‘There’s No Line Between Traditional and Contemporary:’ Bass-baritone Gerald Finley on Exploring New Music
New carols were being composed for Christmastime choir. New musicals were being written for the school band. And Finley, then a young musician in Ottawa, Canada, got a chance to perform them all.
It put Finley in a mind to question what classical music could be—and what new possibilities might lie across the horizon.
“At one point, I remember as a teenager thinking, ‘Well, why do we still have violins? And bassoons? And all these really old instruments in the orchestra?’” Finley explains in a Zoom interview from the U.K.
Soft-spoken, with a pair of half-rimmed glasses perched upon his nose, Finley is once again contemplating those horizons, as the Grammy winner prepares to perform a new opera this September: John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra. Finley plays the role of Mark Antony, a general whose love affair with the pharaoh Cleopatra triggers the collapse of the Roman Republic.
It’s all new music to sing, with no previous performances to compare to, nor recordings to rely upon. But that’s not a problem for Finley. As he sees it, debuting fresh work is what he’s been doing from the start.
“My experience with new music has been from the very, very, very beginning of my singing career. There's no line between traditional or contemporary for me. All that’s important, as I've grown into it, really has been about the communication,” Finley says.
“The composers and storytellers—the librettists, lyricists, what have you—what is their relevance and how are they making those ideas speak to an audience?”
From Boy Chorister to British Choir
It’s a question that has followed Finley his entire life. As a boy chorister and bass clarinet player in his school band, Finley grew up musing how classical music might harness the power of pop culture.
He remembers his sisters were big on rock ’n’ roll and singer-songwriters like Carly Simon and Bruce Springsteen. It left him wondering, “What’s the transition between the world that I’m involved in and the world that they’re listening to?”
As Finley grew older, he considered pursuing a career in veterinary science. But music won out. And when it came time for university, Finley chased his dreams across the pond to King’s College in Cambridge, England, home to one of the world’s most renowned male choirs.
Finley describes King’s College as a hotbed of musical activity: There were budding composers and amateur musicians everywhere, performing in university orchestras and small chamber groups. Some students organized opera societies. It was an energizing, youthful scene.
And there, Finley would meet artists like George Benjamin, a student of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen. At the time, Benjamin was putting music to T.S. Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral. Finley would be among the first to sing it.
“So there I was, working with a composer who has since become a major part of the British and international composing scene,” Finley recalls. “I’ll never forget when he burst out of his room and ran across the grass, clearly in an elated mood.”
His friend’s erratic behavior caught Finley’s attention. “I stuck my head out of the window and said, ‘George, what’s going on?’” He remembers the composer crying back: “I’ve just written a C major chord in root position!”
The memory still makes Finley laugh: “For him, that was a huge triumph to write the most basic harmony, because he had been avoiding it for many, many years.”
A Chorus Member Turned Leading Man
By 1986, Finley had joined another prestigious English musical institution: Glyndebourne, the countryside mecca for fans of Mozart’s opera. Finley got his start in the chorus.
But as his star in the opera industry rose, he found his career developing into a “dichotomy.” On one hand, he had forged a reputation as a Mozart singer, playing all the classic characters: the trickster Figaro, the lecher Don Giovanni.
But on the other, he had a burgeoning business performing 20th century English composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten—the latter of whom was still alive and composing when Finley was young.
“So I had my teeter-totter of activity,” Finley explains. “The first real contemporary piece that I sang wasn't until Mark-Anthony Turnage came to me.”
Turnage, a British composer, had adapted a play called The Silver Tassie, the story of a young athlete who becomes paralyzed in World War I. Finley was cast as the lead in the world premiere.
“It was pretty much an anti-war piece,” Finley explains. But, he says, plans to tour the opera to the United States had to be scuttled. “Before we could get to Dallas, 9/11 happened, and the anti-war sentiment was not as, shall we say, marketable as it had been in its London premiere.”
Still, it proved a turning point. Finley says his association with new music became “pretty profound” from that point forward, thanks in part to his bond with opera director Peter Sellars.
Finley and Sellars had first worked together at Glyndebourne, when Sellars had arrived to direct a 1990 production of The Magic Flute.
It was Sellars who later recruited Finley to perform in the U.S. premiere of composer Kaija Saariaho’s very first opera L’Amour de Loin or Love from Afar. And it was through Sellars that Finley developed a relationship with Antony and Cleopatra composer John Adams.
