It’s my chance to meet Britain’s most internationally acclaimed tenor. A man who, in the next 12 months, will be singing huge roles in Wagner, Strauss and Beethoven operas everywhere from New York to Vienna and Berlin. So what do we spend half of our allotted interview time talking about? Football, obviously.
Is it true, I ask David Butt Philip, that he decided to do a degree in politics and philosophy at Liverpool University so he could be in the same city as his beloved Liverpool Football Club? “It wasn’t the sole reason,” he protests, “but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider that.”
And we’re off. Half an hour later we have touched on virtually every angst known to English football supporters — from the murky legal issues surrounding certain big-spending clubs we both hate to what Butt Philip claims is the “exceptionalism” of supporting Liverpool FC.
Isn’t everything about that city, not just the football, characterised by exceptionalism? “You’re right,” Butt Philip says. “The people in Liverpool will never forgive the government for the decades when they felt ostracised and looked down upon and basically left to rot. I mean, I was brought up to hate Thatcher. But when I moved to Liverpool I learnt what hating Thatcher really means.”
After putting the footballing and political worlds to rights we eventually work our way round to the subject we are supposed to discussing: namely, Butt Philip’s brilliant career and his return to London this summer, at the age of 44, to play the homicidally jealous Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (being performed in an Opera Holland Park double-bill with Wolf-Ferrari’s charming Il segreto di Susanna). But that circuitous route is apt because the man himself took a while to work out that he wanted to be a singer.
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As a treble he had been in Peterborough Cathedral Choir, but paradoxically it was only while doing his politics degree that he realised his future lay in singing. “I was spending all my time doing music and none studying for my degree. I had a kind of epiphany and realised I actually wanted to go to music college.”
But even when he went to the Royal Northern College of Music he never dreamt he might become a world-renowned tenor. There was a good reason for that. In those days he was a baritone. “Then I started to notice my voice changing,” he recalls. He was in his late twenties. “The top was getting stronger and higher while the low register, which had always been pretty pathetic, disappeared entirely.”
Changing from baritone to tenor is not entirely unknown; Plácido Domingo went the same way early in his career, then concluded his performing life by singing baritone roles again.
In the opera world changing from baritone to tenor means a lot more than simply singing higher. Dramatically, they occupy different worlds: baritones tend to play villains; tenors are usually distressed lovers.
“That helped me too,” Butt Philip says. “I was struggling to be taken seriously in baritone roles. I think nobody believed me when I auditioned for Don Giovanni. But I found when I transitioned to tenor and started going for parts like Rodolfo [in La bohème ] people suddenly felt that my character and looks fitted. We singers overestimate how much audition panels and even critics judge us on our singing. Personality counts for a lot.”
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Even after becoming a tenor Butt Philip had to make another leap. It turned out he was trying to be the wrong sort of tenor — the sort that sings Italian roles such as Rodolfo or Alfredo in La traviata. “When I started auditioning around Europe, particularly in Germany, the response was: ‘We would never cast a voice like yours in Italian repertoire. The tone is much too dark. If you switch to Wagner and Strauss we would hire you tomorrow.’ So I did and they did.”
It’s ironic then that for his return to London he’s back in an Italian role — albeit the tragic role of the clown who kills his wife and her lover. “That’s going to be a lot of fun,” he says. “I love playing these troubled types who fall apart psychologically in front of the audience’s eyes.”
He admits that after spending months in Germany already this year he is relishing having the summer at home with his wife, who is the director of music at a London school, and their children. But there’s also the pleasure of returning to the breezy little theatre in Holland Park where he first sang in the chorus straight after leaving college. “I did loads of bits and bobs like that in the days when my wife and I lived in a tiny one-bedroom flat in south London and didn’t have a mortgage or kids,” he says. “I did my first paid solo opera gig at the Hoxton Hall in east London and my first Bohème at the Cock Tavern in Kilburn. It just about paid the bills. Sadly, those sorts of opportunities seem to have dried up. I’m not sure what career path exists for young British singers any more.”
Maybe that’s true, but Butt Philip’s own spectacular success proves that even after Brexit a talented British singer can still conquer the opera capitals of Europe.
Pagliacci and Il segreto di Susanna are at Opera Holland Park, London, from July 17 to August 3; operahollandpark.com
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