Episode 40 - Voice, Power and the Big Machine: Opera Special
Bass Barnaby Rea joins Steve backstage at the Royal Opera House for an exploration of the operatic voice, the vast machinery behind it, and opera’s complicated relationship with class, power and access.
Hello, musically curious people
Opera is not my natural musical home.
I’ve seen a fair amount of it over the years, but I’m no expert. That makes this episode less of a guide for committed opera buffs and more of an attempt to understand the form from the outside: how it works, why it became so enormous, and what one unamplified human voice has to do to fill a theatre.
My guest is British/Irish bass Barnaby Rea, recorded backstage at the Royal Opera House while he was performing Doctor Grenvil in Verdi’s La traviata.
Barnaby’s route into opera was not entirely conventional. It involved school swing band, musical theatre, a geography degree, years of training and the belated discovery that he was, in fact, a bass. He went on to train at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the National Opera Studio, before performing with companies including English National Opera, Oper Frankfurt, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Zurich Opera and the Royal Opera.
We get into the physical reality of that job: breath, resonance, vocal placement, formant, vibrato, stamina and the strange business of turning your own body into an acoustic instrument powerful enough to carry over an orchestra without a microphone.
Barnaby also demonstrates his range, sings extracts from Verdi and Berg, and attempts to give me a very compressed opera-singing lesson.
But the voice is only part of the story.
The episode was also inspired by my visit to Milan’s extraordinary Teatro alla Scala. Standing inside its tiers of boxes made me think about opera as architecture and social history: wealthy Milanese families displaying their status above an auditorium once filled with servants, standing audiences, dances, dinners and even equestrian entertainment.
Opera was high art, but it was also popular entertainment, commerce and a place to be seen.
That leads into a broader question about opera’s reputation for elitism. Tickets at major opera houses can be expensive, but cheap seats and standing tickets can also make the spectacle surprisingly accessible. Meanwhile, seeing a major pop act in a stadium may now cost many times more.
I also reflect on what that concentration of money at the top means for the rest of live music. Grassroots venues, small festivals, independent promoters and touring musicians are struggling, even while enormous headline shows make the overall industry appear healthy.
So this is an episode about voice, but also about buildings, money, hierarchy, tradition, access and the huge number of people required to make opera happen.
It is a long episode. That seems fitting for opera.
In this episode
Barnaby’s route from school swing band and musical theatre into professional opera
Why opera singers often train for years before entering the profession
Singing and acting in Italian, German, French, English, Russian and Czech
The differences between opera and musical theatre
How an operatic voice carries over an orchestra without amplification
Breath, resonance, placement, formant, range and vibrato
The scale of the Royal Opera House and its backstage operation
La Scala, private boxes and the social history of opera
Whether opera deserves its reputation for elitism
Ticket prices, public funding and opera culture across Europe
The growing divide between stadium shows and grassroots live music
Vocal stamina, double casting, travel and last-minute jump-ins
How singers, conductors and orchestras breathe and move together
Barnaby’s answer to the question: what is music for?
Links & references
Listen and watch
Barnaby Rea
Opera houses, history and access
Support the show
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Stay musically curious.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Full transcript
Steve Pretty:
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I’m a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On the Origin of the Pieces.
Steve Pretty:
This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.
Steve Pretty:
Hello, musically curious people. It’s lovely to be back in your ears after such a long time away. Sorry for the long delay. 2026 continues to be a real doozy.
But if you’ve ever wondered how an opera singer is able to make that extraordinary, enormous vocal sound, today I hope to help answer that question with the help of my guest, Barnaby Rea.
He’s coming up very shortly in an interview I recorded with him backstage at the Royal Opera House.
Today’s opera special is also partly inspired by my trip to Milan. I was working there a couple of weeks ago, and I managed to get a tour of the amazing La Scala opera house, arguably one of the most famous opera houses in the world. It is an extraordinarily grand and really, really beautiful venue.
Opera is not my natural home. I think it’s fair to say I’ve seen quite a bit of opera over the years, but I am absolutely no expert.
Hopefully, for the non-opera-lovers among you, that gives you a bit more of a route into opera through my chat with Barnaby and, later, my reflections on my experiences at La Scala in Milan.
But without further ado, I’m going to hand over to the brilliant Barnaby Rea backstage at the Royal Opera House.
