38 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukBOOKS & ARTSARTS
‘Opera is something you come to later’
After a record 18 years – and counting – as music director, Antonio Pappano talks to Norman Lebrecht
about life after Covent Garden and how opera is beyond younger audiencesT
he horse beats me to the stage door
by a short nose. Known as Tiz, it’s an
opera specialist who comes up from
Norfolk for 10 a.m. rehearsal and is driven
back home each night. Tiz is on call right
through the Fidelio rehearsals — unlike, as
Sir Antonio Pappano points out, the star
tenor who does not show up for the first act.
This is a fairly sore point, and I wait until
late in our conversation to probe it. There
has been a media hoo-hah about Fidelio tick-
ets going to ROH friends, leaving hardly any
for the general public. Pappano, the quiet
man of opera, suddenly shoots up an octave.
‘That’s not particularly true,’ he cries. ‘In
October, we released several hundred tick-
ets. They were snapped up. We couldn’t sell
Fidelio for love nor money the last time we
did it. I don’t understand. Is it because of
Jonas Kaufmann? Really?? He doesn’t sing
until the second act.’
The notion that Covent Garden keeps its
treasures for the rich cuts him to the quick.
‘We are going into 1,500 cinemas with Fide-
lio on 17 March. That’s a lot of people to
reach. We are going into people’s houses,
where they live. I try to fight with my TV
programmes [the idea] that opera is only for
elites and toffs. The best sound in this house
is where the cheapest seats are. Get in there
early and get a sense of community in this
beautiful horseshoe.’
After a record 18 years as music director,
longer than Haitink, Colin Davis or Solti, he
is about to share thoughts about his future,
the mere mention of which sends a chill
through the building. Put plainly, Pappano
is Covent Garden’s talent magnet. The rea-
son Kaufmann, Netrebko, Terfel and co. turn
up year after year, and never cancel as theydo elsewhere, is that they love working with
a guy who has coached singers since he was
ten years old, assisting his father, a private
voice tutor, in a Clapham council flat. He
would also go out with his mother at dawn,
cleaning offices.
His mother is now 86 and when he wants
to visit her in Connecticut she tells him not
to take time off work. ‘Oh, don’t you come,
your work is the most important thing,’ he
trills in an Italian accent. ‘That immigrant
work ethic was instilled in me.’ So was the
paramountcy of family. ‘If there’s one thing
I’m proud of,’ says Pappano, ‘it’s the family
we’ve created at Covent Garden.’
Moving to America in his early teens, he
caught the twang but left the country whenDaniel Barenboim plucked him from a City
Opera piano to be his assistant at Bayreuth.
He learned to be a music director in Oslo
and Brussels, where an EMI producer nego-
tiated his transfer to London.
Covent Garden has been his preoccupa-
tion ever since, but that is about to change.
He turned 60 a few months ago — with an
intimate dinner for 50 in his favourite St
John’s Wood restaurant — and he’s think-
ing hard what to do with the rest of his
life. First, he has booked a sabbatical next
year — ‘during the season,’ he stabs the
air, though he’ll be reachable by email. To
escape altogether, he’s taking a slow trip to
the Antarctic and Patagonia with his wife
Pam, a voice coach.
They have been married 25 years andwork together from time to time. ‘At the
beginning and end of season,’ he clarifies,
‘there’s no ballet here, so it’s opera full-
on and we don’t have enough pianists. She
comes in, and they love her. In our life, Pam
doesn’t say a lot, but two words and I under-
stand everything. In that way, she has a tre-
mendous influence and a tremendous power.
And I also say she’s a moral force. She’s ter-
rific with people, we share decisions.’
Those decisions are beginning to take
shape. During his year off, he will conduct
Puccini’s Fanciulla del West in Berlin (‘Dan-
ny’s house’) and the ROH production of
Szymanowski’s King Roger at La Scala. He
is also giving masterclasses at Aldeburgh
and the Royal College of Music, reaching
down to his roots. Last summer he con-
ducted the National Youth Orchestra of the
USA. ‘It was a picture of America,’ he says:
the melting pot, all the colours, that energy.
I’m building bridges again to America after
not conducting there for years.’
That could be where his eye turns once
his contract ends at Covent Garden in 2023.
Or maybe not. I chide him that he has told
me many times that he’s leaving the ROH,
only to sign on for five more years. He looks
sheepish. ‘I’ve been offered other houses,’
he says, ‘and I turned them down because
I don’t think I could replicate the conditions
here — the family that has been created.
And I like the building. I like the fact that
rehearsal rooms have windows. That’s quite
rare, actually.’
He lets slip that ‘there’s a Ring with
Barrie Kosky which I’m very much looking
forward to’ in the season after he is sup-
posed to have left. No need to shortlist his
successors yet.There’s a Ring that Pappano’s ‘looking
forward to’ in the season after he
is supposedly leaving Covent GardenArts_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 38 26/02/2020 10:43