Timothy Nolen Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Baritone Timothy Nolen

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Timothy Nolen (July 9, 1941 – August 31, 2023) was an American actor and baritone who had an active career in operas, musicals, concerts, plays, and on television for over four decades. He was the second actor to play the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway replacing Michael Crawford in October 1988. [Photo of program is shown below-right.] He left the production in March 1989 being replaced by operatic tenor and fellow Sweeney Todd and Phantom star Cris Groenendaal.

Nolen notably portrayed the title role in the first operatic presentation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Houston Grand Opera in 1984 and the role of Judge Turpin in a concert version of Sweeney Todd broadcast on PBS's Great Performances in 2001.

Nolen was born in Rotan, Texas, and began his career appearing in small supporting roles with opera companies in the United States during the 1960s. He made his debut at the San Francisco Opera as the Officer in the United States premiere of Darius Milhaud's Christophe Colomb on October 5, 1968. He appeared in several supporting roles with the company through 1973, including Gregorio in Roméo et Juliette, Marullo in Rigoletto, Montano in Otello, Morales in Carmen, Ned Keene in Peter Grimes, Schaunard in La Bohème, Sciarrone in Tosca, and the Wigmaker in Ariadne auf Naxos among others. He then portrayed leading roles at the SFO including Figaro in The Barber of Seville (1976, with Frederica von Stade as Rosina), Dr. Malatesta in Don Pasquale (1980, with Geraint Evans in the title role), and Dr. Falke in Die Fledermaus (1990, with Patricia Racette as Rosalinde). In 1981, he created the title role in Willie Stark by Carlisle Floyd. [More details about that work are below in this box.]

Nolen portrayed the title role in the first operatic presentations of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Houston Grand Opera and New York City Opera in 1984.

He made his Broadway debut in 1985 as Doyle in the original production of Larry Grossman's Grind; a portrayal for which he received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical nomination.

Nolen reprised the title role in Sweeney Todd at Chicago's Marriott Theatre in 1993, receiving a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for his portrayal. He has since played Sweeney Todd in numerous productions, including at the Goodspeed Opera House.

Nolen played the Comte de Guiche in Cyrano: The Musical (1994) on Broadway and later took over the role of Cyrano. [Photo of program is shown below-left.]

In 2001, Nolen performed the role of Judge Turpin in a concert version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with the New York Philharmonic. The production was broadcast on PBS's Great Performances. Starring opposite him were George Hearn as Todd, Patti LuPone as Lovett, Davis Gaines as Anthony, and Neil Patrick Harris as Tobias. He reprised the role later that year in a production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with Bryn Terfel in the title role. [A full list of his appearances with Lyric Opera is in another box farther down on this webpage.] He later played Turpin in 2012 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. In 2004, he returned to the title role at the New York City Opera opposite Elaine Paige as Mrs. Lovett.

His television appearances include guest star appearances in The Sopranos, Wildfire, and Guiding Light.

Nolen made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera on October 1, 1996 as Krusina in Bedřich Smetana's The Bartered Bride under the baton of James Levine. He has since returned to that house as Baron Zeta in The Merry Widow (2000–2001, with Plácido Domingo as Count Danilovich) and the One-Eyed Man in Die Frau ohne Schatten (2001–2002, with Deborah Voigt as the Empress).

* * * * *

Willie Stark is an opera in three acts and nine scenes by Carlisle Floyd to his own libretto, after the 1946 novel All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, which in turn was inspired by the life of the Louisiana governor Huey Long. The opera was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, which premiered it on April 24, 1981, in a production directed by Harold Prince and conducted by John DeMain, with Timothy Nolen as the title character. Also in the cast were mezzo-soprano Jan Curtis, tenor Bruce Ford, and bass Don Garrard. The original production was dedicated to the American radio journalist Lowell Thomas. Floyd made cuts to the score for a television presentation of the opera, and the edited version was shown on US public television in September 1981.

The opera was remounted in 2007 by the Louisiana State University Opera. The composer visited the university and advised on the production. The production was recorded and released on DVD, by Newport Classic.

The work generated some small controversy among music critics, as it draws upon elements of Broadway musical theater more than Floyd's other more traditionally operatic works. The involvement of Broadway director Harold Prince in the initial production contributed to the emphasis of these elements of the work. In the years since its premiere, this sort of blurring of boundaries between opera and Broadway musicals has become commonplace.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

As noted in the box above, the opera Willie Stark was first given in April of 1981. The following October, Timothy Nolen was appearing once again with Lyric Opera of Chicago, and we met at that time for an interview.

Since Willie Stark had just been televised, it seemed like the right place to start our conversation . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   [With a grin] My guest today is Willie Stark. Are you happy to be known as Willie Stark rather than Timothy Nolen?

Timothy Nolen:   [Laughs] It’s going to take some doing to get to the point where I’m just Willie Stark, but it’s fine by me. It was some of the finest work I’d ever done.

BD:   Is this the first world premiere you’ve been involved in?

Nolen:   Oh, no. I’ve done several, some in Europe and some in the States. But this is probably the best of the things that I’ve done. It’s such a powerful piece theatrically. I’m basically an actor who happens to sing, rather than the other way around.

BD:   So you want a more dramatic part rather than a more musical part?

Nolen:   If I had my choice, I’d take the drama. I’d rather sing Wozzeck than the Barber... although Rossini is one of my favorite composers because he was extremely theatrical.

BD:   When you sing The Barber of Seville, would you prefer to do it in an English translation so that there’s more contact with the audience?

Nolen:   I like singing in English a whole lot, particularly for an English-speaking audience. After all, if you’re dealing with a comedy, you like the idea of the immediate response.

BD:   To the jokes?

Nolen:   Right. We call it immediate gratification, but the same holds true, and maybe even more so, for drama. I do like singing in English, and much prefer it.

BD:   What are the particular problems of singing in English, if any?

Nolen:   There aren’t any. [Both laugh]

BD:   You just get out there and sing?

Nolen:   You get out there and you sing.

BD:   Do you work harder with the consonants in English?

Nolen:   No, absolutely not. You apply exactly the same technique to your diction in English that you do to Italian, or German, or French, or Spanish, or Russian, or anything else. I’m not being facetious about it. There really aren’t any problems in singing in English, no more than singing in Italian.

BD:   It just seems like Italian has more vowel sounds.

Nolen:   No, that’s not true. It’s a myth that’s been perpetrated on the public for a long time, and usually by singers who don’t want to take the trouble to learn an English translation to a piece. They say you can’t translate Bohème properly, but I’m sorry, they can be translated. I’ve sung excellent English translations of Bohème, for example. I like singing in English for American audiences.

BD:   My feeling is there should be both. There should be opera in the original, and opera in the translation.

Nolen:   I agree.

BD:   A friend of mine who is a Russian scholar has sent me recordings from Russia of Bohème and Faust and a few others in Russian.

Nolen:   Having worked in Germany, I’ve done The Barber of Seville and Pasquale and Bohème in German as well as the original.

BD:   Are the translations in Germany standardized?

Nolen:   Yes.

BD:   The problem is they’re not here. Singers have told me that they go from one small house to another small house, and the translation is similar, but it’s a little different.

Nolen:   They’re trying to make it better. This is also a problem in Germany, by the way. The translations are all standardized, and some of them aren’t very good. If you’re going to take the trouble to translate a work, you may as well do it the best possible way, and this is going to change over the years, as language, of course, changes. I don’t see anything wrong with learning different translations. After all, no one seems to mind doing different dialogue for Fledermaus, for example. [At this point we were interrupted by a phone call.] [Returning...] I’m going back to New York for three days in between performances.

