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A Song (and a Singer) for Anything:
Gerald Finley, Charles Ives, and a Framework for Exploration
(from Fanfare Magazine, 2005)
Don Giovanni sits, playful, on a throne in the Canadian Embassy, by London’s Trafalgar Square. Unfazed, if a little bemused by the persistence of electronic flashguns, he starts to reminisce on the habits of the wife of a distinguished, late American. “He thought she’d have affairs, but all she did was have an affair with the bottle. Oh, she was such an alcoholic. Poor guy, he’s not only going to blow up the world, but his own life was going nuclear as well!” The guy in question is Robert Oppenheimer, father of The Bomb, and subject of John Adams’s new opera, Dr. Atomic, due to premiere this fall, in San Francisco. The Don, fresh from an authentic triumph in the Mozart role at the Met, is busy Canadian-baritone Gerald Finley, who seems bent on conquering the entire repertoire, rather than all the ladies in Spain. The alpha-male of the stage for Mozart, Britten, or Verdi, the master of the varied Liederabend, is here to discuss Charles Ives, but how did the Adams connection develop? “My work with Peter Sellars on Magic Flute and L’amour de loin by Saariaho led to my meeting John. We did Nixon in China, and now Dr. Atomic, a monumental piece for our day and age, with themes we are all dealing with now: technology, morality, the pressures of modern-day life, alcoholism, cancer, corporate and general responsibility, nuclear power.” And the Oppenheimer marriage? “So far, the opera’s taking the view that they needed each other to survive. He was a romantic in the real, old, intellectual sense. Then he was dealing with these unbelievable guys in the military, who had no idea, no idea at all.”
Finley himself claims to have had no clue as to his future when starting out as a kid around Ottawa. “At age 13 or 14, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was going to be a scientist, I was going to be a vet; I measured sheep droppings on an experimental farm for my work experience. I also grew up as a choirboy. I auditioned for a boys’ choir as a nine-year-old, and apparently I had a voice, but it wasn’t the singing I enjoyed so much as being with a team. I played soccer; the greatest loss was not being able to do baseball trials, knowing that baseball practice night clashed with choir rehearsal night! In the end, we had fun at choir, too. There was a choir soccer team, and we did a kind of rugby-scrum activity at the end, so I’d ask dad to come late to collect me. The singing seemed almost incidental, and that was what first made me realize that part of the fun and joy of singing was that it didn’t have to be just about the singing—even though that was a team event, too! But I did some chorus work in Ottawa, through the big new arts center, with opera companies and so forth, and that experience produced people like me, and the next generation of singers.” So how did this lead out of Canada? “Youth choir was doing a conference there, and David Willcocks came over. It was suggested I ask him about the Royal College of Music. I was never intimidated by any new situation, or audition. I thought then what I think now: if there’s not a good reason not to do something, then I should take it on. So I arrived here, and there were Cambridge Choral Trials going on, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ I had it in mind very much to be a choral person. So I became an undergraduate at Cambridge, a rare thing for a North-American. Philip Ledger was there, and the musical environment was very encouraging, so I was allowed to see out my three years, and the contacts I made then have permeated my performing life ever since.”
That life soon led to Glyndebourne, and to the major opera houses and recital rooms of the musical world. Finley’s presence and athletic demeanor are not just noted by critics: they are clear from any encounter with the unassuming man himself. How did the drama start? “I enjoyed acting when I was a teenager, didn’t know whether I’d have a voice at all, but then opera seemed to be shifting towards a more realistic mode of presentation, needing that combination of real acting and singing. So as a singing actor, I’ve been lucky.” It seems more like talent and sheer hard work: the physical conviction Finley applies to his performances strikes everyone, even setting aside the flexible voice. It impresses in particular, as he assumes the Don’s mantle. “I feel very much at home as Don Giovanni now after five or six years. It’s great, and every show’s different. It was physically challenging in New York. The Met’s stage is big. The more I do that kind of role the more I realize it’s an all-encompassing job. Not only is it intellectually and artistically stimulating, but in a 3,800-seater you’re trying to project your energy out there, and also relate to colleagues onstage. What I do is not exactly calculated, but quite precise; so when one is, for example, delivering recitative efficiently and full of energy, going outwards, then the exhaustion is palpable by the end. Every artist comes to understand where his limits are, and I think I came up against mine, closely, by the end of that production. I had come off the end of a production of La traviata, here at Covent Garden, equally intense, but in a very different way.” So how does he stay in shape? “I’m not one of those singers who goes to the gym every day, though many colleagues do so. For me it’s the actual rehearsal process that keeps my fitness at its peak.”
