Evviva la Nilsson/Birgit for ever

'Two roles - two worlds,' announces this spread in a programme for one of Birgit Nilsson's local events in Båstad on the Bjäre Peninsula, southwest Sweden, which I was so lucky to visit this summer for the Birgit Nilsson Days. On my return, I eagerly read, finally, from cover to cover La Nilsson - My Life in Music the autobiography translated into English, and handsomely republished (though with rather too many typos) by Verlag für moderne Kunst,Vienna.

Part of Birgit's abundant legacy - I'll call her that, as do the good museum folk of her family home, since I feel in an odd way I know her, and not as some ossified legend - to have allowed music lovers like me to experience her roots in the mostly happy, if physically tough, farm work which grounded her for life. And as she tells her story, there is no personality split, despite the superhuman talent she had as one of the greatest singers of the 20th century (no need even to qualify that with 'one of the greatest Wagner and Strauss singers' - I've been listening to her recently in Scandinavian song, and she's consummate there too). 

The second chapter, 'When the little one came into the world,' gives as beguiling an account of a rural childhood as Carl Nielsen's, though Birgit's circumstances were far from poor, and she was an only child, rather than one of 12 (the Danish composer's situation) or nine (the case with her father Nils). Most folk I met around the locale were delightful, natural and very down to earth. This is the farmstead where Birgit spent the first year of her life before moving to the ensemble now housing the museum.

The first of our walking expeditions - see the Hovs Hallar blog entry for the second - was an admirably signposted trail in the footsteps, or more often the bike tracks, of young Birgit.

Ingrid, aforementioned in that previous entry, was our guide, but I very much liked the way you could (if you had a sophisticated phone, which I certainly don't) access carefully chosen music sung by oour versatile heroine at various stopping posts. The most charming was in front of a hillock where young Birgit joined her friends in al fresco dancing - a polka and a folksong were the choices. They put a spring in our step as we walked on.

The route led along minor roads and farm tracks through gently undulating landscapes with distant views of the sea and the Danish-style church at Hov

and eventually to the bigger edifice at Västra Karup where Birgit's formative choral training took place, and where all this year's concerts of the Birgit Nilsson Days took place.

The diva always returned to give concerts to the locals

and also to visit her parents' grave. Relations with her father were not always easy - though he bought her a house organ when she was a young girl, the idea that the natural heir to the farm, who should marry a strong man and settle there, wanted to go on to study singing  was abhorrent. He gave her not a penny for her studies in Stockholm, but fortunately her mother had some money of her own. In the house-museum, we heard a recording of Stina Nilsson singing, made at the fair in Gothenburg - not just a natural voice, but also a professional-sounding one, very lovely. Lucky how posterity preserved that. In later years, Nils inevitably became very proud of his world-famous daughter.

So this was always the spot, right by the church - no special privileges for La Nilsson, who also chose to be buried there (much to Vienna's disappointment) alongside her beloved husband of 55 years, Bertil Niklasson. Though she refers to him throughout the autobiography, Birgit leaves their story until the last and, by implication, the most important chapter. The down-to-earth portrait of a marriage, not sparing of either her or Bertil's faults, is as much of a gem as any of the other highlights in the book. Forgive me if I don't show the full inscriptions which place them both equally on the plot in front of the parents' headstone (she gets the picture, though).

It's not my intention to follow the extraordinary Nilsson story through, and there are way too many fascinating insights in the autobiography to quote (not least on how the singing voice ought to work). One thing especially struck me, though: how artists at the highest level can be professional when it comes to themselves, but totally the opposite in often abysmal attitudes to their fellow musicians. The account of lessons at Stockholm's Royal Academy of Music with Scottish one-time famous tenor Joseph Hislop is a case in point of a teacher nearly wrecking a young voice, applying deadly pressure to the vocal chords, and dealing out devastating snobbery ('Birgit should be aware that it is not really possible for a farm girl to become a singer'). This photo of Birgit around that time shows she was not one to be deterred, though the effect was temporarily devastating.