Barnaby Rea:
My name is Barnaby Rea, and I am a professional opera singer. I think I’ve been doing it professionally for about 11 years.
I started training about 17 years ago now, maybe.
Steve Pretty:
Maybe we can start by talking about why that’s so. That’s seven years of training. Why did it take you so long?
No, no, no, I’m kidding. But opera does take a long time to train for, right?
Barnaby Rea:
I think it was because I did a geography degree straight out of A-levels. I picked the thing that I was least bad at because I wanted to go and get a degree, and I had no idea what I really wanted to do.
I’d always enjoyed being on stage when I was at school, and doing a little bit of music playing.
We were technically in the same swing band.
Steve Pretty:
That’s true, because we went to the same school five years apart. Full disclosure, we were at school together, and I was in the same year as your brother, who I’m still good friends with.
We were in the same school swing band. What did you play again?
Barnaby Rea:
You were first trumpet, and I was about 85th trumpet.
Steve Pretty:
You played trumpet?
Barnaby Rea:
Of course I did. One of my closest friends would play the music, and I would just play it fractionally behind him.
I’ve always been a great con artist in that way, and hopefully less so now.
I was terrible at the trumpet, but I guess it opened the door in a way. There was the musical side and the acting, which is what I did more of when I was younger. That evolved into doing both disciplines together, which is essentially opera.
Steve Pretty:
After you left school, you did some musicals. Did you do Sweeney Todd?
Barnaby Rea:
That’s right. I look back on that now and have no idea how I sang it at 18, with no training or anything.
Steve Pretty:
It’s funny that you mention Sweeney Todd. I was talking to a friend who had a rehearsal this morning, and he was telling me about a local amateur production he had played in the band for recently.
He said it is mad how difficult that piece is for everyone involved. It’s an amazing piece of music.
Barnaby Rea:
Interestingly, the next time I performed it after doing it at 18 was 16 years later, while I was a young artist at English National Opera.
I was performing in a rooftop flat belonging to the chairman of ENO, for about 15 people, one of whom was Stephen Sondheim.
Steve Pretty:
Really?
Barnaby Rea:
That was literally the next time I sang the music publicly. If you’d told 18-year-old me that, I probably would have just…
Steve Pretty:
That’s incredible.
Barnaby Rea:
It was a weirdly cyclical moment.
I haven’t done it since. I’d love to. They’re about to do a new staging of it at the Komische Oper in Berlin with a friend of mine.
It’s a great piece of art. Check it out if you haven’t.
Steve Pretty:
Going back to university, did you do much there?
Barnaby Rea:
I did one musical in our first year. We did Guys and Dolls, and I was Nathan Detroit.
There are two main couples. In the film, I think it was Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. I was the Frank Sinatra sort.
There was one musical a year, I think. There wasn’t a huge amount of musical theatre at my university.
The next year, they were going to put something on for me and another guy. But it ended up being the 2003 Rugby World Cup final in Australia, which was on really early in the morning.
We went to the pub very early and then didn’t quite turn up on time for the show, so we weren’t allowed to do it any more.
Steve Pretty:
That was a crashing reality check.
Barnaby Rea:
I’d probably be slightly more responsible now. At that point, I didn’t know I wanted to do it for a living. It was a hobby.
As a 19-year-old boy, I wasn’t necessarily going to miss the World Cup final that England won for a musical. Nowadays I would have to make a different decision, because it’s my profession.
Steve Pretty:
You often miss things, as you know.
Barnaby Rea:
Absolutely.
Steve Pretty:
Being a musician, you miss so many friends’ weddings, parties, big family events and all sorts of things.
You have to really love it. I always think that it is as much about choosing the lifestyle of being a musician as it is about your skill and your craft, which you obviously work really hard on.
Being a musician means getting used to that lifestyle and being comfortable with it, and being ready for the adventure and all the ups and downs that it can bring.
There’s the unpredictability, the irregularity of work, the lack of consistency in your life, travelling everywhere constantly and never seeing your own bed.
Barnaby Rea:
But on the other side, it’s varied and exciting.
Steve Pretty:
Exactly. We shouldn’t always start with the bad parts.
Barnaby Rea:
No, of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do often, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I love it, as I’m sure most of us do, but it definitely has its downsides.
