An epoch has ended.
Alastair Macaulay reports from Glyndebourne:
Tonight, the British baritone Thomas Allen, aged seventy-nine, announced from the Glyndebourne stage that this had been his final performance; I wish I had been there. He had already informally announced his farewell to friends and few years ago, but Glyndebourne had tempted him back this year into “The Merry Widow”.
It feels as if a significant part of my life has said farewell. Allen was already in the ascendant at Covent Garden when I became a regular there just over fifty years ago. I remember in particular an October 1973 “Simon Boccanegra” starring Peter Glossop, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Boris Christoff in which the connoisseurs singled out Allen as Paolo and Robert Lloyd as Pietro.
I see now how Te Kanawa, Allen, and Lloyd were a golden generation of Covent Garden singers: in 1975, Te Kanawa and he were Marguérite and Valentin, sister and brother, in Covent Garden’s first production for many years of Gounod’s “Faust”. Of them, Allen was the most intelligent, the most versatile, and the most enduring. I’m lucky that I remember him in 1974 as a definitive Moralés (“Carmen”, with Te Kanawa as Micaëla) and definitive Schaunard (“La Bohème”) before he took larger roles; as the 1970s progressed, his first Marcello (“La Bohème”) was in a 1976 cast with Te Kanawa and Luciano Pavarotti; he soon became a classic Count in “Le Nozze di Figaro”, for many people a definitive Don Giovanni, and (with Ann Howells) a luminous Pelléas. He became a hauntingly poignant, brave, forthright Billy Budd; and a marvellously impressive, dependable Ned Keene in Elijah Moshinsky’s great 1975 Covent Garden production of “Peter Grimes”. In 1980, he and Agnes Baltsa made Guglielmo and Dorabella in “Così fan tutte” have more human complexity than Te Kanawa and Stuart Burrows made Fiordiligi and Ferrando.
Later in the last century and well into this century, he became an important Don Alfonso in “Così”. I saw him sing the role of the Marquis of Posa (Verdi’s “Don Carlos”) in three languages – in English at English National Opera, in the opera’s original French at Covent Garden, and in the usual Italian translation in San Francisco. He sang at the New York Metropolitan, La Scala, and many of the foremost international opera houses. Around 1989, I reviewed him (for the “FT”) in Poulenc’s song-cycle “Le Bal masqué” at the Wigmore Hall.
In French, German, Italian, and English, he planted words to eloquent effect. I’m sad I never caught him in two of his most admired roles: Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and (“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”) Wagner’s Beckmesser. His wit and flair for intelligent characterisation continued this century with such roles as Faninal in “Der Rosenkavalier” and Baron Mirko Zeta (“The Merry Widow”); I saw him sing both at the Met. He also served as the Chancellor of Durham University – a job where his predecessors had included another Covent Garden deity, Margot Fonteyn, and in a city not far from his native Northumberland. A great career; a great artist.
Sunday 28 July
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