‘Music is at its most beautiful when it’s painful’
Graham Vick expects and will relish a fierce debate as he brings a stormy ‘Hipermestra’ to Glyndebourne, he tells Ben Lawrence
On the lawn at Glyndebourne, looking towards a clump of silver birch and lime trees in the distance, Graham Vick gives me some advice: “If you’re not happy with your life, plant some seeds and grow the world you want to live in.” This may sound like psychobabble, but Vick has always put his money where his mouth is. The director has worked in some of the world’s greatest opera houses – Covent Garden, La Scala, Paris Opéra – but a social conscience and an intellectual restlessness mean he has sought to take opera to uncharted territories.
In Copenhagen last year he directed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny using refugees who were still waiting for their applications to be processed. Here in Britain, he has done more than anyone to make opera relevant. As the founder of the Birmingham Opera Company, he has taken the art form to the most unlikely of places – a disused rubber factory, an abandoned warehouse, a defunct rock venue – and built bridges with the city’s diverse, multi-ethnic population.
“I woke up one morning and realised I had to change everything,” he tells me. “We achieved diverse audiences in Birmingham by setting out to. We didn’t have the audience I wanted, so we reconfigured the company until we got the audience that I did want.”
He makes it sound simple. Vick says it wasn’t, although his strategy was always clear. “We don’t perform in theatres – we perform in open spaces. Everyone stands up. Every ticket costs the same, so there is no tiering, and even if you give us more money, you don’t get a free drink or whatever. Also, every opera is in English. We spread our nets through the city, pulling people in.”
So how does Vick justify his other, financially lucrative work around the globe? “I need the challenge of working with people who are better than I am,” says the 63-year-old. “It is a basic human need. I feel stimulated and more comfortable when I am in the presence of exceptionally gifted people.”
He admits to being occasionally seduced by the glamour. “Look at La Scala. La Scala is [a] very difficult [place to work] but something in your heart leaps because it is La Scala. You are doing Otello on the same stage as the premiere. That means something.”
Now Vick has returned to the Glyndebourne Festival. He directed various productions there during the Nineties but left in 2000 because, he says, “I did quite a lot of bold work and went in a direction that people didn’t follow”. Indeed, these productions are the only blips on an otherwise flawless CV, including a critically mauled production of Don Giovanni in which the title character feasted on the bloody entrails of a dead horse. Speaking to me now in the grounds of the Sussex country house, he says the atmosphere is “peaceful and concentrated and supportive”.
This season, he’s directing Hipermestra by Francesco Cavalli, a 1658 work that is little known outside opera circles. It tells the story of one of the 50 daughters of King Danao of Argos who disobeys an order by her father to murder her husband. In the title role is the Hungarian soprano Emőke Baráth, while the great Italian counter-tenor Raffaele Pé plays her husband, Linceo. “I love the 17thcentury Italian repertoire,” says Vick. “It offers moral dilemmas, intellectual debate and high entertainment, and this is one of the best.”
Originally a festa teatrale written for a wedding, this version of Hipermestra is slightly amended. The prologue featuring the gods has disappeared and the masque element has been greatly reduced. Vick, a no-nonsense sort whose bluffness masks a brain of considerable erudition, seems slightly miffed when I suggest this is an attempt to make the opera more relevant.
“It has always been relevant. It’s about political intrigue, warring factions, succession problems, the nature of brotherhood. Human beings have not changed that much since the 17th century. We have the same emotions and the same thing is fundamental to opera now as it was then. We buy a ticket to see suffering. Music is at its most beautiful when it’s at its most painful.”
This production of Hipermestra will be set in the eastern Mediterranean in the present day, and will feature an attempted rape, a city bombed and much revelling in the glory of war.
Vick is prepared for criticism, but says it is part of his mission to perpetuate debate, even though he says “the British don’t like to talk about the big questions”.
Vick was born on Merseyside and fell in love with opera as a teenager, spending his pocket money on records and concerts. He was part of a generation who were exposed to opera by a nascent BBC Two, which staged brand new productions in studios with librettos translated into English. “We were a much poorer world and culturally much richer,” he says sadly.
He doesn’t want to decry the noble work done in recent years by outreach projects and education departments but believes there is a problem with the essence of what they do, that there is no substitute for actually seeing a show.
“I believe in direct encounters. The mistake is to think you need to be educated into opera, when in fact all you need is to be exposed to it in sympathetic circumstances.”
Vick rejoices in the holistic nature of his Birmingham company which, he says, “takes away the pain of working in the big opera houses, which always leave you disillusioned”.
Part of that pain, he says, comes from working in 19th-century repertoire, which attracts big-name singers who are rarely available for the long periods of rehearsal the work demands. “The star system has done a lot of damage to opera. When the stars dictate repertoire we start getting not very good operas. And when the economy of theatre starts to need those stars, they have an unhealthy amount of power because of their box office draw.
“It creates a big divide within the art form and that is when it turns into showtime rather than art. It may provide exciting moments but it doesn’t provide great work.”
With that, Vick is fired up and ready to return to the fray. It’s hard work being the saviour of opera in Britain.
‘You don’t need to be educated into opera – you just need to be exposed to it in sympathetic circumstances’