A few months ago Ian Bostridge, the 46-year-old English tenor, had what he describes as a “typical midlife dream” in which he anxiously totted up all the things he had done with his life. “There was 18 years of home and school, then three years as an undergraduate and four as a post-graduate student. Then I remembered the couple of years working in television and another three years as a research fellow. But I just couldn’t make it add up to 46 and I couldn’t work out what I had done with the rest of the time. It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized what the missing years were; they were the singing.”
Other people’s dreams, even people as talented as Bostridge, are rarely of interest to anyone else. But in his case the relationship between his academic and musical careers is a peculiarly fascinating one. In 1994 Bostridge was still a research fellow at Oxford University, having completed a doctorate on 17th and 18th-century witchcraft and “the point at which it passed into the realm of ridicule for most educated people.” In 1995 he was making his debut at the Royal Opera House in Strauss’ Salome. The unusually intense way his academic work has impinged on his musical thinking and practice underlies many of the pieces in a new collection of his writing about music, A Singer’s Notebook (Faber), which is published this month.
The book opens with the Edinburgh festival lecture Bostridge delivered in 2000 about the links between music and magic, and also includes essays and book reviews dealing with subjects as diverse as Monteverdi, Hans Werne Henze, Noel Coward and Bostridge’s “somewhat bizarre animus” toward pop music and his objection to the “huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound.” The book also prominently features writing about the music Bostridge has been most closely associated with, in particular that of Benjamin Britten and the German lieder tradition.
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Bostridge’s voice occupies a distinctive place in the operatic soundscape. Not for him the barnstorming theatrical bludgeoning of an audience in Puccini or Verdi. Instead his delicately expressive ability to inhabit character and emotion — he is most often compared in this respect to Britten’s long-term partner Peter Pears — finds its home in recital, the chamber end of operatic performance and most particularly in lieder. As one critic noted about a memorable early Bostridge performance of Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, “In all the many performances heard in concert halls and on records, I had never really believed in the ‘ich,’ the protagonist ... had never truly thought that there was any such person ... with a childhood, a nickname, a particular way of tilting his head. Now he stood in full view.”
“But even as a child I was unnaturally obsessed with love and death,” says Bostridge, “so in that sense I really was born to sing lieder. I remember being about 10 and talking about death to my friends who, of course, weren’t bothered by it at all. And when I was 12 I did the whole romantic thing of falling hopelessly in love and essentially living out Die Schone Mullerin” — Schubert’s song cycle based on a young man’s unrequited love for a miller’s daughter — “as I trailed after this poor girl like some 19th-century poet. But I’d always been interested in ultimate things. When I was a teenager I loved theoretical physics and I went on to study the history and philosophy of science, by which I could sort of pretend that I was actually studying the ultimate grounding of everything.”
MUSIC AND MAGIC
The essays, written over the last decade or so, come with italicized passages of commentary and updates from Bostridge — “I got the idea from Martin Amis’ collected essays in which he did the same thing — and clearly I’ve had a long-term obsession in trying to make sense of going from one activity to another and how they join up.”
His Edinburgh lecture revealingly drew many parallels between music and magic. The way that audiences and performers alike “humble” themselves “before the creative spirit of our ancestors.” The use of arcane ritual, the belief that music improves us and provides glimpses of the transcendent. “Which modern magus is more like the conjurer of old than the post-Toscanini conductor,” he asks, “standing before his — overwhelmingly they’re men — orchestra, magic wand in hand, the stance, the rapture very often shamanic in essence.
“I felt a strong sense of the mystery of music from the beginning,” he explains. “And still the sort of singers I like give the impression that there is more going on than just the surface. That they are actually communicating something else. Something that isn’t quite graspable.”
Bostridge was born on Christmas day 1964, and he and his elder brother, the biographer Mark Bostridge, were brought up in Streatham, south London. Both parents were from working-class families and had gone to grammar school but left in their mid teens. They were keen on sport — Bostridge’s great-grandfather had played for Millwall and Spurs soccer clubs — but both boys were “terribly shortsighted, hopeless at sport and bookish” and won scholarships to Dulwich Prep School and then Westminster College. “In one sense it was a different educational path,” says Bostridge, “but when I look back at what my mother actually studied at grammar school it wasn’t that different to what I did. She talked to me about putting on Comus and things like that.”
Neither parent played a musical instrument — neither does Bostridge — and the music he most remembers came from his father’s “100 great tunes” sampler records. But both boys were sent to sing in the local church choir, “part of that low-level Anglicanism which I’m not quite sure exists in the same way any more.”
From an early age Bostridge’s voice was his defining characteristic at school, and he would sing solos. “I had an amazing music teacher at Dulwich who got me to do lots of interesting things, as had the choirmaster at Streatham. But I used to blush terribly and to get over that I’d stare at this huge photograph at the back of the hall which I thought was of the Queen and the headmaster, but was actually of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.”
As his career progressed his mother regularly attended his concerts, but his father found it “a bit of a trial. Partly because he was a heavy smoker and so always wanted to nip out. But he came to see me singing Winterreise and after five songs turned to his friend and said, ‘Are there any more?’ The idea of listening to 24 songs like that was not his cup of tea, but while I never felt he quite got what I did, I know he was also very proud of me doing it.”
