Felicity Lott

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is one of Britain's best-loved sopranos, Dame Felicity Lott. After a breakthrough role in the Magic Flute in 1975, she built an international career, performing at opera houses and concert halls all around the world, singing works by composers including Strauss, Schubert and Mozart.

0:47At home, she was seen frequently on television, starred at many BBC proms concerts, and was made a Dame in 1996. She was also the recipient of the Légion d 'Honneur, France's highest cultural award.

1:05Following a recent diagnosis of cancer at an advanced stage, Felicity Locke came to BBC Broadcasting House to look back on her distinguished career in music.

1:24Felicity Lott, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much. It is really wonderful to have you with us here today. How are you feeling, given the state of your health? Well, just at the moment, pretty good, I have to say. They just put me on steroids, and I think I wish I'd been on them all my life, because I feel quite lively and awake. I'll probably disprove that as we go through this, but anyway. No, I'm in an extremely good place and I can't understand it because I'm not very well. I've had, well, I had a dreadful diagnosis last year, which knocked me flat. It certainly isn't great now, but it's been amazing.

2:05I've had the time to think and to look back and think, my goodness, you lucky girl. You've met all these wonderful people and you've had a wonderful life. You've been all over the world. Ah, I can't believe my luck. Well, I'm going to be encouraging you to do some more looking back over the course of this interview. Your first choice of creative influence for this cultural life is your parents. Were they a big musical influence on you? Yes, but they were amateur musicians. My dad played sort of pub piano. He could sit down and play anything on the piano. Not quite anything, no. Well, sing songs.

2:42Beethoven, not so much. More sing songs? More sing songs. Musical? Yes, I'll be loving you always and all those kind of things. A, you're adorable, B, you're so beautiful. You know, all the words of those. And my mother had a lovely voice and she used to sing One Fine Day, Un Belle Die from Puccini's whatever that's from. So this was an upbringing in Cheltenham? That's right. In Gloucestershire? Yes. There was a field at the bottom of the garden and a railway that ran along the line at the bottom of that field. And it was, in my memory, very happy. There was always music at home. They were always rehearsing something downstairs when I was going to sleep or trying to.

3:21I took quite a long time to arrive. They got married in 1941, I think, and I turned up in 47. And my mother had a little girl to dress up and she used to enter me for dressing up competitions. I read that your father was the youngest of five himself. He grew up in an orphanage, I read. So not a privileged family background. No. He had a jolly hard start, my dad, because he was sent off to the railway workers' orphanage in Derby, which was pretty hard in those days. It was actually a good school. They had school uniform and they had great discipline. He told stories about coming down and breaking the ice in the wash basins and swapping around the crusts of bread.

4:04It was quite Dickensian sounding. Where did he learn music then? Was he self-taught? I don't know. I think it was in the family generally. I don't know. He died in 1988. And my mother died in 2016 on leap year day, so the 29th of February. Trust her to be different. She comes around once every four years. She was wonderful, my mother. And what about her creative influence on you as a girl? You say she sang and she was singing arias and it was Madame Butterfly you were singing. Yes, she sang that, but she also sang lots of popular songs. Dad wrote a song for her, actually recorded it. My sister found it.

4:43But she took me to Cavendish House in Cheltenham and you could record a voice. This is way back in 1949. So when you were two? When I was two, I recorded for my grandmother's Christmas present Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Had a very shiny nose And if you ever saw it You would even say it close Or all of the other ladies Used to laugh and call his name I mean, do you recognise it as you? Is there something about the tone, the delivery in any way? I don't recognise it as me. It's all in tune, which is quite surprising. I've got another recording which I looked for but failed to find when I was 12, I sort of recognised that.

5:43But it's frightfully posh. So it's... I knew an elf in the burnham tree Swaying so tenderly, swaying so low It's really funny. I couldn't find it anyway. You had elocution lessons as a child, didn't you? Every lesson in the book, I think my mother was determined she was going to make something out of me. Elocution lessons, piano lessons, singing lessons as soon as anybody would teach me and violin lessons. So you were her project? Yes. And I was an only child for eight and a half years. And then my sister arrived. So there's a lot invested in you at a young age. Yes. So a lot of expectations. Did you enjoy all those lessons?

6:23Not the piano lessons, because they were with a great aunt who lived in a very dark, frightening house, and she had a grey parrot called Joseph. I hated going there. And when I played the wrong notes on the piano, as I mostly did, she would wrap me over the fingers with a wooden ruler. So, I mean, what's to like about that? You were sort of rubbing your hands as you were remembering that story, as if you could still feel the ruler wrapped over your knuckles. But I quite like the elocution lessons with, what was she called? I can't remember. Mrs Barraclough, I think. I think she taught Diana Dawes.