Simply gobsmacking, and often very funny to us, though clearly not to the unfortunates under his baton, is the behavious of Herbert von Karajan as reported here. Quite often, I'm told, conductors ask for pianissimos from their singers in rehearsals, and then conduct mezzo forte in performance because they can't help it. Karajan, Nilsson observes, went for loud in performance quite deliberately, having asked for the same quiet dynamics from singers earlier. And the performers would often be kept waiting for up to 45 minutes in morning rehearsals, only to be told that the 'Maestro' was held up - they had to come back in the evenings. 

In Vienna and New York, we read, Karajan fancied himself an expert in lighting his own Wagner productions (in this sphere he was absolutely an amateur). The Vienna Philharmonic was more than a little piqued that Karajan had granted it two rehearsals compared to 80 for the lighting. 'The technical personnel...decided, in their own charming, Viennese way to teach him a lesson in giving him a laurel wreath to celebrate the 75th lighting rehearsal'. Can you imagine how ludicrous the vain creature looked, raised up with a light shining on him (the lucky one), baton in one hand, telephone to give lighting cues in the other? 

This splendid piece of satirical wear, a miner's helmet with red light for a Brünnhilde groping in the dark, now on display among the items on Nilsson's dressing table and mirror in the museum, was sent to Nilsson on the evening of her Walküre premiere at the Met. Karajan wanted to know the sender but never found out. We learn from the afterword to the new edition of La Nilsson that the writer, high-up Met secretary Peggy Tueller who became great friends with Birgit, was the culprit. The Valkyrie duly modelled it in her dressing room (though I don't think she went on stage in it during a rehearsal with Karajan, as has also been asserted).

As I wrote in the piece for The Arts Desk, I've never laughed more going round a museum: Nilsson had a wonderful sense of humour to counter all the weird flummery of the opera world. I wonder what she thought of all these dolls, sent by one fan, though she became firm friends with the lady and godmother to her son.

Warm and honest with genuine fans, Nilsson recalls the less funny side in her autobiography: a long and terrifying story of a glamorous stalker which might make a good subject for a film, a play or even an opera. I'll leave you to read about that.

Anyway, her reading was eclectic - or maybe she just displayed the books given to her in the farmhouse which became a summer home. Did she ever learn any of The World's Best Dirty Jokes?

While you're free to wander at will through the museum, in the converted cow barn, the house can be seen by guided tour. Our young guide Klara, a perfect English speaker with real flair in delivery giving her first tour in the language, couldn't have been nicer, and in that she was no different from all the staff who work at the museum. That's a portrait of Nils on the wall, by the way, next to some traditional Swedish furniture and fabrics.

Just a few more shots from the farmhouse: the kitchen

which also has a copy of the Met Cookbook open at the page of Birgit's recipe for gravad lax; two of her cakes are also available from the excellent cafe (where the pigs used to be kept, appropriatedly enough); and a view of the piano surmounted by photos - I love the treated one, top row left, of a Stockholm debut as Agathe.

So thankful that the house organ given by dad to talented young daughter is on display in the pastor's house at the Boarp Museum of Local History above Båstad,

because otherwise we might not have discovered this delightful open-air collection of buildings or been treated to a very special tea in a cosy back room of the wooden building in which refreshments are served. My gorgeous friend Pia was doing up a house only fifteen minutes up the coast by train , and she joined us for the afternoon. I love this pic of her pouring coffee while the splendid lady who spoiled us stands in the background.

I need to return to Båstad for a blog entry about the supremely beautiful church there, another local venue for Birgit of Bjärehalvön. A final word on the autobiography: it's so mich more than a series of anecdotes. And while our incorruptible heroine does not spare the timewasters and troublemakers of the operatic world, she is infallibly generous about the majority of her colleagues (even Karajan is granted the ability, when he feels like it, to pull something absolutely sensational out of his oversized hat). And, I'm sure, absolutely truthful.

By way of coda, since we haven't seen much of Birgit in the roles for which she was most celebrated, see how different she could look on stage according to costume and make-up. The cover of the Decca Salome - although I have it on CD, I couldn't resist picking up the LP box set in a charity shop the other week - has always been a hoot, an audition before its time for RuPaul's Drag Race

but then look at my favourite glamour shot of our heroine in the same role. Very Emma Peel as played by Diana Rigg in The Avengers, don't you think?

