Twice every year, on her official birthday and at the New Year, Queen Elizabeth ll hands out new honours to the great and the good. Last week, as well as a few Orders of the British Empire to various singers and musicians, she awarded a knighthood to Simon Keenlyside, which means we should all call him Sir Simon from now on. As I’ve seen him in his underpants while we shared a dressing-room, this is going to be a tall order.

Sir Simon joins Thomas Allen, Willard White, John Tomlinson and Bryn Terfel in the small gang of opera-singer knights. All richly deserved and great ambassadors for Britain on the world’s opera stages, no doubt, but not one of them a tenor. Which is odd. The last tenor to be knighted was Peter Pears, fifty years ago, when he was 68. Placido Domingo was given an honorary knighthood in 2002 which doesn’t really count as he can’t use it.

Philip Langridge, Charles Craig, Robert Tear and Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, all now dead, only ever received lower honours, despite achieving as much as their lower-voiced contemporaries. Is there a royal conspiracy against tenors? Or is it simply that baritones and basses are seen as more patrician and noble because of the roles they play versus the feckless, rash and comic roles that tenors end up singing?

For me, there’s one particularly glowering omission: Graham Clark, one of the world’s greatest character tenors and still working at 76. If there has been a better ambassador for the craft of the singing-actor I’d like to meet him. Yet he has received no honour at all. Was he simply too good at playing Mime at Bayreuth and the Met? How I long to hear the Queen say one day: “Arise, Sir Graham!”

I’ve been unusually good-humoured recently, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by friends and family. This is not because I have reached sixty, an age after which people expect you to be grumpy, so are surprised when you are not. It’s because I’ve been on tour. 

Touring isn’t always a pleasure. Indeed, more often than not, “touring” has come to mean a punishing schedule of concerts, each day in a different city, with all the associated flying and bus journeys, a dispiriting round of chain hotels, snatched meals, late nights and early mornings. That’s ghastly and exhausting.

No, I’m talking about touring an opera with a regional company. It’s a rare thing these days, and possibly something that barely exists in Germany with its wealth of small opera companies. But in Britain, it’s a long-established tradition with its roots in the days of Shakespeare and travelling players. It’s how I got my earliest experience, singing alternate nights of Figaro and Die Fledermaus in two towns a week, all over Britain, for three months. 

Now I’m doing it in Scotland, staying in the Highlands (and if you haven’t visited the Highlands then I suggest you get booking straight away), while I’ve been singing in Aberdeen and Inverness. A performance day, of which there are just two or three a week, consists of waking up to the sound of birdsong and sheep, hiking up a heathered hill for some mountain air, a good lunch, then driving an hour to give a performance in a moderately-sized theatre. And it must be said these performances are of a really high standard; much better than you find in many so-called “world-class” houses. 

There’s nothing like playing to a regional audience who only get to hear opera in their theatre once or twice a year. They have a genuine enthusiasm and appreciation. There’s none of the weary cynicism of a metropolitan cognoscenti who have already seen Onegin fifteen times in ten different productions and who are expecting to be impressed (or shocked) all over again. 

I imagine that this is how opera used to be, before recorded media and HD relays, when touring companies took the works of Verdi and Donizetti around cities like Montepulciano and Siena, and people could enjoy opera without worrying whether a critic had said they should enjoy it, or whether the production compared favourably with one in Munich or New York.

Next week we play Edinburgh and I’m really, really looking forward to it.

For as long as I can remember I’ve maintained a strict rule: “When you do an opera job, NEVER stay with family”. This is not because I don’t like my family. It’s just that, unless they too are musicians, families never quite understand what it is we do and what we have to do to get it done. They are civilians and we are the military. So, rather than impose a singer’s discipline on “normal” people we love - strange meal times, odd sleep patterns -  it’s usually much easier and more relaxing to rent digs and live on one’s own. 

I’m now working in Glasgow and I’ve broken my rule, simply because it means living for two months with Dodo, my only surviving aunt.  Eighty-one years old, recently widowed, she is not perhaps what you might expect of an elderly aunt. It’s not all tea, cakes, jigsaw puzzles and ticking grandfather clocks. Oh no, far from it. 

I love Dodo. Dodo loves wine. A lot. She won a national wine-tasting competition in the 1970s. So when I come back from rehearsals, I find her uncorking a vintage Champagne or fine Bordeaux. Or she’ll say “We’ve got some serious work to do. You get the cheeses, I’ve got some vintage port we need to test.” Yesterday she returned from a weekend trip to Islay clutching three different bottles of the island’s single malt whisky.  And she doesn’t take “no” for an answer. This is not how I normally achieve a good work-life balance and I’m getting through a lot of acid reflux medicine.

Dodo is also a music fan, as was her late husband Graham, one of the world’s authorities on the origins of life, whose great grandfather was the little-known composer Emile Steinkühler, a friend of Mendelssohn. A regular concert-goer, Graham once sat next to a woman who suddenly vomited into her handbag during a Brahms symphony. After she’d finished, she simply closed the handbag and continued listening as if nothing had happened. Contrary to popular myth, this is not how people usually behave in Scotland.

Dodo listens to a lot of music, usually when I would prefer silence, but it’s her home so why shouldn’t she? She also has an enthusiast’s admiration for certain conductors that I happen to know are either second-rate or terrible people, so I bite my tongue rather than upset her with the truth. It’s a small price to pay. 

And now I’ll have to stop writing this because Dodo wants to take me to a fishmonger that sells particularly fine scallops. She thinks they’d go well with a Chablis she is keen to try. 

Send help. And Gaviscon. 

I’m in Glasgow for rehearsals of Eugene Onegin with Scottish Opera. I’m singing Monsieur Triquet and at my very first rehearsal two days ago, everything was much the same as normal. It was a music rehearsal, so the conductor was there with a couple of repetiteurs. As I arrived, the bass singing Gremin was leaving. We’re old friends and there was lots of banter and laughter. 

First music rehearsals are otherwise a bit nervy, especially when you’ve never worked with the conductor before. They tend to feel like auditions. The conductor may be smiling but he may be thinking “is that really the best that you can do?” You worry that as soon as you’re done and you’ve left the room, the music staff will be making faces and digging around in their address books for a possible replacement. 

The conductor picked up his baton, the pianist gave me a few bars of introduction, and I launched into my first line, in English but with a heavy French accent: “By chance I ‘az wiz me a song…” The conductor stopped, his mouth open, and so did the pianist, his mouth open too. Was it really that bad? The French accent a bit over-the-top?

“Um. We’re doing the opera in Russian.”

Oops.

Luckily, Monsieur Triquet only has about six lines in Russian before he switches to his native French, so this wasn’t a disaster. And I have done it in Russian before, 21 years ago, but too long ago to remember it. And in the two days since this happened I have re-learned it in Russian. But how did I get it so wrong?

To be honest, I have no idea, and I would rather it was somebody else’s fault than mine. A while back, I’d asked my agent to ask Scottish Opera for a copy of the English score, and one had dutifully been sent, so there had been an earlier opportunity to spot my error. That might have been the point at which somebody said “why on earth do you need a translation?”

It’s not as if this is completely unusual. At another house I was once booked and contracted for the wrong role. It was only when the first rehearsal schedule arrived that I discovered they were expecting me to sing somebody completely different. It was a clerical error in the casting department which they compensated me for with an extra fee and which, interestingly, they asked me to keep secret from the intendant, lest he get upset. So I took the money and dutifully spared his feelings, but I couldn’t help wondering why mine were of so little concern.

I have a dear friend, Gwynne, a Welsh bass in his late seventies, who complains to me often that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden never gave him a proper send-off. 

He had sung there for well over forty years, big roles and small. 

“Surely I deserve some recognition for my long years of service, don’t I? 

His last role there was in Gianni Schicchi, his last performance a schools matinee. He had hoped there would be some sort of ceremony, a medal, a gold watch… But no, nothing.

I asked him if he ever actually told the Royal Opera, or anyone, that he was retiring.

“Well, no, because I can still sing pretty well. I thought they might ask me back for something. The Doctor in La Traviata, something like that.”

“Ah, well”, I said, “that’s the problem. You can’t retire whilst simultaneously waiting for the phone to ring. It sends a mixed message. Unless you actually say “that’s it, I’m done” they’re going to assume you’ll keep going. Imagine how you’d feel if they made that decision for you! Imagine if they said: That’s it. That’s your last performance for us. We’re never having you back. Here’s a carriage clock. Now off you go to your cottage in Wales!”

It has often struck me as odd that so many singers simply don’t know how to retire. Oh I get the need to be needed, the feeling that you’ve still got a few good years in you so why are they giving all the good stuff to the young singers when I can still do that!?! But unlike any other moment in a singer’s career, retirement is pretty-well the only event in which a singer has total control. All the years of building a career, the decisions made about you by other people, opera managers, agents, conductors, the auditions, the choices presented to you by the little bits of flesh in your throat called your vocal cords, the going-on in spite of illness, the struggle, the disappointments… all those haphazard events in your life you’ve had to deal with, THE CHAOS…! And here, finally, is this singular opportunity to determine your own destiny, this one moment in time which no-one else need decide for you.

It’s so tantalising and tempting, yet so many singers just wait to see what will pan out rather than choose this important moment in their life. Or they become quasi-baritones and qausi-conductors (or quasi-magazine-columnists for that matter), in the apparent hope that they can actually evade death and achieve some kind of immortality. Or, like Gwynne, they miss the perfect opportunity. 

As for me, I’ve been doing this for a long time but I’ve got some good gigs coming up. I think I’ll just see what happens after that. Who knows? Something tasty may come in for 2020. Or perhaps 2021...

Twenty-five years ago, with lots of time to kill in between rehearsals of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria in Amsterdam, I started to write a novel. Killing time between rehearsals is among the greatest skills any comprimario singer can learn and I was thinking big. 

Sadly, I lost the manuscript, which I had been bashing out on a portable electric typewriter that, at the time, seemed the very epitome of hi-tec. (Yes, mes enfants, there was a time when singers couldn’t afford laptops.) 

I’m beginning to think I should have another stab at it, as the central premise of the novel has suddenly swung into focus. 

My plot was built around an entirely fictitious and poisonous egomaniac of a conductor - there were plenty of role-models to choose from - who was having a big career in the field of “authentic performance”. I never wrote the middle of the novel but, SPOILER ALERT, the anti-hero, whom I called something like Jack Ellison Fieldman, got his comeuppance in the final chapter when his nemesis, someone he’d wronged at university, revealed the very latest in “authentic performance”: a concert of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony conducted by Gutav Mahler himself, with the Vienna Philharmonic, all reproduced electronically in the form of “living” holograms.  

The argument went that when electronics and research could reproduce as-near-as-dammit the real thing, what need did the world have for conductors who gave their mere interpretations of authenticity? The villainous Jack Ellison Fieldman was suddenly out of a job.

Twenty-five years ago this was merely the stuff of science fiction. But only in January of this year, at the Lincoln Center in New York, Maria Callas appeared in concert as a hologram, and I’m beginning to wonder if my fantasy novel may be less fantastic than I imagined. 

In fact I’m willing to make another prediction. In twenty-five years it will be perfectly possible to mount operas without any trained singers at all. Anyone will be able to do it. They’ll just take a holographic photograph, make a sample of the person’s voice and then package it all up electronically into A Great Singer. High C’s? No problem. Roulades? A few clicks of the mouse. Then the opera-lover will be able to live their fantasy of being an opera star without all the tedium and stress of actually being one. The same “singer”, with a few digital adjustments,  will be able to sing anything from Purcell to Wagner. They will be able to select the major opera house of their choice, the cast of their dreams, Kleiber in the pit (if they have any sense) and Bob’s your uncle, the “perfect performance”. They won’t even have to leave the comfort of their own home. 

I should probably finish my novel before it all comes true. 

I was recently sent ten copies of a CD that I recorded in March. This presented me with two problems: 

First, I don’t have a CD player anymore. I have always looked for ways to minimise the amount of stuff I carry around, so for me, the death of physical media has been a godsend. In a digital age, the CD strikes me as an analogue dinosaur. Why on earth use a plastic disc, stuck inside a plastic case, to move some megabytes of binary code from one digital device to another? It’s like printing a letter you’ve typed on your computer and sticking the printed sheet of paper into a fax machine in order to send it to another computer. I think we’ve figured out by now that the paper is not only a waste of time but also of perfectly nice trees. So, to listen to the CD - which sat unopened for a week before I could summon up the effort and the courage - I had to dig around in a drawer for an old CD-ROM drive, hook it up to my laptop, and rip the tracks. And now I might as well throw the CD I ripped into the bin. It’s served its purpose. It is now redundant. 

My second problem is that I have nine unopened, shiny CDs, still wrapped in cellophane with their glossy booklets, and I have no idea what to do with them. The music - songs by two obscure early 20th century English/Australian composers - is so hopelessly limited in its appeal that I can’t think who would want them. The music is perfectly delightful, but the people who love and buy this stuff are the types who think that no good music has been written since 1940. They are retired teachers who love steam trains and drink sherry, or beer which has been called Bishop’s Dirty Sock or Toad Breath, and not without good reason. We did a concert in London last week, a “big launch” for the CD, and only forty people showed up. Just one person has reviewed it on Amazon. If I gave away my remaining nine copies it would make a very serious dent in the sales forecast for the recording. 

