The BBC Music Magazine Interview
The soprano-composer Héloïse Werner tells Fiona Maddocks about her unconventional musical journey
Awhole cast of characters jostles inside the one person called Héloïse Werner. We need to meet them all if we are to get any understanding of this multi-faceted musician, a fast-rising star, both as solo performer and as a member of the Hermes Experiment, a unique line-up of harp, soprano voice, clarinet and doublebass (see p34), of which she is co-director. First there was the child growing up in Paris who started cello, aged four, in 1995: ‘I worked hard at it and thought that would be my future.’ Her French mother was a Baroque flautist – ‘there was always Bach in the house. She played the solos in all the Passions, the cantatas. I knew that sound from a very early age’ – and her Germanborn, French father played the violin – ‘really well’ – for pleasure.
This young cellist turned into a bright 12 year-old who discovered a passion for singing. As a member of the celebrated children’s choir the Maîtrise de Radio France, Werner received free music lessons every afternoon for six years (ordinary school being crammed into the morning) – she took up composition and flourished. She also worked with top conductors, discovered new repertoire and sang in, among other epic choral works, Britten’s War Requiem ‘which was unlike any music I had heard before’.
In constant internal dialogue with this talented musician was a teenager with an insatiable interest in science. Her father Wendelin Werner, a recipient of the Fields Medal, is one of the world’s top mathematicians. Héloïse set her sights on becoming a doctor, and having secured the requisite high grades in science, went off to medical school. Weeks in, however, the musician in her started shouting back. ‘I had a crisis. I didn’t want to give up music. I couldn’t see how to make it a hobby.’
Conservatoires in France, broadly speaking, like you to pursue one area of performance, or else you study
‘‘I was often told I must just compose or just sing, or I wouldn’t have a career ’’
musicology. Werner happened to have three equal talents: composer, singer and cellist. Speaking fast and fluently, she talks with tumbling enthusiasm and admits to a preference for juggling several projects at once. When she gets an idea, she works at speed, finds focus, creates. This sounds easy and enviable, a life of endless opportunity and positive achievement. But, when asked, she admits it has been far from easy. ‘I faced quite a lot of old-school way of thinking,’ she says. ‘I was often told I must just compose or just sing, or I wouldn’t have a career. That would never have worked for me. I don’t have that kind of voice – to sing big operatic roles, or lieder – and so much of my composition is to do with improvisation and performance. I tend not to write conventional scores. I might use a coloured highlighter on a text to indicate the sounds I want to make… So I’ve had to forge my own path.’
Having made the decision to leave medical school, she knew that her best chance for the musical education she wanted was abroad, probably in the UK. Speaking limited English, she took a gap year, worked as an au pair and mastered enough of the language to get through a university interview, winning a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge. During her first term, her mother, Pascale Bulit-werner, died aged 43 after several years of illness. ‘So my mother passed away just as my new life was starting. I’ve really lived here in the UK ever since. But I think, hope, she would be proud.’
After Cambridge, Werner encountered some rejections in her attempts to go to a conservatoire for post-graduate vocal studies. ‘I was turned down or put on waiting lists at more than one college,’ she explains. ‘I’m not very good at auditions. You might sing just one song, then get turned down for a whole year until you can apply again. That was hard.’ She used the time in between to set up Hermes with musician friends from Cambridge. Then she won a scholarship to London’s Trinity Laban ‘which really supported me’. She studied with mezzo-soprano Alison Wells, who worked on her technique and understood the versatility of her student.
Today, Werner describes herself as a soprano-composer who also plays the cello. That restless, complex personality who thinks in several directions at once is evident not in her physical poise, but in the quick clarity of her thought and conversation, and in the variety and energy of her work. One click on Youtube takes you to her brilliant lockdown project, Coronasolfege. This started because ‘I was stuck at home with nothing to do,’ she says, so she began to experiment with creating rhythms and short melodies.
