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John's Way

By Robert Wilder Blue

John Hancock. Photo by Debra Hesser.

1. Lynn Owen in Mary Dyer. New York Lyric Opera (1979). Photo by Johanna Sturm.

2. Richard Owen, Jr. ("Ricky") and Lynn Owen in Abigail Adams. New York Lyric Opera (1988). Photo by Johanna Sturm.

New York baritone John Hancock has sung in world premieres of three American operas during his young career. He created the role of Lord Henry in Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Monte Carlo, 1996); he took on three roles in the one-act trilogy Central Park (Glimmerglass Opera, 1998); and just a few months ago, he played Abelard in Stephen Paulus’s Heloise and Abelard (The Juilliard School). He is about to add another classic American role to his repertory: Dr. John Buchanan in Lee Hoiby’s Summer and Smoke. USOPERAWEB visited Mr. Hancock in New York during a rare morning off during the run of Heloise and Abelard and while he was preparing for a New York Festival of Song recital and learning the role of John Buchanan. His road to becoming a singer was not without its detours though.

“I was born right here on this rock of granite, at New York Hospital. My parents were Californians so after a few years they moved us back to California and I spent my high school and college years there. As far as exposure to music, we had a lot of recordings in the house and so I developed a fluency in classical music. It was a very exciting time in Los Angeles when I was growing up because we had the [Zubin] Mehta and [Carlo Maria] Giulini years at the L.A. Philharmonic. My mother was very good about taking my sister and I to concerts. My parents weren’t big on opera though and we didn’t have it in the house. There wasn’t an opera company in Los Angeles at that time so, except for the touring companies, there wasn’t much happening. So if was an unfamiliar art form to me until I got to Europe. I think the most memorable of my first opera experiences was seeing Aïda at Arena di Verona, which is not exactly a typical opera experience.

“In high school I was in the chamber singers; I also had an abiding interest in theater and took drama classes in high school. We always did a big musical production in the spring and one year I auditioned for The Pajama Game. There were three sets of auditions: reading, dancing and singing. The reading audition was easy; the dance audition was also fine because nobody knew what they were doing; but the singing audition had me terrified. I had learned ‘Hello, Dolly’, but I decided on the day of the audition that I couldn’t go through with it. I went back to the signup board to erase my name from the list and the list was gone. So I felt I had a moral contract to go through with it. I sang my song (taking the high passages down an octave) and I got in!

“I went to Occidental College and studied French literature and spent my junior year in Paris, which was a transforming experience. I believed then (and still do) that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to find that thing that ignites your mind, not necessarily for the sake of studying to make it a career, but to expand your horizons. I took some music courses in college, but I was very serious about French literature. Singing was something I still enjoyed but didn’t think about it seriously. I was directed to a voice teacher but I actually thought it was kind of silly because it seemed to me singing was something you just ‘did’, unlike, say, the piano which you really had to learn to play. [He laughs.] But I eventually started studying and had a couple of very good teachers and discovered quickly that you did have to learn how to sing! Although it still was nothing I wanted to do professionally.

“When I left college I moved back to New York but I didn’t want to get immediately into a graduate program so I took a job at Sarah Lawrence College in their admissions office. It was a very unorthodox place and a very eye-opening experience. I stayed for three years, but eventually I wanted to do something else and I think I was really missing music. I had been encouraged to try singing opera so many times that I finally decided to audition for Juilliard’s Extension Division. They had a Saturday opera workshop that was run by Vincent la Selva from the New York Grand Opera. He was really an incredible conductor and teacher, especially with that group. It was a forum for about twenty-five people who really loved opera and had grown up with it (mostly in New York). These people had opera in their hearts at least as much as the folks I’ve met who sing professionally. They may not have had the native talent but they had made a huge commitment to it. Of course it was 80% sopranos, a few mezzos, one or two tenors and one or two baritones and a bass. So I got to sing a lot and I loved it! He roped me into singing Morales in Carmen in Central Park, which was my professional debut.

“Eventually I decided to quit my job and really give singing a shot, which was a very scary thing to do. But, I was encouraged to do so by Mikael Eliasen at the Curtis Institute. He was running a program in Europe called the European Center for Opera and Vocal Arts and he invited me to do the program. That was really when everything came together for me, when I experienced the synthesis of singing and acting, of finding the core of the character in yourself and realizing that the more you whittle away at yourself and expose that core, the more you reach the audience. The experience has so much less to do with reaching out than reaching in. The irony is the more you reach in, the more you can express what the piece has to say.

“Then I met Beverley Johnson at the Aspen Music Festival who became my teacher and managed to get me into opera program at Juilliard. I got to do a lot of good shows there: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, L’amico Fritz, Hugh the Dover, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and Falstaff. I also did some summer programs at professional companies; Tito Capobianco at Pittsburgh Opera was a very strong influence for me. I was fortunate because I managed to secure management on the way out of Juilliard. Joel Morgan and Henri Gronnier had started a small management company called MG Artists and they found a group of young singers they really believed in. We used to have these salon-type gatherings in Henri’s apartment. At that time he was the companion of Jean-Yves Thibaudet so we got to sing these auditions with him at the piano. They would have these parties and invite conductors or general directors and we would sing for them. It was sort of an old-fashioned way of approaching things that worked very well. That’s where I met Lowell Liebermann.”