It makes me wonder why anyone makes CDs anymore. One of the first recordings I ever sang on, when I was in the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, was of Weinachtsoratorium. I sat in the sessions when Elly Ameling and Dietrich Fischer-DIeskau recorded their arias. It was a big, expensive undertaking with literally tons of recording equipment, a massive investment for EMI.

Now, anyone with a laptop and couple of microphones can produce a CD and as often as not, it is the artists who are paying for the enterprise, usually as an exercise in self-promotion. Meanwhile, in singers’ homes all over the world, thousands and thousands of CDs are sitting unsold, wrapped in their plastic cases, just gathering dust. 

A production of The Golden Dragon by Peter Eötvös, based on the play by Roland Schimmelpfennig, has recently been touring Britain. Set largely in a Chinese restaurant, it’s a powerful piece that shifts between surrealism and parable, often very funny but ultimately disturbing in the way it throws light on human trafficking and the plight of illegal immigrants. The cast of five play multiple roles. The mezzo-soprano plays: The Woman over 60, Old Cook, Granddaughter, Hans, Chinese mother, and most intriguing of all, The Ant. One of the tenors also plays The Cricket. The parts of two Swedish air-stewardesses are played by a tenor and a baritone, a young kitchen worker by a soprano. Species, gender and race are deliberately distributed with no regard as to the species, gender or race of the performers. This is familiar territory with Eötvös; The Three Sisters casts the title roles with three counter-tenors. No-one is asked to imitate someone of another race; they represent them in this post-Brechtian drama, much in the way that a tenor represents a teapot in L’enfant et les sortileges. Surrealism is the name of the game. 

The cast in this production happens to be all-white. The appeal of singing very difficult contemporary music for underfunded regional companies seems to have been lost on the British-Asian opera-singing community and very few apply to audition, if any at all, but it’s my experience that in opera no-one cares what colour you are as long as you can do your job and sing the role. Until we can get more diversity in contemporary opera, this area of the repertoire is going to be dominated by white singers, and while the opera world in general may not yet be as diverse as it should be, I defy anyone to call it racist. Unlike theatre auditions, opera companies very rarely, as far as I know, specify that they are looking to cast performers from a particular race. Total colour-blindness is certainly my preference and that of every opera professional I know.

A small number of very vocal pan-Asian actors and their well-meaning supporters - not opera singers, mind, but actors - have kicked up such a noise about “cultural appropriation”, “yellowface” as they call it, that the theatre in London where The Golden Dragon was to be performed has cancelled the only performance in the capital. None of these objecting actors or their supporters, not one, has seen the opera or seem interested in its surrealism. Yet, such is their outrage that they made sure that nobody else in London is going to see it either. The cancellation was proclaimed “a victory”. It’s a bad day for the arts when the closing of a show is celebrated before it has even been seen, when actors take delight in fellow performers losing work. I really thought the arts community was more collegial than that, more open to consideration and discussion, especially in the field of contemporary work.

I don’t have space here to debate all the issues at stake. The opera company must shoulder a lot of blame for the way it publicised the opera - “a gruesome black comedy set in a Chinese restaurant” - and please don’t think me insensitive to the trouble that pan-Asian actors have in getting work in British theatre. But I do think it’s a very dangerous situation when members of one race start telling another race which parts they cannot play on stage, and, even worse, when they shut down performances to make their point. In the wrong hands, this is a terrible precedent, its logical conclusion a theatrical form of apartheid or a new form of Entartete Musik. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise what the repercussions of this for the opera world could be. 

I have been reading an article in The New Yorker about Toscanini. It says that when he was musical director of La Scala in the 1920s “35 to 40 percent of the house’s repertory was new”. This struck a particular chord with me because my wife and I are in the midst of setting up a foundation with the express purpose of commissioning new music and I try to imagine how wonderful it would be to live again in a time when at least one third of the operas being staged were new. Indeed, before the 1920s even more of the repertory was new. Going way back, it was ALL new. Obviously.

So it strikes me as odd that for most opera houses, festivals, audiences, the diet is universally of old stuff. The same works are done over and over and over again, re-staged and reimagined until the last drop of novelty has been squeezed out of them, when it might be better for all concerned if something new was written instead. This is a trait particular to opera and the classical music business in general. 

Yes, you could argue that, in theatre, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Checkov dominate the repertoire, and you would be right. But there are plenty more new plays being performed than new operas. No doubt the cost has something to do with it. Opera is such a monumental endeavour these days (though sometimes I honestly don’t know why it has to be) that it’s safer to stick with safe repertoire than take a risk with new. 

We are not alone anymore though. Opera is rapidly being joined by Hollywood in its constant regurgitation of old repertoire, remaking old films with the simple addition of new stars and better special effects. I’ve lost count of the number of times Spiderman and Batman have been re-told. In a hundred years time, if the parallel with opera continues, a trip to the cinema will simply offer the chance to see the latest of three hundred remakes of Casablanca (this time with a modern dress, Jungian theme), or a safe revival of Superman starring the latest in hundreds of young stars who felt they had something novel to say about its eponymous hero. Sound familiar, opera-goers?

I recently caught the opening bars of a video-streamed production of Don Giovanni. I didn’t watch for long because it seemed clear from the outset that the title-role was being performed by a young baritone who spent a huge amount of time at the gym, and I felt instantly bored by the prospect of waiting for the inevitable moment when he removed his shirt and revealed his immaculately-toned torso. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’ve never thought of Don Giovanni as physically vain, nor as someone who spends three hours every day lifting weights down at the gym. He surely wouldn’t have the time nor the inclination, would he? He’d be too busy chasing skirt. He certainly doesn’t strike me as the type of man who would turn down a huge bowl of spaghetti carbonara and a slab of Sachertorte, washed down with a couple of bottles of Primitivo, just because it would mess with his carb intake. Da Ponte and Mozart gave us a Don Giovanni who is a dissolute nobleman, not a swimwear model. 

Yet, the muscleman singer is becoming more and more common. A cliché almost. We had one in a production of Billy Budd I sang in recently who spent three hours every day in the gym. He wasn’t singing Billy - that was a baritone of more modest athleticism -  but one of the smaller roles. Amongst the eighty or so male bodies of all shapes and sizes on stage he rather stood out, aided no doubt by the oh-so tiny singlet he wore (and subsequently removed) and the copious amounts of baby oil he smeared all over his massive arms and chest. I swear that, given half the chance, he would have done fifty press-ups onstage, preferably while somebody else was singing. 

This strange anomaly, of a 21st century protein-drink fuelled, gym-machine toned, six-pack touting hunk in a brooding 19th century parable, wasn’t lost on the neophyte opera-goer to whom I’d given a ticket. “It was very strange,” he said. “It was like this warship had its very own personal trainer on board. Everyone else was so downtrodden and undernourished but there was this one guy who looked like he lived on steaks and protein shakes.”

Perhaps with my sagging stomach and weedy chest I’m biased against so-called “body perfection”. I’ll hold my wrinkly old hand up to that. I don’t mind Don Giovanni looking handsome - though it’s much more interesting when he’s not - but I also want him him to look like he spends more time looking at women than looking at himself in the mirror. A ripped, musclebound baritone in the role looks as natural to me as a Donna Elvira with huge silicone breasts and a faceful of botox injections. I’d rather watch them play Batman. 

And what are these musclemen going to do as they mature into playing older men onstage? Keep peeling off their shirts, as is their wont? I can just see the stage directions now: Papa Germont breaks into “Di Provenza il mar” while rubbing sun oil into his immaculate, naked torso...

Ah, summer! Lazy afternoons in the sun, gardens abundant with flowers and fruit, picnics on the grass with chilled champagne, and lots and lots of opera sung in the open air. I’m not sure how it is in Germany, but the British - with our notoriously wonderful, rain-free summers and our tendency to bouts of sarcasm - will jump at any chance to get outdoors and bung on an opera on an uncanopied, makeshift stage. It’s almost a national disease. At the first sign of sunshine in April, the entire nation rushes to the DIY store to buy barbecues and patio furniture, and many of them to the online box office to book tickets for open-air opera, happily forgetting meanwhile how last year’s summer was ruined by flooding and record low temperatures.

I’ve sung outdoors often; in Italy - no problem, Greece - not a cloud in the sky, France - never a drop of rain, but England? Seriously?

In the early days of Garsington Opera, near Oxford, before they came to their senses and built a seasonal theatre, I sang Cosi fan Tutte under an open sky. Words cannot describe the horror of singing Un aura amorosa with absolutely no acoustic, while planes flew overhead in an increasingly greying sky. A neighbour’s lawnmower accompanied the orchestra, nearby dogs howled - in appreciation no doubt - and a chilly wind hurled through my gauzy Neapolitan costume. Maintaining an expression of loving awe with that lot going on was one of the great achievements of my career. When we performed the last act finale through a steady drizzle, our wigs matting on our faces, the orchestra hidden under a plastic sheet, Garsington’s management realised that steps had to be taken. The next year they built an elegant canopy, but only over the audience and pit.

I was back there a few years later to sing Leukippos in Daphne. Dressed only in a loincloth when Apollo felled me with his arrow, I had to lie all-but-naked for twenty minutes after my death, long after the sun had gone down, while Daphne sang her long final lament and the opera ended. Some nights this was fine, but on most I had to summon all my will to stop my body shaking with cold. Take it from me, it’s not a skill they teach you at conservatoire. If the audience was oblivious to the cold - they certainly were to the fact that Leukkipos was slowly turning blue - it was because in the years since my last appearance, Garsington had installed central heating under the seats of the temporary auditorium. Again, nothing for the stage. All that could spoil a punter’s enjoyment now was a soggy picnic and the sound of torrential rain beating down on the auditorium roof. Oh, and the planes, dogs and lawnmowers. 

As for the singers, as long as we avoided catching pneumonia we were happy. 

I’ve never sung at the Met. The chances are I never will, and frankly, that doesn’t bother me much. I’m not sure we’d get along. For one thing, the few times I’ve sat in the stalls watching a show, I’ve found the audience to be the most elderly and conservative I have ever encountered. Those that weren’t falling asleep or complaining loudly about the modernity of a perfectly unadventurous production didn’t even seem to know which opera they were attending that night. The Met audience claps enthusiastically when a Rolex-sponsored star walks on stage or when the scenery is pretty, no matter how well the orchestra happens to be playing at the time. I suspect many of them think that the Met’s failure to book Andrea Bocelli for roles is a serious failing on the management’s part.

For New York singers - and New York is the city where most American singers gravitate at some stage in their career - the Met is the city’s only fully-functioning opera house and America’s number one employer of opera singers. Its chorus is handsomely paid - some choristers earn well over a quarter of million dollars a season (so, much much more than most soloists) - and it also employs a small army of comprimari and understudies.

Very good singers understudy at the Met, singers who can otherwise be found singing major roles in regional houses and in Europe, and the Met rewards them well. Whereas a London opera house will pay a few hundred pounds to a cover, the Met pays thousands of dollars a night to keep a singer within fifteen minutes’ range of its stage, even when - as is increasingly the case these days - they have no intention of putting the understudy on if a star goes ill. Peter Gelb much prefers to seek out the services of another star, if one happens to be in town, and they frequently are. I’m told if you are booked to understudy Mimi or Rodolfo it is made patently clear you will have zero chance of singing the role in a performance. But they’ll still pay someone thousands of dollars to keep the evening free, just in case.

Which raises an interesting dilemma. Given the paucity of opportunities to sing the roles many singers have spent decades preparing, and the general lack of singing work available elsewhere in America’s biggest city, of course a soprano is going to accept a very well-paid job understudying Micaela at the Met over an offer of two performances of Carmen for, say, the semi-professional Alabama Opera at one thousand dollars a show (if she’s lucky). 

Except of course, she’s not accepting singing work. The soprano is really being paid to not be anywhere else but near the Met on performance nights. In effect, she’s being paid to not sing. There must be dozens of New York singers earning a decent living by understudying and not singing. They’re being paid to not do the very thing they have been trained to do.

Now, call me a lazy man - and I do have an ambivalent relationship with my desire to sing - or call me lacking in ingenuity, but not even I have come up with a way of NOT SINGING for money. 

As I said, I’ve never sung at the Met. So why haven’t I found a way for them to pay me for that?

A long time ago I heard a story about a soprano who was rehearsing as Fiordiligi in a revival of a production of Cosi fan Tutte that she had sung before. They were working on Come Scoglio and she was sitting in a rowing machine, as the production dictated. The rehearsal stopped for a moment and the soprano asked the director: “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten, why exactly am I singing this glorious aria in a rowing machine?”

“Because if you don’t, there are twenty sopranos who will!” replied the director, icily.

Asked what she did next, the soprano said: “I rowed like fuck!”

I think of this story every time the question of nudity arises. It happened to me very recently. I was already down to my underpants - and there is hardly a role I do these days, even Turandot, where I’m not stripping down to my underpants -  when the director said: “How would you feel about going the whole way?”

Now, I’m willing to bet all the tea in China that every single reader of this magazine has seen a nude opera singer. As a profession, we’ve been taking our clothes off and swinging everything around for decades. There’s certainly nothing novel about the experience, nor is it particularly shocking. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say it’s a bit dull or at best, unintentionally funny. “Oh here we go again, yet another director trying to shock me with nudity in an opera” is, I would wager, the usual response from operagoers these days. 

