to have that wide range to explore!).

You mentioned your careful choice of roles – is there anything you regret not singing, either because it didn’t come your way, or because the repertoire wasn’t necessarily in fashion when you were at your peak?

I was fortunate in that the conductors I worked with in houses in the UK understood my voice very well. I did a lot of concert-work and met conductors that way, so when I went into the opera they knew my voice, what I could do, and which roles were within my capacity and suited me. I think it’s very important not to test a younger voice on something like Carmen: Carmen is a killer, and you have to be very sure that you’re ready for a role like that.

Like Kathleen Ferrier, you were never tempted by it...?

No, I wasn’t - neither from the acting point of view or the musical one. I think Kathleen had the weight of voice and the darkness of voice that would’ve suited it admirably - if she’d had the temperament. The two things go together with a role like that; it’s nice to break free in a certain sense, and do things that stretch you (I think every singer should do that to a certain extent), but we’re very much typecast in our own personalities and you can’t move too far from that.

Though you concentrated mainly on baroque and Classical repertoire on stage, you were far more wide-ranging in your recital repertoire…Can I ask you to pick a couple of plums from this set [Janet Baker: The Great EMI Recordings, released to celebrate Dame Janet's 80th birthday] which mean something particular to you?

I know that it’s been done chronologically, and I like the fact that the box covers many aspects of my working life in the sense of period – I liked to do the Scarlatti and Monteverdi roles and songs, and to move through the repertoire gradually as you do in recital. If you do a lot of recital work, which I did, you have to devise a programme which is a bit like a meal: you have a starter, a main course, and maybe something lighter towards the end. You have an audience to please, and it’s really important to do that because otherwise it can be a long listen for them! So you get a bit of experience in judging certain periods of music and where they would come in an evening, and there’s a lot of skill in that, in knowing how to judge your audience.

But it’s also interesting for you as a singer to change period, style, and characterisation over the course of an evening. Recitals are perhaps the most demanding aspect of all singing. You are in fact singing a mini-opera, attempting to characterise something, and you don’t have that much time to do it – a ‘long’ song is perhaps four or five minutes, and in that time you are playing a role, after which you turn aside from that song, grasp the next one and play a different role. So the challenges of recital work in that sense are very similar to the challenges you face on the stage of an opera-house – you have to change character and colour as all the great writers do, you change mood all the time. The two things [recital-work and opera] might seem very far apart: how can you possibly compare a Schubert song with a long operatic role? Well, in a certain sense you can – in both cases you’re building a character, changing mood all the time.

You carried on singing in recital for around ten years after retiring from the operatic stage, and this set includes some of your late recordings, such as the Berlioz Nuits d'été from 1990. Did you know at the time that it would be one of the last recordings you would make?

No, I didn’t. I think the very last thing I did was Respighi, with Richard Hickox who introduced me to that repertoire, and it was very refreshing. In fact it was wonderful as I grew older to work on pieces with people like Simon Rattle, and see and hear them from the viewpoint of a young man probably conducting them perhaps for the first time – it was like a refresher-course for me, to see what they wanted and how they saw a piece that was already very familiar to me.

How different do you think your career would have been had you been working thirty years hence ie at your peak now? Which aspects of the modern operatic world do you think you would have revelled in, and which would you have kicked against or simply chosen not to engage with?

In some senses I think I would be completely unemployable on the stage these days, because a great deal of what I see distresses me. When I look at singers having to perform a role in extremely difficult physical circumstances which don’t appear to have anything at all to do either with the character or with the music that they sing – I find that very difficult to take, and I would’ve had to say ‘Look, it you restrict me in this way, if you lay me on the floor to sing on my stomach, you’re not going to get the best out of my voice!’. I don’t know why the directors don’t understand that the singer’s body has to be carefully exploited and things made possible for them purely by the mechanics. They must use their imagination if they want to introduce fresh ideas into an opera - which of course one welcomes, but surely not at the expense of the instrument you’re using. Singers need very specific things, like room around the diaphragm, and to be upright! I would have found that extremely difficult, and would have had to have said so, or I’d have been very unhappy. But on the other hand, what I think is so exhilarating about modern performance is watching young talent come up and blossom, and realising that nature is very generous.

The art of training a voice must remain quite hidebound, by the nature and rules of voice production - you can’t mess about too much with that! There are easy ways to produce a voice and there are more difficult ways to produce a voice, and if you can find someone you can easily give you a technique which you can then rest on then you can focus on the artistic points of view, which are the end-point of all performers. What is asked of modern singers is tremendously challenging, but it is possible, as long as the voice itself is protected and allowed to work within its capacity.

There’s also the question of this crossover business between classical singers and the pop world – in a sense they’ve grown closer together than in my time, and again that’s no bad thing as long as the vocal technique isn’t disturbed. I think the younger generation of performers are also under pressure to look good, to realise that to be a convincing in a particular role on the stage they have to appear as though there’s some sort of reality there. You aren’t just a singing machine – you have to deliver all the things that audiences expect, and these days they expect a lot! They’re used to TV and operas on the big screen, and that’s good – you have to be an all-round performer these days, which is huge challenge to the younger generations, and they’re meeting it very well!

Our thanks once again to Warner Classics and the Wigmore Hall for hosting this interview - you can watch the video below.