Rehearsal Diaries: behind the scenes of the making of an opera
Earlier this year I was approached by Patricia Ninian of St Paul’s Opera company with the suggestion that I should work with them on their summer production of L’Elisir d’Amore by Donizetti. The director, Eloise Lally (English Touring Opera) wanted to set the production in a hospital after the second world war. Patricia had read my book, The Midnight Man and spotted the synergies immediately, especially as ‘my’ hospital was based on a real, Clapham hospital – the South London Hospital for Women and Children. My research could benefit the show and we could create a small exhibition about the hospital at the performances.
I was also invited to rehearsals and I began to keep a rehearsal diary, a version of which follows.
Saturday 17th May
It’s the first full day of rehearsals and Eloise Lally, the Director, sits in a front pew blocking out stage positions and movement for the chorus. Most members of the chorus are here, taking up their places and moving at the direction of Eloise. Outside the sky is blue. Sunshine makes angular shadows on the deep window embrasures.
It’s obvious that there’s been previous discussions about the setting – in the South London Hospital, Clapham during the period following the end of World War two – and its fruits are evident.
‘Is this where the bed will be?’ asks a chorus member.
‘You’re sitting on it,’ responds Eloise.
The stage is bare.
Yet there is also a television, a relative rarity in late 1940s London, but certainly possible in a hospital common room. Chorus members stare at the invisible item, transfixed by its novelty.
Individual chorus members already have characters. So, I meet Pam, a south London girl, with the accent on ‘sarf’. A middle-aged lady with lumbago, she is never seen without a cigarette in her fingers. Many chorus members are halt and lame, patients of the hospital and walking wounded. These ‘characters’ give both variation and verisimilitude to what would otherwise simply be an amorphous group.
Eloise doesn’t only place the chorus physically, but also psychologically. She tells us that all the chorus characters know that Nemorino is hopelessly in love with Adina, who is so far out of his reach. Most of them feel sorry for him. They see, at the beginning of Act 2, that the lovelorn suitor buys something from Dr Dulcamara and are curious about what. Hospitals are places where gossip and rumour often run unchecked and L’Elisir’s South London is no different.
Throughout the pianist plays and replays accompaniment and also sings the soloists parts where necessary sometimes to the amusement of the cast. She is aided in the tenor role by Edvard Adde (the Norwegian tenor, cover for the role of Nemorino).
At two o’clock we break for lunch and many of the singers head towards Clapham Common and the crowds who are enjoying the weekend sunshine, while others remain closer by in the dappled shade of the peaceful churchyard. Back to resume at three!
Saturday 24th May
It is one week and several rehearsals on and there are more singers in a rather chilly church. This time the chorus and three of the principals are here, as is the Director of Music, Adrian Salinero at the piano, as well as Eloise. Outside the sky is grey.
We go ‘from the top’ Act I, Scene I and singers enter from different parts of the church to take their places on stage. Chorus members ‘characters’ do their stage business and eventually settle down to watch the new-fangled television. Matron Adina (Dorset-born soprano, Fiona Hymns) consults with Nurse Gianetta (Isabella Roberts), then it’s straight into her first aria.
The interplay between principals and with other cast members is taking shape. Belcore (baritone, Theodore ‘Ted’ Day) is a delusional patient who imagines he is still fighting the war, he treats everyone as if they’re in his military company and the rest of the cast plays along with tolerant affection. He preens himself in preparation for his declaration of love for Adina. Her exasperated astonishment, when he makes it, is very funny, without being in any way cruel. I laughed aloud.
Dr Dulcamara (Essex-born baritone Ashley Mercer) makes a dramatic entrance and begins his spiel, producing all manner of ‘wonders’ from his capacious bag and offering, at a one-time-only knock-down price, his miracle wonder cure for all ailments.
The chorus is impressed. Matron Adina is not. The rehearsal ends with their mini-confrontation.
Eloise calls the singers together and gives them notes, about movement, stage business and psychology. The chorus are to remain still and rapt as Matron Adina sings her aria. She is most definitely in charge, but she is also their healer, so they are both overawed and grateful. Belcore is too static, holding his rose for Adina and should make more of his preparation. The relationship between Adina and Dulcamara needs more definition.
Through-out Adrian insists that the singers keep tempo and, occasionally, gives notes of his own, mainly to the chorus.
In the lunch break I meet a few more of the chorus members’ characters; there’s Charles, a professional military man wounded in the war, hitching up his trousers when he sits – ramrod straight despite his damaged leg – to avoid stretching their fabric. Luigi, an Italian wounded in the Great War fighting Britain, who came to Clapham following the Londoner nurse who tended him and who is now a stalwart member of the community. He sells newspapers just outside the hospital.