This was in the back of my mind as I formulated my response to the director who was currently asking me to expose my dangly bits. But I didn’t say “oh don’t ask me to do that because it’s rather boring.” No, I said this: “Quite apart from the fact that I really don’t want to show off my wrinkly old penis, I think the reason it’s not a good idea is because, if I were sitting in the audience, I wouldn’t be shocked for the character; I’d be asking myself how the director persuaded that middle-aged singer it would be a good idea to take off all of his clothes in front of 2000 people. In other words I’d be thinking more about the process of putting on the production than following the narrative of the opera…” And no sooner had I said that, than the director said: “Ah, good point, that won’t do, OK, forget it.”

And that, mes enfants, is how you persuade a director to let you keep your clothes on without getting fired.

I don't know how many Opernwelt readers use Twitter but in the English-speaking side of the opera business, agents now  urge their clients to have  an  "active social media presence" in order to promote their careers. Needless to say, I mostly use my account to be an idiot or to lambast Donald Trump and fans of Brexit. Not that they take any notice...
I recently suffered the displeasure of many singers when I made a sweeping generalisation; in so many words, or rather 140 characters, I accused them of being boring when they promote themselves on Twitter. I don't object to self-promotion. Heck, I do it myself. And operagoers find it useful; they take a genuine interest in who is doing what, when and where. But please, singers, just do it better. 

Twitter, particularly in the English-speaking opera circuit, has become practically de rigeur. Agents insist that their clients open Twitter accounts and bombard anyone who can be bothered to follow them with glimpses of their singing and non-singing life. This amounts to a junior intern in her early 20s cadjoling mature, established singers into adopting a one-size-fits-all mode of hyperventilating excitement that, I think, fools no-one. The tweet I see most often, and which I most dislike, takes the following form: "Thrilled to announce I'll be singing Belmonte at the Swindon Opera ! So excited! Can't wait!" Quite apart from not believing that anyone could actually be excited by singing Belmonte rather than absolutely terrified, I find this generic "everything is simply wonderful" sentiment tells me nothing. It's something an amateur might say rather than a professional, a professional who has to go onstage and convey excitement even when he feels none because he has just been to the dentist, his child is being bullied at school and his car needs a new set of tyres. Sure, announce you're singing Belmonte but do it a different way. 

One agent is charging clients  €400 per month for "social media marketing advice".  I can't help but wonder what it would be like if the great performers of fifty years ago lived and worked in today’s world:

Hi, Mr Fischer-Dieskau! Can I call you Dietrich? Well, me and the guys in the office were just looking at your latest tweet and I think it could do with some pepping up. Here's what you posted: "Tonight I will be singing Winterreise at the Konzerthaus, accompanied by Gerald Moore." Teeny bit dull isn't it? Next time, why not try to give it more happy thoughts?! More excitement?! And I'm not sure everyone knows who wrote Winterreise! I know I didn't until I Googled it! My bad! But do think of your young followers! And who's Gerald Moore? Is he with our agency? Don't think so! Best, Trixi xx
Trixi Parker-Wimsy (Junior Intern, Digital Marketing)
--

Dear D, I hope Schumann's Winterreise went great! (See? That extra little info is sooooo useful!) BTW I played your record of it last night. Amaaazing. But you sound so sad and so serious! Haha just kidding! Anyway, following on from my last email, why not try something like this for your next tweet?: "Can't believe I'm singing Handel's Creation tonight with the bad boys of the Vienna Phil and my old mate Herbert von K! So excited! Can't wait! #lovemyjob" What do you think? I really think this will get some bums on seats and fill the hall. And it will really score with the younger audience too. Kisses, T xxx

--

Dear Dieti (the girls  in the office had a vote and this is what we're calling you now! LOL!), I didn't realise that the Creation concert was already a sell-out.  Congrats! I must say I'm surprised, given I didn't see much on Twitter about it. (Are you sure it's by Haydn? We sang it at school a couple of years ago and I could have sworn it was by Handel. Craaazy piece!) You must feel like quite the star! Wooohoo! Though it would have been great if you could have got a photo after the gig. Best of all: a selfie with you and Herby von K goofing around backstage! That would have been so much fun! Or in a restaurant, partying hard. I know what you guys get up to!  Anyway, we've made great progress and I think this is going to give your career a fab boost. Keep it up! Next step is to get you tweeting photos of your breakfasts.  Ooh, and airports. I think people will find it really interesting. Keep this up and I think you'll get thousands of Twitter followers and your online profile will really take off!

Glad to help! Hugs, Txxxx

P.S. Herby von K is sooooooo handsome! OMG his hair is gorgeous! Total fox! xxx

What is the best measure of a singer’s usefulness, their ability or their achievements? I would fall on the side of ability. After all, what practical use is a tenor who has an impressive CV but who can barely produce a sound any more? 

It turns out however that according to the United States Customs and Immigration Service I’m completely wrong. I know this because they have just denied me a visa to sing Basilio and Curzio in Opera Philadelphia’s new production of Le Nozze di Figaro which starts rehearsals next month. 

What the USCIS wanted was evidence that I’m a big enough star to sing two character roles in America. They had no interest in whether I’d actually be any good in the two roles. Apparently Opera Philadelphia and the director of the production, Stephen Lawless, who had asked for me, can’t be trusted with these decisions. No, they need someone in an office in Vermont with absolutely no knowledge of opera to make the judgement based on three criteria: how good my reviews have been, how many awards I’ve won (“Oscars, Emmys or Grammys”) and whether or not the opera house is prepared to pay an enormous fee for my services. After all, a big fee can mean only one thing in the American psyche: a big star. 

Now if I have a bad habit, it’s that I can’t be bothered to keep reviews. I’ve been doing this opera thing for 36 years and at my stage of the game, believe me, they don’t make the slightest bit of difference. Besides, it’s not as if critics spend many column inches waxing lyrical about the proficiency of singers in smaller roles. You’re lucky to get a mention. Which means I had very little to show the USCIS. 

Apart from a singing competition in 1980, I have never won an award. I think some recordings I’ve made have been nominated or even won something but I’ve never bothered to keep a tally. I’m not a trophy keeper.

And there is no way that any opera company with any sanity is going to fork out more than a modest fee for the guy singing Basilio and Curzio. I know this from experience, though a fat lot of use that is.

I really thought my long CV of performances around the globe, including Figaros in Vienna, Amsterdam, Montpellier, Covent Garden and Los Angeles would suffice to get me the visa. I’ve had several US visas before without a song and dance. Why was it now so difficult? Not even supporting letters from the likes of Pierre Audi extolling my virtues as a performer would shift the USCIS’s opinion that I’m suddenly too ordinary for America. No, they specifically said, we need to know about his achievements, not his ability.

So, here’s some advice for my fellow singers. Given Generalissimo Trump’s casual relationship with the truth, I see no reason why less elevated mortals can’t present the USCIS with “alternative facts” when making American visa applications. What can you lose? 

Me, in anticipation of my next attempt, I’m off to polish my four Oscars and to bribe the editor of Opernwelt into writing fabulous, gushing reviews for me. Oh, and I’m going to make sure my agent secures me $15,000 per performance, minimum. That should swing it.

It has been revealed that President Trump (two words I never imagined seeing side by side) has learned some lessons from the opera trade. Perhaps this shouldn't be incredibly surprising, not because I imagine he has the attention span to have sat through three hours of classical music but because there is more than something of the operatic buffo about his personality. A temperament such as his might seem bizarre in the real world but would appear perfectly normal in many operatic characters; Scarpia, Alberich, Bottom, to name a few. 

No, the reason I bring Trump up is because it seems he has taken to having a claque at all his public appearances, laughing loudly at his attempts at humour, cheering wildly for his policies and leaping to their feet to give him standing ovations when he's done. Then, at his next public appearance, he is prone to telling his audience how he got a standing ovation when he last spoke. And so it goes on. Now if that doesn't sound like the behaviour of a few opera singers I've known, I don't know what does. 

But is there much currency in a standing ovation any more? Go to any performance on Broadway these days and everyone will jump to their feet at the curtain. The disease is spreading to London's West End too where even the dullest of performances will cue an ovation. In The Netherlands they've been doing it for years. Indeed, if you don't get a standing ovation in Amsterdam you must have done something seriously wrong, perhaps said something nasty about canals. They have set themselves such a high bar for showing appreciation that when they really love something the Dutch have to shower the stage with tulips and whole rounds of Gouda to get the message across. OK I made up the bit about the cheese, but the tulips, definitely. 

In Asia audiences the trend for the full ovation hasn't quite caught on yet, at least not for anything I've done. Perhaps they need a state visit from Trump to set the ball rolling. In China, where Western opera is still fairly novel, the fashion seems to be to raise your smartphone and film the curtain calls, which has a peculiar effect on the level of applause, it being pretty-well impossible to clap and hold a phone at the same time. I'm not sure what they do with the video afterwards. Perhaps they play it at home on their TV, stand up, and hurl flowers and cheese at the screen. But given the scarcity of cheese in China, this seems rather improbable.

When I write this column I always try to do it from a place of calm. It might not always sound that way, but if you knew me you’d know that I’m an even-tempered sort of chap. Not fantastically jolly perhaps, far from ebullient, but certainly not highly-strung or prone to tenorial fits of passion. I’m somewhere in the middle.

But today, I’m very annoyed. Being a Brit who is annoyed means I’m making tutting sounds, a lot. And every single singer reading this, were they in my place, would be annoyed too but possibly tutting less. I bet what has happened to me has happened to all of them. And it’s not as if this is a once-in-a-lifetime annoyance. It’s always happening. We know it could be prevented. We know it shouldn’t happen. And yet it happens over and over again, and we singers put up with it like adoring dogs who, begging to be petted, get kicked in the arse.

Last Sunday, I flew to Spain to start rehearsals for a new production. The next morning the director and designer gave a brief if rambling introduction to the concept, followed by an hour of games led by the movement director that were meant to help us become familiar with the rest of the cast and crew. Not all the cast was with us because several of them were unavailable. This wasn’t because they had managed to persuade the management to let them come late but because the original rehearsal period of nine weeks had been extended to eight weeks, and they already had other commitments. Yes, that’s eight, EIGHT weeks of rehearsals. Unpaid of course. Eight. Weeks.

After the games, I was free to go. And I was told I wouldn’t be needed the next day. And then, when the next day finished, the schedule came out and I wasn’t needed the next day either. This pattern continued all week. I’d get the daily schedule and my name wasn’t on it. And I wasn’t the only one affected. 

I have now been in this anonymous Spanish city for over a week and I haven’t done anything. Zilch. Nulla. All I achieved was to catch a cold, spend €100 a day of my own money being somewhere I clearly didn’t need to be, and forget all of the names I learned in the game session a week ago.

This is a fair, vibrant city but it isn’t home and I’ll be here for nearly three months, so I have plenty of time to see the sights. There are worse things in the world than being in Spain with nothing to do - it’s hardly gruelling - but the waste of time was so very avoidable and it’s that which is so annoying. The director knew she couldn’t do some scenes without the unavailable singers, so why didn’t she think to release the available ones? Or even better, realise in advance that we wouldn’t be used and let us arrive a week late with our busier colleagues?

They all do it, directors. And in my brief experience as a director, I know that scheduling can be tedious and complex. But it focuses the mind on what has to be done and it wins the hearts of grumpy singers. So, directors, before you start throwing balls around the rehearsal room and asking as to imagine ourselves as trees swaying in the wind, please PLEASE learn how to make a bloody schedule! 

Tut.

I've been taking a look at the remote  corner of our wardrobe that my wife lets me use to hang my concert suits. I haven't worn my tails for two years now. This is partly because they are falling out of fashion - about time too  - and partly because I  don't do many concerts these days. It's a younger tenor's turn to sing all those Masses and Messiahs. I'm hoping the tails I have will see me through to retirement because, frankly, I'll be buggered if I'm buying any more. Call me stingey, but I really can't see new ones giving me enough miles to the  gallon. 

In forty years of singing I've only ever bought one tail suit. In my early career I was lucky enough to inherit two suits from my father and my grandfather. They weren't musicians but  they came from a social class and generation where wearing tails to go out to dinner or the opera was quite normal. My grandfather's tail coat had small holes in the lapel where his medals used to be pinned. He fought in the Somme, where he got shell-shock, and I thought of him particularly whilst singing Britten's War Requiem, wearing the coat of the jolly, gentle old man I knew, long  after moths had left much bigger holes all over  the fine wool fabric. It was only when the crotch of the trousers split open after decades of strenuous Creations  that I had to give the suit  up. 

My newer tails are 100% polyester, shiny yet bland, and indigestible to moths. There are no medal holes  as they've never been worn by anyone brave or selfless enough.

The only tuxedo I own is white. I bought it second-hand twenty-one years ago for a concert in Macau of a mass  by the Portuguese baroque composer Texeira. The conductor insisted on white tuxedos. I've never worn it since, nor  sung any Texeira either. But who has? On the extremely rare occasions I'm asked to wear a black tuxedo I just wear a black suit with a bow tie. So far, no-one has batted an eyelid. Not being a freemason,  a croupier or likely ever to win an Oscar, I see no reason to buy a proper one. 

