The performing voice: Gerald Finley
Opera Now, November/December 2008
As he struggled to overcome a crisis in his career, Gerald Finley began to answer some of the fundamental questions that pervade his approach to life and art. He tells Mark Glanville about his discovery of a fresher, more open and honest approach to his singing
Mark Glanville: Last time we met, you were singing Yeletsky at the Royal Opera in Londonand it seemed a watershed time for you. You’d been struggling with your voice after withdrawing fromSalzburg’s Pelleas et Melisande in the 2006 Easter Festival. What’s happened to you since then?
Gerald Finley: While I was singing Golaud in Salzburg, I began to get the feeling that my voice wasn’t growing. I’m getting into the middle period of my career, and I don’t want this to be the peak. Have I really done enough to explore the physical state of my instrument, that combination of muscles, all that potential?
Also, in my own life, things were stirred up and there seemed to be a lot of tension. I’d just done the Count in Nozze di Figaro at the ROH, and that was challenging too. The Count’s a singing role, but you can get a lot of anger built up in your spirit, and if that’s going straight into the throat, well, there’s a lot of wear and tear there.
The long and the short of it was that I had an oedema on my cords. A wonderful doctor in Salzburgsaid, ‘Well this is kismet, of course!’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll take your version of events. I’ll take kismet over abuse, thank you!’
In any case, the swelling ruptured, and I had to stop singing and get back on form relatively quickly. I thought, right, back to baby steps. I’ve got to learn this thing again. I started working pretty much on the fundamentals of singing: just making basic noises, trying to rediscover the foundations of breathing with the help of my teacher Gary Coward (he was Count to my first Figaro in a little production down in Sussex!).
MG: How much did having a teacher at your side help in the recovery of your voice?
GF: The one thing Gary and I share more than anything is a passion for the old-style singers. We adore Gruberova. We think Cappuccilli is heaven sent. We’re clutching onto the idea that there is a voice which is clean, pure, has the abandonment, the technical control to do whatever it likes. I absolutely trust his ears, and ability to know when a process of singing is both free and ringing. Singing Yeletsky inCovent Garden’s Queen of Spades was quite interesting, because I had to decide, on pretty much a performance-to-performance basis, was I going with the old technique, or was I adopting the new? That beautiful aria – if I hear it now, I feel my whole body cramp into a tense ball! The dress rehearsal, for me, was, I think, probably the worst I’ve sung in public for 25 years. It was humiliating – and I really mean that! I struggled, I sounded strained – it was just awful. Between the dress and the opening night I had to say, ‘OK, this is a mind game now. If you concentrate and you get on with the job you need to do, it’ll be fine: And the first night went fine! After that, I thought, this is serious business now. It’s not an instant fix. It’s going to take time. If I want to carry on, I have to get down to work.
MG: Tell me in more technical terms about the work you’ve been doing.
GF: Effectively, it’s trying to get rid of all the manipulation in the throat, which probably comes from my choral background. In choirs, singers try to sound like the people around them, so the sound becomes a solid thing where the vibrato is under control. You’re always trying to cap the flow of air, and of course when you constrict the passage of air with any of the throat muscles, things aren’t going to vibrate freely.
I had my first vocal crisis in my late twenties, after I left the National Opera Studio, when I couldn’t even sing Mozart or Stravinsky. That’s when I went to Armen Boyajian in New York. I thought if I’m going to learn how to sing I know there’s a guy who trains singers like a footballer, gives you drills. I wanted all that; I wanted the equipment. I’m naturally analytical. I’ve always really been interested in the mechanics of things – how things work.
For a time it went well. Boyajian gave me the strength and exercises to make tone in a clear, straightforward way, to analyse the top and feel when the ‘turn’ came. That served me well for a while, but three years ago my recital work was starting to tire me. Emotionally, I was feeling drained: every day was an effort to warm up, always having to be conscious about this turn stuff. The ‘Ah’ vowels were getting a bit stuck and high Gs were sometimes there, sometimes not.
