Tenor Ian Bostridge is known as a very fine interpreter of song, oratorio, and opera. He has performed in venues that include the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Munich’s Bavarian State Opera; with conductors such as Sir Colin Davis, Antonio Pappano, William Christie, and John Eliot Gardiner; and in recital with pianists including Julius Drake, Graham Johnson, Mitsuko Uchida, and Leif Ove Andsnes.
Bostridge is also known as a scholar and writer. He has written on music for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Opernwelt, BBC Music Magazine, Opera Now, and the Independent. He is currently Humanitas Visiting Professor of Classical Music and Music Education at Oxford, a one-year sponsored chair, and he will be a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 2015.
Faber & Faber has recently published his new book, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession. Bostridge was recently on a U.S. tour, performing and promoting his book. I was fortunate to see him in a question and answer session at New York’s 92nd Street Y, and to meet him for a personal interview a few days later.
At the risk of asking questions you’ve answered dozens of times, tell me a bit about how the book came about.
When I first became a singer, I was finishing off an academic book. I’d always expected I’d carry on writing books. Finishing off books while I was singing seemed easy. But then I had a commission to write a book about being a singer, which I never fulfilled because I never found a way of getting into it while I was touring.
I did writing, I did lectures, I wrote long review pieces. A publisher at Faber & Faber contacted me and asked what I’d like to do for a book. I suggested publishing these pieces as a collection, and I wrote some additional material for it. It was published in 2011, called A Singer’s Notebook. When that was published, they asked what I wanted to do next. I couldn’t think of what sort of book I could write with this sort of lifestyle—traveling, hotels, and so on. My wife suggested I write about Winterreise. I could write a chapter about each song, and it would be like writing journalism. It was a very liberating structure, and the end result is the book in front of you.
You’ve performed Winterreise over 100 times. Were you less active or more active with the book when you had fewer Winterreise performances?
I was doing the odd Winterreise performance here or there while I was doing the book, and then I did a huge load of them after I’d finished. That’s just the way the performance schedule works. It’s difficult to make things fit together in that sort of way. Maybe it was better not to have a lot of them while I was writing the book. Writing and preparing for performance are two different things. I was trying to process how I’d approached the piece to that point, and having new information from new performances might not have been good. Of course, now that I’m performing it more often, I’m discovering loads of new things that aren’t in the book.
I sort of “lay down the law” in the book in many ways where I didn’t really mean to lay down the law. I simply make it clear what my opinions and preferences are. “This is how it has been and this is how it could be.”
There were many great questions from the audience at the question and answer session at the 92nd Street Y. One was about the protagonist’s life after the last song.
I don’t think of it. In a sense it’s a bit like the ultimate ludicrous question: How many children did Lady Macbeth have? We have the information we have, and we travel with what is given. What we do as a performer is travel with that information and what we’re given, and the meaning is created between the text and the audience. What the audience member brings to that experience is just as important as what I do, and he will fill in the gaps himself if he cares to. I don’t think there is this fetishized character sitting in the center that is to be discovered. Rather, it’s to be created anew each time.
Some scholars think Müller’s intention with Die schöne Müllerin was ironic. You’ve used some very descriptive phrases about the way the protagonist in Winterreise deals with his grief—mordant wit, gallows humor, how he inspects and even chews on his own grief—but you don’t use the word irony. What do you think about irony in Winterreise?
His default position is a sort of ironic one. A self-lacerating character. Always self-conscious and always questioning, putting stuff out there and questioning it or mocking it. In Die schöne Müllerin you can approach in a naïve or sentimental way or an ironic way, and I suppose as you get older you can lean more toward a sentimental approach. Winterreise is always questioning, always putting stuff out there. You can’t really perform Winterreise in a naïve way.
There are many who say you can’t sing Winterreise until you’re 50.
Schubert and Müller weren’t 50! I think it’s one of those pieces where—as with all these great works of art—you cast different lights on it at different ages. You can sing it when you’re 20, you can sing it when you’re 50, you can sing it when you’re 70.
I remember going to hear Peter Schreier sing Dichterliebe at an age I’d have thought it impossible to sing the cycle. I thought Dichterliebe was a young man’s cycle. My wife made a wonderful comment—it was like a character out of Tergenev, reflecting on a love long ago. That gave it validity. That’s something that’s not in the text, but comes from the performer’s own life experience.