By the time Bostridge arrived at Westminster he was less defined as a singer as his voice began to break, although he sang in the choir and, through a German teacher, got interested in lieder via the singing of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He boarded with other scholars in a house of “children much cleverer than me. It was quite intense in that two of my friends went on to become professors of philosophy and two others had breakdowns. But I always assumed that thinking would be my job. First I thought I would be a theoretical physicist. But I was a bit lazy about maths and I always took the path of least resistance. I liked subjects that I could talk myself out of problems rather than having to confront them, such as history.”
Keith Thomas’ seminal study, Religion and the Decline of Magic, was a revelation to Bostridge as he left for Oxford, “incredibly humane and with an intellectual argument which made me think of history as an intellectual exercise, not just one thing after another.” At university he “did some theater and sang a little and did enough academic work to carry on. And I met my wife, so it was a very good time.” He married the writer Lucasta Miller in 1992 and they have two children. “But I was very much on tramlines so I thought carrying on with academic life was the only thing to do. Not that my work with witchcraft wasn’t very exciting. You could have an idea, in this case, how the climate of opinion about witchcraft changed. And then you could go into the archive and find that it was actually true. Historians wouldn’t have approved, but I did have an a priori idea how it must have been, and it proved to be the case.”
‘DON’T GO PRO’
Bostridge gave “a few” lieder recitals as an undergraduate and joined a choir — “which I didn’t really like” — at Cambridge University while doing his master’s degree, but through a teacher he entered and won competitions and was awarded a place at the Britten-Pears School, “so by the time I’d finished my doctorate I had done quite a lot of semi-professional work.” However, when he asked his teacher whether he should go professional, “he said I shouldn’t because I’d always want to do things that I wasn’t able to do and I would become frustrated. That was when I was 22, and looking back it was quite silly advice in that there is not a problem with repertoire, but I still think it’s probably sensible not to tell people to become professional singers. If they really want to they will anyway.” The perceived limitations of his voice were more recently used as a stick to beat him after he wrote an essay on his problems with Mozart — essentially that “the tenor roles are boring” — which drew a sharp response from the director David McVicar, gamely quoted in Bostridge’s italicized notes, who said “if he could sing Ferrando in Cosi and finds it unrewarding, I would listen to what he has to say, but since he can’t ...”
After completing his doctorate, Bostridge worked for two years in television on a current affairs program before being offered a research post back at Oxford. “It allowed me time to sing, I got an agent and in effect began a three-year transition from being an academic to being a singer.” He had sung his first adult role — “comically inexperienced” — in a university production of Idomeneo. By 1993 he was making his debut in a Royal Festival Hall Tristan, before singing Lysander in a Baz Lurhmann-directed version of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival. Debuts soon followed at Covent Garden, Wigmore Hall and the English National Opera.
He says the fact he didn’t attend music school has never held him back. “And I’ve picked up a lot of things along the way, which I’ve always thought as part of its charm for me, although I probably ought to pick up a bit more. I know it can make me sound a little amateurish, but Pavarotti was even worse.” He started music O-level in elementary school, but never learned his key signatures “out of a certain cussedness.” “My sight reading is perfectly adequate, but what I didn’t establish as a child, and what people who become musicians usually do establish as children, is the link between the notation and what you hear. But while I can’t see a recapitulation of the music in the score, I can hear it and identify it. What is more surprising is that I occasionally work with people who are far better musically trained than I am, and they don’t notice when there is a recapitulation. Now that is strange.”
Because he does comparatively little opera he says he can feel slightly the outsider when joining a company. “But I do love it, although there have been times when I didn’t realize what was going on until afterwards.” He sang Caliban in the 2004 Covent Garden premiere of Thomas Ades’ opera of The Tempest, which he describes as “technically very difficult for me. I think I got on top of it by the end, but during rehearsals I felt very vulnerable among all these other singers who looked like they found it easy. But then I realized, long after the process had finished, that all those emotions had been contributory and useful to my performance as the outsider Caliban, and it actually fitted rather well.”
He says when he first began to sing full time there was an academic shaped hole in his life, and he even briefly thought that he could carry on with both, “but it is impossible. That said, as an historian I’m obviously still interested in where things fit together. I think when we look back at the classical music of this period, the early 21st-century, it has become somehow detached from its cultural and political roots. It’s very easy to link Beethoven and Mozart to their period. In the late 1960s music was deeply politically engaged. But through the process of modernism and post-modernism, I suppose, there is now a relative isolation of classical music.”
He realizes that to write he has to concentrate on it and nothing else. “I miss that, but I also know that if I did it I would miss the singing even more. Like a lot of things in life, it is more of an emotional thing. I’m a musician by ear and I think too much analysis of something can draw its teeth. I’ve seen analysis of music I know really well, and what academics say about it often misses the real point.”
While at Cambridge he once sung in a masterclass, “and afterwards the tutor phoned up my teacher to ask if I had some sort of big personal problem because I sang the piece with such agony. But that’s what so much of this work is about. Britten summed it up in Death in Venice, and that’s why singing a role like Aschenbach is so fascinating. It’s essentially about the loss of dignity of the artist. Aschenbach wants to be a grand person in grand clothes with a grand reputation, but that has cut off the sources of his creativity. What we have to do is essentially and necessarily undignified and exposing. As a performer you are mining bits of yourself in a way that is endlessly potentially humiliating. It’s enormously satisfying. But you do tread a fine line.”
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