BD:   How hard is that on the contemporary singer to flip back and forth going from place to place?

Nolen:   It’s not so bad in this case because it’s only an hour difference in time. But when you’re talking about going from here to Europe, or back and forth or from Europe to San Francisco, for example, then it gets tough. I’d like to go back to the old days where you did it by ship.

BD:   Maybe should have that as part of your contract, that you get steamship tickets from New York to London, and then go off elsewhere. [Both laugh] We were talking about translations, so would you sing Willie in German for the audience in Berlin?

Nolen:   Sure, you bet.

BD:   You would take the trouble to learn it in German?

Nolen:   Oh sure, why not. First of all, as a new piece, and particularly in Germany, we’re talking about a population that doesn’t speak English, particularly a specialized English like this is, meaning Southern English.

BD:   Would you translate that into come kind of Southern German?

Nolen:   I’m really not sure how you would do it, but I imagine no.

BD:   Might it come up as the same kind of Viennese dialect that Baron Ochs uses in Rosenkavalier?
nolen

Nolen:   Right, which is not the same flavor that you want for Willie. No, it’s a very specialized type of English, so I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t just do it in Hochdeutsch. I have a story about that... I was doing the Ponnelle production of Magic Flute in Cologne, and Jean-Pierre wasn’t there. One of the house directors had taken it over. The Tamino was also from Texas, and so during the rehearsal, when we began the dialogue after my opening aria, we looked at each other, and winked, and started in speaking it with a Southern drawl. Nobody laughed. Nobody cracked a smile, and they scheduled us for coaching! [Much laughter] We explained very carefully that this was a joke, but they really weren’t quite sure about it.

BD:   “Das ist ein Witz!” [This is a joke]

Nolen:   When I first went to Germany, it took me a long time to find the word for ‘joke’. ‘Witz’ is the German word for a ‘pleasantry’, but ‘joke’ doesn’t exist in the German language, as we soon found out.

BD:   As Papageno you could come out in cowboy boots, and lasso the monster. [More laughter] Getting back to Willie Stark, is it scheduled for productions elsewhere?

Nolen:   I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Carlisle about it since we finished the television taping, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t go to Europe. I’d really be surprised if it wasn’t picked up here in the States very shortly.

BD:   Do you think it’s that strong a piece?

Nolen:   Oh yes, I do.

BD:   Do you think that having been on television will help it travel more?

Nolen:   Yes, I do. It’s so very different. You certainly couldn’t call it an opera in the ordinary sense by any means. We had to develop an entire new style of delivery for a lot of it. For example, Carlisle would write notes in the staff with X’s, and would say, “I want these on pitch, but I don’t want the folks to know that you’re singing.”

BD:   It’s more than Sprechgesang?

Nolen:   Yes. It’s not quite Sprechstimme, and it isn’t quite parlando. It’s all on pitch, but there are sections that you really don’t know that we’re singing, even though we are. We used our speaking voices, and then he would lead from that into something a little more sung, a parlando type thing, into singing, into emotional high points and full-throated real Italian type sound.

Sprechgesang (spoken singing) and Sprechstimme (spoken voice), more commonly known as speak-singing in English, are expressionist musical vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, Sprechgesang is directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing (in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose like speech), whereas Sprechstimme is closer to speech itself (because it does not emphasize any particular pitches).

Sprechgesang is more closely aligned with the long-used musical techniques of recitative or parlando than is Sprechstimme. Where the term is employed in this way, it is usually in the context of the late Romantic German operas or "music dramas" that were composed by Richard Wagner and others in the 19th century. Thus, Sprechgesang is often merely a German alternative to 'recitative'.

The earliest compositional use of the technique was in the first version of Engelbert Humperdinck's 1897 melodrama Königskinder (in the 1910 version it was replaced by conventional singing), where it may have been intended to imitate a style already in use by singers of lieder and popular song, but it is more closely associated with the composers of the Second Viennese School. Arnold Schoenberg asks for the technique in a number of pieces. The part of the Speaker in Gurre-Lieder (1911) is written in his notation for Sprechstimme, but it was Pierrot lunaire (1912) where he used it throughout, and left a note attempting to explain the technique [shown in the next paragraph]. Alban Berg adopted the technique and asked for it in parts of his operas Wozzeck and Lulu.

In the foreword to Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg explains how his Sprechstimme should be achieved. He explains that the indicated rhythms should be adhered to. Whereas in ordinary singing a constant pitch is maintained through a note, here the singer "immediately abandons it by falling or rising. The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either."

BD:   Tell me about the character of Willie Stark. Do you like him as a person?

Nolen:   Someone asked me at one point if I thought Willie was a good man or a bad man. His great strength is in the fact that he’s just a man, and like all of us, he’s good and bad. I’m not copping out on you. It’s not that he’s good or bad. It’s that he’s extraordinary. He’s simply different.

BD:   Does he really think he’s doing good for the people? [Note that the following two photos of Willie Stark are for sale from a commercial site, hence their watermarks.]

Nolen:   Oh yes, very much so. Without any question, and it’s the trap that so many people in power fall into, believing that the good justifies the means. He doesn’t care how he does it, which is exemplified by his big final scene on the steps of the Capitol, in which he says, “I have won,” which means we have won. “Now we have the power, and now things are finally going to be right. All these things that I had to do to get the power, they’re finished, they’re done. My enemies are crushed, and if anybody stands in my way, I’ll crush them again. Now it’s going to be right. No man’s children shall want for school, and no poor man’s land shall be taxed. Nobody shall be hungry just because he can’t work any longer.” He really believes that Utopia is about to burst on Louisiana... or whatever state it happens to be.

BD:   It’s sort of a no-state then. Do you have trouble relating this? There are so many details that do relate to a certain state, yet you’ve got to keep it more general.

Nolen:   We never really thought about it much. Actually, I really did think of it more in terms of Louisiana simply because the undercurrent of Huey Long is so strong. In fact, the first day of rehearsal in Texas, one of the members of the chorus came up to me and said, “I really hope that you do this good, and really do it good, because when I was five years old, my daddy, who was a dirt farmer in North Louisiana, took me to Baton Rouge, to the Capitol, and pointed to the bullet holes in the stone, and said, ‘Now, honey, I want you to remember this forever, that a very great man died here.’ It still runs long and hard and strong in Louisiana.”

BD:   Do the Louisianans approve of Willie Stark, and the way the opera has molded him?

Nolen:   Oh yes, they liked it.

BD:   Were the TV ratings good?

Nolen:   They were. They were indeed. New Orleans carried a big publicity campaign for it. We got lots of viewers that night, and they liked it, simply because it pictured him as being a man who was doing his best, even though that best was often a little underhanded.

BD:   A little shady?

Nolen:   A little shady.

BD:   How much was Willie Stark a man of his time?

Nolen:   That’s a tough question. I would say that he was very much a man of his time, but I don’t think he would have been a great deal different now.

BD:   You think there could be a Huey Long now?

Nolen:   Oh, sure. Of course. Who knows? We may already have one. There’s a wonderful story about Huey... There was a man who owned a toll bridge that went over a river, and all the farmers in the area had to use this bridge to get their crops to market. It was a buck-a-head, and in those days that was no small sum. Huey sent one of his lieutenants down to buy the bridge and was going to open it up.

BD:   Make it free for the people?