Steve Pretty:
Coming back to the training, what changed between you doing musicals at university and starting the journey that ended up with you here at the Royal Opera House?
Barnaby Rea:
As I was finishing university in Plymouth, my mum said, “You should probably do something with the voice. You enjoy it a lot.”
I was busy having fun and everything, but I started having lessons with a guy connected with Exeter Cathedral. He had just got someone into the Royal Academy of Music, so I went to sing for the person who had auditioned them.
That was Mark Wildman, the head of vocal studies at the Royal Academy.
I took a bunch of musical theatre pieces and the one opera aria I knew, which was a very short Sarastro aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
I sang that and he said, “You’re a bass. Throw the other stuff away.”
I thought, “Okay, whatever that means.”
That set me off on more of a journey towards classical singing.
I trained with various people over the next couple of years, auditioned for the three major colleges in London, and decided to go to Guildhall.
I was there for five years. As we have already proved with my trumpet playing, I didn’t have any discernible musical background before my training.
I wanted to take my time over it, so I did three postgraduate years and then the two-year opera course, which is the top level of the singing programme.
Over those two years, you do actual staged performances. It is designed to replicate how the job works while you’re still training.
I remember when I first went to Guildhall. I was dropped into a postgraduate Italian class with a man who had previously been principal flute in the orchestra here at the Royal Opera House.
I nervously sat at the back. The person who later became my best friend in singing, the lovely Emanuele, was also in the class.
They said, “Are you a big guy? Sing.”
He pulled out this giant Bible of a folder. I had my two arias. Since getting in, I had managed to learn one more aria, which was not a huge amount of music.
Then he performed this amazing rendition of Leporello’s Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni, in which he lists the many women Giovanni has been with.
When he finished, I leaned over to the person next to me and said, “Is this postgraduate Italian singing?”
He said, “Yeah.”
And I thought, “I am not in the right place.”
It took me a term to get up the courage to sing in class because I was so out of my depth.
I had arrived knowing almost no repertoire and with no real discernible technique or understanding of how to do it. It was a baptism of fire.
The thing I relied on early on was the fact that I was useful in an acting sense. I would be put into the opera-course productions in silent or spoken roles.
That was my key in. I did have a useful tool in the toolbox.
You lean on the things you’re comfortable with, and you still do that in the profession.
Over the years I was there, I had to balance out the singing side until I was ready to go out into the big, wide world.
Steve Pretty:
Opera, more than most genres of music, is not something you can learn entirely on the job.
I didn’t go to music college. Most of the work I’ve done has involved getting up and doing it, learning from other people and learning by listening. Obviously I’ve had lessons too, but mainly I’ve learned by doing.
That isn’t really an option with opera, partly because there are so many languages involved.
Barnaby Rea:
There needs to be a certain foundation of learning.
But like any profession, you can’t get infinitely better unless you’re really doing it.
There is the pressure of performing in front of people and having to do it to the highest level you are capable of at that point, and then stretching that level slightly more every time.
You only get that development from the pressure of doing it in front of people.
Steve Pretty:
I think that’s true.
But compared with my world, or pop, folk and other genres, opera has big barriers to entry. Some are technique-based, which we’ll come to, but you’re also often singing in a language that isn’t your own.
You mentioned Italian. You didn’t speak Italian?
Barnaby Rea:
No.
That is where opera is a little different to most other types of singing.
I have performed in six different languages. A lot of my colleagues are into double figures.
There aren’t necessarily that many core opera languages, although that number can include Spanish songs or somebody’s national language.
The core five are Italian, German, French, English and Russian. There is also a large body of Czech opera.
Those are the six I have done. There is opera in many other languages as well, but those six make up much of the core repertoire performed here.
Steve Pretty:
Do you need to learn those languages? I don’t necessarily mean conversationally.
Do you learn things phonetically, or do you learn enough of the language to get by? You have to worry about pronunciation and all of that.
Barnaby Rea:
The goal is to sound native while you’re singing, in terms of phrasing and phonetics.
It should sound as though you could be German, for example.
It obviously informs the performance massively if you do speak the language. By speaking it, you learn its natural phrasing, pronunciation and general lilt.
I speak better German than anything else because I live there.
People approach it in many different ways. Some people speak six languages. Some people only speak their own language, but learn the repertoire to a level where it sounds as though they speak the others.
