In the run-up to the performance, Gerald spoke to me about his forty-five-year relationship with the Proms, the experience of creating new roles in John Adams's Antony and Cleopatra and Mark-Anthony Turnage's pitch-black Festen, and why he's saying 'no for now' to a certain Wagner role which has recently been dangled in front of him...
Over the past thirty-five years you’ve sung at the First Night, the Last Night and pretty much everything in between! Is the excitement of the Proms still as strong as ever for you?
To be involved in this festival in any capacity is fantastic, but doing an opening or closing night is a special moment in one’s life. I think every musician aspires to perform at the Proms, because you know that the audience are so excited to be there: the Promenaders have maybe lined up for hours, meeting (and making) friends in the queue and enjoying the anticipation. It’s a party, especially on the First and Last Nights.
My Proms debut was in Glyndebourne’s production of Katya Kabanova in 1990, but the story started well before that…The night I first arrived in the UK happened to be the Last Night of the Proms in [cough] 1979: I was about to start at the Royal College of Music, and the guy I was staying with said ‘Come on, I think we can get in…’. You can’t imagine what it was like for a Canadian fresh off the plane to be immersed in that: I thought ‘If this is what music in London is going to be like then this is where I want to be!’
Every time you left the College the Albert Hall was right there opposite, waiting for you. One of my earliest professional gigs was Messiah from Scratch there, with David Willcocks conducting the entire audience in the choruses and emerging artists as soloists. That was just four or five years after I arrived in London, and when I stepped into that hallowed space I felt excited but scarily insignificant: it feels like singing into the heavens.
Gerald Finley singing at the Last Night of the Proms in 2018, with saxophonist Jess Gillam and the late Sir Andrew Davis.
As a young singer you can be tempted to give the sound an extra push, but that’s counterproductive and unnecessary. I remember a colleague telling me that he’d heard my great hero Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau opening a Lieder recital there with one of the quietest Schubert songs in the repertoire: 'Meeresstille', which begins pianissimo. 5000 people were hanging on his every word, and they could hear everything: OK, he was a pretty good singer (!), but if you have a healthy technique in place you can trust that you’ll be heard.
You’ll be singing in Vaughan Williams’s Sancta Civitas tomorrow night - tell me a little about your relationship with the composer and this piece…
Vaughan Williams’s music came into my life as a young chorister, then later on I sang Pilgrim in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and this feels like a culmination of all those things – I’m also doing the Songs of Travel in recital at the moment, so it’s all connected! Sancta Civitas is a huge piece with huge forces: remote brass and choir, a solo tenor up in the gallery, plus full orchestra, double choir and semi-chorus on stage. Other than Mahler 8 or the Britten War Requiem, there aren’t many bigger pieces to put on!
Vaughan Williams was a master of putting that sort of choral majesty together, as he’d already proved with the Sea Symphony. He composed Sancta Civitas between 1923 and 1925, and it was premiered in 1926 when the echoes of World War One were still resonating: people needed beacons of hope to lift their spirits after that incredibly gruesome time, with Spanish Flu in recent memory and the General Strike underway.
The piece describes Babylon being overthrown and the Heavenly City appearing on earth, and there’s great drama in the choral and brass writing to herald that - all shot through with these hymns of worship which Vaughan Williams did so well. My role is very much that of the prophet, introducing various sections and observing events. He then hands it over to the choir who intone that famous line from Revelations: ‘And I saw a new heaven’.
At the close of the piece you have the tenor singing ‘I come to you with peace and with love’ from high up in the gallery: it makes for a hushed, unbelievably touching ending after all the drama, and in Vaughan Williams’s hands it’s quite an experience. In our own very uncertain times it’s a wonderful chance to reflect on hope, and the idea of humanity’s good side triumphing over its dark side.
You’ve recently created roles in John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen - what was the process like in each case?
Gerald Finley and Julia Bullock in Adams's Antony and Cleopatra (photo by David Ruano)
It’s interesting that they have such different approaches. Once John gets a theme in his mind and works out how he wants to organise his ideas, he’s unstoppable: the music just seems to flood out of him, and that means that you receive a draft of the complete opera straight off the bat. Doctor Atomic [in which Finley created the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer] was my first experience with him and I’ll never forget opening the score at 'Batter My Heart', which comes at the end of Act One and has become one of the iconic baritone arias of the twenty-first century.
The process for Festen was much more collaborative: we did four or five workshop performances with Mark altering things as we rehearsed and then going away to make further revisions between the sessions. The piece also had such a great librettist in Lee Hall, who was very open to feedback from the cast - but the guy’s done Billy Elliot for heaven’s sake, he didn’t need any lessons from me! The collective effort was incredible, and it meant that we were all invested in the opera as a group: we were in the same room for seven weeks for at least six hours a day, so the Stockholm Syndrome was real! But at the end of the process we knew that we had something amazing, even though you can’t predict how critics and audiences are going to respond.
Working with just the piano reduction was tough, but once the orchestra showed up the piece came alive. There are elements of jazz and film music, beautiful solo writing for oboe d’amore, and incredible virtually unaccompanied passages for the singers…every day was a revelation. With John you know what the orchestration is like from the beginning, because he sends you the complete midi file on Day One! I feel hugely privileged to have encountered these two extraordinary creative minds.
