‘You always give it reverence’
Kiwi opera singer Teddy Tahu Rhodes tells Paul Little why his part may be short but is crucial to the four-hour Wagner performance
“You do know it’s the smallest part?” says Teddy Tahu Rhodes on the phone from Melbourne. “I have about 40 notes in the four hours of music.”
He’s playing Titurel in Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, being performed for the first time in Melbourne at the end of this month. Victorian Opera has gathered a stellar cast of international Wagnerian specialist singers in the lead roles, plus Rhodes, with his 40 notes. A goodly number of other New Zealanders are expected to cross the Tasman to take this rare opportunity to see the composer’s last opera.
The Christchurch-born baritone has had a busy and varied career in leading opera houses around the world since making his debut with the
Australian Opera in 1998. He’s now 52 and, as well as being the oldest character in the opera,
“I’m almost the oldest person on stage. I’m not old for opera, but at my age you don’t play the romantic leads. I’m loving it. It’s a great place to be — the older person in the older roles.”
There are some more substantial ageappropriate parts coming up: “I’m playing King Henry for Opera Australia in Anna Bolena and Mephistopheles in Faust.” Having made his home in Melbourne since 2011, Rhodes has a full year of work around Australia ahead.
A month out from the first night of Parsifal he’s still in the dark about the details of what Victorian Opera promises will be a “sleek, modern production”.
“I’ve just come in for a couple of coaching sessions. It’s a ‘stand and sing’ role, so I won’t step into the production until the week before we go on stage.”
It’s very much a voyage of discovery for Rhodes. Not only is it the first time he’s sung Wagner but, “I haven’t seen it live. Not at all. My knowledge is a bit scant. I’ve not been a big Wagner follower because I’ve not sung much of it.”
Others in the cast and the pit will presumably require more preparation. There are 83 singers and 75 musicians involved in a performance that will take six hours, including breaks of 90 minutes for dinner after act one and a 20-minute interval after
act two. Parsifal is a serious work, combining pagan, Christian and Buddhist themes. Wagner didn’t even call it an opera but labelled it a “stage consecration festival play”.
First performed in 1882, in its early years it was the centre of a semireligious cult, encouraged by the composer and his circle. It has been criticised as blasphemous, for effectively presenting a mass on stage. Wagner refused to allow it to be performed anywhere expect his own specially built theatre in Bayreuth in Germany for 30 years after the premiere. It is however, also astonishingly beautiful and regarded by many as the finest of all Wagner’s operas.
The plot — and we’re really simplifying here — concerns a brotherhood of knights whose job it is to guard the Holy Grail. They haven’t been doing well since their king, Amfortas, lost the holy spear that was used in the crucifixion. It falls to Parsifal, the holy fool, to redeem them.
“My part is encouraging Amfortas to unseal the Holy Grail,” explains Rhodes. “And then I die. Then normally what happens is you hear his voice, which sounds like it’s from the grave, although it’s still live.”
The role may not be big, but if you stuff up a small part in an opera it can take the whole thing 15 minutes to get back on track. And there are other challenges with a small part.
“With a big role you have time to work your way into it,” says Rhodes. “If something doesn’t work, it’s lost in the entirety of what you’re doing. But when you’ve only got a few notes, that’s it. You always give it reverence, no matter what.”
Rhodes says the roles he takes are as much a matter of timing as of any career masterplan.
“I’ve never sought out any particular roles, but roles I never thought I’d do, I’ve ended up doing. I’ve been part of some modern productions, which created my career overseas more than anything. I did Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie in San Francisco. That was my first big break outside Australia. I did The Little Prince. Also The End of the Affair from the Graham Greene novel . . . and I’ve done Streetcar Named Desire all over the place.”
The joy of contemporary work is that there is no tradition to restrict what a performer can do.
“There’s no reference point to go back to and you get the chance to work with the composer. On Streetcar I got to work with Andre Previn, who wrote it. That person is in front of you and you’re the starting point for the music they’ve written.”
He sees this as crucial to the survival of opera. “You’ve got to have a regeneration and move forward with new works, otherwise the art form will be a stagnant version of what there was 20 years ago.”
Which, ironically, is just what Wagner wanted to happen with Parsifal, with his strict instructions for how it should be performed. Fortunately, there have always been opera companies — Victorian Opera is simply the most recent — who have been happy to give reverence to his music by ignoring his wishes.