Photo by Juan Camilo Roa
Photo by Florian Grey
JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
DOUGLAS WILLIAMS: At the moment I am just days away from performing the role of Neptune in Mozart’s “Idomeneo” with Opera Atelier at the Ed Mirvish Theatre. This is my third production with Opera Atelier and each time I’ve sung with this company they have found new ways to challenge me. This time Director Marshall Pynkoski has expanded the role of the voice of Neptune (perhaps in the original performance the character was not even seen) into a character with a choreographed physical presence throughout the opera, causing storms and calamity that propels the drama. It is a movement intensive role. I like working with Opera Atelier because you utilize your entire body — you bring the drama of the music and the story through your body. This is uniquely Opera Atelier’s style.
I am also preparing the role of Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” for staged performances next month with the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Barbara Hannigan. This is a role that I have dreamed of singing for years, and I feel like the opportunity has arrived at the right moment in my vocal development. I don’t think it’s a role I could have sung successfully even a few years ago. Dramatically it’s so much fun to play. Nick is a devil charged with unleashing the hedonist in his protégé, Tom Rakewell. Barbara has cast young, emerging voices for this “Rake.” It’s also her opera conducting debut, so there should be a lot energy and attention around this project. We already had workshops on the piece last November and I have every confidence it’s going to be an exciting performance.
JS: How did doing this project change you as a person and as a creator?
DW: Well, the Rake is not yet complete, but in process. In preparing Nick Shadow, I felt a synthesis of a lot of things that I’ve been working on over the years and that I never want to lose sight of in my singing: This balance between darkness and light, graveness and fun, power and agility. Nick is spontaneous, and insistently positive even as he drives Rakewell toward ruin. There is a sense of play within a very strong frame of this supernatural, evil character. And I think that especially as a low, dark voice that is something I never want to lose sight of and I want to integrate into my singing with everything I approach.
JS: What might others not understand or appreciate about the work you produce or do?
DW: Whether or not you’re a singer, your voice is one of the biggest ways that you project your soul into the world. So, there is a lot of unconscious psychology and ideas we have of ourselves and of our bodies that needs to be stripped away to find one’s true voice. To surrender to your real voice. That has been a part of my story as a singer and perhaps that something non-singers would not think about as part of the training and development of a singer.
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work?
DW: I’m a little bit crazy and weird, and an opera stage is often a perfect place to let that flow. As a bass-baritone I’m usually in the role of the menace, the wicked one, the loner, the seducer. Figaro would be a sunny exception of a role that I do that is good-hearted and earnest and normal! I embrace the opportunity to live other lives on stage, and I commit to it once I’m there.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
DW: I’m sensitive. To other’s egos, to the energy in the room, to my own faults or failures. Sometimes it takes a lot of emotional focus (like a warmup before I sing or rehearse) to brush off what’s going on around me and stick to my first intention.
JS: Imagine that you are meeting someone, living or dead, whom you admire because of their work in your form of artistic expression. What would you say to them and what would they say to you?
DW: I would love to meet Emanuel Schikaneder, the actor, singer, composer, and most famously the librettist of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and the first Papageno. He was someone who created his own unique path — unbound by any category and also bringing together all the arts in his work. He thrived in collaboration.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that helped to make you who you are as a creative artist.
DW: Coming out as a gay man. I was not completely hooked up to my body prior to that, and so I think my singing was less interesting than it is now. I was also distanced from my impulse — and a creative person must learn to hear and respond to impulse.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
DW: What appears to be a circus life of being away from home most of the time, juggling multiple works of music at once in your brain, having income fluctuate… all of the stuff that comes with being a performer can be quite manageable and richly enjoyable with some mindfulness, loving and supportive friends, and a voracious sense of adventure and curiosity for life.
JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts? Why the delay so far?
DW: I would like to create more music-films. Maybe even a film of an entire song cycle, such as Schubert’s Schwanengesang. I love combining music and imagery. This will take a fair amount of money. Doubt — that I would have a clue as to what I’m doing — is also factor. I’m also starting to write some music (art song) for myself. This is also coming with a lot of doubt.
JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts how would you change it and why?
DW: I’ve only just dabbled in acting — and I know that I am too much a musician and too in love with it to do without music — but, sometimes I do think about a second life as a Shakespearean actor. I think it has to do with empowerment. Without music you lack the genius of the composer’s text setting, but then you have to dig even deeper and find your own connection to the text. This is a very exciting feeling. I recently heard Natalie Dessay speak about her transition from the opera stage to the theatre stage. She said what’s different between the two worlds is that in theatre the challenge is: how present can you be? I love that.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically fives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
DW: I’m amazed by the quality of singers these days. There are just so many fine singers it seems. I’m also inspired by increasingly diverse group of composers, librettists, conductors, and directors who are creating new work for the opera genre. Opera is also a hot place for collaboration with artists from visual disciplines. There is a lot to be excited about.
I’m concerned about the diminishing baseline knowledge of fine arts in society. You need just a little tiny seed of awareness of opera to get you in the door. You won’t go if you have zero reference point. But gone are the days, it seems, when an opera star might also be a mainstream celebrity. The shrinking attention span is also a huge problem. Curiosity and the simple willingness to sit through anything for a couple hours without your phone is seriously under threat. When part of the audience leaves at the intermission of a Saint Matthew Passion (as happened to me in January) you have to wonder, what did they go off to do? Was it so uncomfortable for you? Or was there something just more safe and convenient awaiting at home.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create or do?
DW: There are so many things I like about what I do. Singing is a learning experience about yourself that has no end, and I am so grateful for that. Singing music that spans four hundred years is like cultural time travel — you can never stop learning or making new connections to history and across art forms. I like traveling and the challenge of meeting a new team and creating something special in that city, for those artists, at that time. What better way to experience a place than to participate in its cultural life? Most of all, I like that singing opera can be both playful and highly disciplined at the same time. A rehearsal room is a space to experiment, to open the costume box in your mind, to indulge your childlike imagination — while at the same time working very hard and drawing satisfaction from challenges and craft and the skill of those around you.
JS: In your creative life thus far, what have been the most helpful comments you have heard about your work?
DW: I have a teacher, Neil Semer, who is very honest with me. You need love and support in this career, but when it comes to improving your work you don’t need fluffy praise. More generally speaking a mentor of mine once told me to trust in who I am and what I’m doing and the right people will notice. Patience and trust were tools that older and wiser people had to teach me.
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising things about you?
DW” I respond strongly to nature. It’s so vital to me that I’ve learned I need to do a camping trip in some spectacular landscape at least once a year. These experiences used to seem mysteriously unrelated to my life as a singer, working in cities and theatres. But I recognize it’s all coming from the same deep place. Experiences in spectacular nature seem to lift the ceiling for me, remind me of unbound possibilities, primal impulse, and declutter my soul.