I am shocked to read that Graham Vick, the pioneering opera director, has passed, at the young age of 67, from Covid-related complications.
Since the creation of the Birmingham Opera Company in 1987, he was an inspiration to all of us who think that the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ must not choose between bold artistic stands and outreach beyond the educated and wealthy audiences of the opera world; all of us who, in fact, think the total medium is all about creating new work for new audiences, and starting conversations.
This was a man who knew how to use the big stage like a master and had an international career – but as he told me when we met in Paris in 2015, he really was only excited to be challenged by the next show he was preparing for his audience in a warehouse in Birmingham, and mainly saw the glitz and glitter of the big houses as a way to keep the project that mattered most to him going in his home town.
His eager, erudite knowledge, his British tongue-in-cheek humour, and his commitment to the entangled forces of music and theatre will all be sorely missed.
When I wrote the program note for his production of Ernest Chausson’s take on the Arthurian legend (he hated the notion of the program note, and said the show was the only actual director’s note, but somehow he didn’t make me feel like an idiot for writing one), he insisted I end with the following image rather than all the ideas about politics, mythology, Wagner and Tolstoy we had been discussing; and if you didn’t know the man, please be informed this is what his grumpy idealistic genre-bending soul sounded like, and as a last tribute it fits him like a glove:
Arthur rises to the sky. It is not my mission to interpret this ascent for the audience, and I think it should remain open, although it is cyclical, and the end always goes back to the beginning. When we enter into the realm of mysticism – as is the case when a man, who was destroyed by his ideal, is himself transformed into an ideal for other men –, it really becomes a matter of each and everyone projecting his preferred answer anyway. But again, one must remember this is an opera about idealism. So the earth will be separated from the sky. And that is how a legend is born, which is, again, what this is all about. Like Charlton Heston leaving on horseback at the end of Anthony Mann’s El Cid: “… he rode out of the gates of history – into legend”!
>marginalia* 