The museum sells postcards and even spectacle cloths with this on. Needless to say, I bought four.

Into the woods with Wagner's Siegfried

Perhaps I should more accurately have put 'flying through the forest', since the first four Mondays of my Opera in Depth class kept us buoyant in unpromising times. There's so much wit and spirit about young Siegfried's rapport with his scheming foster-father Mime, such galvanising energy about the forging scene, that it was hard to be downcast by dismal circumstances leading up the 31st (and including it; more of what I did on the day anon).

Such are the insane demands on the Heldentenor singing the most taxing role in the rep - Stuart Skelton, talking to me for the Wagner Society, said it was tougher than Tristan, and he'll never take it on - that I've only seen two Siegfrieds live who both lasted that act and looked goodish (in one case) and close to perfect (in the other): Siegfried Jerusalem in the Kupfer production for Bayreuth (image from Act 2 up top), and more recently Stefan Vinke at the Royal Opera, not the loveliest voice but the only other hero to make us leave the auditorium in the interval spinning with exhilaration. Fine actor too.

To guide the class, I've had none but the best for company. Delighted to find that Jay Hunter Morris (pictured above in the first of two Metropolitan Opera photos by Ken Howard) looks and sounds the part, though Robert Lepage's Met production doesn't really have enough Personenregie infill; it seems to rely on the dramatic intelligence of Hunter Morris and his Mime, Gerhard Siegel (also a Siegfried of yore, Vinke told me at another Wagner Soc talk).

Good to have a video-suggested forest and running water, too, but the ineptness of the lighting (too many follow-spots, video strips on faces) lets it down.

Even so, I'll be returning to the Met DVD for the middle of Act 2. After we'd eased in with Hunter Morris and Siegel, I reverted to the Chéreau Ring for the meetings of Donald McIntyre with Heinz Zednik's Mime and Hermann Becht's Alberich (the Licht- and Schwarz-Alberich similarities are brilliantly realised here, as they were in Richard Jones's Royal Opera Ring). The Forging Scene could only be Jerusalem's with Graham Clark's acrobatic Mime - we took the Kupfer production's Act 1 from the second part of the riddle scene (John Tomlinson's Wanderer superb, of course) to the end of the act, where Barenboim takes the last stretch at such a lick, Clark vocally and Jerusalem tapping-wise just keeping up with him. Terrible shame this clip doesn't go to the end, but you see how infilled the production is.

For soundclip excerpts, I was spoiled for choice: Remedios, Dempsey and above all godlike Norman Bailey on the ENO English-language Ring, now on Chandos;

bits of Melchior on various recordings;

Suthaus and Patzak for the sake of Furtwängler's Rome conducting; Domingo amazingly good in an excerpts disc with Pappano conducting the Royal Opera Orchestra (he's best in Siegfried anyway, I think); Hotter with Clemens Krauss, Bayreuth, 1953; for Act 2 Scene 1, Thomas Stewart and Zoltan Kelemen with Karajan and the Berlin Phil.

That took up the second half of Monday's class. In the first, we had a visit from the wonderful Tom Eisner. long-serving (30 plus years) first violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whom I know through his wife Jessica Duchen. Unusually curious for an orchestral musician (though the ones who came to talk at my BBC Symphony Orchestra course were, too), he has long rehearsal break chats with Vladimir Jurowski, who can talk about everything under the sun except sport (not a problem for either of us). There were four full days of rehearsals for Siegfried, and it showed right from the start - see my review for The Arts Desk - and when they embark on the full Ring in January, there will be three rehearsals before Xmas and then two weeks. Here's Tom at the class, happy to show the message on the back of his mobile while I flourish the Dover score of Siegfried.

We know that Jurowski is a phenomenal preparer, and also that he likes to place his players carefully. There was nearly a riot some years back when he wanted the double basses centre back, continental style, but they now prefer it. For Siegfried there were many extra players, making the numbers up, for instance, to sixteen first and sixteen second violins as Wagner stipulates, but Jurowski wanted only 12 each to play much of the score. It was, of course, a concert highlight to have superlative new guest principal horn Nicolas Mooney step forward to shake hands with Kerl's Siegfried and embark on his magnificent solo. Tom had hoped to bring him along on Monday for a reprise, but he was off to Belgium.

