One of the biggest challenges for young conductors is very easy to explain. They need to find a way to get themselves in front of an actual orchestra. Because, in college, they will spend a lot of time conducting two pianists at two pianos. While doing that, they have to imagine a full stage and pay acute attention – as they would with an actual orchestra – to where the instruments would all be positioned, and show they can communicate with players who are not actually there.
Irish conductor Killian Farrell, who next season becomes generalmusikdirektor (general music director) of the Staatstheater in Meiningen, at the southern end of the German state of Thuringia, found a radical solution to the problem.
He had been a member of Dublin’s Palestrina Choir and, after his voice broke, filled the gap by paying more attention to his piano playing and then falling in love with opera, an experience sparked by buying Georg Solti’s recording of Strauss’s Salome with Birgit Nilsson in the title role. At 14, he says, he was “looking for any escape from suburban Dublin”, and Salome became “a real fixation of mine”.
He became “a real recording nerd”, and reading about Solti’s time as a kapellmeister in Germany (literally a person in charge of making music, and the formal title of conductors in German opera houses), he realised “Okay. I love playing the piano. I”m completely enthralled in the sound world of Strauss and Salome. And there are places where they will pay you, in Germany, to sit down every day and coach singers in this music.”
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His biggest musical spur, however, came from a much earlier composer, Bach. He got a gift of Bach’s major choral works in recordings by Masaaki Suzuki’s Bach Collegium Japan. And, driving home in the car, he played the first CD of the St John Passion, “and it really did change my life”.
He explains: “I thought from that moment there is nothing I want to do more than be responsible for a performance of this music. Conducting was of course what I meant. But I just wanted somehow to get inside that music and be a part of it. Not singing or just playing, but a more general thing.”
He persuaded his local parish to sponsor a performance of the St John Passion as part of their 50th jubilee celebrations. “I would put it on with professional musicians in the orchestra, professional soloists, and with an amateur choir that did not exist, but that I would form for the occasion. I think I was about 15 then. They did it. It was really amazing.”
His parents, he said, “used to have to come to rehearsals, because I was under 16, which is the child safeguarding age. They didn’t sing. But whenever I would be at the rehearsals – at the beginning trying to tell the 12 people who had come up to sing, trying to convince them that I knew what I was doing – my parents would be sitting at the back reading a book.”
He got great help along the way. The tenor John Elwes went through the Bach score with him for six hours. “He instilled in me the importance of musical detective work.” He got breaks from conductors David Brophy (in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus), Fergus Sheil (in John Adams’s Nixon in China), John Wilson (as chorus master for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra’s opera performances), and from opera director Vivian Coates (becoming chorus master of Coates’s Lyric Opera Productions). And he studied for a music degree at TCD.
If you’re unlucky, which I very often have been, as a young kapellmeister, you will not have any rehearsals whatsoever
But at age 22, he says, “I thought, I really know nothing. At the very beginning it’s easy. Because one really doesn’t realise the abyss of ignorance. I thought, this is not good. I need to become educated. I’d gone to Europe a few times for master classes with conducting professors. They weren’t interested in me. They thought I was ... I don’t know what they thought, but I wasn’t having much resonance in terms of finding the right teacher for me. I think they may also have viewed an Irishman with suspicion. Because it’s not necessarily a country that educates conductors, if I could put it like that.”
So he took a sideways weave, and got a place in London’s National Opera Studio as a répétiteur. He was grossly underqualified in comparison with his colleagues. But, “In the second half of the year I realised I had gotten so much professional experience in Ireland that I had a sort of instinct for things that you can’t necessarily learn at a conservatory. I began to see that the gap actually wasn’t so large.”
After London he harked back to the idea of becoming a kapellmeister in a German opera house and, after a stint as a prompter in Darmstadt, he managed to get his toe in the door through a last-minute audition as a répétiteur at Theater Bremen. He explains the system he had opted to work in. “Every opera house in Germany and in the German system, including Austria and Switzerland, is a repertoire house. They all have a fixed ensemble of solo singers. It can range from eight upwards. In Stuttgart, where I have been working since, it’s 40.”
