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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
Jessye Norman: I was given my very own radio. I know that most kids sort of listening to this right now would just burst out laughing, but it was the greatest thing in the world. I was given my very own radio in my very own bedroom, which meant I could listen to anything that I wanted to. I didn't have to invite my brothers. I could close the door, and if I wanted to listen to Gunsmoke or to Elvis Presley or to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays, I could do that. And I would listen to the Metropolitan Opera because they had the most wonderful announcer. His name was Milton Cross, and Milton Cross would tell you everything you needed to know about the opera. Of course I didn't understand Italian or French or German or any of these things, but I didn't need to, because Milton Cross told you everything you needed to know. He told you what Joan Sutherland was wearing, that she was very tall, that she was wearing a very beautiful blond wig and that her costume for Lucia di Lammermoor was this beautiful teal blue color. So I could see all of this in my mind, and however long the opera lasted on a Saturday afternoon, that's how long it took me to clean my room, which was my job on the Saturday. So if it was a long opera, it went on for a bit, my cleaning.
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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
Jessye Norman: I think that she saw great joy in the actual act of singing, and that even though I was walking into a classroom of people -- and it was a small classroom. It wasn't a big auditorium. People were sitting all around me. And that I was comfortable in that situation, because that's the way you sing at church. I mean if you were standing in church singing, there's somebody sitting in the front row, there's somebody sitting on the side. There are the deacons sitting to your right, so it's not like you're on a platform performing. So I think that she saw a certain degree of enthusiasm, and a certain degree of happiness, just being allowed to do it. I think that that sort of caught her eye and her ear, which was, of course, a glorious thing for me, to be able to work with someone, not having studied anything about voice before.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
Sir Trevor Nunn: I think I was seven-years-old. I was taken to a place called the Ipswich Hippodrome. "Hippodrome" is a word that means a stadium where horses are going to be on view, but lots of vaudeville theaters were called hippodromes. I was very excited that at last I was being taken to a theater. I had no idea what the inside of a theater would look like. Even in this area - it was just a kind of vaudeville house - there was this feeling of red velvet cushions. Probably it wasn't velvet; I don't know what the material was, but some feeling of plushness that I found very exciting. As we sat there, I heard an orchestra tuning up for the first time. I say an orchestra -- it was probably six musicians, eight musicians, I don't know -- but I heard violins -- an E being struck, and a clarinet being played. And then, the overture, and I have never forgotten that completely visceral excitement. That -- butterflies in the stomach and a show is about to begin. I can't remember much else about the show, except that there was a woman in it who had a very shiny black skirt and it was split right up to the waist. That image remains. I would imagine, therefore, that I was being taken to a show that was pretty inappropriate for a seven year-old. Heaven knows what kind of blue jokes were coming down from that stage! But, it was an indelible thrill.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
The conditions of theater, particularly of classical theater, should be improved to the point where it's the seat price that can be lowered, where the working conditions are such that the standards are higher, and therefore it lets you down less often. Because when it works, when it really works, then it can change your life for good and all. There are things that can happen to you in a theater, things which can be to do with performance, to do with understanding elements of the human condition, which can be to do with ideas, can be to do with uncomfortable ideas, abrasive ideas, revolutionary ideas. But, there are things that can change you more extremely and stay with you longer because of that live visceral contact. I worry that we are possibly, towards the end of something. Rather than still flourishing right in the middle of something. I sense that we needn't be near the end of something. I sense that there's a wonderful ecological balance to be achieved between live things and mechanical things, between the indelible visceral things and the library of things that you can go back to and check out many times over. There's a balance that will ultimately be the best thing for the species. Just this morning we were cheering to Nobel Prize winning chemists who had warned us all about what we were doing to the environment, what we were doing to the ozone layer. When we get too rarefied with scientific advance, when we rely upon scientific advance that takes us further and further away from our basic human condition and we get it wrong, we have to keep coming back to our basic human condition. The basic condition of the theater actually requires no technology. All it requires is that fire last night and those costumes and the human voice and people gathered together. That's all that's required for something to happen that is life changing. Of course, there are countless sophistications of it. Keeping the two things is what's going to make entertainment, and expression, and communication so much more rich in the next century, in the next millennium.
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