The first time I ever saw Mark Padmore onstage, he was singing the dual role of Thespis and Mercury in the 1998 Cal Performances premiere of Mark Morris’s Platée. (Technically it was Rameau’s Platée, but Mark Morris had so entirely rethought and rechoreographed the eighteenth-century opera that I came to think of it as a co-production on the part of Morris and Rameau.) Thespis, the inventor of comedy, was a character who appeared only in the prologue, which Morris had staged as a bar scene, complete with Bacchus as bartender. Padmore played the Thespis part as if he were both a regular habitué of Bacchus’s dive and the originator of all its action—a drunken, unkempt playwright who pounded his beer bottle three times on the table to give the production its classical French start, and who, when he passed out toward the end of the prologue, proceeded to “dream” the rest of the opera. Within that opera-dream, it was the character Mercury who came up with the ploy that fueled the plot, the device of having Jupiter first court and then abandon the ugly nymph Platée in order to win back the jealous Juno. So Padmore, transforming himself from a staggering drunk with unzipped fly to a white-wigged, impeccably turned out messenger god, was in both cases the figure who actually brought the story to us, the man behind the plot.
And this is as it should be. For Mark Padmore is not only one of the best actors I’ve seen among opera singers, consistently capable of entering into either a serious or a comic role; he is also the clearest enunciator of lines, the most evocative teller of tales, the best narrator. That both these aspects of performance—being inside the character and conveying the story as text—should reside so comfortably within the same person perhaps says as much about the strange art of baroque opera as it does about the talents of this particular singer.
I would say that Padmore was born to sing baroque tenor parts, except that he doesn’t actually convey the aura of someone who was born to sing anything. His is not a naturally gorgeous tenor voice, the kind that leaps easily into soaring high notes and liquid arpeggios; it is instead a strong, clear, immensely human voice, carrying in its tones a sense of labor expended and labor rewarded. This is not faint praise. There are certain vocal roles which can only yield their full measure of emotional richness if we sense that they are performed by a person (rather than, say, the special kind of amazing instrument, similar to but beyond any other orchestral instrument, that many world-famous opera stars possess). Most of these roles were written before 1800, and most of them entail a solitary voice occasionally entwining itself with one other voice or instrument. It is these parts at which Mark Padmore excels. When you hear him in a Handel oratorio or a Bach passion, you forget that song can have any other purpose than the one he brings to it. His singing is like the speech of one’s dearest friend: intimate, recognizable, and true. It is true to the melodic line and the musical history of the piece (in this respect, Padmore resembles all good singers), but it is also true in the way an essay can be, or a poem, or a great novel. And it is this quality, of narrative truth, that strikes me as supremely and perhaps uniquely his.
Nearly seven years passed between my first Padmore sighting and my second. In the early months of 2005, he came to Berkeley again to perform the role of Samson in Philharmonia Baroque’s concert version of the Handel oratorio. At the time I bought the tickets, I did not view myself as being committed to the full three-and-a-half hours—that is, I told the friends with whom I was going that if we got bored, we could always just leave for dinner. In the event, though, we were riveted to the spot. Nicholas McGegan and his orchestra—who had, incidentally, done the music for Platée—were typically excellent, and the other soloists and chorus members were all very good; even after Samson left the stage (which happens, in this piece, about two-thirds of the way through), the performance still held my interest. But it was Mark Padmore who made the experience galvanizing, mainly by the way he seemed to become Samson, even in his modern-day concert clothes, with only the slightest gestures and facial expressions to help the characterization along.