Needless to say it was the lazier players who asked to be on the back two desks...not Tom, of course. He said that the violas have it tougher than the violins, but it's still an endurance test, the toughest bits being Siegfried's outbursts over the sleeping Brunnhilde ('Das ist kein Mann', etc). Gossip about the singers was interesting but not repeatable here (he liked them all but was scared of one). The full works next January/Feb will be phenomenal, though we hope for some cast changes. Not, certainly, Adrian Thompson's Mime, Robert Hayward's Alberich or Elena Pankratova, tackling Brünnhilde for the first time. Here she is with Jurowski, Kerl and the players in the second of Simon Jay Price's two images reproduced here (there were so many to choose from).

Meanwhile we'll have ENO Siegfried Richard Berkeley-Steele coming to talk the Monday after next, and I'm working on two illustrious possibilities, about whom it would be precipitate to speculate. Then in the summer term, on to Elektra and Madama Butterfly. I hope the members of the Wagner Society who'v taken my class numbers up to 36 will stay on...

Onegin as tool?

Updating last week's argument, which began with hero Desmond Tutu and ended up at the Met,  I draw your attention to a petition set up by 75 year old composer (Charles) Andrew Rudin. Its title quickly clarifies: 'The Metropolitan Opera: Dedicate 9/23 Opening Gala to support of LGTB [don't we usually say LGBT?] people.'

The reason? The deep irony that the opera is Eugene Onegin by that not exactly closeted, but hardly 'out and proud' composer Tchaikovsky*, due to feature Anna Netrebko as Tatyana and Valery Gergiev as conductor, two artists who have explicitly lent their support to Putin's campaign.

Should they be forced into the position of decrying their leader now that he has unquestionably gone too far and taken a leaf out of Hitler's rulebook? That's a difficult one, but asserting their support for the LGBT community worldwide might release them from explicitly condemning their friend and supporter. Should they be dis-engaged if they don't speak up? No, of course not. But in that instance it would be up to the individual whether to go to their performances or buy their CDs if they carry on remaining silent. Each person must make his or her choice, but imperatives - as I wrote, paraphrasing QE2 in Gloriana, 'the word MUST is never to be used to Princes' - won't get us anywhere. Come to think of it, Deborah Warner, whose oddly anodyne production this is, might be in a better position to say something.

Working on an article for Kasper Holten's much more vivid (to me, at any rate) Royal Opera production of Eugene Onegin earlier this year (scene above with Krasimira Stoyanova, Peter Rose, Simon Keenlyside and a recumbent Pavol Breslik by Bill Cooper), I came across an essay in the annual Bard publication, in this instance devoted to Tchaikovsky and his world - I think it might have been by Alexander Poznansky, whose refutation of suspicions about the composer's sudden end I don't entirely buy - giving me more chapter and verse on Tchaikovsky's attitude to his gayness than I'd seen before. I'm indebted it to it for these lines following the usual report on the composer's decision to marry Antonina Milyukova:

Pyotr Ilyich certainly had no intentions of fighting his nature. Of Modest’s charge, the eight year old deaf mute Kolya Konradi, he would no doubt have gone no further than to admit that he ‘adore[d] him passionately’ and to write to the boy ‘ I kiss you warmly 1,000, 000, 000 times’. But he continued to have (buy?) sex with the likes of a high-school student in Vienna and a coachman on a friend’s country estate which he described as ‘nothing but a homosexual bordello’. He told Modest that he could not think of his loyal manservant Alyosha Sofronov ‘without being sexually aroused…[his] boots I would feel happy to clean all my life long’. In January 1877 he fell in love – admittedly without the wish or the hope for consummation - with the coquettish 21 year old violinist Josef Kotek [pictured with the composer up top] and remained so during the whole affaire Milyukova; Kotek was even one of the two witnesses at the wedding [official photo below].

