Antonio Pappano

Moving from the UK to the US

Antonio Pappano is the child of Italian immigrants who came to the UK in 1958. He and his younger brother were born in the UK, but in 1973 they left for the US, where their mother’s family had installed themselves.

Why had his parents come to the UK in the first place? “The small village where they were born is called Castelfranco in Miscano – in the Campania region, inland from Naples. It was a pretty tough life there in the 1950s. Most of the young kids left, a lot of them going to northern Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Australia or America, but many of them came to London.”

He continues: “My parents didn’t live in London right away because they found jobs as a housekeeper, butler and chef in a fancy house in Epping – hence I was born in Epping Forest Hospital. Eventually they found a council flat behind Victoria Street, which is where I grew up.”

How did he begin as a musician? “My father was a singer who had a facility for teaching. I started playing the piano at six, and by the time I was 10 I was playing for his students. It became a sort of family business. I did that for 12 years.”

I started playing the piano at six, and by the time I was 10 I was playing for my father’s students

So, Pappano grew up to the sound of voices – not all of them singing opera. “To make ends meet, my father had to take all kinds of singers. I used to play Italian art songs, pop songs, anything that was current, so right from the beginning I had an idea of music being very wide.”

When he was 13, Pappano moved with his family to Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Just down the road was Verrilli’s piano shop, and there I met this lady, Norma Verrilli, who would become the most important influence in my life – an incredible musician, a wonderful pianist and teacher, who also played the harpsichord and clavichord and had an early-music group.

“Norma’s teaching involved a lot of sight-reading, playing two pianos, and – I had a little bit of this from my father’s singers – playing show tunes because Norma was big into that, too. It was a crazy mix.”

Meanwhile at home he was continuing to do a lot of accompanying. “I would run home after school every day and get home at 1.32pm, and we’d often be teaching until 9pm at night.”

Unusually, the young Pappano opted out of the conventional conservatoire training. “It was decided that I wouldn’t leave home but stay and continue with Norma. To be honest, at the time, the idea of leaving home was something that I could not imagine. I don’t think I was ready, actually.”

Q&A Antonio Pappano

What was your first professional music job?
Playing the piano for my father’s voice students.

What is your next job?
Who knows?

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Who or what was your biggest influence?
The defining details of different cultures.

What’s your best advice for auditions?
Don’t choose something that’s too long.

If you hadn’t been a music director, what would you have been?
Probably something to do with languages.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
I have the same pre-performance meal.

But singers he was playing for were already passing his name around and he was soon being spoken of in high circles. “At some point I got a call to audition as a répétiteur for the New York City Opera. I landed the job, and of course that meant leaving my father with nobody. To this day, I feel guilty about that moment, though I remember my mum pushing me and saying: ‘You’ve got to do this.’”

Working with Barenboim

When he went to work at New York City Opera, he met several singers who said: “Oh, you play the piano like an orchestra. You’ve got to conduct.” He started to come back to Europe as a répétiteur, travelling (among other places) to the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, which was strong on Wagner and Strauss. So he took some German lessons.

“I went to Frankfurt, too, and from Frankfurt I was called to play some auditions for Daniel Barenboim because he was casting the upcoming Ring cycle at Bayreuth. He was auditioning singers, but he said: ‘You’re coming with me – we’re going to Bayreuth.’ So that’s what happened.”

Pappano did six summers at Bayreuth, playing The Ring, Tristan and Isolde, and Parsifal. “I also did other stuff with him on tour. Being close to that kind of mind, that firing on all cylinders, I just became drunk on that,” he says.

He was then supposed to go with Barenboim to become his chief assistant at the Paris Opéra. “The next three years of my life were fixed, when all of a sudden the deal fell apart and bang, it was gone.

“That was the day my career really started. I’d never had ambitions to conduct – in fact I couldn’t conduct my way out of a paper bag – but I was a good musician and always very communicative. Little by little, I saw that I could work with orchestras as if I were working with singers – as a coalition, if you like, with a suggestion here or there, finding technical solutions to musical problems, or musical solutions to technical problems. Through a recommendation I got a management, and all of a sudden, little things started coming in.”

It was in Oslo in 1987 that he really took off. “I conducted my first Bohème, which showed me what I had become without my even knowing it. I went to the first piano and staging rehearsal, and all of a sudden I took over everything – I was telling them how to move, I was telling them how to sing, I was telling them the whole business.”

He continues: “All my fascination to do with what opera really is – this communion with the pit and the stage being absolutely joined – came out, and it shocked me as much as anyone. I still wasn’t technically adept, but I was getting experience, and through my enthusiasm and my knowledge of the scores themselves, I got other work.”

In 1990, he was appointed music director of the Norwegian Opera. “What I learned there was to hone an atmosphere of family, which has been very important for me here.” Then, two years later, he was poached from Norway by La Monnaie in Brussels. “I stayed there for 10 years, conducting many important productions and developing a very wide repertoire, and then I came here – a job I couldn’t say no to, although I didn’t know much about it.”

His second Covent Garden debut

That was in 2002, though he recalls his previous – disastrous – Covent Garden debut in 1990. “John Pritchard had passed away, and I was to jump in for him with La Bohème and a very young cast. Jerry Hadley was the tenor, but he conked out after performance one and I had a series of seven different tenors in the first seven shows.

“Nobody knows that piece better than I do, but the situation was just too much for me. I have never read the reviews, but they tell me that they were stinkingly awful. I was never invited back, so who would have thought I would become the music director?”

Yet, when the Royal Opera House was looking for a successor to Bernard Haitink, they went to see him conduct Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. “My name was on a list of five. All of a sudden I got the job.”

What was it like when he arrived? “You have to realise that the love and admiration that the orchestra had for Bernard Haitink was something that I could never, ever compete with, even to this day. I came in with Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, a piece for chamber orchestra, which was a good way for me to get to know all the soloists. I felt I just did my job, but it’s not even a question of what I felt – you know what needs fixing, and because of my upbringing I was the polar opposite of Bernard in every way. I just got on with it.

“My relationship with the orchestra was slow to warm up, although from the beginning we were very cordial. Now, after 18 years, I feel it’s a very natural relationship. They know me inside out, and I know them inside out, so they know my weaknesses and my strengths.”

My relationship with the ROH orchestra was slow to warm up. Now they know me inside out

What does the music director at an opera house actually do? “You’re guiding the musical level, the quality of the ensemble, working with the orchestra and laying down certain principles, not only for the piece you’re working on, but in general.

“You should also be aware of personnel issues, to really care for and nurture your musicians and your choristers. You have to set the example for the level of energy that is expected. I think I’ve made the orchestra more aware of the dramaturgical content of what it is they’re playing – why it is they’re playing this way, or that way. You don’t have to be intellectual about it – these guys are extremely emotionally intelligent. You just give them a clue and bang, they’re off.’