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Finley, Unlimited
Opera News (William R Braun) August 2005, vol 70, no. 2
I'm just really thrilled to work. I don’t want to limit myself,” says Gerald Finley. It’s a lucky thing, too, because in a few hours the Canadian bass-baritone will be onstage singing Don Giovanni at the Met. The next morning, he’ll fly to
Toronto for Schubert’s Winterreise. He’s also trying to prepare for an imminent performance with the Vertavo String Quartet, but not all of the music has been composed yet, and he has only a few weeks before a role debut as Eugene Onegin at English National Opera. Next month, he begins rehearsals for John Adams and Peter Sellars’s eagerly awaited Doctor Atomic in San Francisco, in which Finley sings the title role of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
At the time of our April interview in the Met’s green room, the Adams isn’t finished yet, either. (“John would love for me to say it was,” Finley jokes.) But he is eager to talk about Adams’s music, and it is indicative of the breadth of Finley’s interests that the first piece he mentions is The Dharma at Big Sur, an electric-violin concerto with no vocal component. “What I love about John’s music is that it is all about the drama. I don’t feel that it ever draws attention to itself. It has a sense of mantra, of chanting, that whole sense of being able to mesmerize in some way.” Finley, who has sung Chou En-lai in Nixon in China, notes that in Adams’s operas “you’re comfortable with the orchestral foundation, the colors remain consistent, so that the vocal line comes out over the top of that, and that’s where the drama and emotion come. But then he’ll take the orchestra and make it big and jazzy. Vibrancy is a word I’d use for his music as well, without being brash. And there’s a confidence, too. I think he just loves the various sound worlds he gets, the huge vertical palette of orchestration.”
Finley explains that he and Adams work with a MIDI click track. “He listens to see exactly how my voice sounds within that context, then says, ‘That’s not the color I want here — where can I put it so I can get a certain feeling?’ There’s a particular section where the chorus is describing the effects of the nuclear explosion. And with the heightened tension of full orchestra and chorus, John wrote things higher for Oppenheimer, basically so that it cuts through the texture. And he admits that in fact he got carried away. In his exuberance to get the cutting-through element, he forgot that I don’t have a very substantial top A, which is very high in the baritone voice anyway. And, as he says, ‘No other baritone would look at this piece if I kept that in.’ So he’s very accommodating in that way. And he admits that it’s his sheer exuberance of getting a tonality and everything.”
Doctor Atomic also reunites Finley with director Sellars, a collaboration that has involved Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in Paris and Santa Fe, as well as Nixon in China at ENO. (The latter production was rehearsed, but the full staging was a casualty of that house’s delayed post-renovation reopening.) “The great strength that Peter has is he’s able to encourage you to your limit of acting — or living your part, which is how he would describe it. And when you’ve reached that stage, then he feels, ‘Great, we’re just scratching the surface.’ And you’d be going, ‘What — I’m giving you my outpouring here, and you feel it’s just scratching the surface!?’ But you know, he’d always be right. He’d always know there was a bit more. And his ability to encourage you to ever-increasing reality of circumstance is really wonderful, almost perhaps to the extent of the Actors Studio in New York — so that you’re not acting from life experience but absolutely investigating your deepest corners. Sometimes you can be in jeopardy, because you might be investigating something stronger than yourself, than your self-control.” The character Finley played in L’Amour de Loin, Jaufré Rudel, “was a very disturbed man, a very sick man. Trying to focus on the investigation of that sort of journey was harrowing for me as a person. But Peter was always there to say, ‘You know, if you feel the power of the music and of your presentation, you will convince us that what you’re going through is real.’”
In some ways, Chou En-lai turned out to be as difficult. “He is very spiritually oriented, very compassionate, and that is hard to play onstage,” Finley laughs — “being benign and comforting and understanding. But again, what Peter would go for is the character’s vulnerability. How can I show myself being weak, but a weakness that is interesting to the audience? Those are pretty wonderful elements for stage work, because we don’t often get them on the opera stage. It’s more about where do you stand, how fast a particular aria is.…”
It seems fair to ask Finley whether Doctor Atomic has made him ponder the moral issue of nuclear power. His answer has been in formation for years. He considered studying chemistry and physics in college, and his long, detailed response takes in critical mass, Marie Curie and the X ray. He considers himself a “green” person; he drives a hybrid car and brightens noticeably to hear that his interviewer does too. “It’s really an ethical argument. Do we restrict our pursuit of the understanding of atomic physics so that nuclear weapons are not available, or do we examine it so we can control them, so that we can then say we understand what’s going on here, now we can put a limit on how it is used? The idea that it sprang from military need is heartbreaking, and the suffering it has caused.
“I think to have a weapon that would demonstrate superiority of armament, which meant that war would have to stop, to me seems kind of a loose end, which in the end tied something up, hopefully for the better. The threat of rogue states will continue to haunt us, I think. But I don’t think the development itself was something that scientists would have resisted, or saying from an ethical point of view we must not do this because of the tension. I think atomic power has given a great deal to the world. We just have to be responsible enough to know how to keep it under control.”