Essentially, you need to perform your lines in an opera to a hopefully native level and understand what everybody else is saying.
You could go through a whole career not speaking anything other than your own language and learning the others phonetically, as sounds.
But you also have to understand the meaning because it is an acting job. You need to present the text convincingly as drama, rather than just singing a bunch of vowels.
Steve Pretty:
We were talking about Sweeney Todd on the way in. That is a musical, albeit a fairly operatic musical.
What makes opera opera?
People who know musical theatre will be familiar with singers acting and moving around a stage in costume. What distinguishes musical theatre from opera, given that both involve singing, acting and moving around on stage?
Barnaby Rea:
The first difference between us and musical-theatre performers is that they do a huge number of shows every week.
They are also more multitalented in that they dance as well.
There is dancing in opera, and some opera singers are obviously very good dancers, but generally it isn’t the same kind of triple-threat singing, acting and dancing.
On the other hand, musical-theatre performers can do eight shows a week because there is amplification. We perform without amplification.
Generally, you wouldn’t do more than three or four performances of an opera in a week. Three would probably be more normal.
During rehearsals you might work in two sessions a day, but if you’re singing one of the main roles in a five-hour piece, you need time to recover before doing it again.
It is more demanding in a different way.
What musical-theatre performers do is insanely demanding, and I have no idea how they do it. But in terms of pure vocal production without electronic amplification, we have to create our own resonance.
That is demanding on the vocal cords and the rest of the body.
There is still acting. These days, we are moving away from what used to be called “park and bark”, where you stand and deliver your vocal prowess, and that’s it.
There are wonderful singers who can communicate all the necessary emotion using their voices, without doing much physical acting. That is a skill in itself when it is a conscious choice.
But it shouldn’t happen simply because that is how the form has always been done.
In the 1960s and 1970s, people might have stood and delivered in that way. That could be great in itself, but the form has moved into a different area.
People expect different things from theatre now. They expect it to feel truer to what they see on television.
You also see that in the demands of casting and appearance.
Theatre, in my view, is a mirror of emotion. As an audience member, you want to relate to what the person on stage is doing.
If it isn’t relatable, it won’t carry across to the audience and it won’t be good drama.
That still has to exist in opera, even while we are doing backflips in a singing sense.
You still need to communicate the basic fact that he is in love with her and can’t have her, or whatever it might be. That is what somebody can relate to, rather than the fact that you have just dropped two octaves and jumped back up again.
Opera presents the particular challenge of conveying a character’s story, viewpoint and emotions.
We are also an interesting part of music because we don’t write our own material in the way that you do, or that many other people in the industry do.
We have to mould ourselves around something that has existed for 200 years. That is its own challenge and part of its greatness.
You know it works because great people have sung it in the past. Then you think, “If I don’t do this well, I’m just not as good as that person.”
Steve Pretty:
That is true across classical music and, to be fair, in a lot of jazz and other music where people perform existing songs.
People are always comparing performances with historical versions.
Since the invention of recorded music, people can say, “It wasn’t as good as Callas,” or whoever.
Barnaby Rea:
It’s like anything. When you’re alive, you are compared with your peers. When you become one of the best in your field, you start being compared with dead people.
Steve Pretty:
A big thing about opera is that it is really big.
We have just been into the main house, where you’re performing tonight. It’s enormous. There are around 2,000 seats, an enormous stage and a huge dock where the sets are prepared and moved around.
The dock is actually much bigger than the theatre, isn’t it?
Barnaby Rea:
It’s huge. You’re standing in an aircraft hangar, looking through this comparatively tiny proscenium, and then it gets bigger again on the other side.
Most of the building you see from the outside is the dock.
Steve Pretty:
That huge square section at the back is where the trucks unload the sets.
Because opera singers don’t do eight performances a week in the way musical-theatre performers do, you have two or three productions happening at the same time.
Barnaby Rea:
There is ballet here as well. I think they can run three or four shows at the same time.
Steve Pretty:
That is mad.
Barnaby Rea:
They have to. Ballet dancers can’t do that many performances either.
They are probably much more resilient than we are, but I don’t think they do more than about four shows a week.
Steve Pretty:
The scale is enormous.
