by Peter Hall
Covent Garden allowed me to hire for the scene half a dozen strippers from Soho who found it a highly diverting change from their normal work. In those days, if you were naked on the stage you had to stand still, the theory being, I suppose, that this was less likely to inflame the audience. Our strippers, therefore, were permitted to move only if they wore pads of false pubic hair, and Elastoplast patches over their nipples. The effect was to give the girls the most noticeable breasts in Old Testament history.
Some of the staider members of the women’s chorus were so shocked that they refused to come on stage while this scene was enacted, and insisted on contributing their atonal wails and cries of lust while they knitted in the wings.
At the first dress rehearsal, Forbes Robinson as Moses and Richard Lewis as Aaron found themselves singing their final metaphysical debate over an altar on which lay a naked girl covered in blood. Neither of them stopped nor made any observation about this additional prop. They merely said to me afterwards, somewhat drily, that I might have warned them about it beforehand. Any actor would certainly have stopped, not in moral indignation but amazement. For singers, the dress rehearsal has to go on …
Reports of the orgies on stage leaked out, and the indignation of the popular press, days before the production opened, was wonderful to behold. Should public money be wasted on this filth? Had Covent Garden, of all places, joined the unseemly ranks of those being swept along in the tide of Sixties immorality? Schoenberg, as a result, became box office, and advance ticket sales soared, which astounded the management. The pages of titillating comment in the newspapers also aroused the claque who regularly sat in the Royal Opera House gallery on first nights. They sent word that they were going to boo me loudly at the final curtain for depraving the Royal Opera House. It was, I thought, decent of them to warn me.
It was one of the most frightening first nights of my life.
But a vivid performance was given by both the cast and the orchestra, and we received not the bird but an ovation. The notices were enthusiastic and I began to be asked to work in other European opera houses.
The Lord Chamberlain was satisfied too, which rather surprised me. I once discussed with an ex-naval officer on his staff a delicate passage in a play which he suspected was hinting at sexual intercourse between two men. He was actually wrong, but he had a nose for prurience which could not easily be deflected. ‘Oh, come on, Hall,’ he expostulated, ‘we all know what that means: “up periscopes!”’ ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Buggery, Hall, buggery,’ he shouted.
At the time of Moses and Aaron, Madame Furtseva was on an official visit to London. She was the Soviet Minister of Culture – a diehard Stalinist who had survived many a purge. Some bright spark at the Foreign Office had thought it might be interesting, perhaps provocative, for her to witness a modern opera at Covent Garden. She and her entourage sat stony-faced. At the end, by courtesy of an embarrassed interpreter, she harangued me soundly. She said she thought it was completely wrong for the country to grant me public money so that I could create such an erotic and reprehensible spectacle; I was pandering to decadent tastes. I asked if she liked the music. She said she found that decadent too; Covent Garden had clearly done the opera only in order to attract huge audiences. Schoenberg was at that time a difficult and rarely heard composer, and the thought of staging him as a crowd-pleaser was something to treasure.
The production is full of memories: the sheer excitement of moving hundreds of people around the stage; the letter signed ‘God’, postmarked St John’s Wood, that threatened me with unspeakable sexual diseases if I continued this depraved activity; and the eight gallons of stage-blood prepared for each performance and poured over the cast during the Golden Calf scene. A gutter ran along the front of the stage to collect this, but it sprang a leak in early rehearsals and blood dripped down into the orchestra pit. I was not surprised when the indignant fiddle section angrily waved their violins at me.
The production became an icon of the mid Sixties, and offers of opera work poured in. I was tempted to enter the opera circuit, travelling round the main international houses. It is a career that looks glamorous, and the money is much better than in the theatre. But it is a switchback with little continuity. Productions are only a director’s own for the first three or four performances. After that a new cast is rehearsed by various assistants and the work consequently sung by people the director will never even have met. The production no longer represents his work. I knew that I had to be in one place, one house.