Nolen:   Right, and the man wouldn’t sell. He was sitting on a gold mine. Finally, Long himself went down, and they were standing on the bridge discussing it. Huey was trying to get him to sell, and the man would not budge. He said, “Forget it, I’m not about to sell this bridge.” Long picked up a rock, and the guy backed off and said, “Wait a minute!” Huey said, “No, no, it’s all right. Just watch.” He took the rock and threw it over the bridge into the river about 20 feet away. He said, “You see where that rock hit? Well, you poor SOB, you’re broke right now and you don’t know it, because in a month, there’s going to be a brand-new bridge right there and a bypass road.” Sure enough, the new bridge was there, and the guy went bankrupt.

BD:   That’s how Huey would get anything he wanted. He would just buy it or take it. He would do that with people, too.

Nolen:   That’s exactly right.

BD:   How sorry are you for Jack Burden? I get the feeling that Willie really didn’t want to squash him.

Nolen:   Oh, no. Willie was a man of great compassion, great ruthlessness, terrifically hard-hearted, and extremely open at the same time. This is what made him such a wonderful character, because he was such a complex man. He’s Everyman. That’s what made him great. As an extraordinary man, a man of extraordinary intelligence and power and charisma, born into very poor circumstances, this often happens. In fact, it inevitably happens with men of his type. They find that because of their background, they cannot enter into an upper stratum of society, and they almost inevitably want to. They are not accepted because of that, and they can’t really go back to their roots, because they’ve come way beyond that. So they exist in a sort of limbo. What inevitably happens with an extraordinary person is that they tend to create their own world around them, and you get drawn into it. You can’t help but be changed in some way or another by coming in contact with a person like that.

BD:   So it’s more of a cosmic thing, where a new planet is formed, and he gets his own little solar system working around him?

Nolen:   Yes, with all the sturm und drang that goes on with a new planet, and the creation of a new world like that. Jack got caught up in it. He wasn’t strong enough to take care of it. Sadie gets caught up in it. Certainly, Anne Stanton, Judge Burden, Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy, all these characters are Willies’. They belong to him. They’re his people, and when he dies, when he’s killed, it’s all summed up in Sugar-Boy’s last line to Sadie. He says, “What’ll happen to us now, Sadie? What’s going to happen to us?”

BD:   What does happen to them? What happens the next day or the next month?

Nolen:   In his book, it’s all pretty well outlined. Sadie goes into a sanitarium and eventually gets her sanity back. She comes out, but she’s scarred forever by the experience. She eventually comes out of it and manages to make her way. Next to Willie, Sadie is probably the most extraordinary character in the show. She would have been Willie had she been a man in that time.

BD:   She molded Willie?

Nolen:   Yes. When Willie got away from her, Willie was just a cut above her in power and scope. But Sadie would have given him a good run for their money if she had been a man. You can imagine the kind of difficulties that any woman would have had in those times, in politics particularly.

BD:   If Sadie had been a man, would there have been a Willie? She says that she shaped Willie, but would it have just been her?

Nolen:   If Willie had been around, he would have been there and you would have known about it, regardless. He would have found someone to do for him what Sadie did.
nolen

BD:   So he found her, rather than she finding him and molding him?

Nolen:   I don’t know. People of that ilk tend to draw each other. It’s a real case of magnetism, both animal and sexual as well as intellectual.

BD:   So why didn’t they just get together?

Nolen:   They did. It’s implied rather strongly in the piece that they indeed were bedmates in the early days.

BD:   Why couldn’t Willie just leave it at that?

Nolen: Willie always has bigger plans. He’s always looking ahead. “When I get to the White House,” that’s what he’s talking about.

BD:   He wouldn’t have taken Sadie to the White House?

Nolen:   Maybe, maybe not, depending on how well she fit in with what he wanted to do. Remember, he takes people, and uses them, and then discards them if he no longer needs them.

BD:   When he discards someone, does he cast them off completely, or does he file them away to be used again later?

Nolen:   It all depends.

BD:   Does Willie plan two moves ahead, or five moves ahead?

Nolen:   Willie always plans every move ahead, the best move ahead. Someone asked a great chess master how many moves he plans ahead, and he said, “Only one. The best one.” [Both laugh] Sadie is a wonderful case. Senator Proxmire came back after the show in Washington and said, “You know maybe one or two Willies in your lifetime, but there are a million Sadies.”

BD:   How well was the opera received in Washington?

Nolen:   The Vice President said that it’s like it is. He loved it, said it’s a great show. He urged people not to miss it. Mostly the political community found it to be of great interest, and saw it many times. Inevitably they saw themselves or their colleagues somewhere in the show.

BD:   How long after these productions were on stage was the television taping?

Nolen:   We finished in Washington at the end of May, and about a week later we went back to Houston to tape it.

BD:   I’m asking about this because there are two completely different versions. They are really two different operas.

Nolen:   Actually, there are more than that.

BD:   There was one in Houston, then a middle opera in Washington, and then another one for the TV?

Nolen:   Right. There were actually even more than that, because a year before we went into rehearsal in Houston, Carlisle had a workshop version in Houston. It was about the same length, but it was a very different show. There were all kinds of arias and scenes that were cut and changed and reworked. That’s why he did it. That’s a problem nowadays with new works. Composers don’t have the opportunity to workshop their pieces, to put them up, to take a look at them, to find the faults, and to correct them. It’s an ongoing process, and you have to have it. It’s a very, very great problem nowadays. Certainly Chicago had that problem with Paradise Lost (by Penderecki). It’s just not fair to commission a work, and then the composer works in a vacuum. They have it put on stage cold turkey, without a chance to rework and rewrite for the stage, because the problems change when you put it on its feet.

BD:   Too bad you can’t play it out of town.

Nolen:   Yes. Of course, Broadway has had this luxury for years, and opera needs it desperately. When Willie was commissioned, the workshop version was planned.

BD:   Where was this done?

Nolen:   In Houston. Texas Opera Theatre did it on a much smaller stage.

BD:   Were you Willie, or was it a completely different cast?

Nolen:   No, it was a different cast. It was the Texas Opera Theatre people. There is a place to do it now in Connecticut, the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, which has had the playwrights conference for many years. They’ve been doing plays for years, including Equus and Bent. Some very, very great works came out of it. Three or four years ago, the Composer-Librettist Conference was initiated, and we developed new pieces. My wife, Paulette F. Nolen, is the artistic director and conductor. We put on and developed new pieces for stage and television. In fact, a piece that we did two years ago was based on Fellini’s 8½, and was called Nine. It is a musical comedy, and it won the Richard Rodgers Award. It’s going to get a production somewhere soon. I’m not sure where, but it’s in the works right now. We also did one of Lee Hoiby’s pieces called Something New for the Zoo, a one-act comedy. It’s very cute. This past season, we did another musical called The Adventures of Friar Tuck. It’s a Robin Hood legend from Tuck’s viewpoint.

BD:   I wonder if Tuck is really a Sadie.

Nolen:   Yes and no. The story goes that there never was really a Robin Hood, that he’s an invention of Tuck’s. Whenever Robin Hood is needed, he grabs some unsuspecting soldier and says, “I’m going to make you a hero,” and proceeds to educate him. We also did a piece for television called Rappaccini’s Daughter based on the Hawthorne story. This was the first time we started with television.

BD:   Now are these musicals, or operas, or are they all kinds of things?

Nolen:   All kinds of things. We call them music theater pieces.

BD:   So then each piece becomes its own form?

Nolen:   Yes. In working on Rappaccini’s Daughter for television, we made some really startling discoveries. First of all, high notes have absolutely no impact on television. You can’t appreciate them. There’s no way, unless you have a simulcast on the radio. The quality of the audio equipment for television is going to improve enormously over the next few years. [Remember, this conversation was held in the fall of 1981.] Sony has already got something coming up, and there’ll be others following suit, but high notes at this point have zero impact. So things written in a very high tessitura tend to be lost. Because of this, we often dropped things down an octave, or even two octaves sometimes. There was a scene I was playing with a tenor, and it was rather high. In considering camera angles, we were talking about close-ups on the face. After all, television is a medium for close-ups.

