Opera Rara Founders

Patric Schmid

Impresario dedicated to the revival of bel canto operas

Patrick O'Connor The Guardian Wed 16 Nov 2005 00.02 GMT

In April 1801, Giovanni Simone Mayr's opera Ginevra di Scozia was premiered at the newly opened Teatro Nuovo in Trieste. Exactly 200 years later, Opera Rara performed it there again. That special anniversary was one of the typically imaginative projects organised by Patric Schmid, who has died of a heart attack, aged 61. Schmid was the co-founder of Opera Rara in 1970, and for 35 years oversaw the rediscovery of dozens of neglected or forgotten works by the masters of bel canto.

Schmid was born in Eagle Pass, Texas, the eldest of the three sons of Pauline and Albert Schmid. His father was in the US air force, so Patric's childhood was one of frequent removals. His interest in music, and particularly singing, was fostered by the family's collection of records, though it was Billie Holiday and Doris Day, rather than Melba and Caruso. The family eventually settled in the Sacramento valley, California.

Patric had already taught himself to play the piano, and from Mozart and Chopin he moved on to Bellini. Listening to an album of highlights from Norma, with Maria Callas, proved a revelation. "It started with Casta Diva, and within two minutes the whole direction of my life had changed. It was like someone opening a window." He acquired his first opera score, Bellini's Il pirata, which always remained a treasured possession.

As a student at San Francisco State College, Schmid became "a backstage pest, a smart-alec kid, but I loved the opera". In his teens, he had already fixed on Donizetti as one of his preferred composers, and started to play his way through as many scores as he could find. He corresponded with the musicologist William Ashbrook, who advised him to go to Italy; five years later, they met by chance in Bergamo, Donizetti's birthplace. Meanwhile, Schmid had been befriended by Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, who gave him an introduction to London, where he moved in 1969.

Through the Bonynges, Schmid met Don White, a dynamic advertising executive, but also translator and writer. They set up an artists' agency. Schmid later recalled, "I was the worst agent in the entire world, because I didn't know anybody." He and White, however, shared a consuming passion for 19th-century opera, so, in 1970, they put on their first concerts, of arias and ensembles performed by some of the artists they had been trying to represent. In January 1972, they put on their first complete opera, Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto. Schmid called it "a baptism by fire", but it was a notable success, with an accomplished cast, led by Patricia Kern, Janet Price, Christian Du Plessis and a last-minute substitute, William McKinney.

During the early 1970s, Schmid spent much time in libraries in Italy and France, gathering material, "The names of the operas were like a litany of saints - Ugo, Conte di Parigi, Trajano in Dacia, Carlo di Borgogna." Several more concerts followed, then stagings; one notable success was Offenbach's Robinson Crusoe, for which White made a brilliant translation. Radio 3 broadcast many of the operas, and, finding that pirate labels were issuing LPs of them, White and Schmid launched a subscription scheme, announcing the recording of Donizetti's Ugo, Conte di Parigi.

In the mid-1970s, Peter Moores became a sponsor for the company; the encounter between him and Schmid was a meeting of minds on every level. Their partnership continued for 30 years and resulted in more than 30 recordings of works by Rossini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Mayr, Viardot, Offenbach, Pacini and Meyerbeer. Singers associated with the series in the early days included Ludmilla Andrew, Margreta Elkins, Della Jones and Eiddwen Harrhy, and, more recently, Nelly Miricioiu, Jennifer Larmore, Bruce Ford and Antonino Siragusa. The conductor David Parry has been a tower of strength.

From 1975 to 1986, Schmid was artistic adviser, and then director, of Opera Northern Ireland. During this time the company moved into the renovated, Frank Matcham-designed Grand Opera House. Schmid was instrumental in bringing to Belfast such directors as Graham Vick, Richard Jones and Steven Pimlott, as well as other singers who would later record for his label. Back in London, the young Nicholas Hytner staged Pacini's Maria Tudor for the company in 1983, and with the CD revolution that joined the growing list.

