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Helmsman
WILLIAM R. BRAUN speaks with conductor David Robertson, whose musical passions run from Billy Budd to Barber to The Music Man.
Portraits by Dario Acosta
Grooming: Affan Malik
© Dario Acosta 2012
When David Robertson enters
the orchestra pit at the Met this month to conduct the revival of Britten's Billy Budd,
audiences probably won't realize that one aspect of Robertson's interpretation
is what he learned about the opera from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg.
Last summer, when Robertson was in Santa Fe for Berg's Wozzeck,
he was invited to a brunch. In what he describes as "the coolest moment of
my life," he was seated next to Ginsburg. "Of course, you're not
supposed to talk about any of the court cases," he says. But he thought of
his wife, pianist Orli Shaham. "If she wasn't a pianist, she would love to
be a judge. So I'm trying to live vicariously for her and think about what I
can bring back. And we're talking about things, and Justice Ginsburg has this
incredible recall, not just about court cases, but she'll recall who was the
set designer and the director and who sang which role in some opera production
she saw in 1963. And she said, 'Do you know the origin of where the Billy Budd
story came from?' which I didn't. I thought Melville and the sea, I knew about
the play Billy
Budd, I'd read Moby-Dick, but I hadn't realized this. She
explained that Melville's father-in-law was a judge in Massachusetts. This was
the period before the Civil War, and a case came to him where a slave had
escaped, and they knew who the slave owner was, and according to the laws of
Massachusetts at the time he needed to be returned. The case fell on his
docket, and he had to make the decision. And Melville watched as this went on
and then, against everything his father-in-law believed in, he had to send the
slave back, because that was what the law decreed."
Hence Robertson's interpretation of the trickiest moment Britten
bequeathed to conductors, a long sequence of nothing more than a few dozen
slow, solemn whole-note chords in Act II, when the orchestra must somehow
portray the agonizing judgment Captain Vere passes upon Billy. "She turned
to me, and I wish I had a recording, and she said, 'because slavery is such an abomination.'
And the way she said it, the voice and everything, it was like opera in and of
itself. What Britten has done in the opera is very carefully given all the
melodies, with the possible exception of the very beginning and the very end, a
movement which is like the deck of the ship, so that everything has this kind
of undulation, this kind of positive and negative quality — which, if you look
at it, is a wave. Whether it's a wave on the water or a wave in sound or a wave
in calculus, it has a shape to it. And of course it's our own experience of
life, which has its highs and lows. Our body rhythms, basically our whole
nervous system works in that way, continually ebbing and flowing. And the story
of the opera, as well as the actual choice of intervals for all the melodies
throughout, is about this — which for me is the extraordinary thing when it
becomes fragmented in the chords of the interlude in Act II, when Vere goes in
to talk to Billy, when this easygoing, flowing movement is suddenly broken up
into block chords. We feel the normal musical flow literally come apart. It's
as though Britten has said, 'This law is so against nature, it is such an abomination,
that the laws of nature no longer obtain on these chords.' And that is why they
are so amazing."
When Robertson says a word like "amazing," you can't
help believing in it. At first, you think you have been taken in by his eyes,
which are such a striking shade of teal blue that you have to remind yourself
not to stare. He is rail-thin and unfailingly enthusiastic. His conversation is
peppered so many times with "Gee," "Oh my gosh" and
"Wow" that one might think he came from the Midwest. (He grew up in
Santa Monica, California.) But his emotions come out so easily that his
orchestra, the Saint Louis Symphony, has come to anticipate it.
"They're not at all surprised or upset when it comes to the
surface," he notes. "Christine Brewer and I were doing a New Year's
concert in St. Louis about the changing of the seasons, so we did Barber's Knoxville:
Summer of 1915. Chris and I had done that one in London, and it was
just fabulous, although the British reviewers don't really understand it, so
they didn't get what she was doing with it. But in the rehearsal, we got to the
amazing part where the poet says the line 'By some chance, here they are, all
on this earth,' and elicits the line 'my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good
father.' And of course Barber has got this total understanding of how to
manipulate the emotions, in a subtle way — he's never coercive but so strong.
