‘I fly the flag for opera as a great art form’
As he appears at Glyndebourne, baritone Thomas Allen tells Rupert Christiansen how a working-class boy turned into an elitist
Still lithe after 50 years on stage, Thomas Allen has no thought of retiring. He may be 72, but like his contemporary and friend Placido Domingo, if he rests, he rusts. “I can’t sit about doing nothing, I find it more exhausting than being up and about,” he says bluntly. “What does surprise me is that 30 years ago I thought that by the time I was 60 I’d be involved in something other than music. But now I find I’m more absorbed in it than ever.”
Famous, in particular, for the role of Don Giovanni, which he estimates he’s sung more than 300 times, the muchloved baritone is offered fewer leading parts these days, but has become a master of the cameo, and this summer will doubtless be stealing scenes as the nameless fusspot Music Teacher in Glyndebourne’s revival of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Then he’s off to Verbier to give master classes focused on Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin – the title role of which is one of his most celebrated interpretations – before returning to New York to play Baron Zeta in
The Merry Widow at the Met.
“The theatre is where I belong,” he says. “It’s where I hang out.”
His schedule may be one that he finds physically exhausting, but much as he enjoys home life in west London with his wife the former model Jeannie Lascelles and their family, not to mention his hobbies of woodwork and painting, it’s one that he can’t seem to moderate. And it’s not surprising that he’s in such demand, because he’s the most straightforward and generousspirited of men, without vanity or side – a favourite in the business for his good-humoured professionalism.
It’s been a long journey. Born in County Durham in 1944, he comes from a coal-mining background that has often led him to be cited as one of the original Billy Elliots. (“Where I came from everyone who could pull themselves up by their bootstraps did just that,” he has said. “We knew there was a choice if we could find out how to make it.”) But his story is hardly the stuff of musical comedy; his much-loved disabled father collected hire purchase payments.
In his immediate environment there was plenty of home-grown music – church choirs, school concerts, the parlour ballads he returned to on his unapologetically sentimental 2002 album Songs My Father Taught Me. At his grammar school, where he was a high-achieving head boy, he was orientated towards a medical training, until the encouragement of a cultured physics teacher, who recognised his exceptional vocal talent, led him to a scholarship at the Royal College of Music. Making his way south wasn’t easy. “Travelling from Seaham Harbour to Kensington Gore was interplanetary as far as I was concerned. I became a cuckoo in the nest wherever I was. I nearly went home several times, but I was alienated from my family and background too in many ways. Durham folk don’t have the confidence that Yorkshire people do, and for years there were simple things that I found a terrifying challenge – ordering food in restaurants, walking into hotel foyers, anything like that. But I had grit. There was a seed in me that needed watering. So I just dug my heels in.”
How different or difficult would a young Thomas Allen find it today? “In some respects, it would be harder – not so much because of the matter of who would pay the fees, but also because the cultural barriers have risen higher.”
This is a theme which resonates in Ariadne auf Naxos, where Music Teacher’s pupil, the idealistic composer of an opera-within-an-opera, has to make compromises to satisfy a philistine patron. Allen is no snob, but he is adamant that classical music deserves a special regard it has lost.
“There was respect for classical music, and interest in it in my childhood. It was accessible too: if there was a commemorative concert on BBC television, you might get to hear Dietrich Fischer-dieskau singing Wolf. Nowadays, what you’d get would be – well, you know… classical music just doesn’t register outside the minority any more, and there’s so little recognition in the media of what British musicians do abroad. That irks me.”
But he himself has been richly honoured – with a knighthood, a clutch of prizes and doctorates, the chancellorship since 2012 of Durham University – and he’s long past feeling any social discomforts, even among the audience at Glyndebourne, where he first sang in the chorus in 1969.
He also seems unruffled by the modishness of modern production, even though his own nicely detailed and visually attractive stagings of operas by Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti have leant decidedly towards the traditional and realistic. Of all the great names with whom he has worked on dramatic interpretation, he remembers with most awe the Italian Giorgio Strehler, who directed him as Don Giovanni at La Scala, Milan. “He shouted at you the whole time and you just had to shout back. The process was tempestuous and exhausting, but you always felt you were in the presence of someone with real vision.”
Rather less daunting was Woody Allen, who proved almost neurotically diffident when staging Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi in Los Angeles. “A very modest man,” Thomas Allen says drily. “I pretty soon learnt that I was on my own. The cast was presented with a set and we were left to fit ourselves on to it. All Woody said was that he couldn’t understand other people’s words and could only work with his own.” In an interview at the time, Woody Allen admitted, “I have no idea what I’m doing”. Ironically, the production scored considerable success.
To an outsider, Thomas Allen’s career appears to have followed a very steady trajectory. Does he have any regrets? “I’d love to have done Wozzeck and Falstaff on stage, but they both got away. Perhaps I just wasn’t fat enough for Falstaff!” Another disappointment has been the failure to make his mark as a straight actor, though he did appear in a television drama-documentary about Mozart and can be spotted briefly in the Judi Dench movie Mrs Henderson Presents. He’s sung in a lot of musical comedy recordings, however, and came within an ace of playing Emile de Becque in Trevor Nunn’s South Pacific in 2001. “We just couldn’t get the diaries to work.”
But for all his restlessness, his loyalty to opera remains unswerving, and through his teaching and lecturing he spends increasing amounts of time attempting to instill his passion into the young. “I fly the flag for opera as a great art form. Music adds another dimension, another level of emotion that you don’t get from spoken drama. We should have faith in it.”
Ariadne auf Naxos is in repertory at Glyndebourne, near Lewes, June 25-July 27. Tickets: 01273 815000; glyndebourne.com
He was once in an opera directed by Woody Allen. ‘I pretty soon learnt I was on my own’