As I prepare this interview for my website (at the end of July, 2017), it has been less than two months since conductor Jeffrey Tate passed away.  Tributes have poured in from around the globe, and the full measure of our loss is being felt in opera houses and concert halls.

The conversation presented here was held at an early juncture of his career, in July of 1982, exactly thirty-five years previously.  Moving from coach to conductor, his firm grasp of the music was apparent even then, and the promise he demonstrated was certainly fulfilled over the next three and a half decades.

He was affable and thoughtful throughout our encounter, and several times he paused to consider his response.  Having contributed interviews to Wagner News for many years, when Tate mentioned his involvement with the Ring at Bayreuth, I seized the opportunity to inquire about it, and much of our time was spent discussing that immense subject. 

With bittersweet feelings of both triumph and loss, here is that chat from long ago . . . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:    Are you primarily a pianist or an opera coach?

Jeffrey Tate:    I’m primarily an opera coach now, and partly a conductor.  Conducting is now taking over from coaching.  I’m in that strange transition phase where coaching is not exactly a thing of the past, but it’s a thing I do much more rarely than I used to.

BD:    Do you find any of your physical limitations a problem for conducting?  Do you conduct sitting down?

JT:    I conduct sitting down the whole time.  Once you get used to sitting down, it’s never a problem whatsoever.  I’ll be taking on Parsifal for first time in Nice with a very remarkable cast.  I made my Nice debut

was the Andrew Porter translation with Goodall at the English National Opera.  Although I didn’t understand every word, I understood enough to sense the drama going on properly.  My German was already good enough to cope with the Ring, but the performances at that stage at Covent Garden were not enjoyable.  In fact, unquestionably the Goodall Ring, for all that it is now, I can’t listen to it.  I find it very self-indulgent.

BD:    Too slow?

JT:    Yes, unquestionably.  If you sang the German to it, it disintegrates in a million pieces.  But it revealed lots of things that other performances skate over.  It is an essential view of the piece, but not the last word, by any means, as a lot of English people would have you believe.  Reggie’s a very, very important figure, and I owe a great deal to him in terms of my own career.  He was on the staff of Covent Garden when I was there, and I must have gone to his Meistersinger fifty times.

BD:    Have you conducted much Wagner, besides going to it?

JT:    That’s my bread and butter.  You may not want to talk to me because I am the infamous assistant for Pierre Boulez for the centenary in Bayreuth.

BD:    Oh, no, that means let’s talk for three hours instead of only two!  [Both laugh]

JT:    Wagner is the last resort where I shall end up as a conductor.  That’s the way I see my life moving.  l was asked last week when I was in London what my greatest ambition was, and my ambition is to conduct something at Bayreuth.  If I have a little goal to achieve in my life, that’s the goal.

BD:    Are you on the right track, then, to do it as the second or third production after Solti?

JT:    This is a very complicated story.  I was asked by Solti to be his assistant [for the Bayreuth production to begin in 1983], which would have meant a lot of conducting.

BD:    The rehearsals with singers and the orchestra?

JT:    Some of them.  Not the bread and butter rehearsals.  His orchestral readings are in a realm of his own.   But he had a sensible habit

simply because as a conductor you have no chance of ever knowing what the balance is outside.  You can guess at it in a normal orchestral pit, but in Bayreuth, as you well know, there is no chance. 

BD:    When you’re standing there and the whole sound is coming up at you, can you hear the voices at all?

JT:    You can hear the voices, but sometimes it’s very difficult.  Pierre used to say that in very loud moments in Götterdämmerung he had to lip-read!  [Both laugh]  I can well believe that to be true.  I conducted many a piano rehearsal in Bayreuth, and I know problems.  If you’re not in the directional line of the singer, you sometimes don’t even hear with the piano quite as you would want to hear them, simply because they’re going straight out.  It’s quite clear, quite obvious what’s happening.  In performances you hear a barrage of orchestral sound, which is also not fair because that’s not what the audience hears because the sound is directed at them.  It’s a very complicated procedure conducting and balancing.

BD:    Johanna Meier mentioned this when we spoke.  She said that the sound comes up at you in a wave, and you have to remember not to destroy your vocal production because the sound goes out.

