Thomas Allen says farewell from the stage
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Tonight, the British baritone Thomas Allen, aged seventy-nine, announced from the Glyndebourne stage that this had been his final performance; I wish I had been there. He had already informally announced his farewell to friends a few years ago, but Glyndebourne had tempted him back this year into “The Merry Widow”. It feels as if a significant part of my life has said farewell.
Allen was already in the ascendant at Covent Garden when I became a regular there just over fifty years ago. I remember in particular an October 1973 “Simon Boccanegra” starring Peter Glossop, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Boris Christoff in which the connoisseurs - rightly - singled out Allen’s incisive, dangerous Paolo and Robert Lloyd’s weighty, dark Pietro.
I see now how Te Kanawa, Allen, and Lloyd were a golden generation of Covent Garden singers: in 1975, Te Kanawa and Allen were Marguérite and Valentin, sister and brother, in Covent Garden’s first production for many years of Gounod’s “Faust”. Of the three, Allen was the most intelligent, the most versatile, and the most enduring. I’m lucky that I remember him in 1974 as a definitive Moralés (“Carmen”, with Te Kanawa as Micaëla) and definitive Schaunard (“La Bohème”) before he took larger roles; as the 1970s progressed, his first Marcello (“La Bohème”) was in a 1976 cast with Te Kanawa and Luciano Pavarotti; he soon became a classic Count in “Le Nozze di Figaro”, for many people a definitive Don Giovanni, and (with Ann Howells) a luminous Pelléas. He became a hauntingly poignant, brave, forthright Billy Budd; and a marvellously impressive, dependable Ned Keene in Elijah Moshinsky’s classic 1975 Covent Garden production of “Peter Grimes”. In 1979 (and in subsequent revivals), he was Papageno (virile, adorable, funny, vulnerable) in the new Covent Garden production of “Die Zauberflöte”; in 1981, he and Agnes Baltsa gave Guglielmo and Dorabella in “Così fan tutte” more human complexity than Te Kanawa and Stuart Burrows gave Fiordiligi and look Ferrando.
Later in the last century - and well into this century - he became an important, mordant Don Alfonso in “Così”. I saw him sing the role of the Marquis of Posa (Verdi’s “Don Carlos”) in three languages - in English at English National Opera, in the opera’s original French at Covent Garden, and in the usual Italian translation in San Francisco. He sang at the New York Metropolitan, La Scala, and many of the foremost international opera houses. Around 1989, I reviewed him (for the “FT”) in Poulenc’s song-cycle “Le Bal masqué” at the Wigmore Hall. And he sang for Glyndebourne, for Welsh National, for Scottish, and for English National Opera.
In French, German, Italian, and English, he planted words to eloquent effect. I’m sad I never caught him in one of his most admired roles: Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. But I’m happy to remember now, in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”, how he played Wagner’s Beckmesser: dangerous, conservative, affronted, malicious. The opposite adjectives applied to his Forester in Covent Garden’s first “Cunning Little Vixen” (1990), where all his largeness of spirit was apparent. English National Opera in the 1980s cast him as Prince Andrey (“War and Peace”); I remember how friends compared the nobility and beauty of his singing to the more aged sound of Norman Bailey as Prince Kutuzov - a comparison designed to celebrate two of the most affectingly human baritones of the day.
His wit and flair for intelligent characterisation continued into this century as he, so capable of mobility and heroism, showed an increasingly riveting capacity for buffo supporting roles, such as Prosdocimo in the 2005 Covent Garden “Turco in Italia”) and Faninal in “Der Rosenkavalier” and Baron Mirko Zeta (“The Merry Widow”); I saw him sing the latter two at the Met. He also served as the Chancellor of Durham University - a job where his predecessors had included another Covent Garden deity, Margot Fonteyn, and in the city of his native county. A great career; a great artist.
Sunday 28 July