7:02What was school life like? Was your talent for singing recognised and nurtured there at a young age? Yes, it was. I went to Pates Grammar School in Cheltenham. It was all girls then. Did you have extracurricular singing lessons or was it just at school? I think Mum sent me for singing lessons when I was about 12. Outside school, yes. And she said, it's too early to teach you to sing, but I'll teach you to breathe. It was actually quite a useful thing to learn how to do. I was going to say, that stands you in good stead as an opera singer, doesn't it? Absolutely. It's so much about breathing. Yes.

7:34But if this talent was spotted at such a young age and you were, you know, this perfect pitch at the age of two, were you already as a child thinking, I might be able to be a singer? I might make a living out of this as a grown-up? Absolutely not. I didn't correspond in any way to my idea of what a singer should be, what she should look like. I was tall and gawky and I wore specks. And we'd watch musicals on the TV with people like Mitzi Gaynor and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and they didn't look like me at all. Did you know much about opera at the time? No. So no exposure to opera, you weren't taken to?

8:13No. There wasn't a lot in Cheltenham, really. I think the first opera I ever saw was La Boheme, probably. But, no, I mean, you can't sing Your Tiny Hand is Frozen when you've got a great mitt like I've got. It's enormous. And nothing about me corresponded to anything that I thought was appropriate, really. I mean, I was one mass of complexes about this, that and the other. I went and spent a year in France and they used to say, is it cold up there, you know, or you've eaten too much soup? or they were always joking because I was always taller than anybody else. And what were you, just under six foot?

8:51Five foot ten and a half. But, you know, I wanted to be petite and be able to sit on people's laps without crushing them to death. And also, oh, I don't know, I was shy. That's one of the great things about getting older, I'm not so shy. But all through quite a lot of my early professional life, I was very shy and a walking apology. Why? Do you think the shyness is also linked to your height? Because, I mean, a lot of tall people in childhood are trying to kind of come down because they don't want to stand out. That's right. No, I didn't want to. Well, I mean, come on, you know, you want to be up there and it's nice when people clap.

9:32And obviously there's an exhibitionist side. But also, once you're up there on the stage, you're doing something you've learnt. You're putting across somebody else's words and obviously somebody else's music. and so you don't have that kind of inventive responsibility at least. I remember I think the first radio interview perhaps I ever did live, I was doing something in Wales and I went to do this interview and the lady said, do you have a lot of problems because of your appearance? And I said, sorry, what do you mean? And she said, because of your height. And I said, oh no, I've got used to bending my knees for tennis.

10:14I said, please don't put that out. And of course I realised it was live. But I mean, I did. You know, you've got a big frock. You can get shorter and shorter the closer to the tenner you get. The best ones were the trouser rolls. I didn't do many, but at least you could stand up straight.

10:36Your next choice for this cultural life, Felicity Lott, is France. And your career has owed so much to French music, to operetta, to the music of Offenbach and Poulenc and to other French composers. Do you trace all of that back to a love of the French language itself when you were young? Absolutely, yes. My mother loved it too because you're kind of in disguise, you know, you put on another language. It's an amazing feeling if you can do it. And she used to encourage us to try and speak French over one meal a week, two meals a week. Dad couldn't understand it, which was also quite fun, I suppose.

11:14So I loved the sound of it and the romance of it and the difference. You know, well, Robert is lovely. Robert is different. Raoul. and all these... I just fell in love with all these sexy sounds. And so it was... What I wanted to do for my career was be an interpreter. But unfortunately, my brain doesn't go from one language to another very fast. I can manage one at a time, but people would say, how do you say so-and-so in French? And I would know it, but I wouldn't be able to get it out quick. They'd have gone mad in Geneva if I'd been doing the translations. But you studied French, actually, rather than studying music, which is what people possibly would have expected you to have studied.

12:05No, I studied French. I went to university, to Royal Holloway College. If you didn't think you could become an interpreter, what were you going to do with your French language skills? I had no idea. I went to France for a year as part of the degree course, and I was an assistante d 'Anglais, so English assistant in a school in Voiron, I lived in the school and Voiron was about 15 kilometres or a bit more from Grenoble. And I was supposed to give English conversation classes to these reluctant teenagers who weren't much younger than me. And I had to stand in front of this class and think of things to talk about.