Chapter Four
Lord Drogheda was an old-style tycoon with many new-style habits. As well as being chairman of the Financial Times, he was chairman of Covent Garden and an influential figure in the arts. He was wealthy, cultivated and enthusiastic. And he had the gift, beloved by all artists, of being a fan. His charm made any ballerina or prima donna feel unique. He was dazzled by stars.
I began to know Garrett Drogheda and his wife during the Sixties. They came down to Stratford to see my RSC work. And our friendship was sealed when I went to the Royal Opera House to do Moses and, a year later, The Magic Flute.
Soon after I left the RSC, when I was deep in films and also in discussions about an annual contract at Glyndebourne, Jacky and I had dinner at the Droghedas’ house in Lord North Street. The next music director at Covent Garden, succeeding Georg Solti, was there with his wife. I had met Colin Davis before, but had never until now had the chance of talking with him at any length. We were of the same generation – both young lions of the new artistic establishment, both impatient of formality and what we saw as the old, stuffy British way of doing things. We found an identical enthusiasm about what opera should be, how it should be created and how the audience for it should be broadened. We both wanted to bring the theatre back into opera. I felt the same excitement, the same sense of going with the current of the times, that I had felt when I dreamt up the RSC. Our wives and the Droghedas stared at us dumbfounded.
We talked on and on. It was a magical evening, as important to me as my night in Leningrad with Fordie Flower.
Within a week Colin Davis had done an extraordinary thing: he had offered me half his crown. He wanted me to share his directorship of the Royal Opera. This was an act of immense generosity. It was also absolute proof of his feeling that music and drama should be equal partners.
I accepted with alacrity and excused myself to Glyndebourne who were understanding and agreed that I could still do occasional productions for them.
Opera has a long lead-time. Plans are made two, if not three, years in advance. So before I was due to join Colin there was a long period of preparation in which I did three productions at the Royal Opera House: Eugene Onegin as well as Tristan with Solti, and the premiere of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden with Colin.
Working with Tippett – humanist, mystic and humorist – was like working with all the Englishness of my past. He was steeped in Shakespeare and Eliot and Blake; he loved Purcell and Samuel Palmer. The Knot Garden was born of an amalgamation of The Tempest and Heartbreak House. Colin and I thrived in a frenzy of discovery, and found we had a real rapport in the rehearsal room. We also laid schemes for the future. During the eighteen months before I took up my post, much went well.
We planned to reach new audiences and to develop new singers. I remember an audition Colin and I gave to a young soprano fresh from the Opera Centre. We immediately cast her as the Countess in our forthcoming Figaro. Some thought it a great risk. Her name was Kiri te Kanawa. I also remember Colin’s excitement when he encountered another young voice – a personality more lyric than dramatic, and so more likely to inspire him than me. Colin recognised a talent not only beautiful but already capable of conveying subtle shades of meaning. He was talking of Jessye Norman.
With the Board of Covent Garden and with Garrett Drogheda, however, all was not so well. The Royal Opera longed for the kind of new thinking that had swept through the theatre in the Sixties. Colin and I were to be new brooms; and Davi
d Webster, after a distinguished period as general director, was soon to be succeeded by John Tooley. Yet it quickly became plain that the Board were prepared only to go on exactly as before.
I also discovered that Garrett Drogheda, whom I continued to like, was one thing as a friend and quite another as a boss. He bombarded me with memoranda – an anxious hands-on chairman who tended to pick up and magnify every passing anxiety.
Colin and I had hoped to gather an ensemble of young singers, and to create a distinctive style of doing opera. Brilliant young talent existed: Frederica von Stade, Ileana Cotrubas, Kiri te Kanawa, Janet Baker, Thomas Allen, Luis Lima. We thought we could persuade them to give us three or four months of each year so that we could build up a company. We planned to create new productions with these young, keen singers; then to revive these productions in repertory, when the great stars of the operatic circuit could arrive and take over the roles after their usual cursory rehearsals lasting a few days. We felt that this two-tier system (which would be reflected in the ticket prices) provided a central artistic policy while at the same time giving the public the big names, and maintaining Covent Garden’s position as an international opera house.