We are here mainly to talk about singing, obviously, but as a form opera is epic. That scale is built into it.
Why is that, and how did it come about?
Barnaby Rea:
I wonder whether it was grandiose because people wanted to see grandiose things.
That is also why operas were so long. In the past, the culture of attending the theatre was often more about being seen than about what you were watching.
People sat in what would now be the stalls and watched the people in the boxes because they were the rich and important members of society.
That is one reason operas were so long and why you might have a ballet at the beginning of Act Five.
Now things are moving closer to the length of a film. They’re changing slightly.
The set we are using tonight is around 30 years old. It is a big, classic stalwart and it works amazingly. But not all operas are staged like that nowadays.
People are moving away from it in some respects. We are in an era where directors and designers are experimenting with not using giant flats and huge pieces of scenery.
Those things can look amazing and mirror the enormous scale of the orchestration and the sound.
But in a more character-driven, smaller piece, it may be better to be minimal and focus on the singing, music-making and acting.
It is tricky on a massive stage, though. You need to give people something to look at.
If you are at the back of the amphitheatre, looking down, a big design may work better because you can’t necessarily see people’s faces very well.
The best sound is often back there, because it has spiralled together by that point.
I think there is a place for all of it. If a director wants a big design, and it works with their vision, the music can carry it.
Steve Pretty:
I’m going to cut in here and explain a little more about my trip to Milan and La Scala, and how it differs from the Royal Opera House in London.
Again, this is from an outsider’s perspective.
The Royal Opera House in London is, of course, an extraordinarily grand venue. But the social hierarchies seem quite different at La Scala.
La Scala appears to be largely made up of boxes, those private seating areas you get in theatres and particularly in opera houses. The central stalls area is much smaller than at the Royal Opera House in London.
The reason for that, I learned, is that grand Italian and Milanese families would have their own boxes at La Scala, and could decorate those boxes themselves.
If you’re watching on YouTube or Spotify, you can see the vast expanse of them. It is quite a thought to imagine each one decorated in its own presumably plush and lavish style.
These days they are all red velvet and gold curtains, but in the past they would have been decorated to reflect the power and taste of the families that owned them.
They really did own those boxes. The system is different now, but it is interesting to think about that social history and hierarchy.
Down in the stalls would be the servants.
You might bring your servants to the opera. You would go up to your fancy box, and the servants would remain down in the stalls.
The stalls used to be standing, as they still are at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. In that era of theatre and early opera, many standing tickets were available.
The servants and other less wealthy audience members would be down there, and it would be much more of a social occasion.
You can imagine those grand families in the boxes looking down, literally looking down on their servants as well as looking towards the stage.
Because there were no fixed seats, La Scala could also use the stalls for other kinds of performance.
They had horses in there, for horse displays, battles, dances or other equestrian performances in the area where the seats now stand.
I think they may also have done that at the Royal Opera House. They certainly did at the London Coliseum, which is now the home of English National Opera.
They also had grand balls. Tables could cover the entire downstairs auditorium, with dinners and dances where you might waltz around with your prospective lover.
It is evocative to imagine all those boxes looking down on the dancing, the food, the horses, the servants and the opera.
It made me reflect on the difference between opera then and opera now.
Opera really was music of the people. It was very expensive to own a box, of course, but servants and other people would be down at the bottom. It was entertainment designed to appeal to everybody.
It was mass-market entertainment.
Today it isn’t quite the same. We touch on that in my chat with Barnaby.
If you’ve heard previous episodes, you will have heard me talk about the different uses and reasons for music.
One thing that is often overlooked when we think about opera in the 21st century is that we think of it as art music. It is art music, of course, but it was also commercial music and popular music.
Jazz was popular music and has subsequently become art music. Similar things have happened to all sorts of forms over the years.
The same is true of Shakespeare in the theatre world. It was mass-market entertainment and has now been elevated into a more rarefied art form, something held on a pedestal and admired from a lofty distance.
A lot of people would say that it doesn’t always connect with mainstream culture, for better or worse.
Now is not the time to dig into all the reasons why that might be good or bad.
But it was interesting to be inside that space, in the home of opera in Milan, and to think about its social hierarchies and how they have changed.
That also applies to how we think about culture now.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last couple of months is how difficult live entertainment is at the moment.
Live entertainment has arguably never been in a worse state during my professional lifetime.