These singers, he says, “will take the vast majority of the roles in any given season. Because it’s a repertoire house, we play a different opera every night. In Bremen we did eight operas a year. In Stuttgart we play 30. Every night the audience has the opportunity to see a different piece. Things aren’t particularly well-rehearsed if they have already been rehearsed as a new production.”
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The rehearsal time goes mostly to the year’s new productions, “for which a piece is rehearsed from beginning to end for eight weeks, with singers and orchestra, very thoroughly, and when it comes out it’s a big event. But if that piece comes back the following season, or five seasons later, or even in the case of some productions 50 years later, it will normally just be ‘revived’ in a week.” Not by the original director, he explains, “but by an assistant director, who may have worked on the original production, or who may watch a DVD and read the directing book about where everyone should stand and when. Because the orchestra in theory know the piece you might only have one or two orchestral rehearsals if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, which I very often have been, as a young kapellmeister, you will not have any rehearsals whatsoever. You’ll just go on and do the performance.”
There are consequences to the system. “This is why the standard in German opera houses can vary astoundingly. I’ve experienced things I couldn’t have thought possible in a very bad way. But I’ve also had nights where nothing should work because no one had ever met each other before, and yet, if you’re working at a high level and everyone is on the same sheet, you can have the most incredible experience.”
He tells me the story of how in one production he was required to climb a ladder from the pit to the stage, and play piano to accompany singers in a Schumann duet. The long series of misadventures meant that although the tenor was on the stage, he had no voice, and his replacement, singing from the side, did not know the song. So Farrell had no option but to sing it himself to keep the show on the road.
He had a lucky break in Bremen where, although the theatre had all the conductors it needed, he got to conduct Dvorak’s Rusalka as a last-minute stand-in. It went well enough for him to get another opportunity, a single performance, without rehearsal, of Shostakovich’s incredibly difficult, shattering, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
“I was so hubristic back then,” he explains, “that I said, yes, of course. I hadn’t played it. I didn’t speak Russian. I hadn’t heard it before. I knew nothing about it. I had about two months to learn it, which is about enough time to get through it but not much else.”
“The performance began and ended,” he says, “and we didn’t have to stop.” But he made enough of an impression to get 20 performances later, including core repertoire, and was eventually appointed first kapellmeister, with responsibility and rehearsal time for his own productions.
After Bremen he climbed the ladder again in Stuttgart, where he tells of conducting his first Tosca “with Carmen Giannattasio and Lucio Gallo. He’d done Scarpia 260 times, she had sung the title role over 100 times. And Tosca is not rehearsed in Stuttgart.”
Verdi castrated Macbeth in terms of his ruthlessness, but made him a much more three-dimensional figure than he is readily seen as in the spoken drama
In September, aged 29, and still without formal training in conducting, he takes over the top musical job in Meiningen, where he will programme orchestral subscription concerts as well as plan and conduct operas. He has nine operas to conduct for the first time before the end of the year and, with disarming frankness, he says, “I’m at the limit of what I can realistically assimilate.”
For the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival he will have assimilated Macbeth, “One of Verdi’s most extraordinary operas.” The composer was setting Shakespeare for the first time, setting a text he regarded as sacred. “But,” says Farrell, “he was also very specific about what he wanted from the libretto. There’s maybe 20 per cent in the opera of the text from the play. He focused on Lady Macbeth first and foremost, who is the central actor in the entire drama.”
In some senses, he suggests, “Verdi castrated Macbeth in terms of his ruthlessness, but made him a much more three-dimensional figure than he is readily seen as in the spoken drama. Verdi’s Macbeth is a character who, from the beginning, is already wracked with guilt about the fact that fate has chosen him to have to follow this path. The music makes this clear.
“The third major character, as Verdi saw it in the play, is, in the opera, the character of the witches. In the play there are three, in the opera there’s a chorus, written in three parts, of course. When he rewrote the opera for Paris in the 1860s he was psychologically able to penetrate much deeper into the characters than he had done before. He replaced some four-square passages with music of the most sublime profundity. The colour of the opera is unrelentingly dark. There is not one moment of joy that isn’t overshadowed.”
The whole piece, he says “is a pressure cooker”.
Killian Farrell conducts Verdi’s Macbeth at the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival, which runs in Lismore and the surrounding area from Monday, May 29th, to Monday, June 5th. See www.blackwatervalleyopera.ie