The initial response of the Board was good. It was when we proposed that the first run of performances of our new Figaro should be in English, and the second in Italian, that feathers began to get ruffled. Both Colin and I were dedicated to making opera communicate its meaning. We believed translation would help that; and remember, this was in 1969, long before the days of surtitles. For me, now, surtitles have made the vexed question of translating opera irrelevant; I much prefer to hear the words the composer heard when he composed the music.
I grew more and more unhappy the nearer I came to taking up my appointment. Any attempt to alter the established policy was greeted with alarm. Garrett encouraged the members of the Board to think they were musical experts when they were not. They were amateurs. Our plans got nowhere. They were not exactly blocked – they just didn’t happen. The great British habit of diplomatically doing nothing hung like a pall over our future.
I realised as time went by that I had made a terrible mistake. I had dreamed to do for opera what I had done for Shakespeare at Stratford, and in Colin Davis I thought I had found the ideal partner. In this I was right. What we both wanted to do was also right. But we were trying to do it in the wrong place at the wrong time. We would have been better off down the road at the English National Opera.
I now behaved badly. I left Colin Davis and John Tooley in the lurch. Just before I officially became co-director of the Royal Opera, I handed in my resignation. I have continued to feel guilty towards Colin and John who were wonderfully magnanimous in the face of my change of heart. And I have often felt since that a big chance was missed.
Glyndebourne was the operatic haven where I recovered from my disappointment over Covent Garden. It brought me Baroque opera; and joyful collaborations with Bernard Haitink and Raymond Leppard. It brought me Britten, Verdi, Bizet; and Janet Baker and Maria Ewing. Above all, it brought me Mozart and the opportunity to work on the Da Ponte operas year in, year out – refining, developing, and all the time understanding a little more.
Chapter Five
I lost my conventional faith in my late teens. Shakespeare and Mozart were my gods long before then. Mozart preceded even Shakespeare in my love. When I was nine, I had a book of Mozart piano sonatas which seemed to me extraordinarily easy to play. It took me many years to realise that, though the notes might be easy, to express them was one of the hardest things on earth.
For my tenth birthday present, I had asked to be taken to King’s College Chapel to hear Mozart’s Requiem. This was, I am sure, a romantic request. I had read about his death in poverty, the unfinished Requiem ordered by a mysterious stranger, and the marking-up of the percussion part as he was actually dying. All this had captured my imagination. Composers – Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart — seemed to die young, usually penniless or mad. Genius, I thought, was near to madness and very romantic.
Mozart was not fashionable in the 1940s. I was brought up by my teachers to revere Beethoven and to think of him as the Titan, ‘the storm that ended music’. Then, Mozart was still considered a small Rococo genius, a charming entertainer rather than a creative innovator.
I am not claiming prescience or maintaining that I understood Mozart before the fashion changed. I just remember always loving his music. It was partly that I could play it, however inadequately; partly that I was enchanted by the wit and the evocation of a more elegant age. I certainly didn’t understand the pain in Mozart until my late adolescence. There was a popular piece of dance-band music in the early Forties, In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing-Room. It took the first theme of a Mozart C major piano sonata and tricked it out with musical box tinkles and supporting saxophones: Glenn Miller meets Mozart. I hated it, but it expressed a perception of Mozart at that time: powdered wigs, crystal chandeliers and gentle minuets.
Perhaps that is why when I saw my first Figaro (also in my tenth birthday week) it seemed slightly soppy. But as I learnt the piece and saw it again, I became more and more aware of its sexiness; all those people yearning for love, weeping for love. I was already mightily intrigued by the power of lust. Love was clearly not a soppy thing at all. And Mozart knew it.
As I grew older I listened to a great deal of Mozart on the radio. I heard the important Mozart and Haydn symphonies performed in the Cambridge Guild Hall by the Jacques Orchestra. I heard Così fan tutte sung at the Arts Theatre Cambridge by the students of the Guildhall School of Music. I saw Don Giovanni at Sadler’s Wells, and then at Glyndebourne directed by Carl Ebert and designed more apocalyptically by John Piper. I seem never to have been away from Mozart. I have listened to him avidly for more than fifty years, and for twenty-five of these I have tried to direct his operas.