You’ve talked about how your approach to Winterreise—and indeed everything you perform—has evolved over time. You said something about how conveying the text is much more important than beautiful singing for its own sake.
It’s not only the words. It’s not just the immediate sense. It’s colors, I suppose. I don’t mean the adoption of a single, unified, bel canto color. I mean really different colors like those popular singers can achieve. It’s easier for them because they have microphones. I think you need to find many different sounds, so long as you can still project the sound. The great thing about this repertoire is finding a way to juxtapose declamation of the text with actual bel canto—two great traditions in the 19th century, always in play from the beginning among Schubert’s circle. There’s been a lot of interesting work by the critic Edward Kravit about declamation of text. It was seen as a form of acting.
You also talked about the DVD in which Winterreise was staged (Franz Schubert: Winterreise / Over the Top with Franz, directed by David Alden, Kultur Video, 2007). With regard to staging like that, would anything make it too extreme? What would make it invalid for you?
I don’t think anything is invalid in itself. I wouldn’t want to do anything I didn’t feel comfortable with. I wouldn’t want to do Winterreise with no clothes on. There are various shows I’ve nearly been involved with but didn’t actually do, and I was glad of it in the end. There was a Billy Budd that wound up being very camp, with sailors in high heels. There was a production of Death in Venice where Tadzio and Aschenbach actually had sex, and I was glad I wasn’t involved with that. There are taste issues.
I think the main thing for me is to be with a director I trust. I’ve been lucky in that. David Alden is someone I really trusted. The Winterreise was quite beautiful and mellow, but I did a “Poppea” with him that was very extreme. I did a lot of work with Deborah Warner, and I always trusted her. The Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice—difficult operas in a taste sense. If you really wanted to create scandal you could, but [Benjamin] Britten is much more subtle than that. I’m doing a staging of Hans Zender’s composed interpretation of Winterreise with a director I trust. That’s not next season, but the season after. It will be produced at the Barbican and will go to [UC]Berkeley, and other co-producers are being corralled.
You’ve said that not having a formal musical education, particularly with regard to musicology, had some impact on your approach to this book.
Some of the musicology out there I find very arid. But there’s a new trend in musicology at the moment, which I became aware of when I spent some time at Oxford this season with the new generation of musicologists. There is much more emphasis now on music as performance. For a long time I think there was this idea that composers had this platonic ideal and the performance was an inadequate embodiment of that ideal. That produced a lot of extraordinary musicology that analyzed what was on the page in a way that bore no relation either to what the composer had been thinking, or to the performer when performing the piece. It seemed to me to be a bizarre sort of scholastic exercise. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it isn’t.
When I write I want to talk about performance. And I want to talk about what I hear as a singer, which is often melodic rather than harmonic. A lot of the discussion in the book about the piano part is about the melodic structure rather than the harmonic structure. This might be seen as a limitation, or it might be just a different view.
Because of my background as an historian, particularly an historian of science, bringing together disparate elements that don’t quite fit together to explain each other, I go off tangents in the book. Odd little avenues of intellectual history which for me open up the piece.
How did you go from being an historian to becoming a singer?
Gradually and slightly nervously. If I’d been born 30 years earlier I’d have become an academic. In those days you usually got an academic job while you were writing your doctoral thesis. I finished my doctoral thesis and I didn’t have an academic job, so I went and worked in television. I wasn’t particularly happy. It was also a slow time. It was the 1990s, when there was an advertising recession, so we were not making that many programs, and I wasn’t given as many opportunities as I thought I deserved. So I went off and did more singing. Just as the singing was beginning to take off, I got a research fellowship at Oxford to go back and turn my doctoral thesis into a larger book. So I went back to Oxford with this little bit of a singing career on the side, and the singing career gradually took over.
How has your singing changed over time?
It goes up and down. I’ve gone through periods when I’ve listened to recordings and didn’t like the sound. Now I’ve got a teacher who tells me the right things. The same things I’ve heard before, but in a different way, in a way that makes sense to me. I think, “Oh, that’s what they meant 20 years ago!”