That isn’t only my opinion. It is shared by the promoters and live agents I speak to, and by most touring musicians.
Part of the reason, in my opinion, is that we have people spending vast amounts of money on tickets for big arena and stadium shows.
People might spend £500, £600 or £700 on a ticket to see Taylor Swift or another huge pop act. Fair play to those acts. No disrespect to them.
But the problem is that the money becomes concentrated at the top.
Meanwhile, the budget people might previously have used to visit their local venue or pub and spend £10 to see an up-and-coming act is being squeezed.
An artist may never move beyond the circuit of pub back rooms. But that circuit is incredibly important to the lifeblood of music in this country.
People simply aren’t coming out to those shows in the same numbers.
I have just been on tour with Hackney Colliery Band. It was great fun, but it was very hard to get people out. We didn’t always play to great-sized audiences, sadly, and that is challenging.
When I talk to promoters and other bands, that seems to be happening across the board.
Bands are stopping touring. Promoters are giving up. Venues are closing.
When we think about the cultural hierarchy of music, it is interesting to reflect that we are reintroducing the very thing people often say about opera: that it is elitist.
It is expensive to get a good seat at the opera, but in many cases it is much more expensive to see a major pop act in a stadium.
What remains relatively inexpensive is seeing an act in a 200-seat venue or a 50-seat pub.
Those are the places where music is incubated and grown. As the cliché goes, they are where the superstars of the next generation come from.
If those places disappear, as they increasingly are, we are in danger of not having a very rosy musical future for the live scene.
That is without even getting into the financial challenges musicians face because of streaming royalties, or the lack of them.
AI music is another huge topic, which I’ll explore more in subsequent episodes.
I wanted to think about this in the context of opera being perceived as rarefied, expensive and not for the masses.
You can get cheap tickets to see opera at La Scala or the Royal Opera House. You can sometimes find standing tickets for under £10, and certainly tickets for £10, £20 or £30.
That is not very much considering the spectacle you are watching.
You don’t have to be a huge opera fan. I would urge everyone to try to see something like that while they can and while those ticket schemes still exist.
It is a spectacle you won’t necessarily witness anywhere else. The music may not be entirely for you, and that’s fair enough. But it is a unique thing to experience.
That same £10 or £20 can also go a long way towards supporting grassroots venues and independent musicians.
I applaud the big stars for being able to sell out enormous venues and charge a lot of money.
It also looks good on the government’s balance sheet for live music. I have spoken to civil servants in the past who have said that the entertainment sector seems to be doing quite well.
That is because the balance sheet shows that Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift or somebody else has sold a huge number of tickets at £500 each.
That looks good for the economy.
But almost everything underneath that level is struggling, with some exceptions.
I urge you to use your money in a more distributive way where you can.
Everybody is struggling at the moment, and I appreciate there often isn’t much money to go around.
But think about how far £500 could go. You could attend ten gigs at £50, or many more at £5 or £10.
There is all sorts of amazing live music happening, and we are going to lose it unless people come out and support it.
Thank you to everyone who supported the Hackney Colliery Band tour and who continues to support my live Wilton’s shows, the next of which is on Tuesday 19 May 2026 as I record this.
Festivals are also really struggling.
Please keep supporting these things, because they will not exist without you.
Anyway, we’re going back to the opera chat now, and to the Royal Opera House in London, where Barnaby and I are discussing some of these exact issues.
Steve Pretty:
Coming back to the social element you mentioned, I think there is a perception, rightly or wrongly, that opera can be elitist and may not be for everyone.
Do you think that is true?
Barnaby Rea:
I don’t think so, but that may be because I’m in it and therefore biased.
You can sit in the gods here for £8. I don’t think people realise that.
You can stand behind the stalls for £9.
Until a couple of years ago, I was a season-ticket holder at Tottenham Hotspur, and that cost a lot more.
The prices here are much lower than where I sat in the South Stand.
Opera is a somewhat inaccessible art form because it can feel like a very large thing to buy into all at once.
Certain sections of society do tend to attend more than others.
At various points in its history, opera has certainly been more elitist. I won’t name specific companies, but if people get dressed in dinner jackets to attend, other members of society are obviously going to perceive that as hoity-toity, because it looks that way.
Maybe it is, to a certain extent.
