Peter Hall: the Hallmark of operatic excellence

Peter Hall after receiving his OBE at Buckingham Palace
Peter Hall after receiving his OBE at Buckingham Palace Credit: Rex

As Glyndebourne prepares to revive Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rupert Christiansen looks back on the great director’s career

No cri de coeur among opera-lovers today is more anguished than the plea for productions that don’t shock, bully or lecture.

Crudely drawn updatings and outbreaks of gratuitous sex and violence, once seen as the way to attract a younger crowd, have developed their own dreary predictability. Yet the chocolate-box prettiness of the old school won’t wash, either – opera needs to be animated with fresh theatrical life, and audiences want stagings that tell them things they don’t know already.

Only a handful of directors have ever satisfied on both counts, making music drama that offers rich dramatic and emotional resonance without resort to bland entertainment. One of them is without doubt Sir Peter Hall.

Peter Hall at a staging rehearsal for La Traviata
Peter Hall at a staging rehearsal for La Traviata Credit: Corbis

Now 85 and mentally and physically frail, Hall enjoyed an extraordinarily busy career stretching over half a century – a decade at the helm of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a further decade running the National Theatre, dabbling in television and film, plus a compulsion to direct plays of all sorts until his retirement five years ago.

His most impressive second string, however, was the staging of opera. To this most complex and challenging of art forms, he married experience gained from exploring Shakespeare and Pinter to an ingrained musicality, good taste, sensitivity to historical period and a capacity to bring out the dramatic potential in singers without inhibiting their vocal performance.

Many theatre directors have made the transition to opera – Deborah Warner and Phyllida Lloyd among them – but none has had such a deep-rooted affiliation as Hall. Over 40 years, he directed 30-odd titles across the spectrum, and although some productions were better than others – as he was the first to admit – his aesthetics remained constant and his success rate astonishingly high.

Peter Hall in 1965
Peter Hall in 1965 Credit: Rex

Hall launched himself in opera in 1965 as something of an enfant terrible. His production of Schönberg’s Moses und Aron at Covent Garden caused a scandal in the press on account of an unprecedented glimpse of female nudity in an orgy scene.

Subsequently he enjoyed several triumphs at the Royal Opera House – among them the première of Tippett’s The Knot Garden and Eugene Onegin with the young Ileana Cotrubas – but the relationship was curtailed abruptly when he pleaded over-work and withdrew at short notice from his post as its director of opera, much to the fury of the music director Colin Davis.

Peter Hall with then-fiancée Leslie Caron
Peter Hall with then-fiancée Leslie Caron Credit: Getty 

Hall also directed opera abroad, notably a Ring cycle at Bayreuth in the Eighties. This staging succeeded the revolutionary reinterpretation proposed by Patrice Chéreau, and Hall’s emphasis on Wagner’s romanticism rather than his politics made his reading seem reactionary. But photographs suggest that, at the very least, it was beautiful to look at.

Yet it was at Glyndebourne that Hall was happiest: “that little opera house hidden in the Sussex Downs has been as important to me as Stratford-upon-Avon”, he claimed. Here he directed 18 shows, in an association that lasted some 35 years.

This summer sees the return of one of his undisputed masterpieces – a production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream so magical in its evocation of a rustling fairy-infested forest that when Britten’s partner Peter Pears saw it in 1981, five years after the composer’s death, he was reduced to one tearful comment – “I just wish Ben had been here tonight.” The first reviews were ecstatic – “a joyous occasion” said Opera magazine – and after nine revivals, it remains unsurpassed.

1981 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream
1981 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Glyndebourne

Hall had started at Glyndebourne with early baroque opera: his staging of Cavalli’s La Calisto, mimicking the elaborate stage machinery of 17th‑century Venetian opera, did much to revive the reputation of a composer then almost forgotten.  His favourite was the ensuing Il Ritorno di Ulisse by Monteverdi, which he considered “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

His leading lady in both productions was the legendary Dame Janet Baker, who felt that collaborating with Hall “was the peak experience for me as a singing actress.” Together they went on in 1982 to create an equally memorable staging of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which would mark Baker’s retirement from opera.

Mozart was always his Everest. He found Le Nozze di Figaro “extremely difficult” and despite the presence in the cast of Cotrubas, Kiri Te Kanawa and Frederica von Stade, he said the result was “only just all right”.  His second production of the opera in the Nineties, with Gerald Finley and Renee Fleming as Figaro and the Countess, seemed like an after-thought.

Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola at Glyndebourne in 2005
Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola at Glyndebourne in 2005 Credit: Corbis 

Hall also felt unsatisfied with his Byronic vision of Don Giovanni – “never before have I finished a production without finishing it” he wrote when it appeared in 1977; the following year he described Così fan tutte as much “the most difficult opera I have ever directed … it could have been better if I had pushed it further.” But it was here that he first encountered the extraordinary talent of the mezzo-soprano Maria Ewing, who later became his third wife.

For all his reservations about his work on Mozart (Die Zauberflöte, which he mounted for Covent Garden, was “a bugger”, and he never went near Idomeneo or Die Entführung), his stagings were invariably received with rapture by audiences and critics.

With Verdi – there were four productions – his touch was less sure and the results could seem bland. But precisely imagined visions of Fidelio, Carmen and Albert Herring (an opera which resonated with Hall’s own East Anglian childhood) exemplify what one can only call the Hallmark – a solidly specified social context, inhabited by credible human beings behaving with emotional veracity. Finally, in 2005, came Rossini’s La Cenerentola – it was a wonderfully simple and elegant swansong for a director who seemed to have opera in his bones.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is on from Aug 11 to Aug 28. Tickets: 01273 815000; glyndebourne.com

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