Felicity Palmer: 'There is a lot of rubbish in opera'

Rupert Christiansen talks to the deliciously outspoken mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer as she returns to the ENO in Peter Grimes

Felicity Palmer as Mrs Sedley in Peter Grimes
An operatic Miss Marple: Felicity Palmer as Mrs Sedley in Peter Grimes Credit: Photo: Clive Barda

Felicity Palmer doesn’t mince her words, and why should she? She’s a Dame of the British Empire, with a brilliant international career spanning 40 years, and within her mezzo-soprano, older woman repertory, she is widely considered peerless.

But it’s seldom that I’ve interviewed a singer quite so openly trenchant in her views - a bracing blast of fresh air when so many of her colleagues are mealy-mouthed about the business, especially as she is highly articulate and jolly good fun too.

“There’s a lot of rubbish in opera: a lot, at all levels!” she says emphatically. Her list includes conductors who don’t understand how to get singers to give of their best, rehearsals which don’t allow exploration of text or character (at both of which she excels) - and “don’t even get me started on disgusting dressing rooms, because I can end up banging on about them for hours.”

On 29 January she opens in English National Opera's revival of David Alden’s bizarrely Expressionist but enormously powerful production of Peter Grimes, in which she plays Mrs Sedley, a small-town busybody who “fancies herself as Miss Marple, but doesn’t realise the damage that she’s doing. She builds up this fantasy about Grimes because she has nothing else in her life - a bit like Patricia Routledge in that Alan Bennett Talking Heads [A Lady of Letters].” See the trailer for Peter Grimes below.

Palmer has worked with Alden many times over the years. She admits she has “reservations” about some of his work and can find it “rather too twisted. But David knows every note and word of the score, which is more than I can say for most of them. And he has an energy and intensity that electrifies everything in rehearsal.”

Richard Jones is someone else she has found it “fascinating” to work with (“he always give you a thought process to hold on to, and his rehearsals are so concentrated”) but she is sceptical of the run of directors. “We singers tend to do the work for them. All they give us is paraphernalia: the whole thing has gone mad, and it really has got to stop. Sometimes I dream of going out in front of the curtain before a performance and informing the audience that although we have been working with Mr X for six weeks, we have no more idea what he’s getting at than we did on the first day.”

Has she ever thought of having a go at direction herself? “Well, I’ve toyed with the idea, but no, I don’t want the responsibility. Moving a chorus around - how does one do that?”

What concerns her most at this point is vocal technique. Having experienced a lot of problems and insecurities early in her career - including a crisis which led her to change from soprano to mezzo-soprano in the early Eighties - she has studied with “at least 15” teachers and found most of them “charlatans”.

“It’s a very dicey area of the profession. There’s so much unexamined jargon about support and head voice and so on.” What made the crucial difference to her was her fellow mezzo-soprano Josephine Veasey. “She said, ‘Singing is really very simple, dear.’ After being muddled by so many people, that proved to be the way forward for me.”

Now she has evolved her own ideas about this simplicity and attempts to pass them on. “But I’ve concluded they’re only good for people who are desperate for change. Others find them too slow and perhaps too threatening: I don’t tinker, I ask you for something radical.”

She turns 70 this year and although she doesn’t want to retire, she is enjoying a more relaxed schedule and doing “only what I really want to do, which means much less of the suitcase and airport side of things.”

Felicity Palmer in Dialogues des Carmélites

The singing nun: Felicity Palmer in the ENO's Dialogues des Carmélites. Photo: Hulton Archive

Some of us may also regret that she never attempted the big Verdi roles such as Azucena in Il Trovatore or Amneris in Aida, but here she takes some of the blame herself. “I was plagued by doubts at the point in my career when I could have gone down that route: there were too many things I felt I hadn’t sorted out. Then it was too late.”

What does rankle is the attitude of Covent Garden. “I don’t feel I have had a fair crack of the whip there, and I’m not the only English singer who feels this.” She admits to being “pretty hurt” that nobody even checked her availability for one of her greatest roles, Madame de Croissy in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, which she could have been singing in a new production there in June. “But well, c’est la vie. I shouldn’t complain, I’ve done all right elsewhere.”

Peter Grimes opens at the London Coliseum, WC2 (020 7845 9300) on 29 January and is in repertory until 27 February .