Finley is no stranger to new work, having taken part in several previous world premieres. Of these, he’d especially love to see Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which he sang in Los Angeles, join the repertory. “It’s very accessible for children,” he says — “partly comedy, and boy do we need comedy in the theater!” But the scheduled American premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie was, he believes, a casualty of the post-September 11 mindset. “It’s a big statement about war and the debris of humanity which is left behind — how it affects small people, rather than how it affects countries.” Dallas Opera, he says, “pleaded economics” in canceling it, but he suspects it simply wasn’t deemed an appropriate subject.
Finley’s performance in the great antiwar opera of all time, Britten’s Owen Wingrave, is preserved in a magnificent film by Margaret Williams. Only recently has opera on film become viable artistically, with the advent of a new system that allows singers, even outdoors, to sing “live” with a prerecorded orchestra. A soundtrack is made with the singers isolated in a booth. The conductor is videotaped. On location, the original vocal parts of the recording can be removed; the singers can then perform their parts to an accompaniment already tailored to their interpretations, watching the conductor on a screen. To allow movement, Finley notes with some incredulity, “There is a guy holding a microphone boom, and cuing while looking at a score on a harness, and then you have the camera tracking or focusing up.”
But Finley is not looking for a film career. “You know, it was boring. The film world, how they put it together, is boring. You wait around for hours, and then you do one thing, and the waiting around just saps your energy. And you have to trust that the camera is doing the work, and that was a real acting lesson. You have no film training whatsoever, and they’re saying, ‘Just relax, give us a look of some sort, but remember it’s the eyes, we’re looking at your eyes, not your head, so don’t turn your head. But keep your eyes open, please don’t blink…. Okay….’”
The show business gene has been passed on to Finley’s sons. “They’re both musical,” he notes, but “we don’t encourage them.” Yet his eyes are proud, and he mentions that the elder son will make a Glyndebourne debut as the First Genie in Die Zauberflöte a few days before dad’s first Onegin. Finley is married to Louise Winter, a British singer who was a mezzo when he first met her at Glyndebourne. Winter is now turning into a dramatic soprano. She has a close relationship with Frankfurt Opera, where she will soon take on Brangäne. The four live in Sussex — “very near a nuclear power station,” Finley volunteers. At the moment, the baritone limits his North American engagements so that he can spend time at home. “The boys are thirteen and nine, so they’re not going to want to have much to do with me much longer,” he jokes.
His desire to stay within a quick flight of home is in part responsible for the range of repertoire Finley covers. “I’m not in the great tradition of basso cantante, or certainly Verdi baritone,” he offers, even though he spent last winter at Covent Garden as Germont in La Traviata. He has an impressive list of period-instrument performances to his credit, and his Argante in Handel’s Rinaldo was head and shoulders above the current standard for basses in this repertoire. But he is genuinely surprised at the suggestion that he do more Handel. He is simply a singer who delivers whatever is required on the evening at hand, and this was on ample display in the Met’s recent Giovanni revival. When Marthe Keller’s production was new, in 2004, it had a void at the center, but Finley’s performance realigned the show. The difference was starkly apparent in Keller’s concept of “Là ci darem la mano,” in which Giovanni never moves but, confident of his magnetism, allows Zerlina to approach and draw back, circle, and at last rush to him. Finley was so sure of himself that he never even looked at her.
He sang the second verse of his serenade quietly, in the traditional manner, but he never lost the vivid Italian double consonants that English speakers usually forget, giving themselves away. Keller makes much of Giovanni’s preoccupation with Zerlina’s shoes; Finley manipulated them like a Ferragamo salesman. And he added some telling moments of his own. After running his hand up and down her legs, he lightly sniffed his fingertips. (“I like sharing the bounty that I have onstage,” he later explained.) This Giovanni had a sensual relationship with his pasta in the banquet scene as well, massaging it into his face and hair. Keller unexpectedly turned up at the dress rehearsal and was delighted. “She said, ‘Yes, it’s his last meal, and of course you must feel the texture of the food at his last earthly moment,’” Finley reports. Keller asked only that Finley treat Donna Anna more roughly in the opening scene. “She said, ‘Don’t treat her gently — finish her off as you’ve begun!’” All in all, it was the sort of performance any repertory house needs to survive. It was fresh and detailed, but it did not require any adjustments or extra rehearsals.
Jon Vickers is said to have been willing to appear with any opera company in the world if it would produce Smetana’s Dalibor for him. Today’s singers, who have recordings, film work and dozens of opera houses offering productions, seem more interested in choosing from what is available to them. Over the telephone, at the end of a plane flight, Finley considers whether there is a role he would go anywhere to play. Nothing comes to mind at first, but then he ventures, “I suppose I’m trolling for Billy Budd. The character is vulnerable, a victim of circumstance, dealing with courage and yet naïveté. I’m at a stage in my life now where actually I can even see that ‘naïve’ is sometimes strength. You acknowledge that you can’t beat the powers that are around you. I would sense that would be a good lesson for me right now, to accept what’s there. That would be great.”