Also on the rail is a morning suit of the type worn at fancy weddings. I've never worn it at a fancy wedding but only for The Bach Choir. They perform the St Matthew Passion every year on Palm Sunday morning and they insist upon a morning suit. I was their Evangelist for several years but, uncertain I would be asked back regularly, only got around to buying my own suit (rather than hiring one at great expense) after four years. I think I got about six concerts' use out if it, but if my children ever have fancy weddings, and they won't if I have any say in the matter, at least that's one less thing I'll have to worry about. 

I have just been working in Beijing. Perhaps Confucius, enveloped in heavy smog, came and planted some wisdom in my dim brain, but I had a moment of enlightenment. 

As usual, programmes were offered to the cast after the show, but I took a brief look at one of them and threw mine away. The main reason I didn’t want a souvenir was that I already have enough programmes at home, boxes of them in fact, mouldering in the dark, damp attic. Why add yet something else to the massive piles of junk that my kids will have to take to the dump when I die? I don’t see a queue of biographers lining up to chronicle my career, so who needs them, apart from my ego? (I’ll confess here that I never understand people who keep shelves and shelves of books that they have read but have no intention of reading again. What’s the point? To show off?)

The other reason I discarded the offered souvenir of our Chinese tour is that I glanced through the artist biographies, including my own, and was overcome with a deep sense of weariness. Let’s face it, there can be nothing, ever, anywhere, printed on glossy paper that is more boring and ludicrous than a singer’s biography. I’m not sure who they’re supposed to impress, because surely “desperately trying to impress” can be the only motivation for the dreary prose, the endless lists of roles sung, the conductors sung with, the role debuts made… Mine is awful. My agent’s assistant wrote it, or rather assembled it like a bad Lego model, and I find it deeply embarrassing. It’s like the dullest shopping list ever composed and I can’t imagine anyone making their way through it, let alone a Chinese punter in the Poly Theatre.

What’s alarming is that singers rarely get frustrated by the lack of good writing in their biographies but only when someone gets some small detail wrong. “Agh, I didn’t sing Ferrando in Rouen. It was in Rennes! It’s a catastrophe!” 

My simple response to that would have to be: “Who, apart from you, gives a shit?”

And let’s not dwell too long on the headshots on which thousands of euros were spent to make each singer look exactly like each other: a dreary parade of big hair and goatee beards, desperately trying to project an image of ARTISTRY. My headshot is a selfie. I often argue with my agent that if casting directors are now making decisions based solely on fancy photos, we are all in deep trouble.

I’ve spoken to quite a few ordinary opera-goers who not only never read artist biographies but barely look at the cast list. Most of them assume that whoever is on stage deserves to be there and that’s all they need to know thank you very much.

Hopefully, the artist biography will soon be a thing of the past. It can’t be that long before opera programmes just list the cast and next to each name a QR code, one of those little boxes filled with dots of different shapes and sizes. The punter, if he really wants to find out more about, say, the Third Jew in Salome, will simply point his smartphone at the code and then be instantly directed to the artist’s website, where he can browse his way through all the lists of roles, extravagant claims (“the finest tenor of his generation” is my favourite) and moody photographs he can possibly digest. 

It would spare the world millions and millions of pages of unread glossy paper. Just think what that would do for the environment and the mental health of thousands of egocentric singers. Please, please, let’s do it now.

As I’ve had a few weeks off this summer I’ve done what any self-respecting tenor would do. No, I haven’t spent the days reclined on a chaise-longue reading poetry and listening to Schubert lieder; I’ve been installing a new IKEA kitchen for my daughter. 

It takes many people- mostly hairdressers and professional builders - by surprise that an opera singer knows one end of a screwdriver from another, but I’m quite adept at DIY. I’ve built walls, plumbed radiators, laid wooden floors, tiled walls, even extended wiring circuits. I’ve only once employed a professional decorator and the result was terrible. I find the problem-solving challenges, the need for precision and care, the attention to detail, the sense of creation and achievement when it’s all done… all this, just as engaging and interesting as the singing process. 

Yet I know there are many singers who wouldn’t been seen dead clutching a hammer. Though, if you were to pin me to a newly-plastered wall and ask me to make a generalisation about opera professionals, I would say it is directors and conductors who are the least likely to have any DIY skills. Heck, I know several directors who can barely use a corkscrew, let alone a circular saw. I can only assume that they are so programmed to ordering other people around that the idea of doing something solitary which involves nobody to humiliate but themselves must prove something of an anathema.

Conversely, I know many singers who are very deft with a power tool or two, who use their times of vocal unemployment to employ themselves in improving their homes. And why not? I would have to sing about three Messiahs to pay for someone to do the work I’m doing on my daughter’s kitchen, so the fact that no-one has asked me to sing three Messiahs this year doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

A while ago there was an opera production in London, at a fringe venue put on by a small independent company. The set was built from rough timber and scaffolding, sitting on a large bed of coarse sand. As the end of the run approached, one of the singers asked the company manager what he intended to do with the set. “Get rid of it, I suppose”. The singer offered to undertake the task, for a good fee, and the manager accepted. After final curtain, a builder’s truck pulled up at the venue and took all the stuff away, the builder pausing only to pay the crafty singer in crisp bills for the construction materials he had just acquired at a bargain price. The singer might not have demonstrated any building skills of his own, but do I admire his enterprising spirit. 

An interview with the famous diva.

CG: Mrs Foster Jenkins… may I call you Florence?

FFL: No, you may call me Mrs Foster Jenkins.

CG: There’s no easy way to ask this…

FFL: Yes?

CG: What is it like to be called the worst singer who ever lived?

FFL: I don’t know. You will have to ask someone who has been asked that question.

CG: Let me put it another way. Are you a very bad singer?

FFL: Me? I don’t think so. Why? Do you think I’m a bad singer?

CG: Well I have heard some some, um, rather alarming recordings.

FFL: But does that make me a bad singer? I’ve heard some alarming recordings too, by people who are much more celebrated than I, people who sing in the biggest opera houses in the world. Are you saying they’re bad singers too?

CG: Well, no, but…

FFL: Who has said I’m a bad singer? A critic? You’re a singer too aren’t you? Do you believe everything critics say or do you hold to the creed, as I most certainly do, that you should believe in yourself and not be deterred by the opinions of critics? In fact, wouldn’t you say that the golden rule that nearly every great singer abides by is to not read reviews? 

CG: Ah, well, plenty of singers say that, but they do actually read the reviews.

FFL: Well more fool them then. Why can’t they stick to their principles? Where are their guts? Let me tell you, if I listened to every naysayer that dared to damn my work, where would I be today? You don’t have to like my singing but you cannot deny that, unlike you, I am a household name. Have you ever sold out the Carnegie Hall?

CG: I’ve never even sung at the Carnegie Hall…

FFL: Well there you are then. Need I say more? And anyway, what do you mean “a bad singer”? You mean I fail to express myself through song or that I vocalise badly? 

CG: Since you mention it, let’s talk about vocal technique.

FFL: Oh do we have to? I cannot imagine anything more boring for me, for you, or for your readers. How can you possibly be so dull? Name me one truly great singer who has talked interestingly about vocal technique. No, a great singer transcends the limitations of the voice. It’s not all breath, support and resonance you know. It isn’t even necessarily singing the so-called “right notes” or “right words”. Be honest, how many times have you sat in an opera house and been at a loss to understand what’s going on? Hmm?

CG: So what is it then?

FFL: If you have to ask, I cannot possibly explain.

I’ve found myself lately gazing into space and asking myself two questions:
1) If Donald Trump fell into a vat of orange tanning lotion and was in danger of drowning, would I rescue him? 
2) What’s the point of festivals any more? 

The answer to the first is easy and it’s no.
The second question is more complicated.

I was amazed to discover that the original purpose of one of Britain’s most famous festivals, the Three Choirs, was to raise money for the choirs. Yes, festivals were put on to make a handsome profit, an idea so unfathomable these days that I may have to have a lie down.

Then, as we all know, they evolved into something else: an opportunity to celebrate music and art in a certain place, for the benefit largely of the local community, in an age when transportation was more challenging and you couldn’t hop from one side of a country to the other in a couple of hours. A festival became a chance to try unusual pieces or productions, to take risks that you wouldn’t perhaps take during the course of a repertoire season in an opera house. 

I’ve spent most of my working life singing in festivals during the summer months, and apart from some nice weather and the chance of a dip in a swimming pool, I’m not sure I can tell a difference any more between the work that goes on in festivals and the stuff you experience during the rest of the working season.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take all the festival work that’s going. Hang around a lovely seaside town like Aldeburgh for a few weeks? Thank you very much. A couple months in Aix-en-Provence? Very nice. Glyndebourne? That will fill the diary very neatly for three months. 

But would I go to a festival myself, as a punter? The chances are I can see the same opera productions revived in a house’s main season, and without all the palaver of travelling to a place that is full to busting with holiday makers. The prices are probably too high for me and anyway, all the good seats will have been taken by the investment bank that is sponsoring the festival and whose clients are snoring their way through the show because they’ve overdone it in the hospitality tent beforehand. They don’t really like opera but the picnics are fabulous, the foie gras extra fatty and the champagne well-chilled. The director Richard Jones refers to the Glyndebourne audience as “The Santanders”. If you’re doing comedy there, the gales of corporate laughter immediately after the picnic interval are always well-laced with the intoxicating vapours of vintage Dom Perignon. 

As a ne’er-do-well freelancer I simply can’t afford to spend the sort of money most festival-goers must shell out to spend, say, a week in Salzburg. And, frankly, I’m not sure I want to.

Besides, I look at the programmes of the major festivals and it seems to me that everything is being done by the usual suspects. Where’s the novelty, the sense of adventure? During the regular opera season you can probably see a production of Cosi fan Tutte which features a helicopter and a troupe of albino striptease artists (note to intendants, I can pitch a concept!), so what’s so unusual about seeing one during a festival?

So, returning to my earlier questions: number 1 is still a definite no, but for number 2, the answer is I really don’t know.

Something novel happened to me the other day. I was rehearsing for an opera house who sent me an email, from their marketing department, which said “ We hope you’re looking forward to sharing your experiences and letting your friends, family, professional contacts, colleagues, everybody know what you’re working on!” They asked me to download their “personalized banners” for Twitter, Facebook and even email, all to advertise their show. They wanted me to subscribe to their YouTube channel, to use their Twtter hashtag and “join the conversation”. In fact, there was very little they didn’t want me to do.

I thought about it for about five seconds and then did none of it.

Now, I’m no stranger to social media. I get how it works. What I particularly do know about social media is that there is nothing more irritating than colleagues who do little else but go on and on about their career. “Thrilled and honored to announce I’ll be singing Scarpia in 2016-17 for Utah Opera!” “Wow, you must come and see our Madame Butterfly and our awesome cast! Such a privilege to be a part of this amazing team!!” These are just two of the most common yet dullest of the genre and ones to which I take particular exception. The second would make me avoid a show with the same vigour as I’d avoid a rat with herpes.

More honest would be: “I can’t believe it, someone actually gave me some work!” and “I’m in an opera and the chances are it might be quite good, but the chances are equal that it might be awful. I just hope we don’t screw it up.” Now that’s a show I’d see.

So the idea of an opera company actively asking to participate in this sort of breathless bullshit is deeply depressing. Is that the best they can come up with? Do they really think that me tweeting “hey everybody, stop what you’re doing and let me tell you how the show I’m in is so much better than the one you’re in” is going to have people rushing to the box office? 

I also dislike the implication that it’s now my job to sell the show, to put bums on seats. I thought my job was to sing and act, to provide a quality product that sold itself. I didn’t become an opera singer as a massive ego trip. Singing isn’t an exercise in narcissism - well it shouldn’t be - so why would you expect me to fill my emails and social media with advertising which is all about me? I’m not a pop singer, I’m an opera singer. I’ve got better things to do than self-promotion, like watching television and eating pasta, to name but two.

I’m not stupid. I do understand the need to help out our opera companies. But haven’t we reached Peak Promotion Point already? Haven’t we run out of hyperbole with which to plug our performances? If absolutely everyone is screaming “THIS IS THE BEST THING YOU WILL EVER SEE I PROMISE PLEASE BUY TICKETS OR I SWEAR I’LL SHOOT MYSELF!!!” what’s the point in PR any more?

“OK, Chris, now you lead Liz to the table, the other guys hold her down, you pull of her panties and Andrew rapes her”, says the director.

“What sort of panties are they? Will they come off easily?” I reply.

“She’ll be wearing two pairs. The ones you remove and a pair underneath. It won’t be a problem.” 

“Good. I really don’t want to struggle with them.”

“No, it will be easy. Right, let’s do it.”

Yet another opera rehearsal. Yet another rape scene. Yet another situation where the men in the opera do something unspeakable to the women in the opera. At least in this one, the violation is in the score, a vital part of the plot, but it does make one stop and ponder how casually we do this now. 

I’d say of the last ten operas I’ve done, I’ve had to play many more deviants and perverts that “normal” characters. You could argue that that’s just how opera is. If a character isn’t simply pining in unrequited love for another, he’s pulling off their clothes and slobbering all over them. And that rule works no matter which gender is grabbing your character’s eye.