Mozart and Shakespeare have this in common: they were blessed in their historical moment. They both inhabited a language of art which was ordered, formed and disciplined; and they were both able to break that form, often in order to express pain, complication and ambiguity. Shakespeare inherited the regular iambic verse-line of five beats, a line which is a pretty accurate representation of a phrase in conversation. Mozart inherited the traditions of eighteenth-century Baroque music with its rules and cadences; he had a lingua franca of defined shapes which his father, Leopold (the music master par excellence), had instilled in him.
Thus, Mozart and Shakespeare inherited forms which supported them and which they could observe as second nature. But by breaking those forms they were able to make them more human and expressive. This anarchy is at the centre of their art. Shakespeare constantly heightens emotion by creating unexpected irregularities in the verse. He writes against the verse, yet always preserves it. It is about to break and never quite does – like the counterpoint in the phrasing of a great jazz musician which never quite loses the beat. Out of these breathtaking irregularities, the actor can express extreme feeling. Lear’s last agony is a pentameter of one repeated word; what is more, it reverses the normal iambic rhythm: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’
Don Giovanni starts with a formal overture. Yet within seconds, Mozart has wandered into unknown worlds of eerie chromaticism, creating the shifting, painful uncertainties that lie at the heart of this opera. Technically, what he is doing announces the beginning of nineteenth-century music.
Both Shakespeare’s theatre and Mozart’s theatre were based on direct audience address – the ancient storyteller’s convention which allowed the actor to tell the audience exactly what he is thinking and feeling. Hamlet does not wonder to himself whether he should be or should not be: he argues it out directly with his audience. It is a public speech requiring confirmation or contradiction. In the same way, the basis of opera from Monteverdi until Wagner is that in a solo aria the character unpacks his emotions and shares his or her thoughts with the spectators. The aria is not for private musing; that is a naturalistic co
ncept. It is a sharing, and it is always truthful.
I learnt at Glyndebourne that naturalist conventions, by destroying the kind of theatre that preceded them, had done as much damage to opera as they had to Shakespeare. The nineteenth century developed naturalism as a revolutionary force. For the first time, rooms were presented with four walls, though one of them was of course removed so that the audience could peep in. Doors and windows were no longer painted on backcloths – they were real, with catches and locks and knobs. This theatre reached its climax with Ibsen and Chekhov. Time became ‘real’, acting tried to be natural behaviour and dialogue pretended to be real speech. The audience, like privileged voyeurs, watched a simulation of life. The vigorous public story-telling of the Greeks or the Elizabethans, where character is formalised and indeed shows he is aware that an audience is watching him, was challenged. Long, unreal ‘speeches’ or arias had to be disguised. Theatre turned into a representation of reality rather than a game of make-believe where the audience was asked to use its imagination.
This revolution was embarrassing for opera because, like the old theatre, it had been based from its beginning on the conventions of public story-telling. In Monteverdi or in Cavalli or even in the opera seria of the eighteenth century, the singers of solo arias, by opening their hearts to the spectators, telling them the truth, are involving them in their predicaments. They only dissimulate or tell lies to the other characters on stage.
This public demonstration of the heart is even greater when we come to the ensembles – those unique glories of Mozart operas; a musical blend of six, sometimes seven, voices where balance, rhythmic precision and unity are paramount. Musically they are one; dramatically, though, they are not unified but utterly disparate. The characters frequently sing the same words, but the irony is that, with a different inflection, they can have a different meaning. This device is unique to opera: no other medium can convey contradictory thoughts from several people at one and the same time. If several actors speak at once in a play, the result is incoherent. But in Mozart’s operas we can look at each one of the characters for a split second and then move on to the next, comparing their different attitudes, contrasting their different emotions. We listen to what is often the same text from each of them, but we understand the irony because their emotions differ. It is a moment of chaos and contradiction – made clear by the music.
