A Buddhist bows out
Michael Henderson ne of the most gilded careers in our post-war musical life ends next week when Robert Tear sings in public for the last time. At least he thinks it will be the last time. 'There's nothing in the diary,' he says. 'But I'm not disappointed. After 50 years it is wonderful to be relieved of fear. It has made me believe that life could have been like this for ever!'
Tear is singing the Blind Judge in a concert performance of Erich Korngold's little-known 1927 opera, Das Wunder der Heliane, at the Royal Festival Hall, and he is clearly enjoying the discovery. `Korngold came at the end of a generation, the fruit of Wagner that was already wine. His music has a fluency, flexibility and intelligent understanding of every sound in the orchestra, of colour, sense and structure.' All qualities he put to good use when he left Vienna for Hollywood, where he and Max Steiner transformed the writing of music for films.
Tear has not sung Korngold before, but then not many have. He has done an awful lot, though. It was indeed half a century ago that the 18-year-old son of a railwayman from Barry, south Wales, won a choral scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied English with ER. Leavis (There weren't many opportunities for argument') and befriended E.M. Forster — or, rather, Forster befriended him 'Morgan loved to play Schubert, and used to invite some of us over to his rooms for tea and cakes after we had sung in the chapel. I soon found myself as a chaperone, accompanying him to the Athenaeum on trips to London.'
King's, where he is now an Honorary Fellow, opened the door to a singing life strewn with bouquets: 71 roles at Covent Garden, 120 performances as Loge in Das Rheingold, 17 seasons with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and a vivid decade as Benjamin Britten's tenor of choice at Aldeburgh, until he fell foul of domestic politics at the Red House. The sand may have begun to shift during rehearsals for The Rape of Lucretia when Tear wandered along a corridor, singing 'with you and I, dear, arm in arm, Rome can sleep secure', only to encounter a grim-faced composer, who asked him, 'Do you really think this is the way to treat my grand opera?'
'He would make you love him,' Tear says of Britten, 'although it wasn't quite the same when Peter [Pears] was about. Can you imagine, getting music wet on the page, which you had to make something of?' Having said that, Tear, who is a revealing writer about the collaborative process of making music, once referred to the 'toxic introspection' that constrained Britten. Although he finds Death in Venice a masterpiece, he finds it disturbing that, even in his final work for the stage, Britten is 'still engaged in a public announcement of sexual preference, and guilt in that preference'. Unlike Verdi, for instance, or Janacek, whose last operas were full of love for humanity and nature. It's a moot point.
There was also that extraordinary 1979 world premiere in Paris of Alban Berg's unfinished opera, Lulu, conducted by Pierre Boulez, in a production by Patrice Chereau. 'People were fighting, quite literally, to get in. Riots! Windows broken! In an opera house! Can you believe it?'
The young Tear walked out of the chorus when Otto Klemperer, rehearsing Beethoven's Missa Solemnis with the Philharmonia, needed four soloists to cover the quartet of singers who had failed to appear. On another occasion, when he stood in for Franco Corelli at a Verdi Requiem in the Royal Albert Hall, Leonard Bernstein kissed him passionately at the end of the performance (He put his tongue down my throat') and told him, 'If you had a better B flat, you'd be a world-beater.'
Still, he hasn't fared too badly. As well as his professional life on the stage and concert platform, Tear paints well enough to have had an exhibition at the Arts Club, has published two books, Tear Here and Singer Beware, and writes poetry in the commonplace collections he keeps at his west London home. But he is not so high-minded that he is above calling Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde 'a testicle masher'.
His life in opera may now be behind him but Tear will still have a part to play, as a visiting professor of opera studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Students do not find him shy when it comes to proclaiming musical values that he feels need reasserting, for voices have changed since he set out. He laughs when told of the music critic who described a highly regarded English tenor as 'sounding like Orpheus on Wenlock Edge'.
'We're turning out singers who have instruments rather than voices, who make noises instead of having the ability to express themselves. Some of them don't know how to stand on stage.' On the subject of 'early music', and its adherents, which he feels has encouraged so many singers to take the wrong turn, he is withering. 'It's like an outreach of Fabianism.'
As the man who once used the phrase 'the easy mediocre taste of the multitude', Tear does not look for easy answers. The social engineers who have corrupted the performing arts may be uncomfortable with that approach, but the singer makes no apology.
'There are certain people who are born to see further than others. How poorer we would be, for instance, if we could not hear Verdi's Falstaff. It is a seed of life.'
The only Buddhist to have taken part in the Festival of Nine Carols and Lessons at King's, Cambridge, he sounds a content man. 'I seem to be disconnected emotionally from each decade of my life. When you are young you have all this testosterone, and then you gradually begin to see another way of being. I am not disappointed. At last I have come to some alignment with my inadequacies.'
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