I wondered if it was time to bow out gracefully and resign myself to the contribution that I had already made to singing. But I thought, no, I have an intelligence, and I hear Gruberova, even in her declining years, singing more incredibly than ever, and heck, I want to sing for the next 20 years!
MG: How did you confront these vocal problems?
GF: I just needed to know how to sing an open, honest ‘Ah’ vowel! If I were to let everything relax and didn’t interfere with my throat, if I took in a breath and made an ‘Ah’ vowel which travelled through my full resonance chambers and sympathetically vibrated right through my body, what would that sound like? Could I do it? I’d feel naked and very vulnerable…
Gary and I worked very hard at it. It’s all about convincing yourself that it’s OK to simply vibrate! I had to stop being so analytical about everything and say to myself, Just let the air out, let the sound happen. Get used to the feeling of letting the sound pour out. It’s like brainwashing – like removing your brain. It’s like a mantra that leads to meditation, just focusing on that simple activity of making sound. And after a while it started to come.
I still have a long way to go, but I do believe now that the initiation of my sound is nearly OK. I concentrate on trying, very honestly, to believe that my ’sound’ is a natural progression of vibrating air. Now, that’s not singing. Singing is about putting emotion in, and control. Where I’m aiming for control is in the most important muscles I have, the ones that regulate my breathing. Caballe had phenomenal breath control. She talks about all the exercises she did as a singer, and she did two years of exercises before she performed anything. These days, what singer in any music college could go through a process of having just exercises? Any young singer would say, ‘I’m off. I want the scholarship. I want the Singer of the World!’
MG: The new found vocal freedom you have gained through rebuilding your technique must also help you as an artist.
GF: Absolutely. What’s been fantastic is the freshness that I wake up with every single day. It’s, ‘Let’s get to singing!’ and then the voice is ready, and then, suddenly, you can work.
MG: How has your voice changed? Have you found a new ’sound’?
GF: People might not notice that my sound is any different, but I’m hoping that eventually the voice will start to grow, because I seem to have made fundamental changes. People have read recently that I’m doing Hans Sachs at Glyndebourne in three years’ time, and they’re saying, ‘What? How can you possibly do that?’
What I’m hoping to show is that Sachs doesn’t have to be about a monumental sound, only about wonderful singing. Maybe I’m trying to bite into a steak that is far too big, but this is absolutely a personal journey. I’m so looking forward to the opportunity. Finally, maybe, if I look after the fundamentals, there are lots of other potential roles that could open up. I would offer myself as Scarpia or Escamillo any day now. I’m looking forward to Mandryka, I hope Boccanegra some time. Macbeth, maybe not. It wouldn’t be the high lyric repertoire. It’s the middle stuff: Falstaff rather than Ford. Not Rodrigo; I might try Philip. I am doing Iago in concert. I want to feel that my experience with the modern stuff doesn’t in fact preclude me from being a very good singer in the lyric baritone repertoire.
MG: Has your new-found freedom as a singer helped you along your personal emotional path?
GF: Part of what I’m doing is I’m reflecting my life through my art, but I don’t know where it’s all going to lead. I’m a 20th/21st-century person. Therefore the modern repertoire is fantastic for me, because it allows me to collaborate with geniuses of our time: Peter Sellars, John Adams, Amin Maalouf.
But essentially, singing is a primitive act – by which I mean it’s naive, honest, and gets back to first principles. As soon as you open your mouth the person at the back of the hall knows either what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling. I do feel like this extraordinarily, amazingly placed human being that is a conduit for the main messages for what it’s all about to be human. If I think about the singers that I enjoy listening to, I don’t hear their voice. I hear what they’re feeling. Once you’ve got beyond all the business of technique, it leaves you to peer into a world of fascinating stories, to become part of an ancient tradition of myth and simple storytelling. What more can we all ask for?
There are magnificent technicians, and ’show voices’ where there’s an element of sheer spectacle to the singing. That’s never been in my character. My rather Calvinistic upbringing is always telling me that we mustn’t celebrate anything, and behind every silver lining there’s a cloud … It’s a sunny day today, but it’s going to be cloudy tomorrow. That’s maybe my genetic make-up!