But I’m sure when we used to have to rehearse this stuff, there was a degree of preparation. Conversations were had, permission was sought. It was a gentle process because it was an unusual and sensitive issue, especially for the female victims. 

Now, there’s no hanging around. “This is a rape scene, and off you go.” It has become mundane and not in the least bit shocking, for the performers at least. And I bet the only operatic rape victims who benefit these days from some advance warning are the male ones.

When audiences at Covent Garden last year booed during a rape scene in “William Tell” I reckon it wasn’t because they were surprised and stunned. It was because, yet again, there was a women being violated and they were annoyed by another director trying to shock them. 

I don’t expect there’ll be a change in this trend any time soon, but I’m singing in Billy Budd next year and I’m already wondering what the chances are that I’ll be the one who has to wear two pairs of underpants.

I’m thinking about the expression “once bitten, twice shy” a lot at the moment, simply because I’m about to start rehearsals in an opera house where I had an annoying experience about twenty years ago. I won’t say which opera house, but it’s in Belgium. In Brussels. Right in the middle.

I’m not being fair of course. The experience I had wasn’t terrible, and it happens all over the place. It’s one of those experiences that some opera professionals blow off with a shrug, but which gets most singers, like me, into a lather.

I’m talking about cuts.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like cuts. I love them. I am never more thrilled than when they tell me Basilio’s and Marcellina’s arias have been cut from Le Nozze di Figaro. Hallelujah! Why anyone wants to sing them, let alone make people sit through them, is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. I’ve heard of some tenors who will only sing Basilio if the aria is included, which can only count as a triumph of Narcissism over Reason.

No, the thing that exercises my passions is when the conductor and the director either a) know what the cuts are going to be, but no-one can be bothered to tell the cast in advance, or b) can’t be bothered to decide in advance what needs to be cut and they want to make these decisions during the rehearsal process. It’s not hard to see that either scenario creates a lot of unnecessary learning for the poor singer.

My experience in the un-named Belgian opera house in the middle of Brussels was probably all-too-common. I was to sing in the altogether unknown and forgotten La Stellidaura Vendicante (by Provenzale, to save you looking it up). You can’t go to a music shop and buy a copy, so vocal scores had to be provided by the theatre. Two months before we were to start rehearsing, no score had arrived. I pleaded for a score. “Oh, right, we’ll mail you one.” Two weeks later a photocopied score arrived, but when I went to study it, the intern in charge of the task had omitted to photocopy every other page. It was useless. Not only that, but the text was written by hand and often indecipherable. I rang again. “Oh, right, we’ll mail you one.” It was nearly Christmas. It took three weeks to arrive, and when I opened the score (now with only three weeks to study and memorise it), it was still indecipherable but extremely long. I must have had five acres of recitative and eight arias. I got to work, struggling to make out what I was supposed to be singing.

At the first rehearsal, I sang my first aria then launched into three pages of recitative. “No,” said the conductor, “this passage is cut. Didn’t you get the cuts? Let me see your score. No, this is the wrong score!” 

I kind of hated the opera house in the middle of Brussels for a while after that. But I’m willing to forgive. 

I start rehearsals there next week. The production is a revival. After asking them for over a month, I got a list of cuts last week.

I went to see a new musical last night. It was awful. Absolutely terrible. It was poorly-constructed, it was too long, it was full of clichés, it was dull, it was very very bad. But a friend of ours was in it. So, naturally, we saw her after the show and told her what a wonderful evening we had just enjoyed. 

The audience too, which had spent the evening in a mild state of catatonia, leapt to its feet at the curtain-calls, as audiences in musicals are wont to do these days, awarding the cast a standing ovation. As far as I could tell, with my arse planted firmly in my seat, the cast found this reassuring but bemusing. Bemusing because I’m willing to bet that every single one of them knew that they were in a turkey of a show. Though, to be fair, no-one could possibly fault the cast for their dedication in performing such a pile of tosh, so perhaps they deserved all the applause that could be lavished upon them.

In America, the Republican presidential candidates are, day-by-day, calling each other liars, and the rest of world looks on in disgusted amazement. But the candidates could teach the opera world a thing or two. After all, we need to be just as good at telling lies. We have to do it all the time: “Darling you were wonderful!”
“No, I didn’t hear anything wrong with your top C.”
“You do sound as fresh as you did thirty years ago.”
“Yes, Herr Intendant, I have sung the role before.”
“No problem, Maestro, I’ll follow you.”

Indeed, telling the truth could be considered something of a failing in our business. Years ago, I sang an obscure baroque opera in Liege, then again a few months later in Brussels. The stage director hadn’t been happy with his Liege staging and had persuaded La Monnaie to improve it by paying for a brand new version for Brussels. At the first night party, La Monnaie’s intendant Bernard Foccroulle lifted his glass to toast the cast, who sat in expectation of the usual extravaganza of praise. “Well,” he said, frowning, “at least it was better than it was in Liege.”

Something terrible has happened. Since I last wrote for this organ, the opera I have been directing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has opened and it has been a great success. I’m told I must do it again.

Damn. 

I had sort of hoped it wouldn’t succeed, because then I could ignore the experiment and go back to doing what I do best: singing small roles for nice houses, being paid well for it and spending a lot of time (while my colleagues are hard at work in rehearsals) sitting on my wrinkly old bottom watching TV, or drinking good coffee in nice cafés. Now it looks like I might have to be serious about directing and, frankly, that sounds like a lot of hard work.

It’s not so much the directing itself that I find intimidating but the rigmarole of finding good places to do it. I’ve reached the September of my singing career and have put all the bullshit of self-promotion behind me. Please don’t tell me I have to go through all that nonsense all over again wearing a new, directorial hat. And how do you audition as a director? I’ve absolutely no idea. Do I really leave it all to my lovely but slightly useless agent? Do I really have to rekindle the feeble embers of ambition? At my age?

Directing has introduced me to a new set of experiences. Despite having sung the piece over 150 times, I realised I had never actually been to see Britten’s opera in performance until I watched our première. Sitting through your own production of it many times - all those technical and dress rehearsals - is an endurance test. It can even be a bit boring. You need a lot of faith that the choices you made months ago still hold up on stage; that the jokes are still funny when you can’t possibly laugh after seeing them for the gazillionth time. 

The toughest experience is the first night. Now I understand why Richard Jones rarely sits in the audience but paces the opera house corridors instead. Suddenly you have no control any more. It’s all in the hands of the performers. It’s like being a child all over again and watching a bunch of unruly kids playing with your toys. 

Believe me, this directing lark, it’s not for the faint-hearted.

I’m working with a bunch of American graduate students at the moment, and I’m perplexed by how badly-prepared many of them were for the start of rehearsals. Their knowledge of the opera - not easy by any means but now well over fifty years old - is scant. So, I’ve decided to prepare a quiz for them, much in the style of an American university exam, to find out how they go about their preparation.

1) You are offered a role. Do you:

a) Spend the next three months posting on Facebook about how excited you are to be singing the role, “liking” the comments from all your friends who are squealing about how excited they are for you while privately hating your guts? 

b) Diligently mark up the vocal score? 

c) Go to the gym?

2) The score is fairly difficult. Tonal, but with slightly complex rhythms. Do you:

a) Spend weeks at the piano, figuring out the pitches and rhythms?

b) Listen to a CD a few times in the hope that it sinks in by osmosis? 

c) Post a picture of yourself on Facebook, fresh from the gym?

3) The role isn’t long but there are many ensembles. Do you:

a) Keep singing the aria you have, over and over again, because that’s the only bit

that’s important, right? 

b) Catch the latest Star Wars movie? 

c) Spend hours at the piano, figuring out the pitches and rhythms?

4) Rehearsals are due to start in a few days. Do you:

a) Take the opera to a coach, to make sure you have it all memorised? 

b) Take the opera to a coach in the hope he can teach you the notes? 

c) Take the opera to a coach and ask him how long he spends in the gym?

5) Rehearsals begin. Do you:

a) Hope like hell that you get to do the aria soon? 

b) Make up any pitch, rhythm, words you like because, hey, it’s modern music and who’s going to know? It’s not like it’s Verdi or anything... 

c) Make a few mistakes, but with the help of the conductor and repetiteur, correct them without holding up the entire progress of the rehearsal?

For a man of a somewhat lazy disposition, I have made a terrible mistake. I have started directing an opera. And why would I not? After all, I already possess two of the necessary qualifications: a good-seized portion of arrogance, and a loud first-night suit.

I thought that directing would involve lots of convivial rendezvous with designers over nice bottles of wine. I thought I would just say “I want this” and, lo and behold, I would get “this”. I thought I would sit in rehearsals armed with a large cup of coffee, making sizzling little jokes, and the cast would get exactly what I meant, and just fall naturally into performing the show as I could see it in my head. I thought that I would be regularly going out to dinner with my “team” after rehearsals, something I almost never do as a singer. I really thought it would be easier.

It turns out I was wrong.

Surprising to report, but designers have other projects to work on as well as yours, and they’re not instantly ready to drop everything and accommodate today’s newest whim. I think they drink wine, but I’ve yet to find out as they’re always the other end of a Skype call. When I say “I want this”, they suck their teeth and say “hmm, I suppose so, but how about this?” and damn them if they’re not usually right. The lovely stage management give me coffee when I rehearse, but I have to spend so much time running back and forth to the singers, or making points or observations, that by the time I take a sip, my beverage is cold and bitter. 

By the end of the day, even if someone asked me out to dinner - they haven’t thus far - I’m too exhausted to want to go.

And the meetings! I never knew that someone could be in so many meetings. I’ve been to more in the last two weeks than in my entire life. Is this what normal people do? It’s like staring at an hourglass and seeing the sands of your sanity swish through its tiny waist, lost into oblivion. 

And every waking moment, I’m having to think about a little problem to solve, an obstacle to overcome. How will that prop get off stage? How can she sing that line to him and see the conductor? How do I let the choreographer do her job without ruining my show and turning it into a goddam ballet?

Still, every morning I get up and thank the Great Being in the Opera Universe that one thing at least is perfect: I don’t have to worry about - or even think about - my usual demon: singing. For that alone, it’s all worth it.

My favourite conversation ever went something like this:

Me: “Good morning, Maestro, how are you?”

Carlos Kleiber (for it was he): “I am nervous, very nervous. I always am for the first stage and orchestra rehearsal.”

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that. Mind you, this time last year, I was watching you conduct the New Year’s concert in Vienna on the television.”

Kleiber: “Oh you saw that? You know, those Strauss pieces, they all sound the same. So I found the answer was to put down a downbeat and find out which one we were playing. “Ah, right, so it’s that one!! and then continue conducting.”

I can’t imagine Kleiber was a great fan of New Years’s Day. I know I’m not. The Musikvereien concert I can take or leave. It’s all a bit sugary and rich for the day after the night before. It makes me feel dyspeptic. Besides, even though it is a great Viennese tradition, I can’t help but think that it’s appeal lies more these days with music fans in Asia than in Europe; the families rattling their jewellery in time to The Blue Danube are more likely to be from Yokohama than Linz.

There are two reasons I don’t like New Year. I am usually half way through a rehearsal period on January 1st, with work resuming the next day. Invariably this means I have to leave home after a lovely Christmas break and fly back to a city that I don’t much like and with which I’m already bored. So, New Year’s Day, rather than being filled with joyful optimism, is laced with suitcase packing and grudging resentment. 

Sometimes I’m already stuck in the city I don’t much like. I once had a matinee premiere on New Year’s Eve. After the obligatory first night party, which didn’t amount to much, we dispersed to our individual apartments, where we saw in the new year lonesomely watching bad Swiss television while the locals whooped it up on the streets. It was unspeakably depressing. 

And besides, what’s so good about a new year? All it does is promise the same old treadmill or singing and filling out tax returns while your bank account sits completely empty after the festive season. If anything it’s a time of great anxiety.

If you ask me, the Vienna Philharmonic should schedule the gig for Midsummer Day, Then, I for one, would be in a much better mood.

Opera singers have a reputation for being far too occupied with money. This has often struck me as unfair, not least because I've always found conductors, despite the holier-than-thou image they tend to manufacture ("I'm only interested in the MUSIC"), to be much greedier. Just look at the enormous salaries they earn for making absolutely no sound beyond the occasional intrusive grunt. 

But my gripe today isn't with conductors. It's with opera companies who don't pay their singers on time. Note that I say singers, because it has always been my experience that the conductor always gets paid, no matter what happens. Only recently, the Rome Opera failed to pay some of the lowest-earning singers on time while promptly handing over a vast amount of money to the conductor who was meanwhile collecting a million-dollar salary in the USA. 

In Florence, the Maggio Musicale is up to its old tricks. Despite having built an expensive new theatre, it seems their budget doesn't run to paying performers to sing in it. Social media is awash with singers complaining they haven't been paid, some for operas as far back as 2013. In May of this year they put on four performances of Candide, but at the end of October they have still only paid the singers for ONE performance. The one fee may have just about covered the singers' expenses - their flights and accommodation - but probably not. All pleas to be paid are greeted with excuses like: "Everyone is on holiday, next month maybe..." and "We just don't have the money right now." Or the pleas are simply ignored. But I assume the people making the excuses are collecting their substantial salaries. They can afford to go on holiday after all, unlike the singers whose livelihood they are denying.