BD:   Singers are not particularly beautiful when they’re attacking a high note.

Nolen:   Not necessarily. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but the point was that the impact of the line is going to be lost. So what we did was drop it down two octaves. Obviously, I would never do this on stage. I wound up singing low G’s and low F’s and low E’s, which I’ve still got in my range because I started out as a bass baritone, but I would never sing those notes on stage. They just wouldn’t be heard over an orchestra in a big house. But you can do it on television, and it becomes wonderfully effective because the microphone is very close. I talk in that level anyway, so we got real, true, dramatic realism. You can whisper things and have them really come out. It was all a real eye-opener.

BD:   When I was watching Willie Stark on the TV, I was thinking how well it works for television. I was wondering, how much tinkering was there for the television, or how much would have just been lost on the big stage? Maybe Floyd inadvertently wrote a television opera!

Nolen:   I think he did. Carlisle would kill me for saying this, and I’ve told him this before, and he said, “No, no, no, that’s not true!” He’s the one who wrote the piece, but I still disagree with him, and that’s my right. I really think what Carlisle wrote was a wonderful film score to a play, and he did intend it that way. We didn’t want music to be at the fore all the time.

BD:   Did he know it was going to be on television when he was writing it?

Nolen:   They were talking about it, but nothing was settled right up until about a week before we did the taping. But he really wrote a wonderful play, and the music is not always at the fore. It often acts strictly as underscoring, underpinning to the theater. There are lines that are spoken. When we did this inspection, the music just simply laid back and let the theater happen, and happen hard, and it did. He saved the real music for the emotional and dramatic high points, and there it broke out like crazy and did wonderful stuff. When Paulette saw the opening, someone asked her how she liked the show, and just off the top of her head, she said it was a great movie, and she’s quite right. It’s a great movie.

BD:   Floyd made alterations and cuts for the television version?

Nolen:   Yes.

BD:   Which version is better, or which would you want to do again?

Nolen:   The television version is the best. It’s the tightest. There are still some things, in my opinion, that need to be tightened up some, but they’re minimal at this point.

BD:   If someone offered you that part but were insisting it be done in the original Houston version, would you do it?

Nolen:   Oh sure, I would do it, but it would be kind of silly to try to do it in the original version because it was just too long. We would take out two measures here and there, for example, because the time element was much too long for the theatrical impact, and Floyd wanted the theatrical impact. So did Hal. Everyone was wonderfully flexible about the work. Hal attacked it from the text. We would be going along, and he would stop suddenly and say, “I didn’t get that word. Why didn’t I get it?” He would look at us and ask, “Is it a singing problem? Is it too high? Is it in the wrong register for you? Is it a text problem? Does the word need to be changed to bring it out? Is it a musical problem?” We’d turn to Carlisle, and we’d figure it out. We’d all have input, and we’d fix it. We might be going along in a scene, say a line, and have to wait a little too long for a proper response. We’d stop and say, “This is just too long. Can we cut a couple of bars, or can you write a new section for it?” And he would do it on the spot. So that’s how the piece really formed, and took shape in Houston.

BD:   It’s marvelous that you had all these people who were willing to work with it. It’s like you’re taking a piece of clay, and everyone is having a hand in molding it.

Nolen:   That’s desperately what opera needs. It’s not feasible, and it’s not possible to take a piece and put it cold turkey on the stage and expect it to be an enormous success.

BD:   [Gently protesting] But there must be a thousand cases where there were so many hands working on this clay that it looks like too many cooks.

Nolen:   Not in this case. There was always a very strong hand over the whole thing, and that was Hal’s visual and dramatic sense.

BD:   So you’re putting him above Floyd?

Nolen:   In this particular case, yes. The last word, inevitably, was Hal’s. If Carlisle said, “No, I just can’t do this,” then Hal certainly didn’t press the point. He found a way to make it work, and often Carlisle would come back and say, “Hal, you were absolutely right. This works fine.” For example, there was the torchlight parade scene that we did in Houston, and we cut in Washington, and we also cut it for television. But they used a piece of it to begin the show at the very top. They used it as a fade-in to the beginning of the last scene of the second act, but it was an entire scene at one point. Finally, Hal said, “Carlisle, I’ve done everything I can. I’ve used every trick I know, and I can’t make it work. Maybe somebody else can, but I can’t do it.” Carlisle said, "Well, let’s cut the sucker,” and we did, and that was it. Then he found a way to bridge those scenes using some of that music, and it worked wonderfully. [Musing] That ending has such an impact...
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BD:   I liked much of the camera work. Whose idea was that?

Nolen:   That’s Brian’s. Brian Large was the director of television. He did a wonderful show.

BD:   Was Hal also involved in the television?

Nolen:   Yes, he was always there.

BD:   Then you had two directors actually working on that?

Nolen:   Yes and no. He and Brian worked very closely. Brian certainly wanted to be faithful to Hal’s conception of the piece, and Hal knew that television was a different medium. He didn’t want to just have it recorded as a stage piece.

BD:   Not just plop one camera in the auditorium and record it?

Nolen:   Right. This is something he did not want, and rightly so because it does lend itself so well to television.

BD:   Then why didn’t he go one step farther and have scenes in the courthouse in Louisiana, and other scenes outside in the woods?

Nolen:   Time. Strictly time.

BD:   If you had six months to do it, you might try those ideas?

Nolen:   He might want to do it differently. He also wanted this particular concept to be used at least once. In fact, he said in an interview that it can be done any number of ways. He simply made an artistic judgment, and said, “I’m going to try it this way.”

BD:   I liked those four or five great big, huge steps that everyone had to go around.

Nolen:   He wanted to do it as a Greek tragedy, and that whole idea of the red granite courthouse type set worked wonderfully. It looked like a Greek amphitheater. It had that enormous immensity about it that overshadowed the stage production. It gave it another dimension which did not come across on television, of course, because it’s simply not the medium for it, and both Brian and Hal knew it. We aimed the television taping towards the medium of television. He wanted to do close-ups because it’s a play about close-ups, about interaction between individuals.

BD:   I’m glad that the television director had the guts to focus in on someone who’s not singing. I like that very much, and I have only seen it very rarely.

Nolen:   Ponnelle also does that kind of thing. He’s a great figure, certainly.

BD:   If you take Willie Stark from the television, how would you put that back onto the stage?

Nolen:   Probably in a very different way. Hal said that undoubtedly someone will want to do it in a very intimate and realistic style, and it should be done that way. He said he’d love to see it, and so will I. I enjoyed the sweep of the Houston and Washington concept, but I really would like to do it again in a much more intimate style, because it is about smoky back rooms.

BD:   I would think you’d object to all the smoke.

Nolen:   Not at all.

BD:   Would you have Willie with a cigar? What if Hal Prince had said to put a cigar in his mouth?

Nolen:   We talked about it. He asked me if I wanted Willie to smoke, and I said I could, but I didn’t see that it would add anything. Willie didn’t smoke in the book, as I recall, and it would tend to make him a little tawdry. He might be a slob, but he’s not tawdry.

BD:   The gradations of making a persona on stage are really fascinating.

Nolen:   He was a fantastic character to play because there were so many facets of him that were exposed.

BD:   Would you enjoy going to another production with a different baritone?

Nolen:   Oh, sure. I’d like very much to see how someone else would do it, but I’d really object if another cast was not picked on the basis of acting as well as voice. This is my soapbox. I find acting in opera abominable, and I think the reason for it is that no one expects anything better.