The voice changes as you grow older. I’m lucky I’m not working relentlessly in heavy operatic repertoire. The pressure in the opera house is always to have a loud voice, and I don’t have to worry about that. Sometimes I do work with a big orchestra and I have to worry about the voice cutting through. It’s a lot more boring because I can’t do as much with color.
Is there music outside of your Fach you’d like to do? Any roles you’re dying to sing?
I’m lucky that I do such a lot of song. If you’re an opera singer you’re categorized in this weird thing called a Fach. There’s a dramatic tenor, but if you’re a light lyric tenor, does that mean you’re not dramatic? One is very lucky in song that you can do dramatic music without a heavy voice.
I don’t think there’s anything I long to do that I can’t do. I don’t have an Italianate voice. I love listening to Italian opera but it’s not my thing. I don’t long for that. I don’t long for that life, either. Inasmuch as a traveling life can work with a family, my life is reasonably manageable right now. If I were a successful opera singer the pressure would be for learning roles and traveling for weeks at a time. That’s something young singers should think about.
How many opera productions do you do a year?
I would say I do on average . . . one or two. Over the past few years, fewer. I haven’t worked in an opera house—a whole different structure in work and life—since 2009. The last staged piece I did was Curlew River, but that was produced by the Barbican, same as the staged Winterreise I’ll be doing. I’ve got two productions in opera houses in 2016. One is not an opera—it’s the Bach St. Matthew Passion, staged by Roberto Castellucci in Hamburg. And I also do The Turn of the Screw in Milan. It will be strange to be doing two in one year. I did a lot more early on. I did a lot in Munich, and then at Covent Garden.
There are things I’d like to do that I haven’t done. I enjoyed doing Billy Budd in concert, and I’d like to do it on stage.
I was surprised to see your name on a Billy Budd recording. Nowadays we associate heavier voices with Captain Vere.
I often think in America there is more compartmentalization and more of a feeling that there are “real” voices and “not real” voices. Someone who doesn’t sing in an Italianate or operatic way isn’t a “real” voice. I don’t think it suits Britten, and Britten tenor roles weren’t written for a voice like that.
Is there anything in your current rep that you’re tired of doing?
No. I’m about to go back and do a piece by [Gerald] Finzi that I’d given up because I found it a bit tiresome, but I find on picking it up again that I like it. I’m lucky. If I had to spend my life doing Carmina Burana I’d be sick at heart, and luckily that hasn’t happened to be.
Do you do many newly composed works?
Not much. I’ve had close relationships with some composers—Hans Werner Henze and Thomas Adès. But “I’m slow of study,” as one of the characters in A Midsummmer Night’s Dream says. It takes me a long time to learn anything that doesn’t have a key signature. If I see music without a key signature, I think it’s either in C major and very easy, or very, very difficult!
When you talk to young artists what do you tell them? What kind of advice do you give?
When you start out there is a lot of pressure to sound like other people. I think the people who run auditions and the people who run companies want to hear what they’ve heard before. You need to stick to what you do and what you’re good at and not yield to pressure. Eventually if it’s good enough or interesting enough people will like you for what you do. They might still judge you for what you don’t do or can’t do, but you can’t be all things to all people. Stick to what you do best.
I used to worry in the beginning about the weird things that I did and the things I couldn’t do, but I’ve given up worrying and I just do what I do.
I think [Sir Georg] Solti said the most important thing is that what you do is interesting and beautiful, not the size of the sound.
Do you think there are opportunities for young singers who want to focus on song?
I can only speak from my own experience, and say if you commit to it, there are. I think I first went to my agent in 1993. I had come to their attention as a singer of song, but the advice was very much that, while I might get to do some song recitals, the bread and butter of this business is opera. But that hasn’t been the case at all. In the abstract I wish I did more opera, but it doesn’t fit my life. I love it when I do it.
Totally silly, inappropriate observation: I love your hair. You’re my age and you have a full head of hair, and I don’t!
[Laughs, points at my beard] But I can’t grow a beard! There’s definitely a connection. When I did Aschenbach I tried to grow a beard, and it was a very pathetic specimen.
What’s your favorite swear word?
I don’t really have a favorite. I just say the normal swear words . . . . Since I’ve had children I’ve said “Bother!” a lot.