Speaking of Dorian Gray…

“They were in the early stages of planning – I don’t believe much of it had been composed – and they asked me if I would do it. I was immediately interested, not the least because I’ve always had an attraction to supernatural tales. The first time I became acquainted with the story was through a radio broadcast, Mystery Theater hosted by E.G. Marshall. I was in high school and I used to love that program. Of course, when I became involved with the opera I reread Oscar Wilde’s novel.

“When the score was finished, I couldn’t get over how gorgeous Lowell’s music was. You can just bathe in the beauty of it or if you go beyond that you discover that structurally there is so much intelligence behind it. I love the piece so much. The success with the audiences was immense. Monte Carlo audiences are known to be fairly reserved with their ovations and applause to my understanding and they went bananas over this at every performance. It was a cocommission with Opera Pacific and a lot of the Opera Pacific Board came to Monte Carlo to see it. I’m not sure if they were unaware that there were homosexual undertones to the story or whether they just didn’t want them to be played out in the opera – that they just wanted a good ghost story. So those performances never materialized. But then Florentine Opera picked it up and it was a big success there. The performances coincided with an OPERA America event of some kind and so it really got some good exposure there.

“One of the major stumbling blocks for the piece have more to do with the nature of doing new operas: there’s the world premiere and the U.S. premiere and then what happens after that? It is a giant step for a piece to make it past that; I think it’s really difficult for an opera company to say that they want to do the piece because it’s a great piece and they think the audience will love it. There isn’t the caché of publicity. And, there is always a certain segment of the audience who is scared away from seeing a new opera because they think it’s going to be ‘modern’ music and that they’re going to hate it. New operas do, however, seem to elicit a lot of interest from another audience pool.

I think New York City Opera should do it. I believe they have contemplated it but I don’t know what has held them back. Princess Caroline spends so much time here in New York and it’s her opera, after all, and I think New York audiences would like nothing more than to come to the theater knowing she’s in the center box! And it has an immediate resonance with American society today, with our obsession with youth and consumption and our vanity. More than any other piece, I would love to do this again. If an opera company came to me, which so far has never happened [he laughs], and asked me what opera I would like to do, this is the piece I would choose. I think this would be a perfect opera for San Francisco too. I don’t want to get too broad about this because I don’t think it’s a ‘gay’ opera. But I think the opera would play well wherever there’s a large gay community.”

About Lord Henry

John Hancock and Lauren Skuce as Abelard and Heloise in The Juilliard School's world premiere production of Stephen Paulus's Heloise and Abelard.

“Lord Henry is tricky because he can seem to be merely an evil presence in the libretto which by necessity is a reduction of the story. But there are a lot of sympathetic qualities in Henry. Certainly with all the characters I play I try to find the thing in them that I love and to be motivated by that. I don’t want to feel that I have to defend a character. In the case of Henry, he is a character who has given a lot of thought to his mortality. As I enter my 40s, some of Henry’s text means more to me now than it did six years ago when I first did it. I think it will stick with me the rest of my life and resonate more strongly the older I get. I certainly don’t want to be Henry at the end of my life and feel as though I squandered my time on this earth. As far as Henry’s sexuality is concerned, I think he is from a time when he can’t confront it fully and so in portraying the character you’re walking a delicate line. I don’t think he ever manages to satisfy his latent sexual desires and he cannot look himself in the mirror and admit that. He functions very well in the society in which he lives; he plays by all the rules.

“It is such a privilege to incarnate a role. I find it absolutely liberating to do a new work because you don’t have a tradition of performance practice to which you have to adhere. There’s no filter you have to pass through when you’re bringing the music to life. Of course, it’s wonderful when you’re learning something from the standard repertory to listen to as many recordings as you can find, especially if you go back to historical recordings, to learn all the performance practices. You get a zillion ideas and it is a rewarding process in its own way. But when you’re creating a role for the first time, you get to establish everything. In the case of Dorian Gray, I did all the research to find out about Oscar Wilde and his life when he was writing Dorian Gray and discover the autobiographical qualities that were present in it.

“There’s also the excitement of working with the composer and the librettist. I especially enjoy working with the librettist in the rehearsal process, giving the words a little ‘spit and polish’ to find what works best. I haven’t really had the experience of someone writing something specifically for my voice. As Dorian Gray evolved I may have had some influence on the music. There is always that interaction with the composer about whether you can bring forth a given phrase or sentence the way it has been written. In Heloise and Abelard there have been all sorts of little things where a word has been changed when Stephen and Frank heard for the first time – where the stress of the original word didn’t quite work or the phrase didn’t quite work.”

