It may seem a giant step from the rugby fields of England to the major opera houses of the world. But if you have a great big beautiful voice like Peter Rose, the journey’s not so far.
Rose is one of the leading bass singers in the rarefied world of international opera, but before he imagined a career that would take him to New York, Paris, Berlin and other great opera houses of the world, he was a soccer-playing kid growing up in England.
Some students played sports, others perused the arts. Rose did both, but when choir and rugby practice happened at the same time, the music won out. Rose moved on to study music in London, making his professional opera debut in 1986. His debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York came in 1996.
Twenty years on, he’s an in-demand singer with a big repertoire of principal bass roles, praised for his superb voice and acting skills. He’s a frequent performer with Seattle Opera (“Tristan und Isolde” and “Rusalka”) and he returns Saturday night singing in “Der Rosenkavalier,” a sparkling comedy by Richard Strauss set in the gilded high society of 18th-century Vienna that features longtime Seattle Opera favorite Carol Vaness in the role of the Marschallin, one of opera’s great star turns for soprano.
It’s an opulent production that premiered in Seattle in 1997, and it opens Seattle Opera’s 2006-07 season with a flourish. Rose sings the role of Baron Ochs, a middling aristocrat with an offish manner and an eye for women. He’s not the most sympathetic character in opera but for a bass, the baron is a plum role with a lot of singing and opportunities for characterization. And it’s long.
“Der Rosenkavalier” clocks in at more than four hours, and Baron Ochs is in the thick of the action throughout. Rose has sung the role many times including at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and he talked about the rigors of learning and performing the part at a recent interview at Seattle’s McCaw Hall.
Rose is a barrel-chested singer with a deep, rumbling voice, a soft English accent and a ready wit. The life of an opera singer can be anything but grand when you spend much of the year in airplanes and airport lounges, changing time zones and hotel rooms and weather; Seattle’s recent dry spell put extra demands on the voice.
Bass singers are the guys who sing way down low, hitting notes about as low as the human voice can go. Typically, they reach their peak vocal years in their 40s, Rose said, and with care “can go on a lot longer, well into your 60s.”
It’s not enough to have the voice, however. For “Rosenkavalier” a singer needs physical stamina because of the opera’s length and a tremendous memory bank because of the volume of dialog.
For endurance, Rose does cardio work in a gym to stay in shape and watches his diet. Learning the part of Baron Ochs takes mental sweat. It took Rose a year to master the part, cramming in study sessions amid a busy singing schedule. After running through the first act, a friend commented about the baron: “My God, you have a lot to do. He never shuts up.”
While a singer can ease some of the workload by speaking the dialogue, Rose said he tries to sing the entire thing. And why not? “It’s a choice vocal role for bass; among the top half dozen,” Rose said.
Baron Ochs, with his boorish ways, wandering eye and inflated ego, is often played as a buffoon with broad strokes of slapstick. Ochs flirts with a maid even though he’s engaged to someone else, gets nicked in a duel and behaves badly throughout. “He’s a man of his times, and he thinks of himself as a Don Juan,” said Rose, who nonetheless takes a more nuanced approach to the part.
Ochs is not all bad, Rose said. “I don’t think we should think of him as black and white. He’s complex. You have to find something enduring in him.”
That extra something may be charm. And says Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, that’s something that Peter Rose has in spades.
Bill Mohn photo
Peter Rose (left), Alice Coote and director Dieter Kaegi work on a scene from Act III of the opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”
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