12:46And apparently I tried to teach them the rules of cricket, which my father thought was hysterical. Were you a good teacher, though? No. Hopeless. Why? Absolutely hopeless. Well, I've come from an all-girls school and then an all-girls university where they took men for the first time the year I went and they were a funny lot, most of them. And suddenly there were these gorgeous chaps who'd sit at the back of the class. They'd be about 17 and I was 20. And you'd think, oh, golly, you know, there's something else out there. I like this place. But, I mean, that's by the by. but I was embarrassed and shy.

13:28Well, I was going to say that shyness that you talked about before. It was desperate. So it was about standing in front of... I've got to say that, standing in front of an audience. Yes. A classroom is an audience. Yes. So how did you... Did you not worry when you moved into singing, when you started to make that move into the professional world of singing, that that is a big part of the job, standing in front of people? Yes, I think probably I was very nervous. But what was the transition then from teaching to singing? I went and enrolled, can't believe I had the naus to do it, at the Conservatoire in Grenoble, and I met this Madame Maximovic singing teacher who was super and sort of adopted me, more or less.

14:10She said, if you worked a bit harder at your singing, she was a singing teacher, maybe you could do something with singing. I see, so you had spare time as a teacher. Yes. But you still had a love of singing and you wanted to just develop it a bit further, but you had no professional ambitions. No, I don't think so. Well, I was awkward, you know, and hadn't had any drama training. So Madame Maximovich sent me on a summer course in Nice and I met lots of other would-be singers and I thought everybody would be nasty and ambitious and we were all the same. We just loved music and wanted to sing. So I came back to England and finished my degree and then got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music to have a go at singing.

14:52When you were at the Royal Academy, you won the Principal's Prize. I believe. Was that not a big boost to your waning confidence? It was a consolation prize, I think, because I couldn't win any competitions. So they gave me the principal's prize. I did a Handel opera. We did a performance of Athaliah. And all I can remember about that is it says, Blooming virgins, blooming virgins, blooming virgins. sorry about the voice people but I haven't warmed up anyway what's interesting though is you're talking about this sort of a lack of self-confidence lack of self-esteem as well to an extent and then you suddenly realise that you know opera is a calling and this is a very big demanding industry in a way isn't it a global industry were you not daunted by that or intimidated by the prospect of joining something so big and grand and demanding?

15:58I think I was just excited, you know. I never had an ambition thinking, you know, well, I want to, you know, at this age I want to be here or I want to sing at Las Gales or I want to do this or I want, you know, I never, or I want to do that opera even because mostly I didn't know them and probably still don't. So it's very difficult to be teaching people and they always say, I don't do teaching, I do coaching on things I know basically, but they will say, you know, what do you think I ought to be singing? And I have no idea, mostly pathetic. So I didn't have plans like that for myself.

16:34One of the things that fans and critics have loved about your performances over the years has been your acting ability. You know, you're a very expressive performer.

17:15How did you overcome those natural nerves, It was that sort of lack of confidence that you were talking about. I had the great fortune to eventually be accepted for something at Glyndebourne, and I worked a lot with John Cox, who directed... Well, the first thing I did was Capriccio on the Glyndebourne tour. John was wonderful for me because he's got music in his soul and he would have a reason for doing every movement and nothing would ever jar against the music. and in that particular opera you have to walk around the stage for about 20 minutes not singing and you listen to this glorious music and you think, well, what shall I do now?

17:56Where shall I go now? And he had a kind of choreography of it and he would suggest that I would do things and he'd say, well, you obviously can't do that. We'll have to find something else. Never sort of destructively, always encouraging and my confidence grew. You made your operatic debut as Pamina in the Magic Flute, I think at the English National Opera, so here in London at the Coliseum. What do you remember about that night? Well, I jumped in for Barbara Walker, who was indisposed. I'd sung Pamina in the Magic Flute in English at the Royal Academy of Music, and that had gone quite well. My father came, my parents came to see it, and Dad said, well, at least you didn't bump into anybody or knock over the furniture.

18:42So, I mean, you know, my acting skills were terrific. But I had the great good fortune of having done that opera in English in that translation. So I was the understudy and I knew it, which I have to admit was not inevitably the case with things I did at that sort of time of life. I mean, I was quite lazy, I think, or I was always doing something I shouldn't have been doing, like going out with somebody I shouldn't be seen with or something. I don't know. My first husband. And the day, I mean, they just rang up and said, You're on. Oh, gosh. So you go to the ENO and they put the costume on you and they put the wig on you, which was fantastic.

