When I sang Isolde to Alberto’s Tristan at English National Opera all those years ago, it was a joy to hear such wonderful tenor sounds in my ears, my heart and my soul. It was always difficult for him to memorise his work and up until the first night I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Yet when we went into that other place of performing he became Tristan and we travelled, on the waves of his beautiful sounds, to places I have seldom been.
He was a very experienced singer who had sung with many great sopranos but I always got the feeling he was enjoying his time with me as much as any other. His ability to share a monastic love, huge laughter and sometimes despair was I think because of his great humility about his own singing. He really didn’t think of himself as the great singing artist he was. He was just a man doing a day’s work [Remedios started his working life as a docker in his native Liverpool], making friends along the way. Of course, not everyone understood his simplicity, and he was often hurt.
Alberto had an intangible gift of bringing himself and his up-until-that-moment unexpressed thoughts to the music without a great hoo-ha because he had a natural instrument which obeyed his inner thoughts with ease. He was a real person, not afraid of revealing himself warts and all. Reginald Goodall was one of the early conductors to give this non-intellectual singer time and space in the sometimes over-intellectualised world of Wagner, and the Wagnerian world of his generation in Britain was a better place because of this (pictured right: Remedios as Lohengrin studying the score before a performance).
He was also brave, because singers are not always on top vocal form and should sometimes cancel because of health reasons but in the Heldentenor repertoire there is seldom a suitable understudy to jump in. I have seen fear in Alberto’s eyes, as the performance started, change to joy when he made it to the end of the show without letting anyone down.
Long serious shows are where laughter at the smallest mishap is most prevalent and we shared many such moments. A lot of the mistakes were mine, which he instantly forgave, but the one I remember most was when we sat down for the long famous duet which is later echoed in the Liebestod and he whispered to me, "What’s next?" I smiled back because I thought he was having a quiet joke with me but when he asked again I told him the words. He replied, "I’ve forgotten the tune," which was by then upon us. I was never quite sure if in fact it had been a joke, because he remembered the duet perfectly as we sang his line together. The mistake, if it had been one, looked like mine. Laughter could be heard from our dressing-rooms long after the audience had gone home.
I think of that happy laughter and his wonderful singing, and send him love for his final journey.
Alberto Remedios, born 27 February 1935; died 11 June 2016
- Tonight's performance of Tristan and Isolde at English National Opera is dedicated to Alberto Remedios
Next page: a complete radio broadast of the 1981 ENO Tristan and Isolde with Alberto Remedios, Linda Esther Gray and Reginald Goodall conducting on YouTube
Complete 1981 ENO Tristan and Isolde conducted by Reginald Goodall