Amazing how much we have come to know. Of course the whole confusion over Kolya and later over his nephew Vladimir 'Bob' Davydov brings in the horrid equation of homosexuality with pederasty: exactly the sort of grim muddying of the waters in which Putin's laws are currently revelling. But then, as Stephen Fry points out in a passionate polemic I've already eulogised, if you were to even bring up any of the above in the Russia of today, you could find yourself in jail. Enough; I feel my blood pressure rising even as I think about it. Action is what we need, and quickly.

I must note one funny thing that's happened since I started blogging about all this: the number of weekly Russian pageviews which had hovered for ages between the 200-300 mark has dropped to about 20. Now I only noticed the original figures because they seemed rather high - bots, possibly, thought I - but now it's the sudden drop which seems weird. But it's easy to get paranoid about these things.

Let's end, though, with the consolation of Tchaikovsky. The story behind the performer gets us into muddy waters again, I'm afraid; if I understand aright, Russian law helped Pletnev get out of a sticky situation when rape charges were brought against him by the family of a teenage boy in Thailand, where he was living at the time. As a performer, he stopped being welcome in the UK, though not in France, where I heard him conduct a typically inconsistent performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. His pianism has always been on a higher, if still sometimes maddening level; I'm sorry to hear he's stopped playing. Anyway, here he is in the Kremlin with the 12 miniatures that make up Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (properly The Months). If you want to indulge in elegy, try the June Barcarolle at 15m40s or the October 'Autumn Song'  at 27m20s.

(9/8) I've just read here on the Limelight site that Gidon Kremer has enlisted his great long-term collaborator Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, inter alia, to give a concert in Berlin on 7 October in support of Russia's jailed or persecuted opposition.

Kremer, too, has made his own observation on Netrebko's and Gergiev's support, which you can read in the link, but no harm in reduplicating it here as it rounds off everything so eloquently:

I don't want to point the finger, but it always upsets me to see talented colleagues more interested in self-promotion than in their art form becoming state delegates rather than artists. I'm highly suspicious of patriotism that identifies itself with the government. An artist, in my opinion, and historically, should be independent.

6/9  Mr Rudin's petition waxes stronger - over 8,000 signatures and 10,000 likely by the time of the Met gala. He also drew my attention to the isolated but magnificent voice, among singers, of Joyce DiDonato, great artist and clearly true Mensch (I guess you can use that word about both sexes). She has written an eloquent blogpost here, telling us that she'll be dedicating her Last Night of the Proms performance of 'Over the rainbow' to 'to all of those brave, valorous gay and lesbian souls whose voices are currently being silenced – either by family, friends, or by their government'. What a woman.

12/9 In response to the Arts Desk piece ('When artists could speak out') and my statement that if only to square my own conscience I wouldn't be attending a Gergiev concert until he says something, a reader responded: 'I’m afraid Mr. Nice is unlikely to be found at one of Gergiev’s concerts anytime soon. Gergiev was asked about it by a Dutch newspaper. Today there was an article about his festival in Rotterdam. He said the law was misunderstood abroad: “In Russia we do everything we can to protect children from paedophiles. This law is not about homosexuality, it targets paedophilia. But I have too busy a schedule to explore this matter in detail.” ' So the heinous confusion between the greatest of crimes and a natural human instinctcontinues here. Nice.

*8/9 Not according to Putin's Russia. Just read this in Private Eye: 'a new state-sponsored film by the director Yuri Arabov presents him [Tchaikovsky], ludicrously but in line with what seems to be official policy, as heterosexual. Attacked for this deception, Arabov has said it's "absolutely not the case" that the composer fancied men, adding: "I am opposed to the discussion of such things, particularly in the arts." Who said the old ways of the Soviet Union were gone?'

And - 18/9 - Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky has jumped on the revisionist bandwagon, commenting on the film: 'There is no evidence that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual'. How many explicit references in the diaries and letters - faked, no doubt - does he want?  

Tom Service has the right idea of how to answer this in today's Guardian: Beethoven made up his deafness to bolster his reputation! Brahms wore fake beards! Britten kept secret his marriages to several women! And so the game goes on. My own contribution: Mahler concocted his Jewishness because as the bored son of a perfect Viennese Catholic bourgeois banker, he wanted to kick against the grain.