It seemed to us that being involved in the creative process allows everyone – composer, librettist and singer – to really make the character as clearly defined as possible. With a 100-year old opera, how do you make characters that are not very three-dimensional – such as Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor or Germont in La Traviata – come fully to life for yourself and for the audience?

“In the case of Enrico, there is one important thing there you can grab onto, which is that he is trapped really and so that’s something you can go with. I don’t ever want to play him as a cardboard bad guy. That said, it is what it is and the libretto only gives you so much. He’s only been given a certain number of lines in the opera. In contemplating Germont, the thing is finding the real motivation for establishing the relationship with Violetta so quickly. He arrives expecting to find this wanton courtesan but right away he sees the dignity, the intelligence and the warmth of her character and he ends up having a real respect for her. Yet, he still feels his duty to his own daughter. You have to establish all this so quickly and with some sort of clarity. He comes from a society in which his daughter will be ruined if Alfredo remains involved with Violetta. The novel [La Dame aux Camélias] doesn’t really give you the information you need to make all those connections either. You really have to believe that you are in a time when this matters and you have to find a way to may it believable.

“Also, everyone else has to agree on what’s happening, especially between acts when often a lot of time has passed. For me, a good production of La Bohème is going to involve everyone sitting down and figuring out what has transpired between the acts so that everyone is on the same page. If you don’t do that, by the time you get to the end of the performance everyone is working at cross-purposes because they have a different understanding of where they are coming from. I’ve done a lot of Bohèmes and I’ve reached the point where I like to at least have a conversation and ask questions: what has happened? how much time has passed? has Mimì really slept with the Viscount?”

Heloise and Abelard

“It’s hard to overstate the importance Abelard had on western civilization. He was considered the most intelligent and best-educated man in the world and his impact was profound, especially on the creation of the University of Paris. Scholars came from all over the known world to Paris making it really the center of western thought. He introduced the dialectic and reintroduced the idea of debate and the Socratic method in teaching after many centuries of lecture. And there are the letters, so you can get a lot about his life right from his own mind.

“Abelard describes his relationship with Heloise very differently than it is done in Frank’s libretto. Abelard really set his sights on Heloise and essentially beguiled Fulbert under the guise that domestic matters were clouding his thoughts and intellect and that if only he could reside in Fulbert’s house he could be liberated from these domestic inanities. And he would tutor his niece as compensation. In fact he really had become bored and arrogant and begun to have these lusty thoughts for Heloise. He believes he is so untouchable as an intellect that he can give up his vow of chastity and remain far above his peers. But he comes to the realization that it was a misguided notion and he considers his castration and the burning of his most famous treatise to be a providential act of God that brings him back to the true course of his life. In fact, his castration was almost incidental to his life but it is the most famous aspect of the story. He said it didn’t hurt – he was supposedly asleep and heavily drugged – and that healing from those wounds was much less traumatic than from the spiritual wounds he had inflicted on himself.

“In the opera, Abelard is almost seduced by Heloise. She apparently had a reputation of being sort of a freak because of her intelligence and she had attained almost mythical status as the most intelligent woman in the western world. When you read their letters, their union has a lot to do with the profound respect they each had for the other’s intelligence and that motivated so many of the choices they made.

“When I read through it the first time I knew immediately that I wanted to do it. It was very hard and I was brought in kind of at the last moment so I had to learn it quickly. I had to sandwich this in between Parade at the Met and these concerts with New York Festival of Song. I love the way the music evokes the medieval atmosphere with out being conspicuously medieval in actual sound. I love the way Stephen works in parts of mass into the action. He uses Latin so fluently and the way the chant evolves into something very contemporary and fresh is wonderful. It’s a very demanding role but Abelard’s music is so expressive, the third act aria in particular is a wonderful exposition of his feelings. The way music and libretto function in the third act is sort of a three-part resolution for Abelard, Heloise and their son: their relationship is created without being tied up with a little bow. It doesn’t come out as a cliché happy ending at all, yet it is quite a satisfying resolution.

“Isn’t it incredibly bizarre that this opera would be done at the same time that we’re having this scandal in the Catholic Church? It’s so amazing how the entertainment world often seems to presage current events. No one could ever have imaged in the process of creating this opera that the Catholic Church in the U.S. would be undergoing a massive trauma. Here we have this opera in which the priest goes after a sixteen-year-old girl! Although in reality, it seems as though Heloise was probably in her 30s when they met and that they were in fact consenting adults and that regardless, 900 years ago she probably would have been married by age sixteen.

“I hope that Heloise and Abelard benefits from the fact that the premiere was done at Juilliard, i.e., in a school setting, even as important a venue is that is. An opera company can still benefit from saying they are doing the ‘professional’ premiere. It doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of press coverage yet though. I hope it gets done again because I think it should have a life. Quite a few people have told me they were moved to tears by the end of the evening. Opera shoots for that but it doesn’t always get there.”