Proms star Gerald Finley: Why playing psychopaths suits me

Times

2 days ago

In 2018, when the Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley was the star soloist at the Last Night of the Proms, he unfurled a Canadian flag and a Union Jack while singing Rule, Britannia! Parading a Canadian flag at the Proms this year might be seen as a touch controversial — a riposte to President Trump's designs on Finley's homeland. So perhaps it's just as well that Finley is back for the First Night of the Proms — when no flags are displayed.
Which is not to say that the concert won't carry a strong social, even political message. Finley will be the soloist in a rarely performed choral epic — Vaughan Williams's Sancta Civitas, written in the aftermath of the First World War. 'It's based on the Book of Revelation,' he says, 'yet it's a piece reflecting the destruction and slaughter that Vaughan Williams's generation had been through. And it's full of hope. People had lost so much. They must have felt that it meant something, that there must be a way of rebuilding a better world.' One imagines that many people hearing the work in 2025 will be hoping for the same thing.
Finley, 65, looks the epitome of elegant charm as he sips a morning coffee in a central London watering hole — although we spend most of our conversation talking about his life of violence, cruelty, lust and malice. A catalogue of crime confined to the stage, I hasten to add. It's just a few months since he was at the Royal Opera House playing the abusive patriarch Helge in Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera Festen. In September he is back on the same stage as the monstrous police chief Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca.
Add to that his celebrated portrayals of Iago in Verdi's Otello, Don Giovanni and various manifestations of Satan and he has a weighty track record of operatic evil. How does such a pleasant bloke play such horrible characters?
'When I first performed Scarpia I asked myself: 'OK, is he a psychopath?'' Finley says. 'So I looked up Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. It has a great line on its first page: 'Don't worry, the fact that you've picked up this book usually means you aren't'.'
But did it offer useful tips? 'Yes. The whole idea is that psychopaths behave as they observe normal people behaving, even though they have these incredibly brutal, narcissistic, literally unfeeling tendencies. That's extremely useful knowledge.'
Does Finley enjoy transforming himself into a thoroughly bad character? 'I was once chastised by an audience member who said my voice was much more suited to benevolent roles, such as Hans Sachs [the noble cobbler in Wagner's Die Meistersinger ]. But that's why I think it works.'
In September he will perform in Tosca opposite Anna Netrebko , the soprano initially barred from many opera houses (she is still banned at the Metropolitan in New York) after she gave an ambivalent response to the invasion of Ukraine. What is Finley's attitude to working with Russian musicians who are perceived as sympathetic to Putin?
'That's more a question for the Royal Opera's casting team,' he says. 'I'm a working singer, I go where the job takes me.'
After singing as a boy treble in a church in Ottawa, Finley was encouraged by his great uncle — the Westminster Abbey organist William McKie, who conducted the choir at the 1953 Coronation — to take up a choral scholarship at King's College Cambridge, where he read modern languages and then theology. 'I loved theology,' Finley says, 'because Don Cupitt [the radical Christian philosopher] was around then and he was inspirational.'
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Those lectures must have come flooding back when he sang the role of the tormented Robert Oppenheimer in John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic. 'Absolutely,' Finley says. 'When Adams gets Oppenheimer to sing John Donne's sonnet [ Batter my heart, three person'd God ] he really is asking all those fundamental questions. What is the universe doing? Am I finding the answers or not? Am I about to destroy everything?'
Would it be fair to say that singing in the King's choir was less formative? 'Well, David Willcocks [the King's choirmaster in the 1960s] famously said that if you make an ugly sound in King's chapel it lasts eight seconds. So there was definitely an emphasis on gentleness and blend, which isn't perhaps the best preparation for opera. It took me until I was 30 to give strength and direction to my sound and unlock the true voice within me. I had to go to the US to find a teacher — Armen Boyajian, who's a legend in New York.'
The coaching must have been good because Finley excels in just about every serious vocal field. He's the go-to bass-baritone for composers writing new operas, whether it's Turnage (he was also in the premieres of The Silver Tassie and Anna Nicole), or John Adams (he has just played Antony in his Antony and Cleopatra at the New York Met) or Tobias Picker (The Fantastic Mr Fox). And he's one of a diminishing band regularly giving song recitals, most recently on an international tour with the young pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason.
Is he proud of such a breadth of repertoire? He laughs. 'Some might call that indecisive. You know, Mr Variety's the Spice. But you only discover great music by trying it out.'