So how does he balance all the ambitions in his career, among the operatic peaks? “It’s absolutely designed to be a varied working life, and a change is as good as a rest, to try and keep flexibility, artistically and physically. Normally I would try and get concert work to buffer against operatic roles, all equally dramatic but not in the same physical way. After a series of demanding operatic roles recently, I took two months doing just recital work, then some recordings, some concert work, then back into the Verdi. In recital, I’m as physically focused and energized as the recital stage will allow. Sometimes you try and concentrate the whole energy of a song into perhaps just your eyes. I’m not trying to ‘act’ out songs—recitals are in a vocal category. Over the years, I’ve had to modify that priority, but as any stage director will tell you, if the intention is right, then the communication will be right, too. A recital is a wonderful opportunity to exercise your stage imagination, too.” Any models in this arena? “Fischer-Dieskau, Tom Krause, Hermann Prey. Recently I saw Robert Hall, and was fascinated by his complete commitment to the texts. There are many conflicting inputs in the ultra-modern age, and I think the artist always wants to feel his work is being understood. I was always entranced by the ability of Fischer-Dieskau to create sounds that were vulnerable but manly, and for me that was the great excitement. He had a vocal range of power and delicacy, a vocal range I found sweet, yet filled with Männlichkeit. I’ve never been a wimp in wanting to engage either life or physical challenge. I’m thrilled to be part of a trend towards committed stage acting and singing.”
Was his interest in contemporary music nurtured at Cambridge, too? “I worked with composers at the RCM. George Benjamin was up at Cambridge when I was, and he got me to sing in some of his things, though maddeningly I’ve not done anything of his since, through circumstance. I learned that composers are always interested in communicating, and I’ve worked since with Tobias Picker, with Mark-Anthony Turnage, and others. I’m enthusiastic and love the sounds of our time; it’s not a dutiful activity. One of the most exciting experiences was to hear Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht at Covent Garden. To take all those sounds and noises out of life, birds and sounds of nature, and make something like that! What could be better, more inclusive? And something similar could be said of Ives: the song Thoreau, with the sounds flowing through the forest at Walden. Or Remembrance, with the sound of the horn over the lake, capturing that immense sense of space.”
Scaling down both voice and dramatic scope, Finley has, with Julius Drake, devised and recorded a varied recital of Charles Ives songs for Hyperion. The commitment and level of engagement shine in Finley’s eyes. He seems to love this body of work, to need to communicate it. Why Ives? “I was thinking of moving into Nordic song repertoire, or working-up a Canadian recital, but then Julius [Drake] suggested I look at Ives, and when you do look at the whole range of the songs, beyond those few that are well known—but kind of dense—it’s incredible. Like any great composer, like Brahms or Mahler, he makes musical phrases in reaction to poetry, extracting images of song-memory, and extending them. A real part of the challenge is his notion of works being never finished. We’ve called the recital ‘A Song for Anything,’ named after a rather naive song. Ives said such things had a right not to be sung. We’ve tried to respect this extraordinary human being, so active and practical in the business world, but so vibrantly aware of where music was for him. He draws together so many strands, from direct observation of human life, to deep sentimentality, and we’ve tried to do justice to that in the recital. I felt very moved by his whole sense of respect for his father, the huge influence there, his gratefulness for having had a parent who could guide him to the point where he could cope with his own talents, down to the practical side of not struggling as a composer but getting a proper job, too, and doing that job as well as possible.”