Imagine engaging a self-employed contractor to build you a flashy new kitchen, with marble surfaces, top-of-the range appliances...even an American fridge and a built-in cappuccino machine. You draw up a contract. He builds your kitchen, supplying all the materials and appliances on the understanding that you will pay him when it's done. And then you say "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't pay you because I'm going away on holiday. Perhaps sometime next year?" 

Now imagine being the man who has built the kitchen. For any singers reading this, my advice is: whatever you do, don't build any kitchens for the Maggio Musicale.

Last night, I did a stupid thing; I watched myself on TV.

These days it seems everything gets filmed and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Aix-en-Provence is no exception. I’ve given up trying to understand the contracts for these things. A TV contract used to be a big deal. It paid a lot of money, even though the opera was only shown once, on a less-than-popular channel, in only one country. 

Now, it gets streamed all over the world, on the internet, into cinemas and public squares, and your fee might buy you a couple of Chinese takeaways. If it gets turned into a DVD you might be able to order some extra spring rolls. The contract these days even secures your rights “throughout the universe”, just in case some TV executive thinks he might one day be able to sell your performance to the Klingons.

At home I have a pile of DVDs of operas I’m in and I’ve never watched them, simply because I hate seeing myself on screen. It’s always disappointing. And I could do without more disappointment in my life.

So why did I slip?

As our more recent show was being streamed into homes across the globe, a lady in New York started tweeting at me during the performance, full of enthusiasm. I was flattered. Last night, a much-revered soprano messaged to me to say she was watching it on French TV. Again, lots of enthusiasm. Again, my ego was massaged. 

I didn’t even know it was on.

I thought I’d have a sneaky look... I got as far as my first scene. 

It wasn’t that it was bad. It’s just that it was completely different to how I thought it looked and sounded. One little phrase, to my ears, sounded dreadful. What on earth was I doing with my face? This one performance, which I can now do nothing to improve, is now recorded for everyone, including the Klingons. I can’t take it back or say “let’s do another!”

I suppose the solution to this, in future, might be to film rehearsals and let us see what we’re doing, to get us prepared. But, frankly, that sounds awful. No, my instinct is to keep opera where it should be, live for the audience that’s in the theatre, where a passing disappointment can be forgotten and forgiven. But I suspect that’s not going to happen. 

I might as well stock up on soy sauce.

On a cold January evening in 1962, President John F Kennedy hosted a dinner at The White House in honour of an American citizen and one of the 20th century’s greatest modernists, Igor Stravinsky. Another great modernist and American citizen, Arnold Schoenberg, had been dead eleven years. John Cage had just been published by Peters and was rapidly becoming famous, Milton Babbitt was experimenting with electronics and Elliot Carter was teaching at Yale while midway through his series of string quartets.

Fifty-odd years later, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and these other pioneering Americans (though possibly not Kennedy) might be surprised to hear the Wall Street Journal describe another American, Jake Heggie, as “arguably the world’s most popular 21st century opera and art-song composer”, particularly as few people beyond America’s shores have even heard of him, let alone his music. And those that have heard his music could be forgiven for thinking that the very modernism championed by Stravinsky, Schoenberg et al had never happened, or that it had been largely ignored in favour of a more resolutely tonal aesthetic.

In fact The Wall Street Journal might not be far off the mark. In the USA alone, there have already been forty productions of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, a figure no other living composer can get near, and presentations of his bigger work Moby Dick will soon be into double figures. Add to that all the performances of his other operas (starting with The End of the Affair in 2004) and two operas due to première within the next year - Great Scott and It’s A Wonderful Life - and he is a clear winner. And only over the course of eleven years too. Adams, Glass, Rihm, Reimann, Birtwistle, Ades, Turnage or Benjamin are nowhere close. Heggie is such a recent phenomenon that he doesn’t even get a mention in Alex Ross’s seminal book on 20th century music And The Rest Is Noise, but as Christopher Koelsch, CEO of Los Angeles Opera, told me: “Jake is a smart showman. He knows how to write populist and popular pieces. He picks material with an eye to getting it produced.” 

Meanwhile, Elliott Carter’s only opera, What Next?, premièred in Berlin by Barenboim, has only ever had one professional production in America.

Aside from Glass and Adams - the only two American opera composers who have any sort of presence in Europe - there are many more Americans who are having very good careers writing opera for their home audiences: Corigliano, Adamo, Picker, Puts, Gordon, Higdon, Harbison, Argento, Pasatieri, Bolcom, Floyd, Rorem, Wallace, Stucky... and many more. On the American opera scene, these are big names, much revered, but to Europeans (beyond the most dedicated enthusiasts and professionals) they are almost completely unknown. 

Even more surprising is the number of American operas that have already been written, and the rate at which they are being produced. Since William Henry Fry wrote Leonora in 1845, over five hundred American operas have been written and produced. Within a year of writing this article, at least another twenty will have been added. As Aidan Lang, the new intendant of Seattle Opera, says: “In America, putting on new works has become the new currency.” And the LA Times: “Twenty-five years ago, audiences avoided opera premières, expecting a contemporary composition to be inaccessible and probably weird -- but now world premières are trendy events, selling out faster than Madame Butterfly." 

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One of the most striking things about the recent crop of new American operas is their frequent use of familiar stories; in particular the use of titles that have already been used in the cinema. In fact, it is now very rare to find an American opera that isn’t an adaptation of a story that already exists in another genre. In recent years we’ve had, to name but a few: A Streetcar Named Desire, Brief Encounter, Little Women, The Grapes of Wrath, Therese Raquin, The Manchurian Candidate, Dead Man Walking, Silent Night, Cold Mountain, Moby Dick and Il Postino. The reason why this trend has become so strong rather depends on to whom you are speaking.

Herschel Garfein is an American composer. His Rosencranz And Guildenstern Are Dead is pencilled for Fort Worth Opera but he has had a long wait to get a performance. He is also a librettist - of the Grammy-winning Elmer Gantry, music by Robert Aldridge. I asked him if he might have had better luck selling his opera if it were called Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. He laughed and said “Yes, probably. But if you look at the genesis of all these familiar-titled contemporary operas they probably were an idea that started with the general manager. So often, when it's time for a new commission, that's when the general director has his chance to put his mark on the world and very often he (it's almost never she) finds a subject that he's always thought would make a great opera, finds the composer, finds the librettist, and what are they going to say? "I don't like that so much!" No, they're going to say "Oh my God! Of course! Gone With The Wind - I thought that had some real deficiencies as a film that only SINGING can really bring off! How brilliant of you to think of that!"
But Alexander Neef at the Canadian Opera Company takes a different view. If  intendants are leading composers to familiar stories it’s simply because they recognise that a strong, familiar narrative is what their audiences crave. “I would say that the idea of American opera being uniquely well-known movies or novels being put into accessible music is a bit misconstrued, a bit of a European cliché. It exists but there's also some of the other things that exist. An American audience is really less inclined to accept a non-existent or obfuscated narrative. It's hard to say where that comes from. It definitely comes in part from their exposure to works in general. In Europe, there's so much activity that people have a stronger sense of adventure. Even the standard repertoire here, they're still discovering it. Outside of New York, the level of activity, even in the big opera centres...you can't compare it to European opera centres. Here in Toronto I have droves of people who have never even seen Don Giovanni.”
Aidan Lang again: “There's a grass-roots element to the way Americans view the arts. It's quite basic but aside from the narrative, people want to recognise an element of themselves in the characters. That's their approach to theatre. It's not conceptualised. It's part of the reaction of audiences here to what they see - it may be a national characteristic - but people are more upfront about an emotional response. It's easy for us to call it a naive response but it's how people are.” And at Minnesota Opera, Dale Johnson would agree: “I’ve always been interested in genres that are particular to American audiences - The Thriller, The Love Story or The War Story - pieces that our audiences can immediately understand. They don’t have to work so hard when they’re walking into the theatre because they have a feeling that they know the story.”
Herschel Garfein makes the point that drawing audiences into the opera house with the promise of a familiar narrative is all very well, but does it produce good art? “There's the determination to get people into the House, then there's the determination to make it as good as you possibly can. Those two processes are very different. Choosing a subject for opera based on the first of those determinations makes the second infinitely harder.”
A familiar story is undoubtedly much easier to sell though, for promoters and composers. I asked Koelsch how Il Postino came to be commissioned. “Daniel Catan brought Il Postino to LA Opera as he knew Domingo pretty-well and he thought Placido would find rich territory to mine in the role of Neruda. Marketing people prefer the familiar title over the unfamiliar title. But that's not a reason to do something. We're interested in having work that's idiomatic to Los Angeles so having a connection like a home-town composer, a Spanish language opera, something based on a film... that to me starts to build a momentum, something that's idiomatic to this place as opposed to anywhere else in the world. But we didn't go to him saying ‘write an opera based on a popular film.’” Il Postino did have performances in Europe, thanks to its star casting, but its critical reception was lukewarm. The opera was described as “sub-Puccini” and “saccharine”. In Los Angeles it had been universally adored.

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So, if the narrative needs to be appealing for an opera to succeed in America, what about the music? There’s no doubt that for any European whose ears are attuned to a post-Darmstadt sound world, most new American operas can seem shockingly retrograde. Composers label themselves as lyric, neo-Romantics, “tonalists” at the very least. “Audience-friendly” is the buzzword amongst publicists and promoters. This could be why there is now an almost universal disdain amongst European academics and intendants for any American opera music that doesn’t fall under the loose definition of Minimalist, which is somehow acceptable (perhaps only because it is identifiable); but even Minimalism leaves many scratching their collective chin, even in America. Garfein again: “There are no surprises in minimalism. The first 45 seconds of any minimalist piece sounds fantastic and then there's the remaining 2 hours...”

European critics too can be particularly scathing about the neo-tonalists. John Allinson of Opera magazine complains of “the Heggiesque idioms that increasingly pass for new opera in America now.” While Andrew Clements writes of the “neo-romanticist” Jennifer Higdon, whose Cold Mountain is at Santa Fe this summer : “This is an example of American contemporary music at its most vacuous, a noisy mishmash of early 20th-century styles. It's a score that would fit painlessly into many Hollywood movies, providing an anodyne background to something more interesting on screen. Supremely forgettable.” Clearly not a fan. But American critics tend to be much kinder, and they rarely greet a new opera in their city with less than grateful enthusiasm, as often as not speculating whether the new work is the next Great American Opera, a worthy successor to the only other opera that has a serious claim to that title, Porgy and Bess.

I asked the British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen what he made of the current operatic output from the USA. Although he’s hugely reluctant to make light of any other composer’s work, he sees little appeal in what he likes to call the “Midwestern” school. “It’s not that it’s bad - it doesn’t really interest me. It's like curling up on the sofa and watching a nice old movie in black and white.” Pierre Boulez probably hasn’t heard anything by Heggie, but there’s no doubt he wouldn’t be impressed. In 1969, when he took up the directorship of the New York Philharmonic, he said: “For an American artist to be exported to Germany he has to be better than the German product. They have no one in America as good as Hans Werner Henze, and that is not setting your sights very high. A composer the stature of Stockhausen they have not.” 

Even John Adams has entered the fray (and caused quite a backlash from fellow composers) when he said about Kevin Puts’s Silent Night: “We seem to have gone from the era of fearsome dissonance and complexity — from the period of high modernism and Babbitt and Carter — and gone suddenly to this extremely simplistic, user-friendly, lightweight, sort of music lite. People are winning Pulitzer Prizes writing this stuff now.” Peter Sellars, perhaps more the diplomat, politely declined an interview for this article, saying: “It’s not that I don’t have anything to say on the subject; it’s just that I really can’t say it.”

Not only is the music distinctly un-modern, even the word “modern” is avoided as much as possible. “You have to use the word Modern very advisedly, if at all” says Lang. “It does send shivers down people.” I asked David Gockley at San Francisco Opera why. “Modern I don't think is necessarily helpful,” he said. “I believe what is helpful is the subject matter, the knowledge of a particular composer. For example here in San Francisco, Jake Heggie and John Adams are stars, with not only the operatic public but the symphonic public, the choral public. These guys are attractions. I don't have to worry about presenting a new Jake Heggie opera. I know there's a public here for that.” And of course, in no-arts-subsidy America, satisfying a board of directors, getting an audience through the door and filling the 3,000-plus auditorium is the biggest part of the puzzle. 

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Many Americans see Europe’s reluctance to stage their operas as a failing on the older continent’s part. Stewart Wallace, composer of Harvey Milk and The Bonesetter’s Daughter: “There is a kind of bias about American music. Part of it is the anti-academicism of the music in the US, and the academic climate that still prevails in Europe. Part of it is a kind of cultural backlash - the reaction against the hegemony of American popular culture. The truth is I don't really know. I've never cracked the code fully.” The baritone Nathan Gunn, who has sung in countless premières of new American operas sort-of agrees: “There's a lot of misunderstanding amongst Europeans about what Americans are and what they like. Successful commercial ventures like Disneyland, or pop music.... that sort of thing screams "cheap". Taking TV shows and movies and turning them into operas, it's easy to laugh at that. There's also a lot of disdain for it too because a lot of it isn't particularly good!”