Sellars had been working at the time on the libretto for a new opera, one that would tell the story of the first atomic bomb. Adams had been commissioned to write the music. And they agreed that Finley should be considered for the lead role: that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
An Encounter with John Adams, ‘Whipping Through Town’
The opera was practically complete by the time Adams and Finley finally met in person. It was the spring of 2005, and Finley was busy with a production of Don Giovanni at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. He remembers that Adams “was whipping through town,” stopping only briefly. His visit came as a surprise.
“We met in my hotel room, and he just wanted to hear me sing seven or eight phrases of what he had written,” Finley recalls. But the singer balked. The music had just been written, and Finley hadn’t had a chance to learn it yet.
“Just alone with the composer, without any piano, without any context at all, there was no sense that I was going to do any service to the music that he had written,” Finley explains. “I wasn’t going to get the notes right, first of all.”
So Finley offered a compromise: Why not come to hear Don Giovanni instead? Finley figured it would give Adams a more accurate assessment of his voice.
“He maybe only came to the first half,” Finley laughs. But they soon struck up a correspondence. Finley would send Adams recordings of the new music, with suggestions about what he found difficult to sing, and Adams would respond with alternatives.
But often, they ended up back at square one, with Finley realizing that “the original was perfect after all.” Finley chuckles: “He’s teased me about it ever since.”
On October 1, 2005, the curtain rose on the finished product: a new opera, Doctor Atomic. It was a hit for Adams, Sellars, and Finley.
The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Doctor Atomic for its “wrenching, sinewy musical genius,” naming it a masterpiece on opening night. The New York Times made particular note of Finley’s “charismatic” performance, “vividly portrayed” and sung “with burnished tone.”
Finley says his philosophy is to approach every performance like a world premiere—whether it actually is or not. “This is my take on what Verdi has done, on what Mozart has done, what Aribert Reimann has done,” he explains. “It’s never been done like this before.”
A ‘Soldier in the Field,’ Finley Returns With Another Premiere
Antony and Cleopatra will be Finley’s second John Adams world premiere—and his second appearance on the San Francisco Opera stage. And just like J. Robert Oppenheimer, his new character is also a man of the military. It bleeds into how Finley describes himself.
“I am the soldier in the field,” Finley says of his role as a performer. “It’s not a war, but I'm in the cultural battle, in the cultural scene of making people think, ‘Let’s try and make a better world.’”
Finley describes Antony and Cleopatra as a mirror for today’s geopolitics, as well as the challenges of balancing love and duty. “It’s a piece for our time and a piece for all time, as it must have been for Shakespeare,” he says, referencing the opera’s source material.
Finley’s character Mark Antony is a married man who rules the Roman Republic as part of a delicate military alliance. But the truce is starting to fracture. The young leader Caesar is eager to consolidate power, and Antony finds his allegiances—and attentions—split between Rome and Egypt, where his lover Cleopatra resides.
“The way to defeat Mark Antony would be to get him to love you,” Finley says. “You have this great warrior undone by love or infatuation or lust.”
Finley points out that Shakespeare often puts his characters in positions where their most cherished beliefs about themselves are undermined in some powerful way. Antony fits squarely in that paradigm: He’s a honorable man compelled to abandon honor for love.
The opera’s libretto includes text from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Virgil’s The Aeneid—though Finley explains that the opera has taken creative license in boiling the action down to two fleet acts.
“It’s very cleverly put together,” Finley says, gesturing to another opera he’s known for, Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. That composer likewise took liberties in distilling Shakespeare’s work. “There’s Iago’s [aria] ‘Credo,’ which I rejoice on every time I sing it, but it is a complete fabrication. It doesn’t exist in the Shakespeare at all.”
But Finley sees the overlap between Verdi and Adams as going beyond their Shakespearean inspirations. He detects a connection in the precision they deploy through their music.
“John seems to have special talent in making things seem very, very difficult when you're learning it,” Finley laughs. “And then when you do learn it, you find yourself really enjoying not the cleverness of it but the simplicity, the directness of it. He doesn't waste a note. He's very much like Verdi in that regard: Everything means something. It's great.”
Already, Finley is looking ahead to future productions of Antony and Cleopatra, including a stop in Barcelona where Adams himself is set to conduct. An ancient tale, told with new vigor, it exists on that hazy horizon where labels like traditional and contemporary start to dissipate and blur. And that, after all, is what Finley has been drawn to from the start.
Follow Grammy winner Gerald Finley on social media, and see his live performance in the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra, opening September 10, 2022.