White eventually left London (he died in 1995) and Schmid re-established his headquarters in a converted City warehouse. In the spacious studio, lined with bookcases of 19th-century scores, he presided over meetings and preliminary rehearsals. A new project was a series of CDs, Il salotto, exploring the salon music of the era. Schmid combined a single-minded tenacity, with a quiet, sometimes ironic manner. He never lost the essential youthful enthusiasm which had first drawn him to his subject.

Several years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but he did not allow it to slow down his activities. He dressed in practical, casual clothes, but for social occasions would add a sparkling pin, with his name picked out in (quite large) diamonds.

He died suddenly, having just given a pre-performance talk on the latest Donizetti rarity, Il diluvio universale (The Great Flood). The recording sessions had already taken place, and the concert, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was a special occasion - the first time an opera had been heard there for decades. With the audience assembling and the orchestra warming up, he could not have planned a more fitting exit - to expire in the wings of the theatre in which Malibran had sung La sonnambula.

· Patric Schmid, impresario, born April 12 1944; died November 6 2005

Don White

"Yorkshire pudding, Toad in the Hole, Shepherd's Pie - with real shepherds!" as Jim Cocks, seaman from Bristol turned chef to cannibals, so eloquently phrased it in Don White's translation of Offenbach's Robinson Crusoe. White, an illustrious figure in advertising, first as copywriter, then as creative director, started his career in Australia, before moving to London, where he won many awards, including the Sunday Times Prize for Script Writer. He became involved with opera in 1970, when he co-founded Opera Rara with Patric Schmid. White became general administrator of the organisation, dedicated to reviving and recording obscure operas by Donizetti, Mercadante and other early 19th-century composers.

In 1972 White inaugurated a series of brilliant translations, mainly from Italian and French comic operas, with Donizetti's Le convenienze Teatrale staged at the Camden Festival as The Primadonna's Mother is a Drag. This outrageous farce was followed in 1973 by an equally funny but much more subtle version of Robinson Crusoe, also staged for the Camden Festival. This production proved enormously popular, and was revived by the London Opera Centre at Sadler's Wells in 1974, and later recorded. In 1983 Kent Opera produced Robinson Crusoe in White's translation, with equal success; in 1988 it turned up at the Guildhall School of Music. White also made delightful translations of Offenbach's Le Chanson de Fortunio for Abbey Opera and Prince Joseph Poniatowski's Au travers du Mur, originally given at Hintlesham and later revived at the French Institute in London.

White next turned his hand to writing an original libretto. In 1876, the centenary of American Independence, Offenbach had visited New York and other cities in the US, conducting operas and concerts. He was asked to compose a new work especially for America, but never found the time. To celebrate the bicentenary in 1976, Opera Rara provided that "new" piece, with music taken from Offenbach's La Bote au lait and several other scores, set to a libretto by Don White entitled Christopher Columbus. In his version, Columbus is washed ashore on Manhattan Island, where he marries Princess Minnehaha and discovers - not gold, but something equally valuable, the coca-cola nut, a "lump of liquid happiness".

Columbus was premiered at the Ulster Hall in Belfast and then given a performance in London, where it was repeated the following year, before arriving for its US premiere in Minnesota.

Meanwhile Opera Rara was producing up to four recordings a year. Donizetti's Ugo, conte di Parigi, Maria Padilla, Gabriella di Vergy, Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, Rosmonda d'Inghilterra and other operas, many receiving their British premieres, were given concert performances and recorded. White was responsible for the excellent booklets and texts that accompanied the recordings. Cimarosa's Gli Orazi e i curiazi was staged by Opera Rara for Camden Festival in 1981, while the same year White translated the dialogues of Suppe's Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann which, as Ten Belles Without a Ring, was an uproarious success at the Guildhall School of Music. In 1982 he translated Donizetti's one-acter La romanzera, a skit on a lady novelist updated to the 1920s, with a heroine resembling Elinor Glin. This was double-billed with the same composer's Francesca di Foix at Camden.

Throughout his life Don White travelled widely, especially in Asia, for which he conceived a passion. Around 1990 he retired from advertising and went to live in Manila. He continued as general administrator of Opera Rara, which is at present preparing a recording of Rossini's Ricciardo e Zoraide and which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Elizabeth Forbes

Donald Edwin White, librettist and opera administrator: born London 14 November 1935; died Manila, Philippines 30 April 1995.