Handel 2009

Interview with Dame Janet Baker

Dame Janet Baker was born in Doncaster in 1933. As a mezzo-soprano known for her richly expressive voice and dramatic talents she has had an extremely successful career singing both opera and lieder, attracting international fame. She was created a DBE in 1976.

What is your first memory of Messiah?
Growing up with it as a child in Yorkshire. It was the piece of music everybody knew and everybody went to. You could always guarantee a full house and that is my first memory: church music and Messiah. From a very early age, everybody went to Messiah.

Where was this?
Probably in a chapel in York. I think it’s one of the Methodist chapels. They had a terrific choir and my father belonged to it later on but I think my first memory of it was in there. It raised the roof, you know -Yorkshire voices!

What was you first impression?
I can’t remember my first impression because my whole impression of it as a youngster was familiarity - the one thing everybody knew and everybody sang the tunes from and it was something that you could listen to at any time of year. It came out all the time and wasn’t just a Christmas thing. There were always performances of Messiah and all the tunes were familiar to everybody. That was it - familiarity.

When did you, yourself, first perform it?
Well it was one of the first oratorio works that any singer ever does. You are booked for Messiah and in a way it’s a marvellous thing when you’re beginning because you could have a whole career perhaps singing Messiah - pay the rent and the mortgage and the lot - just singing Messiah (laughs) and it’s a marvellous thing to be part of because of this choral tradition, particularly where I grew up in the north: the great choirs.

The great conductors used to come and conduct in Huddersfield and Leeds so it was very much part of music on an international level because the big choirs attracted the great conductors. I once belonged to a big choir, the Leeds Philharmonic Choir, and sang with huge numbers of people in Leeds Town Hall with Malcolm Sargent.

It was mind-blowing, with the building and this huge mass of voices and you standing in the middle of it and Malcolm Sargent out front. And when I first began to earn my living, that is the sort of memory I had. Not particularly of a big one like Leeds – you graduated to that after a time (that was the top of the line, so to speak, and Huddersfield as well) - but all over the country you had little choral societies, little chapels, little churches putting it on, every choral society in the country. It was the backbone of their year, and the backbone of their audience. You could always get an audience, so a lot of us cut our teeth on Messiah.

Do you have a favourite part to sing or listen to and why?
A favourite part to sing is the duet with the soprano where the alto voice comes in He shall feed his feed his flock like a shepherd and then after that the soprano comes in and finishes it and that always seems to me a lovely thing, to have the two voices following each other.  There’s so many wonderful moments in it, great, great moments: The trumpet shall sound,  I know that my Redeemer Liveth – I used to wait for that because so many people in my experience just lifted you to the heights in that and it was a great test for the sopranos.

He was Despised, again, was a lovely moment because everybody related to that. You could go on and say Every Valley - everybody had a piece. Everybody had these special moments. You could see people sort of, “oh yes, there’s this bit coming along that I know” and everybody knew it all and in a sense you got the impression of everybody in the audience sharing in the performance. They probably sang it at home, round the piano as people did in those days…the familiarity of it and the sense that everybody knew every note that you were singing and had probably heard it since the year dot!

So in a sense it was frightening as well and you thought of all the great artists who had been associated with the role. Formidable! Formidable because of all the tradition that went with it. But marvellous as well to be part of it.

Do you have any other Messiah stories?
Lots of wonderful colleagues. When the tradition for Handel in a different way began to permeate through the profession - by this I mean Handel with smaller forces like the Bach oratorios - there came this new idea of performing the works in a lighter more baroque way.

Well up in the North where I come from we didn’t do things like that. We liked the big stuff, the big orchestras, the big choirs, the big sound (laughs), so, of course, as time went on, I became involved with the different kinds of performing and the different conductors. So I remember once doing a baroque performance with a lot of ornaments and the different, lighter, dance music style that the conductor wanted, and a call came through from Ibbs & Tillet, my agent, saying, could you possibly take over? I think it was the Leeds performance the following night, somebody had fallen ill. So I say “yes I can do that (I’d have liked a day off) but of course I’ll go up there and do this as a favour”… well you did that, you did favours for people and people did favours for you.

So I did my baroque performance one night, took the train to Leeds the next day and went into a rehearsal where the big guns were in force. And I started merrily along singing the first recit with decoration because I’d just been doing it, and the conductor stopped me and said, “Look, this is not the kind of performance we’re doing here tonight so please cut all that frippery out” (laughter). Yes! And that was very hard and it brought it home to me just how different the thinking was between the two different sorts of music making. Each being absolutely valid in their own way, I’m not saying any way is right or any way is wrong. I think we need both; I love to hear Messiah done in the traditional way and in the baroque way. I think there’s room for both it’s just quite hard to do them two nights running I found.

Generally, what does Handel mean to you as a composer?
Handel was the most exciting part of my life because, as I say, I grew up with the oratorios and then a friend of mine opened me up to all sorts of other kinds of repertoire…the operas, wonderful cantatas - and the operatic world and the cantatas are a completely different kind of singing to the simple, direct, emotional oratorio singing, and this was a revelation to me. It was like going through the door to another country because suddenly this wealth of music of a different time became possible for me to perform. And it used the entire range of my voice.

I had a big range and I realised how, although how marvellous Messiah was,  it was also only using a very small part of my own equipment and to be able to enter this other world of the virtuoso operatic roles and the big cantatas was a revelation. A wonderful revelation because it suited my range and my type of voice so perfectly. And this was the most thrilling thing - to be doing things with the English Chamber Orchestra and, of course, on stage, with the great operatic roles, which took me into this totally different world and showed me exactly what a giant, an absolute giant of a man, and giant of a talent Handel was.

He just could do anything. And people used to sing the operas a bit like cardboard characters. I think it was difficult to get out of that pattern of oratorio work where everything was just serious. You stood there and you sang. Going on stage and doing a Handel role was, again, a revelation because you saw that he hadn’t written cardboard figures.  He’d written, in his own time and in his own way, but the people that he’d written about and the emotions that he’d put in our mouths to sing were absolutely timeless- just like singing Puccini or Verdi- they were so emotional and so big. That was a great thrill.

Handel House Museum at 25 Brook Street will be at the heart of the Handel celebrations this year. This landmark address is where Handel lived for thirty-six years of his life and where he died on 14 April 1759.