BD:   Isn’t it getting better? I was under the impression that the acting 40 years ago was abominable, but today it’s a little less abominable.

Nolen:   Sure, but abominable is still abominable for God’s sake! How many opera singers could you take off the operatic stage and stick them in a straight play and not have them be laughed at? How many opera singers do you know have ever taken an acting lesson?

BD:   [Being Devil’s Advocate] On the other hand, how many straight actors can produce a beautiful pianissimo high C?

Nolen:   [Smiles] Okay, but they’re not expected to because there’s no music in a play. However, there is theater in opera. So why are we deprived? We are deprived of it, terribly, and I object. I really object strenuously to it. I get up on my high horse and jump around and scream and holler about it.

BD:   Then when you’re doing The Barber of Seville, do you try to act more? [Photo as Figaro is shown below-left.]

Nolen:   Of course, but you’re talking about Figaro, who is one of the greatest characters in literature. It’s Beaumarchais, and he’s someone very, very special. He’s a fine actor in his own right. But any time you have someone on stage doing a play — and I don’t care if it has music or not — if you don’t have theater, I’ll walk out on it. I don’t see any reason why I should stay.

BD:   Do you walk out on operas, too?

Nolen:   I don’t go to opera very much. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it offends me horribly to watch two people who look absolutely nothing like they’re supposed to look, standing on stage having absolutely nothing to do with what they’re saying, draped in costumes in a set, and everybody calls that wonderful. I’m sorry, it’s awful. It stinks to high heaven. It’s horrible, and I really hate it a lot. I get furious about it, really furious.

BD:   What’s the answer?

Nolen:   The answer is, by God, we’ve got to get our opera singers and teach them how to act. There isn’t any reason why that should not be just as important a part of opera singers’ education as vocal training.

BD:   It seems like the opera schools now are teaching acting, and they’re teaching fencing, and they’re teaching languages.

Nolen:   But they’re teaching operatic acting! I’m sorry, they’re teaching ‘this hand is for Puccini, and this hand is for Verdi’, and I can’t stand it! They’re calling it acting, and I’m sorry, it’s a travesty. What we really need is what I’m doing right now... My wife is the general director of the Lake George Opera Festival and I’m dramaturg for the company. This past summer we inaugurated the American Lyric Theater, A.L.T., which is an actor’s studio for singers based on the Hollywood actor’s studio. We use straight plays to train our people. They walk in, and none of them have ever spoken a word of dialogue on stage before, unless they’ve done musical comedy or operetta or something like that. Then it’s always so bad you can’t believe it. So we train them with straight plays, and show them and give them basic stage skills. Some of them don’t know how to walk from stage right to stage left. Then we teach them how to transfer those skills to music, which is another medium.
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BD:   Do you find that the ones who have been involved in musical comedy do better than the ones who have not?

Nolen:   Always, without exception.

BD:   Do you think that opera singers should go through musical comedy and operetta, and maybe even some straight plays?

Nolen:   The opera singer right now better do it, or else it’s going to die. It’s already a museum. How many new operas are performed nowadays? They call Peter Grimes new, and that was written in 1945, which is 35 years ago! The Rake’s Progress dates from 1951. When you talk about new life blood, you’re talking about things that have to be written and performed now.

BD:   But is the musical or the opera that is written today going to speak to the audience 20 years from now?

Nolen:   Of course, it is. The subject of Willie is timeless. It is always going to happen. It always has happened.

BD:   Will the production of Willie 20 years from now be tinkered with as much as this one was?

Nolen:   Maybe. I hope so. Yes, I’d like to see it tinkered with.

BD:   I wonder if Carlisle would say the same thing.

Nolen:   Maybe yes, maybe no. Carlisle is a very theatrical composer.

BD:   Would you want him to write a musical next, rather than another opera?

Nolen:   Funny you should say that, because I would love to suggest it to him. I would really dearly adore asking him to write something strictly for Broadway. I know what he had in mind when he wrote Willie was to aim it in a more popular direction.

BD:   More like A Little Night Music and other Sondheim pieces?

Nolen:   Sure. The thing that Broadway needs right now is a higher quality of music, and Sondheim is moving in that direction. They’ve got the theater, and he’s writing some fine, fine things. Sweeney Todd was a breakthrough for him, and a breakthrough for all of us. There’s no spoken dialogue in Evita. It’s all sung, so it’s an opera when you get right down to it, if that’s your definition of opera.

BD:   How do you define what opera is today? Is it Evita? Is it Sweeney Todd? Is it Willie Stark? Is it La Bohème?

Nolen:   Bohème was a breakthrough at its time.

BD:   Is it Lohengrin?

Nolen:   No. Lohengrin has ceased simply because of the damn tradition. It’s horrible.

BD:   Could you possibly stage Lohengrin or Tannhäuser in the theater that you’re talking about?

Nolen:   Yes, you could. It wouldn’t be done the way it’s done now, obviously, and you couldn’t do it with the people who do it now for the most part. You might get someone like Jon Vickers. He’s somebody with the kind of raw power and craft that could probably pull off a truly theatrical Wagner piece now. But 99 out of 100, forget it. You couldn’t use the artists who sing Wagner now simply because they don’t have the theatrical training, and because they are vocal freaks, after all. Opera singers are vocal freaks. Particularly with the size houses that we have nowadays, if you don’t physically have a freakily large voice, you simply cannot make your way in the business anymore.

BD:   Could you see doing Willie Stark in a much smaller theater?

Nolen:   Oh, yes. It needs to be done in a much smaller theater. It needs to be done in a Broadway-style house of maybe 1,200 to 1,500. That would be the ideal size.

BD:   What happens if you do it at the Lyric or the Met?

Nolen:   Some of it’s going to get lost, just like a lot of it got lost in Houston and Washington, because they are big houses. That’s why it came off so well on television, because it is such an intimate thing. It is about eyes, and about looks, and about small moves, and about little things that mean such a hell of a lot. I really think that opera should be taken much more into small theaters.

BD:   In other words, we’re expecting more because we’ve seen so much television and film?

Nolen:   Yes. That’s why we’ve got to learn how to act, because if we don’t...

BD:   You say that Willie Stark doesn’t work well in a large theater. Would it work well in CinemaScope?

Nolen:   Yes, because they’d have to do it differently. Film is a medium different from television, and Willie does have the scope of CinemaScope. It does have a large sweeping scope to it, because it is truly about, to use a hackneyed phrase, ‘towering passions and emotions and relationships’. You’re talking about giants. These people are giants in their own way. They tend to work in small, smoke-filled back rooms, but they are giants nevertheless.

BD:   It’s their big ideas, and they’ve got to sway the people?

Nolen:   Yes.

BD:   So you’re talking about this huge mass of humanity that’s got to be swayed, and that’s what makes them tower over the whole thing?

Nolen:   Right. The political rally scenes would just be a knockout on big screen.

BD:   Do you suppose that maybe you could nudge PBS to run Willie Stark again during the next political convention? [Note that the re-broadcast (as shown in the announcement of the Encore Greats for Summer Viewing above-left) was on September 3, 1984!]

Nolen:   That’d be perfect. I wonder what kind of effect it would have.

BD:   I wonder what the Nielsen ratings would be!

Nolen:   [Laughs]

BD:   How much do you go after ratings?

Nolen:   I don’t know anything about them, to be truthful. I got an enormous amount of mail and phone calls after it was shown from people I didn’t know, so I know there are lots of folks out there watching, because many people wrote or called. There had to be a lot more of them out there than we thought. Talking about politics, we were about two weeks into rehearsal when Reagan was shot.

