Ernst Haefliger

 

 

I think it was the St. John's Passion in one of the colleges at Oxford University for which my boss, Lina Lalandi had booked the great Swiss tenor Ernst Haefliger to sing the Evangelist and no doub ay tenor arias. I forget who was cnducting but I fancy James Bowman was the countertenor, 

Studying Modern Laguagesat the university I was able to speak to Haefliger in German and he must have taken a shine to me because he offered to help in my ambition to become an agent. He offered to introduce me to his American agent Ann Colbert if I would go to New York when he was planning to be there. I thought this was a good idea and planned a trip to the USA around the promised meeting.

I hade never been to North America before and so it was all very exciting. My first cal was to Boston where my father had a contact called Dr. Max Tennis who himself had a close friendship with Sol Hurok's man in Boston whose name I forget. As well as Boston I would visit a conductor of my acquaintance called Daniel Revenaugh who had the osition of Musical Director of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. It all seemed so heady and I was sure something would arise from these contacts which would see me set up in the musical world.

This is not quite what happened but in each case there was an anecdote to be related, an experience to be gained and even an offer of a job as I will relate.

The Boston experience was amusing if without the tiniest success. Jill accompanied me through the trip and our first experience was to stand next to Carlo Maria Giulini in the lift of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. There I was with only the slightest of toe-holds in the musical world together for a brief moment with one of the greatest conductors of the time, no doubt guesting with the great Boston Symphony Orchestra. Of course I failed to make any use of this circumstance. Only the world's greatest go-getter mighthave done so and that was not me.

The contrast with the episode with Max Tennis couldn't have been starker. I called Tennis and he suggested we met for dinner at some modest restaurant at 5.30. I had never heard of anyone eating dinner at 5.30 before but sun=bsequently discovered that this is not at all strange in the US. Tennis arranged to pick us up at the hotel which I thought was kind of him. He arrived looking not at all like an eminent physician which he no doubt was. Barely 5ft tall extremely broad and corpulent he was almost spherical. He insisted the three of us sat in the back seat of the taxi with Jill in the middle. He then prceeded to point out landmarks on our way to the restaurant by reaching over Jill's chest in a way that was obviously not accidental. 

His introduction to 'Hurok's man' was useless apart from having a nice lunch at the ancient Locke-Ober fish restaurant which weemed to be something Herman Melville might have known.

So much for Boston. Next, New York. Ann Colbert was a dignified and impressive old lady but even an introduction from Ernst Haefliger wasn't going to open any doors with Colbert Artists Management. I say 'old lady' but Ann Colbert was still in full flow decades later. This was a mistake I was to make when I first looked at the agents in London. They all seemed ancient and I fancied I could soon be picking up their artists follwing their sad passing but again, they were remarkably long-lived.

Haefliger was indeed in New York and when we met up he suggested we went downtown to a pirate record shop he wanted to visit. In those days especially in America there were 'private' pressings of what we called pirate tapes of live performances and broadcasts. People would take cassette recorders into concerts and opera performances and surrepticiously make bootleg recordings. These were of course of poor quality and sometimes punctuated with coughs, talking and even in one case, a fart.

I remember Haefiger leafing through the LPs of these recordings muttering 'Das ist eine Schande!' 'Unerhoert!' and 'Um Gottes Willen' and then go to the counter with one of his own recordings and ask 'How much is this please?'

I maintained friendly relations with this kindest of man for quite a few years through his Zurich Masterclasses for young singers. I even attended a session he gave including the young British tenor John Elwes. He was an excellent teacher.

The last stop on out US trip was to Jacksonville, Florida where the flamboyant Daniel Revenaugh had just taken up his position as Musical Director. He met us with his business manager whose name was Travis Selmaier. The two of them showed us Jacksonville, explaining that as far as city boundaries were concerned it was one of the biggest cities in the country and taking us up to a bar at the top of some high rise building where we could survey the whole. It seemed to consist of a quite small downtown area surrounded by a lot of countryside.

That evening we were invited to a joint called the 'Jaegerhuette' somewhere just off a highway out of town. There we had a hilarious meal served by a very drunken waiter called Fritz or something equally Germanic. Revenaugh and Selmaier had taken it into their heads to offer me the post of Assistant Manager of the orchestra on the strength of my British accent. they said the ladies of the orchestral committee would just love it. We asked to have the night to sleep on it and then said 'No.' I sometimes wonder what oyr lives would have been like if we had said 'yes.' Revenaugh was soon to be sacked for programming a Beethoven symphony in each of nine programmes in the Beethoven bi-centenary year, 1970 which was deemed to be far too demanding for local audiences. That and alleged irregularities with young ladies at his beach house.