Robert Lloyd on Opera

So let’s start with David Kimbell’s Italian Opera.

I thought this was a magnificent book, which really got to grips with the whole subject of Italian opera. The span of David Kimbell’s intellect and his grasp of his subject are absolutely astonishing, and it’s a hell of a good story.

Why Italian opera?

Opera comes from Italy, it was born there, and for two centuries virtually every opera singer in the world was Italian. Italian opera singers were exported and became very rich, going all around the world. There was a tremendous appetite for Italian opera and the Italian style of singing. And the story of how it started at the beginning of the 17th century is fascinating. It’s a bit clouded in uncertainty; they’re not quite sure what happened when to create this extraordinary art form. But they have managed to establish the room, in the building, in which the first opera took place. It developed from people reciting the Italian language in a way that enhanced its melodic quality. And then gradually this enhanced speech turned into tunes, and the tunes turned into arias over a span of about 150 years. And you have this amazing phenomenon whereby, at the beginning of the 19th century, opera had completely taken over Italy, much as happened in America during the explosion of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century.

Where is the room?

In Florence. The story of Italian opera is a fascinating story. If you’re even the tiniest bit interested in opera, this is a great book that really, really captures it.

What about your next choice, Wagner and Philosophy?

This book is very dense, there’s a lot of stuff in it, a lot of philosophical thought. But it’s completely riveting. I found I read it like a novel. Wagner is very good to write about because he wrote a lot himself. He had a lot to say about current intellectual trends and was caught up in all sorts of philosophical movements, particularly Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And he was tremendously verbose. He wrote letters and essays and also, of course, the long and complicated texts of all his operas. He had a very complicated mind, and he dealt with very dense subjects in his operas: the heavy Nordic myths, and all sorts of stories that are loaded with myth and message. So in Wagner you have an immensely complicated person, who produced an immensely complicated oeuvre.

And as you get to know Wagner, you come to understand that this is a very dense experience, but it’s extremely difficult to unpick in your own head. You can’t handle it all. And what Bryan Magee has done in this book is unpick it, very, very brilliantly. In the cover of my copy I have written two quotations that must have come from either Wagner himself or from Magee’s commentary somewhere in the book. One is: “It is for art to salvage the essence of religion.” And the other is: “In Wagner, drama is music made visible.” That’s the sort of level this book is projected on: very, very thought-provoking.

But what’s the significance of Wagner to you as an opera singer?

The two giants of the opera world are Verdi in Italian opera, and for German opera it’s Wagner. And you can put Mozart in there too, though his oeuvre wasn’t as big as the other two. Wagner and Verdi together are the absolute summit of singing. They’re tremendously demanding of singers, and if you manage to actually do it, you get a fantastic sense of achievement.

Tell me about Crotchets and Quavers: Or, Revelations about an Opera Manager in America.

This is really fun. It’s kind of autobiographical, the revelations of Max Maretzek who claims to have brought Italian opera to America in 1848. It’s a series of letters to various people about his experiences – the first one is to the composer Hector Berlioz – and they’re all written in a quite witty way. But they give the casual reader a fantastic insight into the chaotic, brilliant and fascinating world of opera at that time, because it was tremendously popular. Opera took off very rapidly in America. There are masses of tiny little opera houses all over the country. Nowadays they are often used as dance halls or warehouses, but as you go through some of the older towns in America, you suddenly see on this wooden building on the side of the road, “Opera House”, and Maretzek was part of all that.

Also, I’ve always thought that the real heroes of opera are not really the singers or the conductors or the musicians, it’s the people who organize it. Because it’s so potentially full of chaos: you’ve got these giant egos, excessive financial demands, and people not turning up, and falling sick at the last minute. So this a great book because it really captures the chaos of opera.

What about Preparing an Operatic Role?

I chose this book because the man it’s about, Ubaldo Gardini, was a tremendously important influence on my life.