It’s a puritanical age now – look at the treatment of JK Rowling
As he prepares for ‘Peter Grimes’, superstar bass John Tomlinson tells Jasper Rees why Britten’s bleak masterpiece resonates still
‘There’s a lot of fifties at the moment.” John Tomlinson, king of booming British basses, is totting up the milestones from his life on the operatic stage. “I’ve been around for 51 years since my professional debut. I did 50 roles at the Colly [London Coliseum] and if I survive another two weeks this will be my 50th role at Covent Garden.”
The Royal Opera part is Justice Swallow in Deborah Warner’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. “Very much a secondary part,” he says. “But it’s a good part.” Its tonalities audibly delight him. We are sitting in a public area of the Royal Opera House, with tour parties being guided past our table to view the Floral Hall. His speaking voice – all shuddering thunder and Lancashire loam – is ear-catching enough. But then John Tom – as he is affectionately known – starts singing snippets of Swallow, his basso profondissimo voicebox nimbly leaping up and down the octaves. I ask if he might sing all his answers.
As he says, the community leader of the Borough where Peter Grimes the fisherman is an outcast is not a big role. Strung together he reckons he could sing it in 25 minutes. Size-wise, it maps neatly onto the perfect parabola of Tomlinson’s career.
He began as a young man in modestly proportioned roles that, a few years in, suddenly ballooned in size. For 20 years he worked atop a lofty peak in which, inter alia, he often sang Wotan in Bayreuth, London, Berlin, Munich and Vienna. That all ended a decade ago, and now he is back on second fiddle.
“It’s a natural progression,” he says. “Perhaps some superhuman being could sing Wotan at 75, but all the way from the toes and knees and ankles and legs and back and ears and eyes and voice and everything, one is 75 years old. People don’t realise the stamina required for these roles. They are immense and you need to have great resilience in your mind and your body and your voice to do them.”
He turned down Hagen, the last Wagnerian whopper in his Fach, in 2018, and went off to do Schoenberg’s
Moses und Aron in Dresden.
It’s not quite true that his Wotan is history. At home in Lewes of an evening, he will keep his voice in nick by trotting through Wotan’s bits of the
Ring cycle. It was good therapy during lockdown. “It’s a high part, and the thing that might go to sleep if you’re not singing enough is the top of the voice. I’ll sing the Rheingold one night. Then the next day I might do Walküre act two, which is three quarters of an hour solid. Then I might do
Siegfried act three. I will complete the whole Ring cycle in five days at home.” The audience consists of Moya, his wife for more than 50 years, and the neighbours. The latter “don’t complain as long as I don’t go beyond half past 10.”
During rehearsals for Peter Grimes, he and his fellow knight Bryn Terfel, who is singing the role of Balstrode, will chew the fat. “We were chatting just now about Hans Sachs [the mightiest role in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s longest opera] and what it’s like coming out for the last scene in act three and you’re sort of in God’s hands and if you’ve got it you have and if you don’t you don’t. And fortunately, I always have.”
His first role at Covent Garden was Fifth Jew in Strauss’s Salome. That was 45 years ago. Whether Swallow will be his last, Tomlinson can’t say.
“I’m turning down stuff all the time that I just can’t be bothered doing because the role’s too small or too far away,” he admits. “I mean, I have been
‘As soon as you have a surtitle, you have the dilemma that your eyes are going off the stage’
thinking about retiring for the past 10 years. Should I? Shouldn’t I? But I’ve just kept going because it’s what I do – it doesn’t seem right just to lay it down and forget about it.”
His retirement plan, if it ever comes to that, involves masterclasses, gardening and making willow baskets from wood harvested in his own two-acre plot. Last year, he made an intriguing left turn into straight theatre acting.
Leading a company of fellow singers, at the Grange Festival, he became surely the first person ever to make his professional debut in the theatre playing Lear.
“It was something of a revelation,” he says. “It was such a risk. It reminded me of when I did my first Wotans in 1988 in Bayreuth. Everybody said, ‘Tomlinson, you’re a young bass, you should not be doing that.’ And it proved to be the making of me. There was more in common than I thought.
“The big difference is there’s no conductor, no orchestra, and so there’s more of a burden to provide the pulse and the momentum,” he adds. “Which was a surprise to me. Intellectually, it was more demanding, although physically it was less demanding.”
If it’s easier on the body, perhaps he could drop the singing and just carry on acting. He’s never sung Verdi’s Falstaff (“a bit too baritonal”), but there’s always Shakespeare’s. He looks the part too, with his foursquare physique and raffish ponytail – “You’re planting a seed there.” Prospero? “That would really appeal.” In the meantime he’s hoping they will do Lear again, even take it to Germany.
For now, there’s Peter Grimes to be getting on with. Does the tight-knit Borough where Grimes is a fish out of water remind him of growing up in Oswaldtwistle, a working-class textile town near Blackburn?
“I suppose I do very much recognise it as being similar,” says Tomlinson. “I was brought up in a Methodist household. The self-righteousness was there. And not having much time for anybody who was different.”
The more he talks, the more he works round to the view that Britten’s opera, sometimes seen as an exploration of his own feelings of ostracism as a homosexual, could be about anywhere.
“I know it’s very easy to say it’s a piece for all time but it absolutely is, patently, obviously,” he says. “You’ve got JK Rowling who is standing out for an opinion and she is excommunicated by a lot of people in a crowd-hysteria sort of way. Not the whole population, thank God. We live in a very puritanical age now.”
Having volunteered this catnip for keyboard warriors without any anxiety about getting cancelled on Twitter, he grows wary only when pressed to stray into a more niche controversy of surtitles in opera houses.
“Terrible question,” he shudders, yet cannot resist wading in. “You only have to go back 20 years and surtitles didn’t exist and it didn’t seem to be a problem. As soon as you have a surtitle you have the basic dilemma that your eyes are going off the stage. And that’s a pity. In a way it’s pointless talking about it because audiences demand surtitles. Peter Grimes is selling like hotcakes, I believe. But I doubt that’s because of the surtitles.”