He has this thing where the high note is going up on 'my mother.' And I looked
at the fiddles, and I said, 'This is the climax of the piece, just give it to
me.' And it wasn't the loudness. I can't explain what they do — this is one of
the things I love about the St. Louis Symphony — they just put their heart into
it. And Chris went up, choked on the high note, and Chris and I looked at each
other, and both of us are bawling. This is in the space of a bar
that they do that. And Chris said, 'I'm so sorry,' and I ran offstage to get us
both Kleenexes, and the orchestra is just sort of sitting there going, 'Take it
easy, calm down, you'll be fine.'"
As if on cue, Robertson's eyes are watering again at the memory.
"I'm leaking all over the place," he laughs. We are sitting in a back
room at his publicist's office. He toddles out to the reception desk in search
of more Kleenex. For my benefit, he moans to the front office, "He's got
me crying, he's being so tough." Back on track, he remembers the first
time he was overwhelmed by a performance. "In the late '80s I did Suor Angelica.
I remember doing the whole thing, shaking the hand of the concertmaster and
walking out and, the minute I was in the darkness outside the pit, just
exploding into almost inconsolable tears. I'd never had anything like that
before. I remember Jim Levine once saying, 'I can't get too excited in La Bohème,
because otherwise I throw the whole performance on the floor.' It's very tricky
to do these things."
The precarious state of Levine's health, of course, has lately
become the elephant in the room during any conversation with a conductor. His
frequent cancellations of engagements in recent years have resulted in a
constant shifting of responsibilities in the world of guest conductors and
music directors. (Robertson began filling in for Levine on a Boston Symphony
tour a few years ago, and he will do it again at a Met Orchestra concert at
Carnegie Hall this month.) Moreover, illness and injury to other conductors,
such as Riccardo Chailly and Riccardo Muti, have added to the shuffle. When we
spoke just before Christmas, Robertson had returned to New York after filling
in on short notice for Chailly in Munich. But the idea of committing to a music
directorship of an opera house, no matter how appealing it may seem to
outsiders, will never be a slam dunk. Of music directorships, Robertson says,
"In theory, everything is great. But it's about the particulars. The
question is like 'Do you want to be married?' Well, in theory, sure! But of
course it really depends on finding the right person. I am on my third, and
final, marriage, because I finally found the right person. When I was first of
marrying age, she was something like five years old. So I had to wait."
And a music directorship, once accepted, is draining. "You occupy this
remarkable position of being a part of the administration of things and having
to take administrative decisions, as well as being a part of the actual
performance aspect, so therefore being on the receiving end of what those
decisions might mean. And this is a really involved process, and I try not to
overdo the number of things that I can be involved with."
Nonetheless, Robertson did come close to accepting the music
directorship of Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu, and the reasons he
ultimately declined illustrate what a conductor has to face. "I'd had a
great relationship with them, I love the orchestra, I love the house, the level
of singers that come through the place, and I love Barcelona. But one of the
things I said was that they were dealing with an outdated contract whereby the
orchestra can only have one service per day. Now that service can be six hours
long, which is not fair somehow, but there's only one of them. So let us say
that you're doing a Mozart opera, which has a particularly small orchestra. You
can't do anything else with the other musicians on the same day. Let us say
that you have performances, and you want to bring in a really great conductor
as a guest conductor to work with the orchestra on a concert to help make their
level better. You would have to block that conductor in for fifteen days to
give them enough rehearsal in between the opera performances in the evening.
And nobody is going to have that kind of time if they're really the desirable
person that you want. So the Liceu was a case of everything else was fine, the
operas would be great to do, I was really looking forward to doing them. But
they said, 'We can't change the contract before you come. You'll have to come down,
and we'll see if we can get it changed.' And I said, 'You know if that's it
then I'm going to be suffering with it for years, and I can't do it.'"