Some don’t care much what anyone outside their city thinks about the operas they programme, like Christopher Koelsch: “Our job isn't to programme for the New York Times or for The Guardian, who don't give a shit about us anyway. Europeans have a reflexive snobbery. We assume that you all believe that we are all anti-intellectual and, because the tradition is so much deeper in Europe, that we're only getting now to the point where you were 300 years ago!” David Gockley too: “You read the critics in Europe and they poo-poo this stuff. And I say ‘whatever works for them, works for them; what works for us...’ Given the forces at work in our particular society - we have to honour those. That doesn't mean we don't push the envelope. We don't push it as hard.”

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So, have general directors pressurised American composers to become commercial, simply in order to fill their opera houses, or have the composers themselves recognised that success in their own country relies almost exclusively on pleasing the public and opera board members with good tunes and familiar stories? Or have they, I wonder, developed an altogether different genre of opera? One which is almost a hybrid between the classic Broadway musical (which many intendants have taken to presenting in their opera houses anyway) and verismo opera? Of which Porgy and Bess is, of course, the prime example.
If one had to single out a particular intendant who has driven the trend in new American opera, it would have to be David Gockley, who at Houston and San Francisco has commissioned over forty operas. I asked him how American opera had ended up so much at odds with the European model. “At some point - I can look at it when Philip Glass switched from his Milton Babbitt phase to his minimalist phase and set the stage for American composers having their own voices and not having to be academically orthodox - there began an evolution that took American opera into a number of directions, and allowed composers the freedom to pursue their individual voices. And people like me, in my position, who are trying to make these pieces work for the public - economically, artistically, in a marketing sense - have pushed composers to write works that are more popular. I'm not embarrassed about that. I'm proud of the record we have. And I realise that the European critics, and perhaps intendants, feel that a lot of the American work is kind of simplistic, or sentimental. But we've got to make a formula that works. There is  a lot of activity in new opera that I think has resulted from the freedom that composers have to use their own voices. And there is the aggressiveness of people like me to get the work before the public and to have it be interesting work, provocative work that has a success factor. I won't necessarily say it’s an immediate admiration, but at least not the attitude: ‘I hated that, I'm never going to come back to a new work again!’”

There is a paradox in what Gockley says. How can a composer have the freedom to pursue his individual voice if, at the same time, he is being pushed by an intendant to write work that is more popular? That’s all very well if the composer has a populist streak anyway, but it seems that a serialist or atonal composer now has as much chance getting his (or her) work performed in an American house as an American neo-Romantic does in a European house, which is pretty-well zero. It is interesting to note here that the dodecaphonist Charles Wuorinen was originally commissioned to write Brokeback Mountain by Gerard Mortier for New York City Opera. It was, of course, performed in Madrid (and Aachen) but it has yet to have an American outing.

I asked Gockley whether he thought the notion of The Great American Opera was something that composers were trying to pursue.“The premature death of Gershwin and the preoccupation of Bernstein with conducting, and doing all kinds of other things, and not having a real series of works that fulfilled the promise of his earlier works - that’s a tragedy for us. Two of our greatest talents got cut down early or did not really focus on the composition of operas. But yes, I believe that Porgy and Bess is the quintessential American opera, and in many ways I have tried to find the successor to that. I've tried to bring the world of the Broadway show into a more sophisticated direction and tried to take orthodox opera towards a centrist location, with the idea of making works that are attractive to the public, that the public will want to see every five to ten years.”
So the audience for good, old musicals - an audience that is not interested in jukebox musicals - would find this new operatic language, with its focus on strong narratives and an accessible tonality, much more comfortable?
“That is what I've dedicated my career to pursuing”.
It's about finding that middle-ground audience and getting them into the opera house?
“Exactly.”

I asked Anthony Freud at the Chicago Lyric if he thought we were seeing a hybrid emerging of musical and opera. “Maybe the American operatic tradition of contemporary opera is in some way derived from the music-theatre tradition. But music-theatre is one of the great American indigenous art forms, which in turn evolved from European operetta and opera. So I don't see there as being any inconsistency either in the history of music-theatre or in the fact that opera and music-theatre have very close relationships. I don't know how conscious it is but maybe composers of contemporary opera are understanding music-theatre, are digesting its strengths and its weaknesses and are trying to benefit from that understanding. But it's not usually a helpful discussion to define the difference between an opera and a musical. Though John Caird, the director, once identified the difference as being the process of the creation; a musical is created as a commercial venture and is a partnership between composer, librettist, book-writer and producer. Whereas an opera is generally created as a non-commercial product and the composer is still primus inter pares in the team of people involved.”

To me, John Caird’s definition of a musical sounds almost exactly like the definition of a new American opera. Aidan Lang agrees: “There's the legacy from the musical, which is the prominence given to the librettist. It's much higher than it is in Europe. So an opera will become known as Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell's Silent Night, for instance. It's an indication that what is on offer is the total experience, a piece of theatre which is sung. Sometimes that opens up the debate of whether that text should be sung... does it warrant it? The flip side of that is we often don't remember in Europe who wrote the libretto - it very much comes just the composer's evening. The sound world becomes all-important. The discussion becomes about the sound, whereas in the US the discussion is always about the effectiveness of the piece.”

I asked Darren Woods of Fort Worth Opera much the same question I’d asked Freud. He replied: “What may annoy the people on the other side of the pond is that I think we're exploring a lot of options. A lot of these composers are highly educated and highly academic but you're seeing the American musical not being so much jazz hands and pop, and American opera not trying to imitate the dodecaphonists. You're seeing some sort of theatrical merging of the two. The two will never fully meet but in fifteen years it will be difficult to distinguish sixty percent of the new musicals from sixty percent of the new operas.”

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Fort Worth is an interesting place. Deep in conservative Texas, Darren Woods has abandoned a traditional stagione system and now focusses the entire season into a festival which has almost entirely eschewed the traditional repertoire and focuses instead on new and recent works. “My patrons are really proud that we’ve discovered new composers” he said. “These are people who only twenty years ago thought if it wasn’t La Boheme or Carmen, then it wasn’t opera.” Recently he has programmed Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America, Glass’s Hydrogen Jukebox and David T Little’s Dog Days. In 2009 they too did Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. “This is Texas, where they take pride in the number of executions they have managed to accumulate. But I talked to my congresswoman last year and she said: ‘I’m still a death penalty Republican but I think about that opera every day.’”

Fort Worth is also part of a rapidly-growing movement that promotes smaller-scale works, and this so-called DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement, unfettered by punishing union costs and the other, monumental expenses of running a large opera house, is where the edgier side of new American opera can be heard. As Stewart Wallace says, “Wherever there’s a trend, there’s a counter-trend.” Opera Philadelphia is another key player, as is American Opera Projects, but perhaps the most dynamic producer is Beth Morrison of New York’s Prototype Festival, who is forging partnerships with opera houses across the USA and seeking out composers who aren’t tied to what might be called the Gockley model. David T Little’s Dog Days is a case in point. Fusing heavy metal and classical vocal writing, Little is a composer and rock drummer who can trace his influences to Bang On A Can rather than Copland or Bernstein and Dog Days has even got the New York Times excited: "It's only a matter of time before this riveting show is confirmed as a groundbreaking American classic." His next opera is JFK and it will première in Fort Worth next year. Whether he can maintain his “edgy” voice in a bigger theatre, with a more conventional storyline and a classical orchestra remains to be seen. 

I asked Beth Morrison if there is now a schism between new main-stage opera and the stuff she produces. “The rift is huge. It's like there are two completely different art forms. There is that question; how do we get the young audiences who come to the small, funky shows to flip to classical opera? Well, what if we don't? What if the opera becomes bigger in terms of what it offers, and what if there are two different audiences, the museum audience and the new audience? And why's that a problem? People have different tastes and I don't think it matters if someone goes to Dog Days and you don't get them to La Boheme. That's not a failure. That's great. They're coming to the opera.”

David Devan, at Opera Philadelphia, is uncomfortable with a distinction between main stage and the alternative, DIY movement, and he incorporates both into his season without prejudice. “We don't talk about our opera house and our other spaces - we see everything as being an opera-ready space. So we don't talk about "second stage" or "main stage", because I think those terms build the idea that it's only good if it happens in the 156 year-old opera house. If we strip out the venues from the conversation and look at the body of work, there's more adventure happening in America than people might see or think. I think there are some very exciting emerging American composers and I think they have something to say musically that we haven't quite heard before, but most of them are not going to find their voice in a romantically geared opera house. The space just doesn't speak to them. A smaller-scale space falls into their dramaturgical thinking. Most American opera houses are way bigger than European houses. If you're writing for a 4,000 seat hall as opposed to a 1,600 seat hall, it's a different thing!”

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It’s easy for Europeans to sneer about new American opera, but really, they don’t think it’s any of our business, and they’re probably right. They may even be leading the way. Houses are full, there’s a lot of buzz around home-grown work, which is more than can be said “across the pond”. Beth Morrison again: “There has been a return to melody and a return to harmony in the writing of the 21st century in America that has brought back audiences who were terrified of new music in the 20th century because it was too intellectual. They couldn't really relate to it. It was non-emotional. You really had to be an insider to get it. It was music for musicians rather than for a more general audience. I really believe very strongly that the music that's being written today here is music that is meant for people to like. There is a concern about audiences. We're not government subsidised organisations here. Glass and Adams have pulled back audiences that were beginning to hate new music, that were being put off going to the opera.”

Many of the intendants, composers and librettists I’ve interviewed talk about connection. Anthony Freud: “When we commission new work, we need to connect to our audiences.” Aidan Lang: “Stephanie Blythe said to me that the future of opera in America lies in generating new pieces, rather than there being a public who will be stimulated by a new take on an old piece. The newness of the New World is such that making their own stories - stories which have characters they can at least empathise with and have that bond - gives them a link to the experience of the piece.” Stewart Wallace: “I think there are many ways to generate interest and I would say the most important of those is to write about things that people care about now.”

Certainly, in my experience of performing and going to opera in the USA, I am often struck by a sense of naivety in audiences. Not intellectual naivety or stupidity, but innocence. An opera such as Semele is certain to be as unfamiliar to an American audience as Die Soldaten. So why programme either? Why not programme an opera that will speak to an audience’s own sense of culture and history, in a musical voice that also sounds familiar? Especially as filling the large opera house is an absolute necessity to keep the company afloat. American audiences can identify with Dead Man Walking in a way they cannot possibly with Rigoletto or Parsifal. In China, the same thing is happening. Alexander Neef: “All those new opera houses with those new Chinese operas telling traditional Chinese stories in a Puccini style. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen!”

Bernstein once expressed the hope that out of American musical theatre would emerge a uniquely American brand of Folk Opera, and his wish appears to be coming true. Some of the new works will be awful, probably because they are too interested in the bottom line. Nathan Gunn: “If we want to be libertarian about music, we’d end up with Britney Spears because that makes the most money.” Others will struggle to find their American voice. Herschel Garfein: “Many of the things that I hear, the neo-Romantic operas, I think that they're not American enough. What gives me the horrors is that kind of cheap American nostalgia - the crinoline dresses, the parasols. I think composers are a little bit timid about actually going for a true hybrid, which I think is a very healthy direction and a great one for Americans to pursue. Musical blandness, there's no cure for that. I think the lingua franca of American opera now is informed by these musical theatre models but also very eager to stand apart from it. It usually comes in the guise of lots of "wrong notes." I am doing this but it's not what you think - it's actually very sophisticated! I'm going to write a broad lyrical theme but I'm going to fuck with the notes!"

Stewart Wallace wrote a chamber opera in 1997 about the painter Edward Hopper, called Hopper’s Wife, which for me is not only a quintessential American opera, and a very good one at that, but which brilliantly explores the struggle between low art and high art. No doubt the discussion in Europe about which kind of art American composers such as he are producing will continue for a long while. For Wallace himself; “I think that everything good to come out of the States has come out of low art. Just about.”

The other day, I, and the rest of the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, travelled by train from Aix-en-Provence to Lyon and back for a Sitzprobe. As we were all native English speakers, a Sitzprobe is what we called it, because, oddly, in English we have no word for a Sitzprobe other than Sitzprobe. But, as we were in France, our french employers called it an Italienne. 

I have no idea why the French do this. Tradition I guess, but it always seems to imply to me that a Frenchman’s idea of how an Italian normally rehearses is to sit around reading the newspaper until the conductor tells them to stand up and sing, which the singer then does without the encumbrance of moving around or acting. And this is considered a productive rehearsal in Italy.

I certainly can’t imagine the British adopting the word Italienne over Sitzprobe because, relentless stereotypists as we Brits are, Italienne would simply be used to describe any rehearsal that starts thirty minutes late and for which they omit to pay you.

One feature is universal in any Sitzprobe or Italienne that I have ever attended: the ladies in the cast - hitherto dressed at all rehearsals in sweat tops and jeans - will wear short skirts, high-heel shoes and copious amounts of make-up. They’ll flutter their well-mascaraed eyelids at the brass players. The men in the cast will not bother to change their wardrobe at all - though in Lyon I did break the Aix paradigm of always wearing shorts and put on long trousers for the first time in three weeks. 

There is one other universal feature of a Sitprobe: American baritones who wear cowboy boots and call the conductor “maestro”. Perhaps the Brits need to start calling the rehearsal an Americano.