19:25I didn't look like me at all. It was a great Egyptian thing with this wonderful costume. And then you have to walk round the stage and work out where you go for the fire and water trials and who everybody is and meet Tamino and Sarastro and maybe your mother, the Queen of the Night. First night nerves? They didn't have time, really. Straight on? Straight on. I mean, I think jumping in is a wonderful thing to do because there's kind of no expectation of what you're going to do before, is there? Apart from the people that say, oh, God, why is that woman on and not the one who should be?

20:03We started this part of the programme by talking about your love of the French language, but opera singers, of course, have to sing in several languages all the time. how important is it for you to be able to speak and understand the languages that you're singing in? Very important. I was never any good at just learning sort of noises and that unfortunately kept me away from quite a lot of roles that I think I might have got somewhere near, some Janacek, for instance, and some Russian. Tatiana in Tchaikovsky's Onegin. I think I would have been able to play her from the kind of insecurity of the woman point of view, the vulnerability of her.

20:43But anything French you're happy with? Yes. Germans as well? German came later. I'd studied it at school and didn't like it. I thought it was guttural and ugly. And then one day Graham Johnson, who was my accompanist for years and years and adored and esteemed colleague, played me a recording of Lottie Lehman reading German poetry and it was so beautiful. And what about Italian, the operatic language of love? Not so much. The only Italian opera I sang was by Mozart, really. I mean, I can order my pasta and I can... But it's not a language that I'm confident in or happy in and I've learnt it a bit.

21:23Obviously, you have to. I'm good to be a singer, you've got to learn a bit of Italian. But does the understanding of the respective languages affect the way that you feel about the music too? Do you have an affinity with one nation's music over another? Yes. And it would be French and German. And English also. I did a lot of Britain, actually. I haven't done, actually, that much opera in French, really. Because quite a lot of it is too high and too showy and too, I don't know, too a completely different personality from mine. Not until latterly with the operatic things. But the German, after Rosenkavalier, I did Intermezzo at Glyndebourne.

22:02But I did it in Munich in German with Hermann Prey. It's a terrific piece, not done very often. Hard to learn, my goodness, that was hard to learn. So I went over for costume fittings earlier before we started the rehearsals and the lovely Bavarian lady who was designing the costumes, I couldn't understand a word she said and she wouldn't understand me and I thought she must think this woman is out of her mind trying to do this German opera in Munich.

22:43As you mentioned, you enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in 1969 and it was there that you met Graham Johnson, who became your accompanist over many decades.

22:58Has, tu, mein Herz, zu warmem Himmeledzunden? Hast, ich, in eine bessre Welt entrickt In a better world, enthroughed What made that musical partnership, that relationship, so special? Oh, well, we kind of thought of things the same way. I mean, Graham has the most extraordinary brain. A walking encyclopaedia is Graham Johnson. He came actually to play for one of my singing lessons at the Academy in, what, 1971? And we hit it off then. We were on the same wavelength. Well, it was with Graham that you set up the Songmakers' Almanac, wasn't it? Which was a project which sort of showcased so much of these songs, and particularly the German leader.

24:08That's right. It was Graham. I mean, I can't take any credit for it. I was one of the first four. It was Graham's idea. And because in those days you had to be somebody extremely well-known to do a solo recital and to have an audience. I mean, who would come to hear a newcomer? And he thought it would be fun to do songs and words and songs of different kinds, so he'd have Schubert and Noel Coward and a bit of Oscar Wilde to read. And we did duets, and it was with wonderful Anne Murray, mezzo, and Richard Jackson, fabulous baritone, an adored teacher and colleague, and Anthony Rolf Johnson, fabulous tenor.

24:54CHOIR SINGS MUSIC PLAYS

25:14Alongside your international opera, Grabe, you became so renowned for these solo recitals and particularly for the interpretations of German Lieder with the accompaniment of piano alone. does that feel more exposing than being on stage as part of a grand opera? Oh, yes. Much more. And I think if you don't sort of start doing it or take it up pretty early on, if you get used to all the disguises and the help of an opera and the direction and the orchestra and being far away, it's terrifying to stand, as it were, naked on stage, facing the audience and just be you, but try and act the various scenes, whatever it is.

25:57It's pretty scary, that. I mean, at the height of your career, were you still aware that you had a lack of self-confidence or was it just something that was pointed out to you that you were unusually self-deprecating? People used to get fed up with me apologising all the time, certainly. But I don't know. It's a very hard thing to get out of, you know, the self-deprecation stuff. And obviously, I mean, I know I've done good things, but you come off the stage, it's so odd. You think you've done a really good show and then somebody will say, well, I was a bit off tonight. Or you come off and you think you've done a really tough show and somebody will say, gosh, it was a wonderful show.