I had rarely been so aware of the English language in an operatic piece. I could understand every line Padmore sang, and because of the way he performed it, the musical meaning of each passage seemed exactly consonant with the literal, literary meaning. Normally with opera there is some kind of barrier to be overcome by the audience: the foreign language transformed into supertitles on a screen; the distant time period represented by the music’s composition or the opera’s setting; the mildly alienating effect, at least in dramatic terms, of lines that are sung rather than spoken. But in this case the barrier had completely disappeared. It was as if I were taking in Handel intravenously—except that image belies the actual experience, which was one of actively seeing and hearing, of using and benefitting from my senses to gain direct access to the music. And what I am calling “the music” was not just a pure melodic line or even a delightful combination of instruments and voices, but a seamless merging of sound and sense, so that the words Samson addressed to his wife, his followers, his father, his enemies, all seemed part of the musical import of the piece. How much this feeling of sensory merging and overlap had to do with the particular qualities of Handel’s Samson (in which the wife is also the enemy, weakness is a form of strength, and blindness a form of seeing), and how much with Padmore’s individual performance, I will never know. That too was part of the inseparability.
Hooked now, I became the kind of Padmore-watcher who would cross oceans to hear him sing. I had been scheduled to stop in London sometime during June of 2005; now I slightly rearranged the trip so as to be able to take in Padmore’s performance in the title role of Handel’s Jephtha. A co-production of the English National Opera and the Welsh National Opera, this oratorio was directed by Katie Mitchell, a well-known British stage director, in a full-scale version that included a dramatic two-story set and a lot of elaborate crowd movement. I guessed beforehand that Katie Mitchell’s involvement might signal an extra degree of reliance on Mark Padmore’s acting abilities, and in this I turned out to be correct—though that was both the good news and the bad news.
Jephtha has one of those Agamemnon-like plots in which an otherwise decent ruler has to sacrifice his beloved daughter in order to thank the gods for awarding him a military victory. (The daughter is even named Iphis, as if to signal her connection with Iphigenia.) The situation is slightly more tortured than Agamemnon’s, in that Jephtha merely promises to sacrifice the first living thing he sees when he returns home from battle; he thinks it’s going to be a goat or something, so he is horrified when it turns out to be Iphis. I don’t know how this plot would come across in a normal staging—how much we would feel for both the father and the daughter, not to mention the distraught mother and the brokenhearted fiancé—but I suspect that under most circumstances Handel’s words and music would be sufficient to overwhelm us with emotion, as they were in Philharmonia’s concert version of Samson.
Mitchell, though, went for a kind of modern-day realism, or rather a heightened form of modern-day realism, Tony Kushner–style, in which a large-winged, brown-suited, female angel hovered over Jephtha during most of his time onstage. (This angel exists in the Handel score, but only in the form of one or two brief arias.) The angel’s odd costuming seemed a compromise between that of Jephtha and his wife, who wore standard if rather Edwardian upper-class garb, and that of Iphis, who was clothed in flowing, virginal-white garments of a vaguely Greek sort; and that strangely unsettling mixture of styles afflicted the production as a whole. It was never clear, that is, whether we were supposed to conceive of these events as happening now, in our own emotional and spiritual world, or as happening in some far-off Then, when people sacrificed family members for their bloodthirsty gods. For a while, I even imagined that Katie Mitchell was offering us some kind of extremely topical allegory: Mark Padmore had been dressed and made up to look so precisely like Tony Blair that the sacrifice of Iphis seemed to be standing in for the sacrifice of the British people in the much-debated Iraq war. (A quick glance at my program disabused me of this conceit, for the production had initially been staged in July of 2003—too soon after the March 2003 start of the war to allow for an opera’s whole development.)
The most daring thing Katie Mitchell did was to have Iphis struggle against her death at the end, and for this the director rightly received a great deal of criticism, since in the actual words of the oratorio, Jephtha’s daughter nobly resigns herself to her fate. I understood, though, why Mitchell made this error. She wanted to compound our sense of the horror felt by Jephtha as he committed the sacrifice—she wanted, I suspect, to make full use of Mark Padmore’s capacity for expressing and generating deep emotions—and she thought that the way to do this would be to show the king painfully murdering his daughter against her will. But Handel did not need such assistance. He had already built tremendous pain into the Jephtha part, and Padmore, with his supernaturally clear diction, would have been capable on his own of bringing every word of that part to life: the scene in which Jephtha sings his sorrow as he ritually binds his daughter would alone have been enough to vanquish us, if Mitchell had not violated that scene with the unnecessary struggles. By attempting to feed Padmore’s capacity to act a role—by giving him more scenery to chew on, as it were—Mitchell actually undercut his narrative strength.