Then it’s back to the South London Hospital to take it ‘from the top’ again.
TUESDAY 10th June
It’s an evening rehearsal at St Paul’s and low sun shines in through windows on the opposite side of the church. Eloise makes tea and Adrian is at the piano, as two soloists, Latvian tenor Martins Smaukstelis (Nemorino) and Ashley Mercer (Dr Dulcamara) arrive. They will concentrate on their duet scene in Act One, in which the crafty doctor sells the naïve Nemorino his ‘elixir of love’.
There is a sing through first and male voices echo around the church. Then a quick discussion with Adrian.
‘Shall we?’ says Eloise.
The soloists take up positions.
Nemorino approaches Dulcamara with a mixture of desperate hope, excitement and fear. Can this ‘alchemist’ help him win Adina? Dulcamara cannot believe his luck and quickly rips a label from a bottle of red wine, offering it as the famed elixir for all the money in Nemorino’s pockets. The doctor rolls his eyes at the audience, who are complicit in his ruse. Then he wants to get away before his victim twigs, but Nemorino calls him back. How does he use the elixir?
There follows a very funny scene in which the doctor instructs Nemorino in how to open a bottle of wine. This scene is, as Eloise says, ‘all about the bench’, where the two characters sit and most of their interaction happens.
As I watch another kind of alchemy takes place.
Eloise offers suggestions but allows her soloists room to create. These two are almost affectionate, she suggests, they like each other. The doctor invites Nemorino to sit, his gestures and instructions become fatherly in tone. Nemorino is trusting, child-like. The action emerges, through physical gesture as much as song, the singers acting and interacting spontaneously.
Nemorino’s tigerish enthusiasm bubbles over and he starts to rush away, to share his good fortune. Dulcamara realises that if other learn of this, the game will be up, his trickery exposed, so he calls Nemorino back to persuade him to keep the elixir secret. The scene ends in more subdued fashion, as Nemorino is, as Eloise says ‘looking inward’. The tone changes.
We run through again, this time in full voice. Stage action now fits seamlessly to the music – when Nemorino plucks up courage to approach Dulcamara there is what Eloise describes as ‘walking music’ and that’s exactly what it sounds like. The handshake between the two men comes at the climax of a passage of music, carrying over to signal in sound what Dulcamara signals physically – that he cannot extricate his hand from Nemorino’s grateful grasp.
Doubtless there will be refinement, but a scene, musically and emotionally consistent, dramatic and very funny, has come into being where none existed before.
This is alchemy indeed.
TUESDAY 17th June
The church is bathed in soft evening light and the whole of the cast is here. So is David Butt Phillip, international opera star and patron of St Paul’s Opera, so the church pews are dotted with a select audience, the VIP Friends of SPO. This is the first time David has seen this developing production. Adrian is at the piano and Eloise is in her customary place.
The singers, especially the soloists, are on their mettle in David’s presence and one or two show signs of nervousness. Plus, Eloise will be focusing more on the soloists this evening, she explains, so as to reinforce the emotional story-telling throughout.
We go from Adina’s first aria in Act One. David reminds the chorus that their staccato phrases towards the end of Adina’s aria should be crisp and succinct beneath the rich and soaring soprano voice, ‘half as long and half as loud’. We repeat and transition into Belcore’s ‘proposal’ aria. There is business here for Nemorino, overhearing Belcore’s declaration of love and reacting to the proposal to his beloved Adina. As Eloise and Martins consider some repositioning, David advises Ted on his stance which should be ‘less elegant, more military, butch, showing Belcore believes that he’s ready for anything’.
We go again. This time Belcore’s marshalling of his ‘troop’ is more militarily done and obviously for Adina’s benefit. The chorus exits in single file, marching. David advises that, without a conductor to cue them, they have to take responsibility for getting on top of the music, thinking about what’s to come several bars in advance and attacking it ‘on point’. Otherwise the sound will be ‘mushy’.
The first duet between the romantic leads follows, but this isn’t a standard lovers’ duet, it is more complex. Eloise wants clarity of emotional story-telling and so, in the break, she discusses the duet, almost line by line with the two singers, asking each, like a therapist, to describe the feelings of their characters at that point in the aria. So, when we begin again we have flirting, devotion, apparent rejection and pleasure in each other.
And on to Dr Dulcamara’s entrance…
L’Elisir d’Amore is playing 3 – 5th July, with a relaxed matinee (which games for children) on the Saturday afternoon. Picnic tables available before all performances. Tickets from L'elisir d'amore — St Paul's Opera
The Midnight Man and A Death in the Afternoon are available online and in all good bookshops or from publisher, Holbeck Books (free p & p) A Death in the Afternoon by Julie Anderson | Hobeck Books.