The talent, grace and grit that took Dame Janet to the very top
Eulogies and superlatives were heaped on the great English mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker in the course of John Bridcut’s 90-minute biographical documentary. Tributes to the “molten gold” of her voice and the nobility and sensitivity of her singing, as well as the warmth and integrity of her character, rained thick and fast.
Those looking for something more human than a paragon would have found a remark made by her old friend Sue Phipps illuminating.
“Janet attacks the world with both fists”, she said – and through that image, one suddenly understood that her stature as an artist comes as much from the formidably stubborn determination which stems from her lower-middle-class Yorkshire roots as it does from her musical sensibility.
Flashes of this aspect of her temperament were visible elsewhere in the film, notably when André Previn recalled a recording session when a producer
asked for another take on the grounds that she was out of tune. “I bloody wasn’t,” she said, and that was that.
We also saw riveting footage of a 1981 rehearsal for the opera Maria Stuarda at ENO, where exasperation got the better of her and she plonked herself down on stage in high dudgeon. A capricious prima donna she wasn’t, but she didn’t suffer fools.
In dialogue with Bridcut off-camera, Dame Janet, now 85, came across with all the intelligence, grace and poise I have sensed in my own several interviews with her over the past 25 years. She was painfully honest about her insecurities, including the haunting fear of “not measuring up to what you’ve been given”, and the reasons she gave up opera at just 48. She also talked candidly about the psychological burden that weighed on her after the death of her elder brother when she was 10.
Frustratingly, why and how she became a singer was not explored, and there was no mention of her vocal teachers or her professional relationships with the pianist Gerald Moore and baritone Dietrich Fischer-dieskau. Other colleagues resorted to clichés as they tried to explain her vocal qualities, but real insight was provided by her admirer and successor Joyce Didonato as she responded to the sublime 1967 recording of Berlioz’s Le Spectre de la Rose, pointing out how Baker made the silences so expressive, so integral.
Despite some shortcomings, this was an affectionate and absorbing film. The final section offered touchingly intimate domestic scenes with Dame Janet’s husband, Keith, yet at its heart was surely her assertion that music has the power to stop us worrying about the future or brooding on the past and instead to “hold us in the moment”.
Listen to her rapturous singing of the Angel’s farewell at the close of
The Dream of Gerontius and you’ll feel what it is she means.