After more than half a century as a conductor, Franz-Paul Decker, in Dublin this month for the Anna Livia festival, tells Michael Dervanabout his experience of an operatic world that he fears is facing extinction
GERMAN CONDUCTOR Franz-Paul Decker, a stalwart of the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, is a man clearly aware of himself as an old-timer. He's not a fan of mobile phones, iPods or television, or the modern obsession with sport. There's raw horror in his voice when he tells of asking a young German boy if he'd heard of Ludwig van Beethoven, and the question came back: "What team does he play for?"
Decker gives the impression of trading on the fact that his world-view no longer really fits. He airs his grievances like a professional griper who knows there's an amusing side to the darkness of his vision. But at the same time, you feel, he's serious about it all, too.
Decker celebrated his 85th birthday in June. He was born in Cologne in 1923, and was one of those conductors whose career blossomed after the second World War. The German musical world that he entered, and that trained him to be what he is, hardly exists any more, he says. He followed the time-honoured route of becoming a conductor by beginning at the bottom, starting as a repetiteur, a rehearsal pianist and coach, and moving upwards towards conducting.
It was a time when regional German theatres supported large repertoires, and emergencies brought about by sickness or the unavailability of key performers could result in nightmarish scenarios. For young conductors, the baptism of fire was to be told at the last minute, and with no chance of extra rehearsal time, that they had to stand in for someone who was indisposed. You got the word, you went on, you did what you could. Decker tells a story of quite how hairy things could get: "One afternoon, 1956, it was around then, I got a call - 'Decker, can you take over?'. Karl Elmendorff, the famous Bayreuth Wagnerian, was our boss, and he was sick. I knew it was Carmen. So I went into the pit, a young man" - he mimics the strutting of youthful confidence - "gave a sign to the percussion on the right side . . ."
"Tschunggggg", he says, forcefully, to imitate the effect of his gesture, "but nothing came. There was silence. The leader then started playing" - he sings a slow, high, soft melody - "and all the other players were laughing. The Carmen, it turned out, was also sick, and they had changed the opera to Lohengrin, and no one had told me. That is an experience I will never forget. But the score was there for me to look at, so I got on with it."
He's careful to explain that this is no story of "Decker the genius," managing to conduct one opera when he was expecting another.
"Any of our conductors - we had seven Kapellmeister- any of them could have done it. I was the first Staatskapellmeister, the state Kapellmeister, but any of them could have done it. I worked from 9 o'clock in the morning until 11 o'clock at night in the opera. It was my life. But it doesn't exist any more, that way of doing things. We had 52 different operas in Wiesbaden, ready to be played at any time. The sets were in a huge warehouse on the Rhine - it was no problem to get them ready."
Almost incidentally, as he's telling the story, he drops in the fact that he'd never actually conducted Lohengrinbefore, though it was in the nature of things that he had played piano at rehearsals. That was the way of the world at the time, he says, and young conductors "jumped in". "I had no interpretation, no special feelings for the work, I just did the job."
He also conducted concerts by Wiesbaden's other orchestra, playing lighter music, again without rehearsal, and his concert career took off after he was appointed Generalmusikdirektorin Bochum, in the Ruhr district, in 1956. His international career blossomed, and he held positions in Rotterdam, Barcelona and New Zealand, as well as with five orchestras in Canada (those of Montreal, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Edmonton), where he now lives.
IT WAS IN Canada that he first came across the founder and artistic director of the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, Bernadette Greevy. He was the music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in the late 1960s and it was then that the Irish mezzo soprano turned up with a team of leading Canadians - Pierrette Alarie, Leopold Simoneau and Donald Bell - for a performance of Handel's Messiah. Decker was impressed with her contributions, and the two have been working together ever since, the peak of their collaborations being Greevy's contributions to a complete Mahler cycle that Decker conducted over three seasons in Buenos Aires. The two have also recorded Mahler song cycles together, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, for Naxos.
Decker's reminiscences are often vague about dates and details, but absolutely firm in the view that many aspects of life used to be better than they are now. He is amazed at the technical finesse of modern violinists, but worries that they don't play with heart or soul. He holds up the veteran Ida Haendel as a model for getting fully behind the notes.
He is concerned about the future of opera, to the point where he wonders if it will still be around as a vibrant art form half a century from now. And it comes as no surprise that he disapproves of the dominance of directors in contemporary opera productions. It's for the music that we cherish opera, he points out. In his youth, Decker conducted no less than five operas by German composer Albert Lortzing, and he laments, for example, that Lortzing's work is rarely heard now, even in Germany.
"Though of course," he points out, "there's not much in those works for directors to do."
He takes particular pride in the fact that he spotted pianist Martha Argerich before she became famous, and put her in a young performers' series in Bochum when she was just 17. And he recalls with pleasure numerous collaborations with two great pianists of an older generation, Claudio Arrau and Emil Gilels.
He has clearly led a long and fruitful life, though he is prepared to express regret at one unfulfilled ambition. "I know Wolfgang Wagner, and years ago it looked like I would go to Bayreuth," he says. But somehow it didn't work out." He doesn't speculate on what the recent power shift in the Bayreuth Festival might mean for his prospects there. But, either way, he has his memories of a complete Ringcycle at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, and no less than five Tristanswith the great Jon Vickers to look back on.
• Franz-Paul Decker conducts Samson et Dalila, by Saint-Saëns, at the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, which runs at the Gaiety Theatre until Sunday