JT:    That’s why experience in Bayreuth is a very important thing.  That’s why I feel rather sad that I’m not going to be assisting Solti.  I’m not doing that because I’ve been asked by the Paris Opera to conduct a new production of Ariadne at the time when they’re rehearsing.

BD:    Ah, but that is a wonderful piece.

JT:    I adore it.  Mozart, Strauss, and Wagner are my ‘Holy Trinity’.  That’s what I really specialize in already.

BD:    So if they wanted you to make your debut at the Met doing Forza del Destino, you’d tell them no?

JT:    I would say go and jump in the Hudson River!!!  There are just three Verdi operas I would want to conduct.  One is Ballo in Maschera, which I’m doing, the others are Don Carlos and Falstaff. 

BD:    When you do Don Carlos, will it be in French?

JT:    Yes.  Although my name wouldn’t have appeared, I assisted John Matheson when he conducted the first complete performance which was done by the BBC in 1973 in French of every single note of music.  That was the famous production when Andrew (Porter) had just discovered all those things.  We did the whole of the original version, including the original version of the fourth act with the original quartet, and we also did the original Rodrigo/Philip duet, and all the extra music, every single note.  It took hours, but it was wonderful.  Once you’ve heard it in French, I don’t see how can humanly want to hear it in Italian ever again... but then I’m prejudiced.

BD:    You are in Chicago this week to coach young singers.  Will you focus on Wagner at all?

JT:    Basically I would coach almost anything that’s put in front of me.   Obviously as a professional one has to...

BD:    Would you coach an opera you hated, or one that you thought was simply bad?

JT:    Not now because I could choose, but obviously when you begin, and if you work in an opera house with a large repertory, you have to under certain circumstances.  When I joined it, Covent Garden had the great fortune of having a remarkable good head of music staff, Ivor James Gibson.  He was a man who helped me and guided me enormously.  He knew where my tastes lay, and allowed me the possibly of doing what I wanted to do.  He now has retired and works for the Ministry of the Environment in fact.  Like me, he was not a musician.  I’m a doctor by training, and he was an engineer by training.  We’re both sort of English amateur school.  He got into music by amateur performances in Cambridge.  He did some conducting at Covent Garden in the 50s, but basically he wasn’t a conductor and didn’t ever want to.  He was a very good coach, a very good musician, a good pianist, and he was for most of the time that Solti was at Covent Garden, head of music staff.  Together with Solti they kept a wary eye on the sort of people they took on, and they made sure that the staff was compatible in terms of musicality.  They wanted a high standard, and they also wanted people to get on with each other, and who could also get on with singers.  That is very important.  You are not just a musical object, you’re also a human object.  You’ve got to be rather like a doctor that is very capable of coping with human beings.

BD:    So you have to get on with the singers rather than the singers having to get on with you?

JT:    I think that’s true.  It’s a bad coach who doesn’t care whether the singers care for him or not.  I care for who I work for, and it’s very important.  I learned that from Ivor, and he pushed me go in the direction of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner, and as a result I had my broad experiences.  The first time I ever played Rosenkavalier for rehearsal was with Josef Krips.

BD:    What’s it like to play Rosenkavalier on the piano?

JT:    Wonderful!  It is a most exhilarating experience.

BD:    I would think that a third hand would be necessary very often.

JT:    [Laughs]  You’ve got to be very clever.  You’ve got to be able to cheat.  You’ve got to know what the score says, and what is important and what isn’t important.  You’ve also got to know which score to play.  You don’t play the easy score because you can’t leave bits out.  You should take the difficult one.  There’s a singer version which not currently available, which has lots of little details, but I am a funny sort of person because I stopped having piano lessons when I was six.  I’m totally self-taught, and I taught myself by playing operatic scores.  So I learned as a teenager to do unconsciously what good pianists have to unlearn, or learn themselves.  They play all the notes.  I don’t play the notes.  I play the music as it seems to me on the page, which is probably why I’ve learned to be skeptical about what’s written on the page.

BD:    Is Wagner easy to play on the piano?

JT:    Oh, it’s wonderful. 