BD:   That must have been freaky.

Nolen:   It was very freaky. We sat around and wondered what the hell was going to happen. We wondered if we should cancel, because it was a tremendously touchy subject. But they said, “Hell no. Let’s get on with it. Let’s do it!” We’re talking about bringing to light something that happens anyway. It’s not going to make any difference.

BD:   Would you have objected if they had moved it down six months?

Nolen:   That wouldn’t have been possible. Opera singers work on an incredibly tight schedule. For instance, I’m booked through 1984. Something else would have had to have been canceled in order to have accommodated it. There were just too many of us, so it would have been too complicated.
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BD: Do you enjoy being booked so far ahead? Do you enjoy knowing where you’re going to be on January 3rd, 1983?

Nolen: Oh, sure. Why not? It doesn’t matter to me. I have a good time wherever I go, particularly here in Chicago. This is great. I’m a big sailor, and I have buddies down at the Columbia Yacht Club.

* * * * *

BD:   Tell me about some of your other roles. You say you like The Barber of Seville very much. [Vis-à-vis the photo from the Seattle Opera shown at left, see my interview with June Anderson.]

Nolen:   Oh, sure. It’s a great role, but my favorite Rossini is Cenerentola.

BD:   You like doing Dandini?

Nolen:   Yes. In fact, that’s what I’ll do as soon as I leave here. I’ll go to Geneva and do a new production there.

BD:   You’re working in Italian, and you’re working with a museum piece. How much do you fight that? How much do you try to breathe life into this dead form?

Nolen:   I’m always fighting it. Every time I do a show, I always gear up and start swimming. You have to, because if you don’t, no one else will. You can usually bring everyone along with you, because they’ll get involved with it. Besides, Cenerentola and Barber, really Rossini in general, particularly the comedies, are wonderfully theatrical. You can do them in very realistic terms. It’s unfortunate that they’re not often done with realistic acting.

BD:   Do you think that Rossini or Floyd speak closer to us than, say, someone in between such as Verdi?

Nolen:   No, not necessarily. Any great composer or librettist is going to stand up through time and speak to anybody and everybody all through the eons. Certainly, Monteverdi still speaks to people, and not just with his music. He does it with his words as well. Certainly, Verdi, Mozart, and even Wagner. I’m not much of a Wagner fan, although I love the orchestral music. It’s just that they go on so damn long, as does Strauss.

BD:   But someone who went to Houston to see Willie Stark would have said that opera goes on so damn long!

Nolen:   It went on too long. The first act was too long, and they cut it down immensely. We cut approximately 20 minutes from the show.

BD:   Who else do you like besides Rossini? I see you have the score of Pagliacci on your table...

Nolen:   Yes. I’m going back to New York to Lake George this Sunday. The Board is having their annual meeting and dinner and whatnot. Along with Alan Kays, who did Jack Burden, and Penny Orloff who did Aldonza for us this past summer, we will do some arias and duets.

BD:   As a recital?

Nolen:   Sure, so that’s why I’m working on those. Talking about Lake George, we had a wonderful season this past year. We did Carmen, Abduction from the Seraglio, and Man of La Mancha. It’s the first time La Mancha had ever been done by an opera company.

BD:   [Surprised] Really??? It’s so very operatic.

Nolen:   Sure, and we had the voices for it. I did Quixote, Penny Orloff, who’s a wonderful soprano at the New York City Opera, did the Aldonza, and John Branstetter was the Carrasco. It was a wonderful show.

BD:   How different was it using operatic voices, as opposed to Broadway voices in that work?

Nolen:   It made a lot of difference, but not in style. This is one of the clues. Whenever you have an opera singer singing a musical comedy, the problem is that they always sing it like an opera singer. They don’t use Broadway style. There’s nothing wrong with using an operatic voice, but you’ve got to have the style, which is what we did. At Lake George, we always hire actors who happen to be able to sing wonderfully. We will keep on doing that, and continue that tradition. Also, we’ll continue the classes in acting. Everyone is invited to come to these. They’re not just for the American Lyric Theater people. We get the stars dropping in and taking classes.

BD:   Do the other stars approve of all of you?

Nolen:   You bet they do... at least the ones we hire! Lake George has always had a reputation for being an opera company with a theatrical brand, and we’re taking it as far as we possibly can.

BD:   Is this the way to bring contemporary opera to the public, with more believable acting?

Nolen:   Yes. It’s the only way.

BD:   Even if you’ve got a piece that’s hard on the voice and hard on the ears?
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Nolen:   We don’t do that kind of stuff. I don’t sing bloop-bleep opera. I’m sorry, if you can’t sing it, then it’s not an opera anymore. It becomes noise.

BD:   There are bloop-bleep operas, and there are operas that you can sing. Somewhere in history it changes. Does it meld, or is there a fine line between them?

Nolen:   There’s usually a very definite line, and it always comes from the singer. It depends if the singer can sing it and make it sound beautiful and theatrical. Sometimes beauty isn’t always purity of tone. Beauty can often be even an ugly sound, as long as it expresses the kind of emotion that you’re looking for. But it has to be a viable emotion that speaks to someone.

BD:   If you were doing an opera on the Hunchback of Notre Dame, would you want all ugly music for the title character?

Nolen:   No, of course not. In the book, Quasimodo does not have an ugly soul after all.

BD:   That’s true. He’s got a heart of gold. What about the villain of the piece? Would you want all ugly music for him?

Nolen:   No, of course not. Willie didn’t have all ugly music. He had some pretty nice stuff.

* * * * *

BD:   You enjoy singing?

Nolen:   Oh, yes.

BD:   But you enjoy acting more?

Nolen:   Yes, I do. I never wanted to be an opera singer. Ever since I was this tall [indicating he was about four feet high], I wanted to be Errol Flynn, or Basil Rathbone, or George Sanders, or Claude Rains. These were my heroes when I was growing up, and Roy Rogers, of course, being a Country Western, Texas boy.

BD:   Gene Autry?

Nolen:   Gene Autry. I always sang Country Western music. I even did the rodeo circuit when I was a kid. I did trick riding and roping and singing.

BD:   Would you ever think of commissioning a country western opera?

Nolen:   I don’t know... maybe if I had some money.

BD:   Could you see doing an opera with Loretta Lynn?

Nolen:   I’m not so sure. You wouldn’t be calling it an opera anymore. It would be something else. I don’t know what it would be, but it wouldn’t be an opera. I have a great prejudice against that word, anyway. It has come to have such a stereotyped stigma to it.

BD:   If opera is such a museum, why isn’t it dead as a doornail? It seems to be in limbo.

Nolen:   It is in limbo. It exists all on its own. What happened was we took a European art form and simply transported it en masse in its entirety here where it really doesn’t belong. When you get right down to it, it is a foreign form. It is not an American form.

BD:   Are there good new operas being written in Europe?

Nolen:   Yes, as a matter of fact, there are. Certainly, the early Henze things were good. I don’t care for the later things. I’ve done several of his works. In fact, I did the premiere of We Come to the River, which I really loathed. It became noise, whereas these earlier things are good.

BD:   Have you done The Stag King [König Hirsch]?

Nolen:   No, I never have, but I’d like to. Certainly, Boulevard Solitude is a gorgeous thing. He’s gotten away from that style, for some reason or another. I’m not sure why.

BD:   Have you done A Country Doctor [Ein Landarzt]?

Nolen:   No.

BD:   That would be a nice piece for you. It’s a 30-minute monologue premiered by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Nolen:   Interesting...