When I was much younger, somebody in the opera business told me that the worst possible person for an opera singer to marry was another opera singer. So, after my first marriage to a clarinettist ended in divorce I married an opera singer. And nearly twenty years later, it’s working out surprisingly well. 

I put this success down to the fact we’ve never sung together in an opera. I imagine that’s a complete nightmare. It’s hard enough to cope with your own psychological baggage on stage without worrying about your wife’s too. And how does your marriage cope if one of you has a success in a production and the other doesn’t? Jealousy must be right at the top of the list of emotions that every singer needs to play at work. It’s really exhausting. Imagine having to do it at home too! 

The downside to the not-singing-together thing is that we often find ourselves working on entirely different continents. Some might argue that this is good for a marriage, but I’m not one of them. No no no. And I’m not just saying that because my wife usually reads my columns.

Recently I’ve discovered the perfect answer. I turn down jobs and let my wife do all the work. Of course I tag along to keep her company. Here in LA, for instance, while she rehearses I can read all day, watch movies, go to the beach, drink beer...All I have to do in return is keep our small house clean and listen to her complain about the conductor, the director, her costume etc etc when she gets home.

It’s wonderful. 

The other really important thing I’ve discovered is that it’s a good idea to prevent her from reading my columns.

If you’ve ever attended the opening night of a new production of Die Zauberfloete, you might have thought that by the end of the opera, Tamino’s trials were over. You would be wrong, for the tenor still faces his greatest ordeal: The First Night Party. 

Oh sure, a party sounds fun. Lots of free food and wine, a chance to wind down with the colleagues you’ve been working with for the last four weeks... what’s so bad about that? But by the time you’ve got out of your costume and make-up, put on something smart to wear and joined the party, all you can see is a sea of completely unfamiliar faces. The first night crowd is in - all those agents, intendants and critics - and they’ve already eaten all the food and drunk most of the drink. Rather than being greeted with smiles, you see people in a much more expensive clothes than yours making slightly disdainful faces in your direction, as if you have come to the party wearing a hat made out of raw sausages. All your friends from the show are talking to their agents. And because most agents treat singers who aren’t their clients like lepers, you avoid them. You are introduced to someone important and try to engage in conversation, but your conversant constantly looks over your shoulder to see who more important than you is in the room. You still don’t have any food or drink and you’re having to shout at the top of your already exhausted voice because a junior member of the marketing department whose job it was to organise the party thought it would be fun to book a live polka band. By the end of the evening you’ve swallowed one tiny hors d’oeuvre and more bad wine than you really should, given that you’ve been responsibly avoiding alcohol for the past month...

You get the picture. 

Frankly, if I were singing Tamino I’d rather give up half way through Act 2 and head to a quiet pub with Monostatos and The Queen of The Night. It would be a lot more fun.

There’s a type of man in the music business that I keep seeing all over the world. I’ve never actually seen this man on a plane or bumped into him at an airport, but I’m sure, judging by the look of him, that the only food he eats is airline food. That and first night party food. His teeth are grey and his breath smells of damp theatres.

Over one shoulder he carries an exhausted fake leather bag which is the only luggage he ever uses. In it are a laptop, a large cardboard diary, a pair of underpants which he alternates with the ones he’s wearing, and a few kilos of sewing kits and little soaps, gathered from cheap hotels around the world. He’s shouldered this bag for so long that he leans to one side, like a fleshy Tower of Pisa.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a typical opera agent; typical at least of the agents I have tended to have, and I’ve had lots. 

My first I sacked when he got a booking wrong by a whole year. My second is now a dog-breeder and my third has become a school-teacher. My fourth gave it up to be a mother. My fifth became a casting director who never casts me. My sixth was my fourth revisited, making a return after a few years of motherhood, who passed me onto my seventh, who then decided to become a lawyer instead. My eighth also gave it up to be a mother and now I’m with my ninth, an ex-singer whom I’ve known since conservatoire. 

Agents have a joke: they say their clients are paid 90% of everything the agents earn. I’ve yet to meet a singer who finds this funny.

With any luck my ninth agent will be my last, if the airline and party food don’t finish him off first.

American opera houses usually have strict rules about swearing, “inappropriate behaviour in the workplace,” and the wearing of perfume. I’m not sure how those rules would cope with some of the operas I’ve sung in Europe where the libretto has been littered with ripe language, there has been plentiful amounts of sex happening on stage and the soprano has been wearing nothing more than some Chanel No 5 dabbed behind her ears. A national prudishness seems to take care of the first two rules, but the one rule they do take seriously is the one about perfume. 

I only wish some of my European colleagues took their personal hygiene equally seriously. The other day I was sharing a very small dressing-room with a young baritone. It was a Sunday morning and an early rehearsal and young people being young people, my guess is that he didn’t have time for a shower. It certainly smelled that way. In the confines of the small room, his bad body odour was nauseating, overpowering. 

And yet I didn’t say anything. Now, this could be because I’m English and massively reserved and over-polite, but weighing on my mind was the possibility that if I did say something the situation might become even worse. He might reach into his bag and pull out a can of AXE body spray and fill the tiny space with disgusting perfume. It wouldn’t get rid of the body odour, it would just add to it, making a revolting cocktail of hormones, sweat and pollutants, closing my throat and making my eyes run.

When I run a conservatoire, the Kodaly Method is going to be thrown out of the window and replaced with a good bar of soap.

Ambition is a fickle beast. Throughout my career I’ve struggled to find the right balance, always hearing the voice of my old singing teacher (and quasi Zen master) Robert Tear in my head. He said to me once “It’s good to be ambitious. But don’t have any specific ambitions because the chances are you’ll only be disappointed.” It’s a philosophical riddle that will have many singers scratching their head, but I’ve tried to live by it; to the point that a conductor once asked me which roles I wanted to record and I simply couldn’t answer him. I’d made myself not want anything in particular, but just do better work than I’d done before. It’s a way of thinking I try to pass on to the very few people who ask for my career advice. They usually think I’m nuts. And of course my work is only occasionally better than the work I’ve done before...

Naturally, I do wonder sometimes if it was the best philosophy. Plenty of my colleagues have very fixed goals. “I want to sing Wotan by the time I’m 45, Sachs when I’m 52...” They have it all mapped out. And some of them succeed. But most of them don’t and there they are with that knot of failed ambitions burning a hole in their heart.

The solution to the ambition paradox is old age. A 50 year-old teacher once told the highly ambitious, younger me that all his ambition had faded away. I was incredulous. But ever since I passed my 50th birthday I’ve found myself thinking about him and watching my own ambition recede like sand in an hourglass. It’s the best bit about getting old.

It seems to be a commonly-held belief that singers are stupid. While I’m happy to admit that some of my colleagues aren’t the sharpest knives in the kitchen drawer, I think this is extremely unfair. In fact, I’m going to assert, with no statistical evidence whatsoever of course, that the average intelligence of singers is very high, pulled up from the average by some very clever people indeed. 

A lot of the singers I know, particularly the ones I actually like, went to university. In fact, whereas I reel off a long list of names of singers who have degrees, I struggle to do the same with concert pianists. Or conductors. Or opera intendants. And these aren't singers who went to university to study singing (in Britain I'm not sure you can even do that) or even Music. Without even trying, I could give you the names of a lawyer, a physician, a zoologist, a historian, a bio-chemist and an expert on witchcraft. Me, I was a bit of an economist, though a rather bad one. I know at least four accomplished composers, all of whom are better-known as singers. Some of them are very famous.

But, there is a down side to having a rehearsal studio filled with highly-educated singers. They can waste so much time getting into deep arguments  about the nuance in a Shakespearean line or quibbling with a conductor on the authenticity of a baroque ornament. I’ve seen a singer in conversation for an hour with the director about the correct wearing of a hat, during which time I was killing off my own brain cells by slowly and deliberately banging my head against the scenery.

No, singers aren’t stupid, but the happiest rehearsals are ones when the deepest discussion is over the location of a good pub.

Oh no, Christmas is coming. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas. It’s just that Christmas is a tricky time in the singing business. In my early days in England it was all about singing Messiah after Messiah after Messiah. I guess my German colleagues might say the same about the Weihnachtsoratorium (though it would take a lot longer to actually say.)

When I started working overseas, Christmas became all about the challenge of getting home at great expense in time for the holiday, then zooming back straight afterwards. Or, failing that, it was about trying to have as good a Christmas as you possibly can when you are not with your family.

Trying to dash home is always interesting - as I’m sure half of the readers of this magazine will agree - often made more complex by bad weather. Like the time I couldn’t get out of Schiphol for three days and felt the rising panic that I might spend Christmas alone, eating nothing but KLM peanuts.

I’ve waited in airports all over Europe, my suitcase bulging with exciting things to take home like jamon and turron from Spain, Bratwurst, Schinken and Sauerkraut from Germany, all with which to add a touch of the exotic to the English diet of turkey and Brussels sprouts. 

I’ve spent two Christmases on long-haul flights, and I spent one Christmas in Koeln, where my wife was on contract for two years. Together with some other Brits and some Australians we tried to recreate our traditional feast, but there was an unvoiced sadness in the air. 

I guess it might not be so bad for some singers. As every city in the world these days seems to host a Weihnachtsmarkt, a stranded German tenor can enjoy some of the comforts of home - Pilze and sickly Gluehwein perhaps - whether he’s in Chicago, Paris or Tokyo. Lucky him!

Happy Christmas!

Jonas Kaufman faced some criticism a while ago for refusing to shake the hands of the fans that greet him after a show, lest one of them unwittingly transmit a cold or flu bug. Pavarotti famously sat onstage in Chicago during concert performances of Verdi's Otello with what looked like the entire stock of a pharmacy at his elbow. 

The anticipation and avoidance of infection makes up a very large part of a singer's psyche, to the point of hypochondria. It can even induce a more advanced form of madness where the singer, all too aware that cold symptoms can be psychosomatic, tries to convince himself that the best form of prevention is to pretend you don't care at all. That works fine until the moment someone close to you starts sneezing. Then you quickly find yourself drinking Echinacea by the litre. 

My travelling spongebag rattles with medicines garnered from across the globe, all of which battle some of the symptoms of a bad throat, mostly from the USA, where hypochondria is more popular than baseball. In fact I’m surprised it doesn’t have its own World Series.

I have also bought various steamers and humidifiers in many countries - most of them left behind for lack of space in my suitcase - including a Humidiflyer, which is a transparent plastic mask, like an oxygen mask, that helps you maintain a good level of humidity when you fly. It also makes you look like a complete idiot, but in the battle to sing well that's a small price to pay. 

No, I'm 100% with Jonas Kaufman on this one. It's bad enough running the gauntlet of taking trains or buses, filled as they usually are with coughing children and sniffling students for whom a cold is just a mild nuisance. For a singer, a cold is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster and all the hand-sanitizer on the planet will not convince me that touching sick people is a risk worth taking. 

There's no doubt about it, contemporary music is not everybody's cup of tea. But it is mine. Actually - and excuse me while I wander around the luxury kitchen of English idiom - it's more my bread-and-butter. That is to say, unlike the hardcore fans whom it would be easy to characterise as wild-haired men with beards, sandals and carrier bags bulging with Stockhausen, I don't spend my days bathing in Birtwistle and tapping my toes to Xenakis, but I am more than happy to perform it and get paid for it. 

If I'm lucky I'll get to sing a good piece; if I'm even luckier I might get to sing a good piece more than once. That is sadly rare. I think that's why a lot of singers won't touch new music. It's not just that it might not suit their more conservative tastes or their precious lyric voices, it's a question of personal repertoire. It's tough to spend months learning a piece that you will probably never perform again after its premiere run. From that point of view you are better off sticking with Mozart.

But I am always optimistic that the next new opera I perform will be a masterpiece and that it will enjoy many revivals. To that end I will continue to sing pieces where I have sex inside a dead horse, play Schubert by scraping a chair on the floor, and do unspeakable things to the lovely Diana Damrau, and one day I'll get lucky. 

Then I'll be having my cake and eating it.

There is a game that British opera fans pretend to play that is called "Richard Jones Bingo". They go to see his productions and every time they spot what they consider to be one of his trademark directorial gestures - flowery wallpaper, a washbasin, bizarre physical movements - the fans pretend to cross a square off their bingo card.

As I write this I'm just starting rehearsals for Richard's production of Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. Given that I'm playing the unscrupulous gossip Valzacchi, you could be forgiven for thinking that I'm about to "spill the beans" on the style of the design and the period in which it is set, and whether or not there's a massive dinosaur on stage... but I'm not.  There is a code after all. It could even get me sacked, and that would never do. 

This is Richard's first ever Strauss production, which surprised me. 

"I reckon I was probably Glyndebourne's fifth choice" he said. 

"Me too" I said. 

I've already spoken to another tenor who was offered Valzacchi but had to turn it down. That's how a singer's life is and you can't waste time worrying about it. How many tenors singing Parsifal at the moment, for instance, seriously believe that Kaufmann wasn't at the top of the dream list? 

This morning, as we entered the rehearsal studio, Richard introduced me to one of the extras, an older man with a white beard. 

"This is Brian. He's playing Freud." 

He paused as he watched my reaction. 

"We'll get to that later!" he said with a grin.