Though the BBC broadcasts of the three very early Wagner operas circulated on non-commercial discs for many years, DG licensed the first two for their 43-CD box set (back shown at right), issued in 2013 for the bi-centenary of the composer. From the casts shown of these operas, see my interviews with John Mitchinson, Lorna Haywood, Janis Martin, Peter Schreier, Hans Sotin, Giuseppe Sinopoli, James Levine, Kurt Moll, and Brigitte Fassbaender. Besides those listed, my other interview guests include Don Garrard as the Feenkönig in Die Feen; Barbara Bonney as the Young Shepherd in Tannhäuser; Siegmund Nimsgern as Telramund in Lohengrin (a very questionable omission from the back of the box!); and Anne Howells and Kiri te Kanawa as Flower Maidens in Parsifal.  Michael Langdon also appeared in the BBC Rienzi.

to see them as part of the contrapuntal fabric. 

BD:    Would he have been more accepted if it had been a traditional staging?

JT:    No!  My categorical answer is no.  It would have still disturbed people because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

BD:    Why do people want to hear only what they want to hear instead of coming to the theater with open hearts?

JT:    Don’t ask me!  I wish I knew.

BD:    I suppose that’s the eternal question.

JT:    That’s the eternal question.  There’s no answer to that.  The staging is now … if seen in fact in the light of a lot of other stagings, is not … is not in any sense controversial.  It just happens to be actually infinitely more detailed and subtle than any other Ring probably since the War, but people didn’t see that.

BD:    Will it work on television …

JT:    Yes, it should.  I’ve seen it all.  I helped choose the musical selections for it.  It was made in such a way that we recorded whole acts twice, and then did a few corrections.  Pierre did the selecting for the records.  He really was a very busy man, and I had a rather more time than he did.  So I went to do it with Chéreau.  We sat down with Brian Large.  First of all I listened to the two takes...

BD:    So the records, then, are not the television version?

JT:    They are, basically, but there are some discrepancies.  To find the discrepancies I’m describing, you’d have to go through with a fine tooth comb.  They are slightly different because one is Pierre.  I knew what Pierre wanted, basically, but the other is mine. 

BD:    What’s the justification for not just simply using the film as the basis for the records?

JT:    It’s very complicated.  There were certain passages that we wanted to use for the video, for instance, where it was very easy to cut in little bits for the record.  What you then couldn’t do then was cut into the video.

BD:    So it’s the camera work?

JT:    Yes.  It was a very long and painful procedure, but I have now seen most of it.  I haven’t seen Götterdämmerung, which I suspect is the least successful because it was the first one we did, and we learned a lot by doing it.  But there were very good reasons for doing it first, rather than regarding it as a test case.  It was the most difficult, and was the hurdle that had to be got over.

BD:    No point in doing the rest if you couldn’t do this piece?

JT:    Yes, exactly.  In that sense, really, we stand and fall.  We were quite pleased with the result, but in comparison with the other three...

BD:    You’d like to go back and retouch it?

JT:    Yes.  It’s rather like Solti listening to his Ring recording and saying,

jump to Meistersinger.  Do you prefer the Wotan-type voice or the Hagen-type voice for Hans Sachs?

JT:    The Wotan-type voice. 

BD:    The few times I heard a real bass do it, I liked the extra weight.

JT:    Yes, but I miss something of the gentleness there.  One is so conditioned by what one’s heard.  One that’s pleased me recently was Leif Roar on the television film that came from Stockholm.  [Berislav Klobučar conducted, and Gösta Winbergh, who would sing Walther later in his career, was David!]  Roar was a youngish Sachs, perfectly capable of being a widower, but nonetheless capable of being a suitor for Eva.  His light voice somehow fit entirely with that kind of vision. The contrast with Pogner is also very important.

BD:    Pogner should be much older.

JT:    Yes, Pogner should be older, and have a darker and deeper voice.  There’s a register voices in which Pogner is the deepest with the Hagen-type voice, and then you get a Hans Sachs...

BD:    It seems right now that basses sing Pogner for fifteen years and then move into Hans Sachs.