How about the Ivesian words, the self-deprecation? “I think he had a fundamental security about his composing that enabled him to joke and to take risks. Think of The Cage from 1906. He had a period developing from the European schools, then doing something true to himself, like life, while respecting his background.” So how did Finley find the right voice for Ives? “Ives’s father said of a bricklayer singing, ‘Don’t listen to the sound, listen to the music!’ Part of my preparation was to strip back the veneer of my classical vocal training, and to think ‘How would I sing this if I were washing dishes at the sink?’ In some ways, I’ve made myself as vulnerable as possible in the recording, trying to imagine how the cowpuncher would feel, for example. I almost wanted the same intimacy one gets from a Karen Carpenter recording, or the Nat ‘King’ Cole or Tony Bennett crooning tradition, savoring the ends of consonants. It’s a risky approach, but if you can do it your own way, that’s great.” Has he studied other recordings of the songs? Fischer-Dieskau has been here, too. “I wanted to make each song feel real and vibrant, for me, so sometimes I think it might be best not to hear recording by your own voice-type. Think of Winterreise; how many thousands of recordings are there of that? In the end, it might be that you listen just to confirm that you don’t want to do it that way! With Ives, I wanted each song to be a fixed, precious moment, and that can be hard under recording conditions, with limited time. Generally, I feel that the more I hear the trained singing style in Ives, the less I like it: I want to be the bricklayer! I’m aiming for that purity of connection, a keyhole, almost, from soul to soul. Perhaps people will play the recital all through, but really, they need to press the random button on the player, hear four or five songs at a sitting. The songs can be so delicately harmonized, and Julius has done such wonderfully impressionistic work in accompanying, or been equally vigorous and lively when it was required. I’ve tried to exploit my North-American sensibility to the familiar Ivesian environment, but also perhaps combined with that a European, distanced view on the implications of his work. Ives was European through his training, and it has been a real thrill to do the four German songs: potentially pastiche, but definitely all Ives. Which brings us back to the courage of Ives. He was a craftsman, committed to the emotional involvement of the listener.”
From the level of the utmost intimacy, Finley climbs, later in the year, and with some logic, to more of the Romantic peaks: on-stage again, starting with Tchaikovsky in London. “Onegin gives me a toehold on the Romantic world: I feel I’m gaining strength as a singer, that there are things with which a baritone feels more complete as a singer for having done. At college, I prepared the duet from Traviata, and a well-known singer came in and said, ‘I’m sorry, what is this? I don’t know this music at all.’ I can see now that he must have been so busy with the music he did do, so there was no need to know things like that, but I’d rather be as complete an artist as possible. I’ve one life, and there are many opportunities. I want to give myself a framework to explore as much as possible. What’s coming up next is a wonderful balance, where I have the Tchaikovsky, then a summer recording some Barber, (more songs with low exposure), then the new John Adams opera. Then next year is my Mozart year: the Count and Giovanni at Covent Garden, with a brief foray into Pelleas.”
We talk of Britten (Finley is the best Owen Wingrave we’ve had, and a noted exponent of the War Requiem), of Schubert and Winterreise, of schools, education, hope, and the future, all wrapped in the gentle, cultured language Finley deploys, backed up by deep thought, and quick wits. And white-water rafting. “I have a family, try to lead my boys in their everyday life, and I have the enormous privilege of working with thoughtful people, artists exploring all these major themes through my daily life. I have a midlife crisis like everyone; and of course I want to do it all, and do the family life as best I can, too. Too many biographies say I’m a young Canadian baritone! But I have responsibilities: I perform, but I also have to lead.”
Gerald Finley is, at present, the baritone who can do all the voices, the works, all with fine style. His looks are ageless, his personal strength and sensitivity immediately clear. He’s the man to beat, and at present you can’t. Catch him soon, at his current peak. Finley deserves his place in the big chair, not least for recognizing that constant reinvention and renewal are the keys to any real degree of artistic success. As he says, disarmingly, amid the opulence of the Queen’s furnishings, and rich chandeliers of his home-country’s Embassy, right at the heart of his chosen home’s capital city, and in view of the two London opera houses he sometimes seems to own outright: “You have to get to know yourself again, every time you open your mouth to sing.”