But she did not, finally, diminish his power to carry the audience along, in a way that I have rarely seen in that setting. The ENO audiences are a well-educated opera-going lot, and they know a good aria from a bad one, so they like to applaud the singers politely at the end of the star turns. This audience began by doling out its plot-interrupting applause at appropriate moments (and the singers did indeed deserve such applause). But at some point the audience members forgot they were watching an opera and began to feel they were watching a play. You could actually sense the held breath, the palpable suspense, as they silently waited for the next disaster to occur, the next tragedy to fall on Jephtha’s family. And because of this classically theatrical suspension of disbelief (which might have had something to do with the fact that the opera was in English and that you could, for a change, understand the English), the three-hour opera seemed to speed toward its dire conclusion. Mitchell’s direction may have been partly responsible for this locomotive power, but I attribute it mainly to Padmore’s performance, which was true and piercing from beginning to end. Even as the staging tried to mire him in muddled emotions, the clarity of his voice and the comprehensibility of his words lifted us up to another perceptual level. We were experiencing the family tragedy, but we were also watching it from on high, as if we too were that brown-suited angel.
The last time I saw Mark Padmore sing, it was at the Berlin Philharmonic in March of 2006, and he was taking the role of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion. This was a dream performance in a dream setting; and it was there that I consciously perceived, for the first time, the narrative nature of Mark Padmore’s gifts. For in this production he was, literally, the narrator, the figure who told us, “Then Pilate said to them,” “Then Jesus answered”—introducing the recitative and choral responses of all the other characters, and then linking the whole thing up by providing the missing pieces of plot. Even though I barely know a word of German, I felt I could understand everything the Evangelist was saying in that language. It helped to know the plot, of course; but it also mattered that Padmore’s diction was unimaginably clear, his emotional demeanor completely suited to each line, and the quality of his voice utterly true and direct, like an arrow going out from the stage and hitting us in our seats.
In this production, Mark Padmore was matched with the wonderful bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, who gave immense dignity and pathos to the dual role of Jesus and Pilate (a strangely effective bit of double-casting, suggesting as it does that the destroyer is also the destroyed). In fact, Padmore and Quasthoff pretty much were the production. The other soloists—Michael Chance, Susan Gritton, and Toby Spence—were people I had admired in other performances, but here they merely held up their end. Simon Rattle, who is normally so captivating you can’t take your eyes off him, reined in his charisma and conducted with near-invisibility. The orchestra and chorus were both terrific, but they too managed to fade into the background and let these two extremely compatible soloists shine forth. There was a chemistry between Quasthoff and Padmore that was confirmed during the curtain calls but was audible throughout the performance, in the way their voices gave rise to and gave way to each other’s, twining in and out among the instruments that accompanied them, singing the familiar words as if they had known them since birth but also as if they were speaking them for the first time.
The St. John Passion was performed without intermission, and the silence that greeted it at the end was almost as remarkable as the music that had gone before. The audience knew what it had been given and was grateful for it. Long after the third and even the fourth curtain call had been taken, long after the bouquets had been handed out and the orchestra had left the stage, a large number of stalwarts remained standing by their seats and clapping. So, with the house lights already up, the five soloists and Simon Rattle came back onto the stage, and Mark Padmore and Thomas Quasthoff were pushed forward by the others to receive their extra measure of applause. I looked at Padmore’s face then, and I tried to see whether he had completely ceased to be St. John, whether he had already turned into his backstage self, the mere owner of the voice. And then I realized that no such separation was ever going to be possible, for the backstage man was the voice, was the role. That’s in fact what it means to be a narrative singer: that you are yourself, alive right now and speaking to us directly, even as you become part of something onstage that never existed and always will.
Wendy Lesser is the editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of eight books, most recently a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, and a memoir, Room for Doubt.