While most musicians might have used a piano or cello to accompany themselves, Werner used her own body: her face and her hands, tapping out complex rhythms on her cheeks. Explaining the process on her website, she writes: ‘I came up with a simple 30-second composition where my eyes, teeth, voice and hands each go in different but repeated rhythms: eyes in crotchets, teeth in quavers, voice in triplets and hands in semiquavers. I filmed it, posted it on Twitter and Coronasolfege was born.’ Since that first effort in March 2020
she has created 35 Coronasolfege videos, each one ingenious and mesmerising.
‘My main goal was to cheer people up, so each video is upbeat and sometimes funny. Alongside the rhythmic games and melodic ear-worms, I also enjoyed creating comical characters using wordplays and props.’ It is no surprise, as anyone who has seen her stage performances will know, to find Werner is also a keen actor, and would have liked to pursue drama on top of everything else. ‘I love theatre and going to the theatre. But it’s frustrating for me. I am good at acting in my own language but not so good in English…’ For the record, her English is well-nigh impeccable.
Héloïse Werner has already won many awards and honours, including the Michael Cuddigan Trust Award and Linda Hirst Contemporary Vocal Prize, has been included in Radio 3’s Young Stars: 31 under 31 and had a Snape Maltings residency under the mentorship of Zoë Martlew.
Werner’s solo opera The Other Side of the Sea was premiered at Kings Place as part of the Venus Unwrapped season in 2019.
With the Hermes Experiment she has helped initiate more than 50 new commissions and, with them, made an award-winning debut album on Delphian Records which came out last year. A second, SONG, is due this autumn. This month, too, Werner will record her first solo disc on the same label – Phrases, supported by the PRS Foundation, RVW Trust and Ambache Trust, is due out next year. ‘I like the fact that the word “phrases” exists in French and in English and has various, slightly different meanings.’ In addition to four works of her own, she will include tracks by Josephine Stephenson, Elaine Mitchener, Nico Muhly and Oliver Leith, together with a selection of those classic works of sound poetry, Georges Aperghis’s 14 Récitations (1978).
‘I’ll record about half of the Récitations,’ she says. ‘They’ve really shaped my own work and shown what’s possible. What I love, particularly, is that they are highly theatrical but very precise. I don’t like the way sometimes contemporary singing can sound hysterical.’ Of four works of her own, Like Words is a duo for voice and the bassoonist Amy Harman. ‘Amy is amazing at playing the bassoon as if she’s singing. It is so close to the human voice…’
Her other duo composition is for the violist-violinist Lawrence Power, as part of his lockdown commission series of ten new pieces. ‘Like all my music, the piece for Lawrence, Mixed Phrases, is about identity and language in performance.
I’ve created two worlds, first the familiar, in which Lawrence plays viola. The text in this section is from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. Then the music switches to a strange, unworldly place. Here, Lawrence plays violin, in effect his second language.’ Beautifully filmed in the atmospheric Peckham Asylum, Mixed Phrases is already out on Youtube.
Having left France so young, Werner is glad that her family has, in effect, now followed her to the UK. Her younger sister Emma, a research scientist turned film-maker and also a violinist, lives here, as does her father, who moves between professorships in Cambridge and Zurich. Héloïse and Emma also have an adored half-sister, Flora, still a toddler, through her father’s re-marriage. ‘I’ve used some of my little sister’s sounds in my piece with Lawrence,’ she says. ‘I’d hear her on Whatsapp and Zoom trying to talk, trying to say Emma’s name – “é-pah, é-pah”. Or attempting to say “papa” – “étaaaaaaaa” – very long, low and funny. I wanted to incorporate those vowel sounds into my music.’ Werner demonstrates, turning these baby syllables into fragments of song. ‘That was an inspiration that I analysed and reformed. Music can be anything you want it to be. That’s what’s so amazing.’
‘My goal, alongside the rhythmic games and ear-worms, was to cheer people up’