JT:    Yes.  I heard that Bernd Weikl did Sachs last year and wasn’t very happy with it, but I gather he’s just done it in Munich, and a very good friend of mine

went to hear him and said he’s matured enormously.  This is a light Sachs, but very convincing.  Theo Adam, after all, is a very respected Sachs, and he’s a light Wotan in that sense, but it works very well.  Norman Bailey is wonderful and bears that sound.  Bailey’s a Gunther voice, I really do genuinely believe that.

BD:    What’s Frick doing these days?

JT:    Hunting.  He’s a hunter.  He said he came from a family of thirteen hunters, and they all had better voices than him, but all the rest of them preferred hunting.  I worked with him for two solid weeks in Vienna in 1971 when we were recording Parsifal with Solti, correcting all those little faults that had crept in every day.  I was very young in the business, so it was very embarrassing in a way, me, a little Englishman telling this very experienced German gentleman all the little things that he wasn’t actually doing.  But we got on enormously well.  It was my first exposure to the international scene, and it cemented my relationship with Solti very much, actually.  That’s where we really found each other.

BD:    Have recordings helped or hindered the operatic scene in general, and the Wagner scene in particular?

JT:    Oh, they’ve helped enormously.  In a way, obviously, you can see where they hinder.  They give you false impressions of what you might hear in an opera house.  What they have unquestionably done, even in this country, is to rouse the interest in the art form in such a way that, surprisingly enough in the time of appalling recession, opera is still growing.  It’s an amazing feature of personal musical life that in lands where opera had appeared to be dying away, it now suddenly begins to really blossom.  I’m sure that’s due to records, and therefore also the radio as the means of transmitting them.  So I’m all for it.  It’s very stupid to be against it.   I’m all for opera on television because it does generate interest, and people then do go to the theater.  It doesn’t stop them going.

BD:    That was always the big question when they could hear it on a record.  You say you don’t find that people stay home listening to records, but they’re going to the theater?

JT:    No, they listen to records, but they also go to the theater.  There is that side of it, but most opera-goers are also becoming increasingly more intelligent, and they know about the distinction between what they hear on a record and what happens in the theater.  They also know full well that quite a lot of records are very unsatisfactory by the way they are made.  Some conductors insist on more natural conditions, but the bits-and-pieces system does create a lethargy in the performances.

BD:    Shouldn’t they be recorded in long chunks?

JT:     It’s very difficult to do.  Karajan vows to do that, and now he really does record in huge long strips.  Boulez does as well, and you hear that in some of their best opera recordings.  There is a magnetism about a particular take that goes straight through, but basically most people don’t do that.  The Karajan Falstaff, for instance, was made very much with huge takes.  It’s a very difficult opera, and there were some little moments where it needed fixing, but he’s a cunning old fox.  He knows full well what you can do.  Falstaff needs momentum enormously, and that is happening more and more now in other operas as well.

BD:    How do we get kids that are going to rock concerts to go to opera?

JT:    Do you want to?  [Both have a huge laugh]

BD:    That was next question

f we do, should we?

JT:    I don’t particularly like to.  If they don’t want come to opera, I don’t see why they should.

BD:    Then will opera die in the next few years?

JT:    No, no, but there are enough other people who don’t go to rock concerts.  There are people who go to both, obviously, but one is far too pessimistic.  There are lots of people on the earth, so why shouldn’t some of them continue to enjoy opera?

BD:    Just the sheer numbers are going to keep enough audience?

JT:    One sees it as an operation, as it is in America.  Look at the number of opera companies that spring up all over the place.

BD:    I just have a nagging feeling that this is the last great gasp before it falls apart.

JT:    That seems to be very unlikely.  Take France as an example.  The whole of the operatic scene is verging more and more on provincial opera.  I have no fear.  I think I shall still be in business!

BD:    Are there enough young people coming along?

JT:    Yes, there are, and they’re fanatical. 

BD:    I hope they continue to be enthusiastic about it.

JT:    Well, that’s up to us.  That’s very much up to what we do to make sure it’s worth their while going to listen to it as we keep up the tradition.  The only thing I say against the tradition is the way we’re running around and doing some things far too quickly and far too soon.  You’ve heard that from everybody I’m sure, because it is actually true.  Singers are forced to do things at too hectic a pace once they become successful. 

BD:    Are any of them recognizing that and slowing down?

