They are lighting the candles at Covent Garden to honour one of the great singers of our age. Thomas Allen (as he was then) first appeared on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 1972, as Donald in Billy Budd, when Benjamin Britten was alive and his opera not nearly so highly thought of as it is today. This month he returns as a long-standing knight of the realm and, so far as our major house is concerned, a monarch to boot.
He may have been born a commoner in County Durham 68 years ago but the baritone’s stellar international reputation granted him regal status many moons ago, particularly in the great Mozart roles. For years he was the first-choice Don Giovanni and Count Almaviva at every major house in the world, and it will surprise few opera buffs that his 40th anniversary treat is the scheming Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, a role he virtually owns.
If there is room on the cake, the baker can add another candle because, last autumn, Allen was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, initially for five years. For a lad who grew up down the road in Seaham Harbour, before he took up a place at the Royal College of Music, this is a signal honour. ‘It gives me an immense sense of pride,’ he says, ‘but a greater sense of humility. The history and culture of the north-east has always been important to me, and now it has renewed its significance in my life.’
In many ways Allen’s is a classic post-war tale, that of the grammar school boy who got on, thanks to a native talent and the far-sightedness of his teachers. Indeed, Lee Hall’s ballet dancer, Billy Elliot, is supposed to be based, loosely, on the singer’s young life. Those tales are less numerous than they used to be but then there are fewer grammar schools than there once were. There’s a lesson there. Also, social habits have changed. The institutions that developed where men did hard physical work — the orchestras, the brass bands, the choirs — are fewer. How many students from Durham villages, one wonders, did the RCM enrol last September?
The gift of singing opened Allen’s ears. A career in singing opened his eyes. This is a man who read Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ as he immersed himself in Mozart’s musical portrait of the character, and who never misses an opportunity to visit the great art galleries of the cities he works in. ‘I like carving wood, painting, and I sometimes write. As Chancellor of Durham University, I shall have to write. And look good in the robes!’
Years ago, speaking of the way in which many people now respond to the world around them, and take their pleasures for granted, without proper thought or appreciation, he said, ‘Our senses have become diminished.’ Prompted, he offers an example of what he meant.
‘In about 1986, I was in Prague for some concerts, singing the German Requiem of Brahms. The place was packed, and for an hour and 20 minutes nobody moved. I remember a man sitting in the front row — he had a handkerchief in his lap — and he sat there, utterly absorbed. It struck me at the time that we had lost something.’ Teach us to sit still, as Eliot advised.
In the cities he loves to visit ‘you can’t go into a gallery without bumping into people who have something clamped to their ears. If you’re interested in paintings you want to look at them in your own way, to work things out for yourself. Our senses are assailed all the time. We must purify the senses, rather than being told what to do, what to think. Some time ago I stopped taking pictures on safari in Africa, because I missed so much. Now I take a pad and I sketch, which really makes you look at the animals. Otherwise you are missing out on what is happening. For too many people life’s supposed experiences are what they see through a viewfinder.’
Singers, like actors, are more able than the rest of us to enter the world of the imagination. Allen recalls with something like awe the production of Wagner’s Meistersinger that Graham Vick directed for the Royal Opera in 1993, when the theatre’s then music director Bernard Haitink was in the pit. For Wagnerians, a notoriously disputatious bunch, that was one of the experiences of a lifetime, when everything came together. It represented the most peculiar of art forms in its finest clothes, rather like Walther, the Meistersinger manqué, at the prize song.
Allen, who sang Beckmesser, the town clerk, opposite Sir John Tomlinson’s Hans Sachs, clearly felt the same way. ‘In the build-up to the first night a feeling went out initially from the cast to the people within the theatre. From there it reached into the street, as people realised something remarkable was taking place. I used to look at the score each day in rehearsal, and think, how can one man do all that?’ Oh, the memories!
In his 40 years at the Garden, Allen has sung 50 roles, from Mozart’s Count to Sondheim’s razor-wielding Sweeney Todd, so there can be few regrets. ‘I might have sung Simon Boccanegra, but I decided it was not my cup of tea. And the Ulysses of Monteverdi, which I sang in America and in Europe, a role I loved, I might have done that.’ He’s had a good run and, in the years that are left, Tom Allen the director should extend his range.
‘People like me are probably nostalgic about the old place,’ he says of Covent Garden, which, under the direction of the latest musical knight, Sir Antonio Pappano, may be considered, month in, month out, the finest opera house in the world. But, as Brian Clough, the great football manager, used to say in a different kind of north-east voice, ‘Hey, he’s entitled to feel nostalgic,’ because singers like Allen made the house what it is.
A voice, as he knows, is only where the singer starts. ‘It’s the beginning, like O-level maths, before A-level, and then applied mathematics. As a singer, you can’t spend all your time doing singing exercises.’ For the new Chancellor of Durham University, and the world-famous singer, going home may feel like one of Eliot’s poetic beginnings: ‘to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time’. But first he has all those candles to blow out.
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