Alice Coote: Maybe more young singers will want to just stay home
NewsThe English mezzo-soprano, in a challenging interview with VAN magazine, thinks that Covid may have changed artist lifestyles forever:
I suspect that it’s going to change anyway after this pandemic. Even young singers have said to me, “I don’t know if I want this life.” Maybe more people will want to just stay home, and it will be structured around people staying at their opera houses. I don’t know if there’s going to be quite the same circulation and air travel. I’m lying in bed at night thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve got to book six flights in the next two weeks to get back and forth to my family. How do I feel about that ethically? Can I justify that?”
How do you do clean opera? I’m sure there’s a way. Maybe there will be better work because of it: Maybe less rushing around might create some deeper, immersive work.
She also talks frankly aboutwomen’s rights and gender fluidity:
My brother is transgender, don’t get me wrong. He’s been through hell, but he’s going on an amazing journey right now. I’m completely open to everything. I don’t know after all these years of playing men and women who I really am. I have questioned myself: What part of me is the male part of me, what part of me is the female part of me? What is truly me?
I’m getting off the [opera], but you’re not allowed to say anything to do with anything at all. Everything has to be so completely politically correct, except about women’s rights. We are still absolutely in a second-class position in every walk of life. We still have to pretend to be other than we are every day, and we still accept that every day. I’ve been doing it all morning. I’ve been doing Alice the female. We don’t have that innate power to be who we are. I’ve learned that from playing men.
Wow.
Read on here.
Love Alice. One of the best I’ve ever worked with. SO talented.
She’s probably right about younger singers. Hell, probably older singers too. It is about time for that paradigm to change.
What a fantastic, refreshingly honest and insightful interview.
Alice is already a century ahead of everyone else in this art form. Mentioning her gender fluidity now explains her truly unique, titillating sparkle on stage.
She is such an inspiration for all upcoming brave women (and feminist men) who decide to step on the podium to represent women’s rights through the language of classical opera. Thank you Alice for your service. Wow, and “go girl”.
Gender fluidity; womens’ issues. The cause du jour for those who have everything they could possibly want at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Wonderful singer (as we all know). I had the good fortune to hear her as Octavian in Seattle several years ago.
Nice to see she is a human being too — or rather, one who is willing to put her humanity out there for people to see.
Grief, how much box-ticking wokery can one stand? How many phobias can today’s entitled young take on board? Thunberg flight-shame, gender dysphoria? She’s being cute: anyone with these right-on views can say anything they want; it’s those who tire of the vacuous navel-gazing who are shut down.
And yet those same progressives would get into a fist-fight very easily to argue over whose sensibilities have and had been the most rubbed raw!!!
Yup, demonstrating their tolerance and inclusivity with every passing upper cut.
“How do you do clean opera? I’m sure there’s a way. Maybe there will be better work because of it: Maybe less rushing around might create some deeper, immersive work.”
But of course. The trend of flying around is a business model, and not an artistic one. Before airplanes, singers and musicians were far more locally rooted. Orchestras developed their own sound, they had many more rehearsels (hence the many great new works which got excellent premieres, which has become extremely rare nowadays), there was more time and more attention. There was a strong relationship between orchestras and opera houses and their audiences, performers were well-known members of the local community. And singers / players / conductors had more time to mature. All those qualities have so often been sacrificed to the superficial wrapping paper: money and fame.
As for gender fluidity: she is well-outspoken, but we know since C.G. Jung that the human psyche is built with two complementary components of which one is, in most people dominant, determined by biology. The psyche is also more fluid, which means that ‘gender’ is a psychic thing and not a literal one. Hence the Hosenrollen in opera and domineering female conductrices. So, Mrs Coote is definitely a feminine woman whose psyche can express roles with masculine qualities, which is entirely natural.
Covid forces music life to reconsider its ways and that can only be good.
Thank you for this fascinating article and the link to “Van.” What an eclectic journal. I will scan this regularly. As for Ms Coote. As brilliant, thoughtful and insightful off stage as on.
Now you’re swingin while you sing…
Maybe more singers will decide to make a hit album with a laptop at home.
Do we really need to know all this?
No.
Good on her for nursing her father while the NHS virtue-signalled from behind its well-stuffed sofa. However, the whole gender slant is just tedious. Never worked with a demanding female director? OK, you didn’t work with Gillian Lynne, to name but one. You certainly didn’t mess with her. I’ve worked with loads and they’ve all had their own way of getting the results they sought. Same for female conductors, though the ones that came through in the 1980s were vastly superior to the current lot.
“I have questioned myself: What part of me is the male part of me, what part of me is the female part of me? What is truly me?”
Well Alice, I’m going out on a limb here, but if you take a shower and look south you should get a few pointers.
There is none so blind…
Great singer… but for goodness’ sake leave out all the pretentious hocus-pocus . I do rather wonder how much of this was actually said, and how much was made up by the writer ?
“MAYBE MORE YOUNG SINGERS WILL WANT TO JUST STAY HOME” And maybe more singers, young and old, will want to abstain from fashionable navel gazing and focus more on developing their voice? Or if they can’t abstain from navel gazing, at least keep it to themselves? One can only hope.
“He who wants to say something worthwhile to the world, should first meditate on the navel, as to connect with the eternal consciousness of the universe.” To-Fu, 9th century China.
Confession time like Hello magazine, and sadly so utterly boring, intense, and a tad self-indulgent. Why does a fine singer need to go into the confession box over gender?
Alice Coote is surely one of our best singers and this is a very interesting article. However, it didn’t take long for the usual subjects of modern day discussion – or efforts to control the conversation – to appear on here. I’ve certainly had enough of the upsurge in wokery that is everywhere, stifling creativity in any society in which it exists like creeping Ivy. No wonder our young people have no backbone if they’re constantly being bogged down by the slightest problem that besets them. We are certainly bringing up our young in an over-pampered, namby-pamby, world nowadays. I agree that today’s female conductors are a poor lot compared to those of a few decades ago; some of them just seem to flail their arms around in exotic dresses and produce very mediocre performances; then again, so do some
contemporary male conductors, minus the dresses, of course. Maybe they should stay at home and conduct CDs away from public view.