Sir Graham Vick – experimental, controversial and a great loss for opera

Sir Graham Vick, that enfant, adolescent and, ultimately, adult terrible British opera director, has died– at the age of 67, one of Covid-19’s tragically premature victims. Controversy raged from the moment David Pountney gave him his first gig at Scottish Opera in 1977 at 24, directing Gustav Holst’s Savitri. Vick’s stars were opera icons du jour such as contralto Janet Baker and bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. 

He spent two hours deciding how to dress for his first encounter, eventually opting for a blue/grey corduroy suit, the formality (for him) softened by a homely jumper. There was no cause for concern. Both superstars treated the new kid on the block as a professional equal. They immediately sensed the potential talent earlier spotted by Pountney. 

The controversy that seemed to whirl like a dervish around Graham Vick’s even passing presence in opera houses across Europe is unlikely to end with his death. Birmingham Opera company’s production of Richard Wagner’s RhineGold– a typical Vick restatement, bringing the 19th-century power struggles of distant Valhalla Gods down to the grittier earth of 21st century Birmingham – will likely prove a fitting valedictory. Performances are scheduled for 31 July and 2 August at Symphony Hall, Birmingham.

For forty years, Graham Vick was a surge of adrenalin, pumping through the arteries of Europe’s often stuffy opera houses, breaking convention, causing offence, courting scandal – and usually selling out. His mission was to free the art form he loved from the chains of formality he thought kept it from wider audiences. He passionately believed that he delivered the kiss of life to a withering medium in breaking with tradition.

My first encounter with a Graham Vick production was in 1979: Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged in Scottish Opera’s Theatre Royal, Glasgow. The setting was a public lavatory. The Don raped Zerlina vigorously, viewed by the audience through a chink in the toilet door. I hated it. I may even have joined in the booing. And in those days, it took something to make a douce middle-class Glasgow audience boo. 

The Theatre Royal was, in Vick’s words, a comfortable world swathed in creamy brown and gold gilt. This was no Bayreuth bear pit. As a relative newcomer to opera, I took the lazy view that upstart Vick, my junior by three years, was simply out to make his mark by the vulgar use of gratuitous shock. How wrong I was.

He went on to adopt shock as a trademark strategy. It turns out there was nothing gratuitous about it. In his Glyndebourne days, he staged Don Giovanni, on a heap of manure, featuring a dead horse; then, Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto in Pisaro, when the oppressed Hebrew slaves were replaced by gun-toting Palestinians; and in Russia, a 2012 version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov when a crowd scene of popular protest was quelled by riot police, clearly identified with the Putin regime. Nicolai Gergiev, the production’s home-based conductor, something of a Putin apologist, was reported to have almost had a canary. 

But to assume shock was Vick’s primary purpose is to miss the point, as I did in Glasgow in 1979. A revealing 2012 interview with music critic, Norman Lebrecht, gave the director the space to explain that purpose at length. Lebrecht, an uber insightful music critic and curator of the Slipped Disc blog, is a polite-ferret sort of interviewer. He firmly, but courteously, challenges interviewees; forcing them to explain themselves. He often deploys the nuclear weapon of silence in response to some tempting, Aunt Sally reply, forcing the interviewee to volunteer a flustered explanation to fill dead air.  

There was not much dead air in the 2012 encounter. In an elegant jousting match, Lebrecht relentlessly unpeeled the onion of Graham Vick’s obsession with opera. It ran deep. At the age of five, he was hooked on theatre. His father, an encouraging influence, had introduced him to Peter Pan. In his own words, this was an epiphany. Ever after, Vick exploited the possibilities of Neverland as an added dimension to mundane reality. 

Time and again, Graham Vick would return to the importance of opera as that “other world” of imagining, another dimension to add to the humdrum reality of the everyday and brimming with fantastic possibilities. Yet Vick never espoused pure escapism. The operatic artform allowed experiments leading to trenchant insights and social commentary. Back in the day, some sought other dimensions by smoking copious quantities of weed. Vick overdosed on opera.

He espoused composers other directors dare not confront. About Karlheinz Stockhausen – almost unapproachable, even for eager opera-goers, including this writer – Vick insisted; “Life is not just the walls we live in. The world of Stockhausen is another place. An internal world where you can soar, sail, go other places.” 

And so, in the 2012 production of Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light) – part of a cycle of seven operas, one for every day of the week – Vick took soaring to, literally, new heights. Tongue in cheek, celebrating the 2012 London Olympics – in Birmingham. 

He placed string quartets in real helicopters. At the beginning of Helikopter-Streichquartett, the fourth part of the opera, four musicians (plus sound technicians) are lifted into the air in helicopters and play to the audience via video link. And your point Mr Stockhausen is? 

Apparently, their music is in part a reaction to the noise of the rotor blades and the pilots’ movement. Stockhausen’s long-time collaborator Kathinka Pasveer, who served as music director, said the composer “longed for its premiere up to his death”. There was much puff about the work signifying “global unity”.

It took Vick, the Argyle Works industrial location in Birmingham, two choppers and nerves of steel to make it a reality. No other director was prepared to rise to the challenge or risk the flak. Global unity hokum aside, it was A-typical, Vick reaches for the impossible and achieves it, moment. The 1998 work, deemed impossible to perform, had been staged – or, at least, test flown. A sort of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk reach for the sky gesture. 

As a teenager, Vick fell into the opera trap. He was bewitched by the cultural cornucopia available to an inquisitive youth on Merseyside in the swinging 60s. Amidst shrieking Beatlemania and the glorious Mersey sound, Graham Vick discovered opera aplenty. His brother, Hedley, was a guitarist in the pop group, The Swinging Blue Jeans. Too young to remember The Hippy Hippy Shake? Find it on Spotify. Gold dust. 

Flourishing alongside pop, there were regular tours by Sadlers Wells, Welsh National Opera, and home-based opera companies, founded on that rock of excellence, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It is sobering to reflect there was no need for cultural levelling up in 1960s Britain. Up north, they could teach the London metropolis a thing or two.

Ever frank, Vick freely acknowledged to Lebrecht he was a megalomaniac. “I am a director”. No further explanation is needed. He insisted he had earned the right during a successful career to imprint his stamp on productions. He musingly added, “but I was never good enough”. Ever the stern self-critic. 

He never got in the way of the music. When the conductor stepped onto that podium – sometimes it was not easy to see if there was a podium or not in a Vick show – he acknowledged the director’s work was done and faded into the wings.

An almost casual observation about his experience at Scottish Opera characterized his twenty-five-year stint at Birmingham. Scottish Opera was the first company in the UK to offer a subscription series. Vick thought that invoked an “It’s Thursday, I have to go to the opera” mindset. 

It may have been sound economics, but maintaining an expensive venue eventually took priority over the operas themselves. It became difficult to stage anything that might risk those boos from a stuffy subscription clientele. He embarked on an “opera, not opera houses” crusade.

So, Vick’s Birmingham products were anything but stuffy. Operas were performed in diverse locations, disused warehouses, factories – even car parks. There was audience involvement. I thought sometimes that went too far. The recent production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, reviewed in Reaction here, was opera as riot. Sometimes that fourth wall between audience and actors is needed to deliver perspective.

That said, Graham Vick’s crusade to engage audiences, obsessively reach out to a new generation and generously share his obsession with an artform he loved was a little short of heroic. Asked in that 2012 interview about his greatest ambition, Vick said, “I would like to change the world”. He did.