BD:   How do you choose your new roles? How do you choose what you’re going to sing?

Nolen:   I do it by the Laurence Olivier method. A young actor asked him for advice, and he said, “First of all, take everything that’s ever offered to you. Secondly, if two things are offered to you at the same time, take the one that pays the most.” I believe in that, and occasionally something wonderful really does come along.

BD:   If you’re doing that, you might wind up stuck doing all Verdi for the rest of your life.

Nolen:   No, I don’t do a whole lot of Verdi. In fact, I only do Traviata and Ford in Falstaff. In ten years, I’ll do Falstaff. That’ll be a lot of fun to do. The rest of Verdi I don’t do. I won’t touch it. Seriously though, if someone offers me a role, I ask myself two questions. Number one is, would I pay to hear me do this, and second, can anyone else do it a whole lot better than I can? If the answer to either one of those is no, then I won’t do it. I’ve got to be able to do a role at least as well as anybody else in the business. After all, why should you put yourself up against better interpretations? Why should I try to sing Wagner when I would get blown off the stage? There’s no reason for that. I don’t have any great desire to sing Wagner, and I don’t have any great desire to sing any of the great big Verdi roles either.

BD:   Suppose you were offered a run-of-the-play contract for a new production of Evita.

Nolen:   Yes, but now you’re talking about something else.

BD:   But then you would be kept off the operatic stage for maybe two years.

Nolen:   I could probably manage that. I would love to do some Broadway now. Hal is talking to me about a couple of things, and I would like very much to do them. I haven’t done any musicals in almost 12 years. I really like Broadway a lot. I like plays a lot, too, but what I have always wanted to do was film.

BD:   Have you done any?

Nolen:   No, not yet. Opera is such an isolated field. We are capsulized totally, and have zero contact with the theatrical world, with Broadway, or with film. It’s only very, very recently that filmmakers have started putting operas on film, and so far, they’ve been done rather badly. The closest thing that I’ve seen to have something done really well was the Bergman Magic Flute. The Losey Don Giovanni left me so cold. I didn’t feel that it served anybody very well. It certainly didn’t serve the singers very well. As to the Bergman Flute, I was rather disappointed because it’s not quite Mozart, and it’s certainly not quite Bergman. It’s somewhere in the middle, but I liked it nonetheless. I think Mozart would love it, but I don’t think he would like the Don Giovanni very much. I saw it twice in France.

BD:   If you were asked to do a film of an opera with Joseph Losey, would you?

Nolen:   Sure. You can’t judge anybody by one piece of work. I wouldn’t see any reason not to do it.

BD:   Suppose in the course of rehearsals you see that it’s going down the same tube that you do not like.

Nolen:   I’m in it, so what are you going to do? You make the best that you can. I’ve done enough operas on stage that were real turkeys, and I had to make the best of it. But I’ve also done some really fine stuff on stage, too.

BD:   Is that the secret, that you’ve got to do so many of them in order to get the good ones, and take the bad ones with the good ones?

Nolen:   Sure. It’s like anything else. You just take the good with the bad. Why not? [Laughs] Besides, if things aren’t going very well, I can always pick up a guitar or go sailing.

BD:   Did Floyd ask you for advice when he was writing Willie?

Nolen:   Yes and no. He didn’t come out and ask how I would like this done, but he did say to let him know if there was something that would make me more comfortable. He did tailor it for me.

BD:   Would you be upset if some singer, without the benefit of Floyd’s approval, would re-tailor it?

Nolen:   After all, we do that with other things, with other operas which are very ‘sacred’. They put it down a step for the tenors if they haven’t got the high C.

BD:   But they don’t re-write the line of the aria.

Nolen:   I don’t know... have you ever looked at the music to the Prologue to Pagliacci?

BD: Yes, there’s no high A-flat near the end.

Nolen:   Right. There’s no A-flat there, and there’s no G at the end, either. That’s all re-writing.

BD:   There are a couple of recordings that are sung as written, and I find myself being disappointed.

Nolen:   Sure. Folks wait for those high notes.

BD:   Is the high note theater? You were saying that the high notes don’t work on television...

Nolen:   They can be theater. They can also be very dull. If you’ve got it, then it can become theater. Certainly, the high C in Che gelida manina [Bohème] is real theater. When he talks about speranza [hope], and he gets up there and honks that high C, you feel it. You really do. That’s why they put them in. It’s exciting. Yes, high notes are theater.

* * * * *

BD:   Have you done any other Richard Strauss besides Ariadne?

Nolen:   Capriccio.

BD:   How do you like doing the character of Olivier?

Nolen:   I don’t like it at all. I find Capriccio a horrible bore. Sorry.

BD:   I would think Olivier would be dramatically your cup of tea, because you’re pushing the story, the prose point-of-view rather than the music.

Nolen:   It’s just I find the opera a bore, and it’s Strauss’ big fault. The greatest thing he did in terms of opera was Salome as far as I’m concerned, and that’s because it’s so nice and short. That really is the best of his work. Rosenkavalier just bores the socks off me. He should have stopped about a hundred pages before the end. I really don’t know why he did the things that he did, and I’m sure it’s just because I’m ignorant. I just do not get into Strauss. I know people who adore him, and they love those enormously long arias. I sit back and just can’t stay awake.

BD:   Are you bored then when Zerbinetta is singing, because you have to be on stage while she’s doing her big aria?

Nolen:   Most of the time I’m just wonderfully bored out of my gourd. However, I must say Ruth Welting can knock that sucker out. She’s a sweetheart, and she acts. Every time she does a line, she’s saying something. She’s not just getting out there and pumping out high notes and coloratura fireworks. Everything means something. Each one of those turns means something. Each piece of coloratura means something. Each high note means something, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way they intended it to be performed.

BD:   Can’t Capriccio be done that way?

Nolen:   Capriccio has its own internal problems. I can’t really get all that excited about sitting around talking about things rather than doing them.

BD:   Would it benefit from the same kind of thing as Willie just by compressing it?

Nolen:   I think so. Almost all of Strauss’ things would. That’s why I’m such a fan of his orchestral stuff, and that’s why I like Korngold so much, because he made Strauss one better. He made Strauss interesting.

BD:   Have you done some Korngold?

Nolen:   No, I never have. I’d love to do Tote Stadt.

BD:   Are there some other parts that you know you would love to sing?

Nolen:   Yes. Wozzeck is one.

BD:   Would you do that in German or in English?

Nolen:   It depends on where we did it. In Germany, I’d love to do it in German. Here I’d rather do it in English.

BD:   Would you learn it in Serbo-Croatian for Yugoslavia?

Nolen:   You’re talking about a lot of work, and it all has to balance out somewhere. I always hark back to Laurence Olivier. [Both laugh]

BD:   You really are Willie Stark! Which is the man who shoots him?

Nolen:   Jack.

BD:   But it’s Sugar Boy that carries him at the end.

Nolen:   Bob Moulsen was fabulous in that. He was wonderful. He’s such a huge guy...

BD:   Did you like getting picked up? Did that bother you at all?

Nolen:   I was dead.

BD:   I know, but what if you get a four-foot-eight Sugar Boy that can’t lift you, a six-foot-ten Willie?

Nolen:   Actually, the only reason we did it was because Bob was such a big guy. He’s six-four, and weighs around 260.

BD:   So that was put in by Hal Prince, and it’s not in the score?

Nolen:   No, it was put in by me. I went to Hal and I said, “You know what would really be terrific? At the end, after I’m shot and they start to carry me off, if Sugar-Boy comes over, and stops, and picks up the body and carries it off into the sunset.” Hal said, “That’s terrific. We’ll use it. You know, of course, I’m going to get the credit for it,” and I said, “Be my guest.”

BD:   Do you find yourself getting credit for things that are Hal’s idea?

Nolen:   [Laughs] Actors never get credit for those things. It’s very one-sided. We steal like crazy, and rightly so, particularly from someone like Hal Prince. If you’re going to steal, you may as well do it from the best, and he’s the best. He’s the finest director I’ve ever worked with.

BD:   Are there other directors that are in his category?

Nolen:   Yes. Rhoda Levine is one. She did lots of things on Broadway before she got into opera. In fact, she just directed The Man of La Mancha for us. She’s brilliant. Ponnelle is brilliant in a very different way.

BD:   He’s so controversial...

Nolen:   He’s controversial because he brings opera to life. You might hate the things that he does, but you’d never walk out of one of his productions bored. I thank God for him. He is also one of the best. They really hate him at the Met. They really put it to him in New York, and I love it. I just love it. One of his was the first opera I ever saw that I sat up and said, “My God, what is going on there? That’s fabulous. That’s real theater. These people are acting, and it’s great music.” That was the Ponnelle Cenerentola.

BD:   When you do that in Geneva, will that be his production?

Nolen:   No, it will be a new production.

BD:   I just wondered if it would be a great thing for you to be part of that production.

Nolen:   It was a great thing, and I did it. It was one of the first things I ever saw in San Francisco. It was 1969, and oh, what a cast... Teresa Berganza, Paolo Montarsolo, and Renato Capecchi was the Dandini. I stole more stuff from him than you could possibly imagine. He said it was okay. Then, when it came to Chicago, about eight years later, they asked me to do it, and I was in heaven.

Timothy Nolen at Lyric Opera of Chicago

1974 - Peter Grimes (Ned Keene) with Vickers, Kubiak, Evans, Chookasian, Meredith; Bartoletti, Evans/Toms, Lepore

1976 - Cenerentola (Dandini) with Valentini-Terrani, Alva, Montarsolo, Azarmi, T. Hines, Romero; N. Rescigno, Ponnelle

1977 - Peter Grimes (Ned Keene) with Vickers, Kubiak, Meredith/Evans, Bainbridge, Voketaitis; Bartoletti, Evans, Toms
- Manon Lescaut (Lescaut) with Chiara, Merighi, Montarsolo, Andreolli; Sanzogno/Bartoletti, De Lullo, Pizzi

1978 - Werther (Albert) with Kraus, Minton, Russell, Kunde, Ballam, Voketaitis; Giovaninetti, Samaritani

1979 - Love for Three Oranges (Pantaloon) with Suliotis, Little, Gill, Trussel, Halfvarson, Tajo, Kuhlmann, Mills, White; Prêtre, Chazalettes, Santicchi
   - Bohème (Schaunard) with Mitchell/Soviero, Shicoff/Prior, Zilio, Romero, Ramey, Tajo; Chailly, Frisell, Pizzi

1981 - Ariadne auf Naxos (Harlekin) with Meier/Rysanek, Johns, Welting, Schmidt/Minton, Gordon, Negrini; Janowski, Neugebauer, Messel

1982 - Fledermaus (Falke) with Brown, Langton, De Paolo, Jobin, Malas, Isaac, Madalin; Schaenen, Mansouri, O'Hearn, Tallchief

1983 - Cenerentola (Dandini) with Baltsa, Blake, Desderi, Harman-Gulick, Sharon Graham, Crafts; Ferro, Ponnelle/Asagaroff

1986/87 - Magic Flute (Papageno) with Araiza, Blegen, Salminen, Serra, Stewart, Taylor, White, Daniels; Slatkin, Everding, Zimmermann

1987/88 - Così fan tutte (Alfonso) with Te Kanawa/Griffel, Howells, McLaughlin, Hadley, Titus; Pritchard, Ponnelle/Asagaroff
    - L'Italiana in Algeri (Taddeo) with Baltsa, Blake, Alaimo, Wroblewski, Langton, Sharon Graham; Ferro, Ponnelle/Asagaroff

1989/90 - Fledermaus (Falke) with Daniels, Bonney, Rosenshein, Allen/Otey, Adams, Howells, Wilson; Rudel, Chazalettes, Santicchi

1990/91 - Magic Flute (Papageno) with Hadley, Mattila, Lloyd, Jo, Stewart, Pancella, Maultsby, Lawrence; Kuhn, Everding, Zimmermann

1992/93 - McTeague [Bolcom] (Marcus Schouler) with Heppner, Malfitano; D. R. Davies, Altman, Kuper

1994/95 - Candide (Businessman, Governor, Dr. Pangloss, Sage, 2nd Gambler/Police Chief, Voltaire) with Futral, P. Kraus, Pauley;
   Manahan, Prince/Masella, Dunham, Tallchief, Palumbo, Dufford

1995/96 - Don Pasquale (Malatesta) with Plishka, Swenson, Ford; Olmi, Montarsolo, Conklin

1996/97 - Ardis Krainik Gala with (among others) Horne, Manca di Nissa, Marton, Vaness, Anderson, Sylvester, Zajick; Barenboim (piano)

1997/98 - Peter Grimes (Ned Keene) with Heppner, Magee, Ellis, C. Cook, Travis; Elder, Copley, Toms, Palumbo

1998/99 - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Announcer/Trinity Moses) with Malfitano, Begley, Palmer, Aceto; Cambreling, D. Alden, Steinberg

1999/00 - Fledermaus (Falke) with Lott, Evans, Bottone, Allen, Del Carlo, Castle; Hager, Copley, Santicchi
    - A View from the Bridge [Bolcom] (Alfieri) with Malfitano, Josephson, Rambaldi/Bayrakdarian, Turay, McCrory; D.R. Davies, Galati, Loquasto

2001/02 - Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park with (among others) Esperian, Fleming, Heppner, Gallo, Malfitano; Davis
- Street Scene [Weill] (Harry Easter) with Malfitano, Cangelosi, P. Kraus; R. Buckley, Pountney, Fielding

2002/03 - Sweeney Todd [Sondheim] (Judge Turpin) with Terfel, Greenawald, Gunn, Bottone; Gemignani, Armfield, Thompson

2003/04 - Regina [Blitzstein] (Oscar Hubbard) with Malfitano, Woods, Travis, P. Blackwell, C. Shelton; Mauceri, Newell, Culbert

2004/05 - A Wedding [Bolcom] (William Williamson) with Malfitano, Hadley, Harries, Flanigan, Lawrence, Doss; D.R. Davies, Altman, Wagner

BD:   We’re hoping you will come back to Chicago.

Nolen:   I’ll be back next spring for the Fledermaus.

BD:   Good. We’ll look forward to that, and we’ll look forward to you being back in the fall seasons, too.

Nolen:   Thank you.

BD:   Enjoy Chicago...

Nolen:   Oh, I will. It’s gorgeous out there. I’m going to go out tomorrow sailing.

BD:   [Surprised] You will go sailing on a day you sing???

Nolen:   Sure. I sing tomorrow night.

BD:   You don’t do any of these ritualistic things that many of the other singers do?

Nolen:   Opera singers are pampered too much. They are coddled like crazy. I don’t see any reason for it. They talk about the fact that they can’t do this, and can’t drink milk, and I can’t do blah, blah, and they have to have spaghetti. Forget it. Life’s awfully short to do stuff like that.

BD:   But you don’t find yourself going out and giving bad performances.

Nolen:   Not if I can help it.

BD: Thank you for spending this time with me today.

Nolen: Not at all.

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on October 16, 1981. A copy of the unedited audio was placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

* * * * *

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.