In the symphonic world, Robertson is especially noted for his
thoughtful programming of concerts. (Last June with the New York Philharmonic,
he offered Shostakovich's First Symphony, Rachmaninoff's The Isle of the
Dead and Deborah Voigt in Erwartung, all on the
same program. The three pieces initially seemed to have nothing to say to each
other, but on reflection, and in performance, they proved to make a remarkable
statement about the early twentieth century.) If he had an opera company, he
says, he would work to have the season provide similarly intriguing
juxtapositions. He might produce the original French La Favorite
of Donizetti alongside the original five-act Don Carlos, to show the
influence of the former on the latter. Asked if any of the symphonic composers
he regularly works with showed a potential gift for opera, Robertson laments,
"I'm very sad, and I've talked to him a number of times, that Pierre
Boulez never wrote an opera, because his sense of opera and theater is just
fabulous. I think Steven Mackey would be able to do something really special.
He has this gift of being able to do the kind of fun, effervescent party music
like you get in Rigoletto
and La
Traviata and then suddenly go into this 'Oh my goodness, my world is
closing in' music."
But Robertson seems more interested in the tricky job of getting
a second production for a new opera. "I worked very hard to get Berio's Outis
a second production, in Paris, with a superior orchestra, some better choices
for the vocal lines, as well as a production where I was really able to work
with the director." He has also been consulting on revisions to Nico
Muhly's Two
Boys after its premiere run at English National Opera. And when
Robertson helps refine the vocal writing in an opera he comes from an unusual
perspective. Nearly all conductors at some point mastered a musical instrument
— Robertson himself started as a horn player — but it is hard to think of
another conductor with as much vocal experience. In high school, he played
Harold Hill in The
Music Man. "People say I have a nice feel for voices. Well, let
me tell you, there's nothing like the lesson of singing Harold Hill, finishing
the entire dance routine in the middle — you're dancing across the library
tables and all of that, then you suddenly get back to 'Maaa-aaaaa-rian'" —
he pants repeatedly on the rest — "'Madame libraaa-aaa-rian' [panting
again]." Taking a conducting class at London's Royal Academy of Music with
Edward Downes, he filled in when a singer was ill, working his way through the
thorny lines of the Captain in Wozzeck. He performed the deeply odd vocal part
in HK Gruber's Frankenstein!!
at Carnegie Hall, which he was planning to conduct, when a travel delay kept
Gruber from doing the part himself. And, he says, he did the lion's share of
the English translation for the Met's premiere production of Janácˇek's The Makropulos
Case, which also served as his Met debut.
Whatever else Robertson may do in his Met career, he'll always be
associated with the sad, frightening opening night of that production. Tenor
Richard Versalle, portraying the law clerk Vítek, climbed a ladder, suffered a
cardiac arrest and fell to the floor, dead. The performance ended, just a few
minutes after it had begun, with Robertson calling out from the podium in a
sweet, comforting voice, "Richard, are you all right?" For those of
us in the audience, accustomed to singers hanging on wires in Philip Glass's The Voyage,
it had first appeared as if Versalle fell in slow motion. Robertson, oddly,
initially thought the same thing, even though he knew it wasn't true.
"That's what everybody thought, because of the way he let go and didn't
try to save himself. I still viscerally remember the experience of slowing the
tempo down because he wasn't singing and hadn't gotten the cue. The violins
were trilling, so they just kept changing bow."
Asked how he managed even to try to conduct the production again,
he answers, "I think it would have been much harder if this had been an
opera like L'Elisir
d'Amore. My first Così Fan Tutte coincided with the Gulf War in
1991. And how, as a conductor, could you do this kind of thing, with the
pretend going-to-war? But I was lucky enough to come across George Steiner's
book The
Death of Tragedy, and reading it between rehearsals somehow put into
perspective the whole human drama. And in a way I couldn't explain in words but
could explain in music, it made sense to be doing the Così.
I think, with hindsight, it's important to remind ourselves that, thank
goodness for Mozart, at these moments when we're not very proud of our actions
and how we behave, Mozart reminds us that being human is not all about the bad
things. And that we're made up of these amazing emotions, and we can get
totally fixated on one thing, which can make us ridiculous, yet this is part of
the human story, the human drama. With Makropulos Case you need
to focus on what the opera is actually about, which is the fact that it's all
ephemeral. And that is what makes it so beautiful." 
WILLIAM R. BRAUN is a pianist and writer based in Connecticut.