JT:    Some of them are trying to do so, and some of them do it instinctively by their nature.  There are singers who have paced their careers and will go on singing and singing.  But there are others that we know who have come up quickly, and then fly away and disappear.  Obviously that will always be the case where there are brief comets like that, but the time span has decreased an awful lot in the last thirty years or so because of the jet plane and jet lag and all these things.  Even twenty years ago, singers didn’t leave town for three months or four months.  Now they’re back and forth because you can do it.  While you can say it doesn’t matter, it does actually matter.  It’s not just physical, it’s also mental.  Concentration on one thing or on one place is a good idea.  Look at a Met program of 1920 and see what certain singers were singing one night, and then the next night and the next night.  People did an awful lot of things, but they were there for the whole time.  They did a Met season, and that’s what they did.  I must say that produces the best results, and is the healthiest both physically and mentally for a singer.  Unquestionably the old ensemble system had a lot going for it in terms of letting a singer develop.  They need to vary.  I don’t say that singers shouldn’t do lots of different things.  The great singers will always vary, and they could do lots of things.

BD:    How do you get your Brünnhilde one week to sing Gutrune, or even a Norn, the next week?

JT:    That’s a state of mind, and that’s what’s probably missing lately.  What’s more impressive is a singer who sings Brünnhilde one week and the Countess the next.  That’s what they should do, and that’s what probably doesn’t happen.  That can only happen by long and slow development.  Johanna Meier is an example of one of the few people who can do that.  There are other singers who can...

BD:    ...but do they?

JT:    Yes.  There’s a very remarkable tenor called Herman Winkler.  He can sing Tamino, and he can also sing Parsifal, and the Kaiser.

BD:    He was here in Chicago a couple of years ago to do Ottavio.

JT:    He’s a very eloquent singer, and he can sing all those things because he has a beautiful technique, although the voice is not enormously large.  He’s not a classical Kaiser, nonetheless he sings it most beautifully, and it is a lot more acceptable than some people who go around singing the Kaiser.  And he can also sing Mozart, and coloratura that’s absolutely right, and he’s someone who hasn’t been noticed.  He’s been singing in German houses for endless years, but singing well.  He sings a lot, but never foolishly, never dashing around and exhausting himself.

BD:    He’s now to be doing a little more jetting back and forth.

JT:    That’s the unfortunate thing because there are very few people that can do what he can do with that degree of experience and fitness.  That’s the bane of our age.  Once someone becomes good enough to do that, then they are thrust around, and it really takes its toll on what you can do.

BD:    How do we get more young people into Wagner when maybe they

heard the Ride of the Valkyries on a concert or even in a TV commercial?

JT:    [Thinks a moment]  There begs your first question about translations.  I’m sure Wagner in English, or in a vernacular, makes a lot of sense.  It adds to the possibility of hearing Wagner.

BD:    The Ring more than Tristan? 

JT:    Yes, the Ring more than Tristan, obviously, but even Tristan actually would help because there’s long passages of conversation in the first act particularly.  For the dramatic input you’ve got to understand the dialogue between Tristan and Isolde for the music to make sense.  I see no reason why shouldn’t have it in translation.  I think Seattle is very good.  Their idea of the bilingual approach makes a lot of sense, and in London you could have that because you have Covent Garden and the English National Opera.

BD:    Have you been to Seattle?

JT:    No, I haven’t actually.  I would like to do that at some stage.

BD:    Theirs is a very traditional Ring with helmets and spears

JT:    I loathe that!

BD:    [Surprised]  Why???

JT:    You could do a traditional staging until quite recently, but now it needs such sophistication.  I’d be interested in what Peter Hall has in mind [for the upcoming Solti/Bayreuth production], because I’m sure he’s going to do it with helmets and spears, but it’ll be done with a visual sophistication, which is needed.  There must be visual stimulation.  We are too used to it in the cinema and in the very good straight theater to accept large, fat ladies in pigtails and hats to take them seriously enough.  That’s the problem!  It’s not that that’s wrong, but a lot of the audience can’t take it seriously.  We love the music and know what it means, but you expect someone going to the Ring for the first time to take it seriously.  It

© 1982 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on July 28, 1982.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB 1987 and 1998.  This transcription was made in 2017, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM.