Richard Margison might have become a police detective or a jewelry maker had it not been for a teacher who believed in his voice. He has requited that faith not only by becoming one of the greatest Canadian tenors on the international opera scene, but also by sharing with students of voice what he has learned and discovered about singing. Besides giving an occasional masterclass, he and his wife have founded the Highlands Opera Studio (www.highlandsoperastudio.com), a summer program for young singers.
Just weeks after his birth, his mother put him up for adoption under the condition that his new parents must be involved in music. A father who played the viola and sang as an amateur in local productions and a mother who taught piano met that condition nicely. Consequently, he was often the reluctant beneficiary of piano lessons at home.
Margison grew up with the weekly family ritual of listening to the radio broadcast of Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. As an adolescent, however, he was drawn to pop music and happily traded the keyboard for a guitar. In a duo during high school, he sang the music of Gordon Lightfoot, Carole King, James Taylor, and Elton John. He spent summers during his conservatory years crooning in coffee houses and clubs to earn spending money while at school.
At age 22, he entered the University of Victoria where he began voice lessons with Selena James. Through the pop music-hued style of his voice, she could discern his potential for opera and suggested that he audition for a special program that led to a degree in performance. The adjudicators initially rejected him, but James believed so strongly in Margison that she resigned her position, saying, “If I don’t have the ears to hear a diamond in the rough, then obviously I’m not good enough for this faculty.” Margison points out with some mirth that “the only person chosen that year to be a performance major in voice never had a career, while the rest of us have been working.” The university has since made amends by granting him an honorary doctorate of music.
James headed to the Victoria Conservatory of Music and brought Margison and several other students with her. The conservatory was launching a new program that offered a degree in performance as well as a teacher’s certificate. It included a work-and-study program in collaboration with the Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Manitoba Opera associations whereby students would perform in schools throughout Western Canada. Margison recalls that period of his education glowingly.
Tell about your experience with the work-and-study program.
We would perform an opera like Bohème but condensed into a show with just soloists and no chorus. At 9:00 in the morning we would sing Bohème, Traviata, Rigoletto. We did about 2,000 shows in five years in communities all over Canada.
I also had the benefit of another organization, Canada Opera Piccola, which was started by Léopold Simoneau and his wife, Pierrette Alarie. We would do a summer production of two chamber operas and then take it on tour in the fall for a month or two to every small community in the country, which was a tremendous way to learn your craft, to build stamina. We did everything from the ground up. We would arrive in a place, check into our accommodations, and then of course go over to the theater and help unload the truck and put up the sets. Sometimes the choir in the school would be our chorus, so we had to work with them—or for a community show, we would rehearse with a local group from that city the night before the performance. We did everything from ironing costumes to putting sets up, driving, the whole nine yards.
The Canadian Actors’ Equity Association set a particular salary for us, which wasn’t a bad salary at the time. We would also be involved in the main productions of the opera. All the comprimario roles would be handled by the ensemble group that was affiliated with the company. So we had ample opportunity to learn, and the beauty of it was that we were paid accordingly. We certainly had enough to afford an apartment and everything that we needed. We didn’t have to go scrambling to find money to have voice lessons and things. It was a wonderful way to learn.
You were making a living from opera in your 20s?
Definitely. I was living off the salary of doing the opera in the schools and the apprenticeship program in western Canada over a five-year period.
How did your career take off from local performances as an apprentice to real, professional roles?
I was doing comprimario roles in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary. Everybody figured that I had the stamina and the voice to take on some of the more demanding roles, predominantly lighter things that lyric tenors would do in those days. I did more Così fan tuttes and Don Giovannis than I would ever want to do in a lifetime, but never felt entirely at home in that rep. I don’t think that it was ever meant for my voice, but you learn something from everything you do, and these were all steps along the way. My first really major professional production was Eugene Onegin (as Lensky) with the Vancouver Opera in 1985. From there I really never looked back. In 1989, I made my European debut, Un ballo in maschera, at the English National Opera. After that, I never did another audition.
Was there ever a conflict between your pop singing and your classical formation?
I didn’t find a difficulty in that at all—because I had a sound base in what Selena taught me in the way of technique which made even my popular music much better. It’s a very natural technique, and I also did quite a few years of Gilbert and Sullivan before I went to university or contemplated a career in opera—just regular theatre and Gilbert and Sullivan. That taught me the power of words and diction. I think it was a great tool for me along the way as well. So, no. I think if anything what I garnered from Selena enhanced everything that I attempted, and I still like to go back and do the Lightfoot-type thing. I don’t sound like an opera singer singing that music, but now it’s so much easier. That I enjoy.
Did you ever consider a career other than in music?
I did earlier on. I had considered a career possibly as a detective in the police department. I always was fascinated by police work and that kind of thing. Another passion of mine, which I still do on occasion, is gold and silver casting, making jewelry. Those were a couple of alternatives.
Where did you meet your wife?
My wife and I met in Sault Ste. Marie [Ontario]. I was singing at the Algoma Fall Festival and Valerie was playing in the Amadeus Ensemble. She plays the viola. It just happened that the nave of the church where we were all performing was so small that I was almost sitting in her lap. We were all making jokes about the quality of the conducting, unfortunately, and I got off on some Monty Python tangent. We sort of struck a mutual vein when it came to our senses of humor and the next thing you know, I stayed an extra month in Toronto when I finished the job.
Did the fact she was a musician give an energetic boost to your career?
Very much so and, actually, early on in our marriage we did a certain amount of concert work together. But over the years, of course, I haven’t had a great deal of time to devote to that particular kind of music, things like Ralph Vaughan Williams. There are some beautiful things for viola, tenor, and piano.
Talk about making beautiful music together! Did you begin playing together in your dating period?
Actually, no, we did more dating. We tried out a lot of great restaurants. [Laughs.] Yeah, a different kind of music! We definitely had an appreciation for music, and Valerie has always been in love with opera. It’s been her passion. I think the fact that she’s made a transition now from the orchestra pit to the stage directing opera is phenomenal, because there aren’t many directors who can bring 20 years of performing in an opera orchestra and that kind of understanding to the operatic stage. Many people who direct opera are ignorant to a lot of that.
How did your wife get involved in directing opera?
She ran a company called Collaborations: A Chamber Arts Experience in Toronto for 10 years as well as carried on playing with the Esprit Orchestra (which is a new-music orchestra), the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, and the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra. At the same time, she was raising our daughter almost alone because Papa was on the road 10 months of the year.
For the Collaborations performances, she would create a through story line of about an hour and a half with no intermission. She would weave in different forms of music, dance, and visual arts. She would have, for instance, somebody on stage with a big canvas painting an image about the story of the show. She would incorporate things like Jimmy Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” arranged for string quartet. She had First Nations (Native American) drummers. It was incredible how she had this ability to create a vision and take you through an hour-and-a-half experience. The last one that I was involved with was on the whole SARS [outbreak] that happened in Toronto.
It was during the early years of Collaborations that she got to thinking, “It might be fun to direct opera, too.” I supported her on that idea, because I knew she would be good at it. That is taking off for her now, which is terrific.
How did you encourage her?
Well, the first major thing that she directed was Un ballo in maschera, which she did in Victoria. I told her to send her bio around and see what happens. Sure enough, she got offers and it just sort of took off.
Tell us about your daughter, Lauren.
Our daughter was a guest in a concert in Lisbon in January 2007 with José Cura when she was just 14, so she’s starting young. Not in opera but she’s singing, funnily enough, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Carole King, and Billy Joel, and is quite a phenomenal vocal force to be reckoned with. There is a lot of interest in her at the moment.
Do you take a personal interest in her musical education?
Yes, both my wife and I do. We’ve had her enrolled in dance, piano, and guitar classes. She seems to go through phases, though. She loved piano for two years and then tired of that. It’s hard to keep the pressure on without turning them away from it. I think those are the most difficult years when it comes to realizing the potential of a particular individual. They just exude music and they have an incredible ear. But to keep them focused on something, you don’t want to make it a real pain and something they hate. That aspect of it is difficult.
How have you dealt with travel in your marriage?
We’ve done, touch wood, very well. It hasn’t been easy. It never is easy. We don’t go a day without half an hour to an hour to two on the telephone, no matter where we are. In some ways, I think we have, perhaps, as a family more of a dialog than when you’re living with a person at home all the time. Talking to each other is important, more important, because we’re not together. We try not to go more than three weeks without seeing each other. If it means taking Lauren out of school for a week to come to where I am, we’ll do that. Or if I’m working in New York, for instance, and I have three days off, I fly home to Toronto between performances because it’s just an hour flight. I’ve tried to make my career more in the United States so I can fly back and forth. Recently it seems that I’m doing more and more work in Europe, which I love, but it’s a little more difficult to go across the pond. Actually, my wife just left Madrid yesterday. She was here for a week. My daughter was here the last week in January to do a concert in Lisbon. So I went out and held her hand for that—15,000 people in a stadium, and she just got up and did it.
Where does your daughter spend most of her time?
She’s in Toronto. Valerie and I try to work it out that if she’s going to be away—say at the Met for six weeks—that will be a down time for me, so I’ll be home. If I can’t be there, we have a wonderful network. My birth mother, for instance, just came out to Toronto from Victoria and stayed with Lauren. Last fall we had to get someone for five weeks. Friends of ours, who live in Bratislava, wanted to come back to Toronto where they used to live, so they came and stayed with Lauren. It works out very well.
Tell us about your birth mother.
I was adopted when I was weeks old. I’ve since located her. She lived in Edmonton and came to the opera and heard me quite a few times. We knew each other, but we didn’t know we were son and mother. She is a phenomenal musician and singer herself.
She asked that you be adopted by musical parents?
Yes, that was the whole thing. I was meant to get into music. I had no choice. Her father and mother were both church musicians. They taught music in the schools. Her grandfather had a 23-piece orchestra that came from Ireland. They toured through the United States and Canada before moving to Canada when the Irish were a little unpopular in the United States. It’s a fascinating story to go full circle and to all of a sudden meet this person.
When did you meet her?
I met her actually when our daughter was just a year old.
That means your daughter has three grandmothers.
Yes, my wife’s mother and my two mothers. I think I was the only tenor in the history of the Met that had three mothers at the debut. [Laughs.]
Did you look for her or did she look for you?
She looked for me, actually. I’m glad that she did. My sister was also adopted and had found her mother, and that was a very successful reunion as well. And my mother and father, my adopted parents, just embraced it with open arms. Now my birth mother is in Victoria where my adoptive mother lives. My father has passed away, but now she’s a part of the family for all of us. It’s wonderful.
Have you worked with students at all?
I have. As a matter of fact, I just did a series of masterclasses at the Royal Conservatory at Toronto. I absolutely loved it. The difficulty I found was that I was nervous as the dickens doing a masterclass with a big audience because you make suggestions and you don’t always get an instant result. If that were the case, we would all be overnight successes. It just doesn’t work like that. But I was thrilled because every person that I worked with made some strides forward. And I learned a lot about myself and about my own technique by watching and listening to what I was saying to others, and then watching them do that. It also imparts wisdom back to you as the teacher.
As a result of a lot of work with the younger singers, actually, my wife and I have started a summer program that runs every August. It’s called Highlands Opera Studio [www.highlandsoperastudio.com] and takes place in the town of Haliburton two and a half hours north of Toronto up in cottage country. This summer will be our third season. We have done shorter chamber operas for the past two seasons but this year we will be presenting Die Fledermaus in English as well as La voix humaine in French, of course, along with excerpt concerts and public masterclasses. It’s the type of situation where the participants have instruction in movement and stagecraft as well as voice lessons and staging every day along with seminars presented by opera company managers, agents, and the press. We only accept 10 participants to our full-scholarship program so it’s very competitive. We want to provide a real jumping off point from the student life to making a living in the world of opera.
The community up there has been fantastic. They’ve given us the use of the high school to rehearse in. And they have come up with cottages on various lakes for people to stay in. It’s wonderful that there’s this kind of artistic support in Haliburton, Ontario. It’s thrilling.
I’m a firm believer in using whatever you have achieved in terms of a reputation or a name. Use it as a drawing card, if you can, to create a platform for young singers and to also create a situation where you can go and do benefit work to raise money for all the various art forms, because we don’t have the luxury that they have in Europe where things are subsidized by the state.
We get a little bit of support in Canada through the Canada Council of the Arts. This is something I am also trying to champion. We have to use our voices to ensure that these art forms are going to survive. But I think more and more the opera companies are appealing to a much younger audience in North America.
Your early experience going to school is certainly a testimony of that.
Definitely. But, there again, with government cutbacks, school tours are not happening as they used to. And music studies in the schools are all but gone, which I think is shameful. We’re trying to get music studies reinstated. I think that if the government doesn’t want to subsidize the arts, what they should say to the private sector is “Listen, if you give $100,000 to the arts, I’ll give you $100,000 tax credit.” In Canada, if I give $100,000 to the arts, I get a tax credit of 40 or 50 percent, which is wrong. It should be dollar for dollar.
In your masterclasses, do you suggest a list of things to do and not to do?
Things to do, definitely. Try to keep in shape physically, which is difficult. But I think the biggest word and the most important word in this business is “patience.” Don’t expect that just as soon as you walk out of the university or the conservatory that the world owes you a career, because it doesn’t. You’ve got to earn that. You’ve got to hopefully be guided along the way by somebody you can trust. As singers, we can’t hear ourselves other than on a recording, so to a certain extent we have to trust other ears—and, hopefully, they are ears that will put you in the right place vocally for that point in time.
I’m dealing with people that are 22, 23, 25 coming out of institutions. What do they do? How do they start a career? It’s not easy. This is where I think what I did, in terms of opera in the schools, gave me a valuable bridge between institution and profession.
As I have already mentioned, this is one of the main reasons that Valerie and I started this program in the summer. We want to also work through the Canada Council touring office in future years, to return to the idea of a cross-Canada opera ensemble tour. We will give these young singers an opportunity in the summer with all expenses paid for them. They will have the performances in the theater in Haliburton, then we want to be able to take this production and perform it from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver Island. Valerie and I want them to have the opportunity to tour across the country and go to small communities as well as the big cities. This will create an actual learning situation for young singers, and they will make money doing something that is going to enhance their education in the business.
But back to your question, my first and foremost advice is to work hard and be patient.
