John Copley
‘Opera audiences are being short-changed’
Take a straw poll of senior British operagoers and it’s a safe bet that John Copley would come out top of the list of favourite directors. Always faithful to the spirit of the piece in question, never aiming to shock or provoke, blessed with exceptional craft and a gift for drawing the best out of singers, he represents a lost golden age when nobody on stage shot up heroin or sat on the lavatory. His shows have another supreme virtue – audiences like them, and they can be brought back year after year without losing their appeal. Who cares that a few exigent critics and intellectuals find them conservatively superficial and decorative?
Copley is 84 now, spry and still hard at it. In the course of a career spanning seven decades, he’s directed more than a hundred productions all over the world – my personal highlights would include the first-ever staging of Così fan tutte at Covent Garden (as well as a La Bohème revived 27 times over
41 years) and Mary Stuart, La Traviata and Julius Caesar at ENO with three of his “absolute all-time favourites” – Janet Baker, Josephine Barstow and Valerie Masterson.
With the energy level of a man half his age, he’s a mine of largely unprintable anecdotes being stored up for his memoirs. Among his more affectionate memories are those of the greenhorn Pavarotti, whom Copley befriended when he was making his British debut as an understudy in La
Bohème in 1963. “He liked to come to my place in the evening with a huge bag of food and start cooking – his pasta al sugo was wonderful, I remember. One of the girls from the ballet used to drop in too, and she made him very happy. Such a nice young man he was then. When he got a bit grand in later years, I used to remind him about the pasta al sugo, and that seemed to shut him up.”
For all his sparkle, Copley has been having a bad time recently. Two years ago, he fell down 19 stone steps on a Moroccan holiday and had a stroke. His partner of 55 years, John Chadwyck-healey, died in 2014 (he keeps his portrait in his breast pocket, “next to my heart”). And most humiliatingly, in February, he was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in New York while working on a production of
Rossini’s Semiramide.
Accounts of what occurred differ, but the nub of the incident, according to those who support him, is that a member of the chorus with imperfect English took exception to a silly remark about imagining a character naked that Copley idly made in rehearsal, and lodged a complaint. If that is the case, his firing is an astonishing misjudgement: Copley’s humour is old-school theatrical camp and the idea of it being offensive, even in the post-metoo climate, is ludicrous. The Met has offered a rather different version of events, alleging that Copley approached a chorus member and said: “I’m thinking of you in my bed with your clothes off.” But in any case, it is not clear that there was a fair hearing.
Copley is now taking advice as to the possibility of legal redress against the Met. He is therefore keeping his mouth shut – not something that comes naturally to him, incidentally. “I mustn’t comment,” he tells me. “I didn’t say those things I am meant to have said. Anyway, the Met paid me my fee and I was glad to get out of there and come home.”
For the present, at least, he’s in a better place. Last summer, he staged a hugely successful production of Britten’s Albert Herring for The Grange Festival in Hampshire. (Britten is someone he knew well for a time, before, like so many others, he was frozen out – as a rookie in 1960, he effectively got the first productions of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream up and running when the directors John Cranko and John Gielgud weren’t quite up to it.) “It was such a lovely experience,” he says of the Albert Herring. “I had the perfect cast, I didn’t have to tell them anything. They just were those characters!”
So he’s come back this year for another comedy of impetuous youth, Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and rehearsals for this seem to be going pretty well too. “Such a beautiful piece, I fell in love with it in the mid-fifties,” he says. “And I think the audience will enjoy it all the more because we’re doing it in English.”
His cast is pretty delighted to have him there too. “He engenders calm and confidence,” says tenor Ed Lyon, who plays Belmonte. “Honesty and clarity are the focus. He trusts the material and the singers to tell the story. Not an ounce of ego, or any hierarchy – big stars or eager students aren’t treated any differently. And there’s the pleasure of being regaled with endless entertaining stories that are also cautionary tales and secret lessons.”
Yet it’s telling that someone with Copley’s apparently bottomless enthusiasm for opera doesn’t extend to seeing much of it any more in the theatre. “Well, I don’t really enjoy it, I’m tired of seeing things that have no relation to the music or the text. The curtain goes up and you can hear the audience groan when they realise it’s going to be one of those productions. And I’m with them. I don’t want to see Carmen on a staircase [a reference to Barrie Kosky’s recent production at Covent Garden]. I’m not a stick-in-themud, I don’t want a lot of clunky, fussy scenery and I know that we have to move on and there are different ways of doing things. But I think that people are being short-changed of opera’s beauty.
“All I ever do with my productions is very simple. My starting point is to stage the opera as the composer and librettist would have imagined it. If I’m any good at that at all, it’s because I know the operas inside out – most of them since my childhood when I endlessly played through the scores on the piano. I may not know anything else – I haven’t a clue where anywhere is on the map – but I do know my opera. That’s not always the way with directors, even the big names. When I was assisting Visconti on Der Rosenkavalier, it was quite clear that he didn’t understand the German or have the foggiest idea what was going on.”
Expertise and experience such as
‘I’m tired of seeing things that have no relation to the music or the text. You can hear the audience groan … I’m with them’
his should be in high demand, but Copley is currently worried that, for the first time in his life, he’s not booked up three years ahead. “I once had to turn down the offer of a big Broadway musical because I couldn’t fit it in. Now there’s nothing coming up in the diary at all. We’ll see what happens.”
He’s not badly off – his partner John has left him “very comfortable” – but he doesn’t know what it’s like not to be working.
One particularly sore point is English National Opera – a company that in its early days enjoyed some of its biggest commercial successes thanks to Copley’s showmanship. But his 2008 production of The Merry Widow, seen only once at the Coliseum when it was much liked as “traditional”, is being dumped and replaced next season. “Do you know Daniel Kramer? [ENO’S artistic director] I adore him, he’s so clever and charming,” he says. “But I am very angry and hurt about this. Did you see what he did to La Traviata? Absolutely terrible, wasn’t it? And the Tristan too! Terrible from every point of view. Oh dear, I must be getting old.”
The Abduction from the Seraglio opens at The Grange Festival, near Alresford, on June 24; 01962 791020