What are the highlights of Antony and Cleopatra for you?
I wasn’t necessarily looking for another 'Batter My Heart', but when I first flicked through the score I found that Act One ends with another tour de force for my character: Antony is up against it in a sea-battle, and although Cleopatra has joined him he suddenly sees her turn and retreat…He’s left wondering what to do, and quickly decides that he’s going to follow her out of the battle which effectively defines his downfall; it ends with a chorus behind blaming him for his inaction and withdrawal, and it’s powerful stuff.
Act Two is all about the unravelling of Antony’s military prowess and honour as a soldier, and he has two more fantastic soliloquies before the double suicide with Cleopatra at the end. When I surveyed the score as a whole I was blown away by the psychological drama, the confrontations, the moments of reflection…it’s exhausting, but incredibly dramatic and bombastic in very John fashion! I think it’s a great piece, and I hope we can bring it to the UK in some form.
Looping back to Doctor Atomic, what did you make of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer?
I found it fascinating, but three-and-a-half hours was a long haul! I thought Cillian Murphy did an incredible job: he had a big advantage over me in terms of physicality, but I was blessed with John’s extraordinary settings of lines from the Bhagavad Gita and poetry by John Donne and Baudelaire, and those emotional sources which generate the music and character were huge gifts to me. I saw the film much more as a documentary than an investigation of Oppenheimer’s personality.
And the timeframes are very different. The opera concentrates exclusively on the three-week period just before the bomb was tested in New Mexico, so I never did any research about Oppenheimer beyond that particular time – I didn’t want to taint my knowledge of him with hindsight. That’s what I do with most of the characters I portray: I identify the period that’s being represented in the opera and try not to get caught up in their later journeys. With Antony (and Iago, Falstaff and Macbeth) of course you have to read the plays…but once I’ve read Shakespeare’s version I focus on the composer’s version.
In Turnage’s Festen, you play the monstrous character of Helge - how do you prepare for a role as disturbing as this?
I mentioned the dark side of humanity earlier, and Festen unflinchingly explores our capacity for destruction and self-destruction. I watched the film when it was first mooted, but only decided to take the job when I discovered that it was never proven to be based on a real event.
Gerald Finley and company in Festen at Covent Garden (photo by Marc Brenner)
I could just about cope with the material being a fictional event, traumatic as it was to portray this character. Wrestling with the role of Helge’s atrocities felt very different from playing other villains with a psychopathic edge. Whether it be Scarpia, Iago, Nick Shadow or Don Giovanni, each one has a new approach, and for Helge – to come at it with due care, attention and carefulness – was no exception. Our director, Richard Jones, provided me with a useful guide, in the form of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. The semi-autobiographical series tells a very similar story to Festen, and you can feel that he’s going through therapy as he writes.
I asked Mark early on if I would make an apology speech at the end, like Helge does in the film, and he said no. That was one of the things I initially struggled with: when I read the end of the opera (with the characters just exchanging banal ‘Good morning’s) I thought ‘Wow, that lack of closure is going to be hard for an audience’. The power of the opera is that we never know whether the family forgive Helge, ostracise him, or sweep what’s happened under the carpet.
You’ve taken on several Wagner roles over the last decade or so - is Wotan in your sights?
You’re not the first to ask - some conductors have popped the question! The short answer is that I’m not saying Never - I’m just saying No for now… The Wagner roles that I’ve been doing – Amfortas, Sachs, and more recently the Dutchman – are incredible studies in human experience, compassion, struggle and fragility, but getting involved in the Ring is something else. I don’t think anyone who tackles Wotan thinks ‘I’ll just try it out and see how it feels’: you have to do it a lot and feel it’s something you absolutely need to do.
It’s hard to know when the time is right. Roles like Sachs and Wotan require huge amounts of vocal prowess and experience, but they also take up so much headspace: learning Sachs is the equivalent of memorising two-and-a-half recital-programmes. When I debuted Sachs in my early fifties I remember Donald McIntyre saying he wished he’d learned the role at that age so he could actually remember it!
People have suggested just doing Rheingold rather than committing to the whole cycle, but to me that feels like signing up to play Gandalf or Dumbledore for only the first film! I’m also aware that it would require me to devote a lot of my remaining performing life to The Ring rather than refining roles that I’ve loved over the years, and I think there are some great singers who ought to be doing Wotan ahead of me. So I’m wary of being tempted…it’s like that one beautiful glass of red wine that I’ve never tasted, because if I did then I’d want to drink the whole magnum!
How about roles that got away?
Billy Budd never worked out – there were a lot of good Billies around when I was the right age for the role, and although I had three productions pencilled in at various points none of them materialised because the opera-houses changed their plans. It happens, but it was pretty gutting at the time. I would love to do Mephistopheles and the villains in The Tales of Hoffmann at this stage in my life, but I’ve honestly been so blessed in terms of the roles that have come my way – I had my Bach and Handel period in my earlier career, then my Gluck phase, then onto Verdi, Wagner, and those incredible roles by living composers. I have nothing to begrudge at all.