But you can see it much more cheaply.
There are all sorts of schemes now designed to make it more accessible.
At English National Opera, where I did my young artist programme, younger audiences can attend for around £20. There are many schemes like that.
If we look beyond England to Germany, where I live, there is a much broader age range in the audience.
I don’t know whether that is because of compositional pride or because opera remains a larger part of the national culture.
We are a niche in much of the world, and that is completely fine. We are not Taylor Swift in terms of broad appeal.
But in parts of Central Europe, including Germany, Switzerland and Austria, opera remains very popular across all age groups.
I can’t necessarily tell you why. I think it is simply still more embedded in the culture.
Younger people go and see it, and the government funding is there.
Whether that is right or wrong is another question. Obviously I’m happy it exists in Germany because it is my job.
I can understand why some people would think it is a misplaced use of funds.
But rightly or wrongly, opera is protected in many areas of Europe, and it is enjoyed by a lot of people.
Steve Pretty:
There is so much in that, and we could talk about it for hours.
I would urge people to take up some of these schemes even if they don’t think they are interested.
Barnaby Rea:
Just go and get an idea of it.
Steve Pretty:
The whole theme of this podcast is musical curiosity.
Even if you think, “I don’t want to sit and listen to opera all day,” that’s fine.
But I really recommend that people go and listen to an opera.
I’m seeing this production tonight.
It is one of those spectacles that you should know about and see at least once. It isn’t for everyone, and if you don’t enjoy it, that is completely fine.
But give it a go, just like anything else.
Barnaby Rea:
A lot of people give it a go and think, “Oh, wow.”
Other people think, “That probably isn’t for me,” but that is true of all music.
Steve Pretty:
You’re seeing people employed. You have an orchestra, amazing singers and the whole spectacle.
If you can see that for £8 or £20, it is an interesting and different experience that you might subsequently get into.
I have all sorts of thoughts about the funding question.
It is tricky because opera is such a grand art form. It is an extremely expensive thing to produce, so the money has to come from somewhere.
I’m not a politician, and everybody will have their own view about how funds should be apportioned.
But when you have a production such as Richard Eyre’s La traviata that has been running for 30 years, since 1994, that feels like a reasonably good return.
Barnaby Rea:
It isn’t cheap, and it requires funding.
In America, where my wife is from, it is generally funded entirely through private donors. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
That is the choice they have made.
Steve Pretty:
You have to go and get your make-up done soon, but before you do, I wondered if you could perform the entire opera for us now, as fast as possible, with costume changes, in the next five minutes.
Barnaby Rea:
All right.
Steve Pretty:
There is a section in this show called Entertaining Noises, where I ask people to talk about and demonstrate their instrument.
You are a bass and have this amazing voice.
Could you demonstrate some key aspects of your voice and explain how you think about and approach it?
Barnaby Rea:
Many musicians use their bodies to play their instruments, but with a singer the instrument is literally inside you.
It is affected by health, the weather, your constitution and all those sorts of things.
Steve Pretty:
Your speaking voice is already so rich. Presumably speaking is a 24-hour warm-up.
Barnaby Rea:
What is useful for me is that much of my performance takes place in my speaking range.
That isn’t true for my wife as a soprano. Most of her singing happens much higher.
In a way, simply by living, I’m warming up.
There may also be a resilience to the bass voice because I am constantly using that area.
I know a few people who speak in a very placed voice. They use the singer’s formant the entire time and speak like this.
Steve Pretty:
Can you explain what you mean by placement and the singer’s formant?
Barnaby Rea:
The idea in opera and classical singing is that you aren’t using a microphone.
You have to use your own resonating chambers and get the voice through them.
For somebody with my upbringing and technique, that involves a constant airflow.
If you have a musical phrase, you want to use breath support and the diaphragm to create an even distribution of air across whatever you are singing.
That might be a sentence, a collection of words or a single word.
You are trying to maintain beauty of tone while also inflecting and communicating.
Different languages are set up more helpfully for singing.
Italian is probably the best. It comes from Latin, which I believe was created to be chanted by monks.
Some languages are simply more conducive to singing.
Steve Pretty:
Can you take us through your range, even just as a scale?
Barnaby Rea:
I regularly perform up to an E, casually touching an F-sharp, and then down here as well.
I sang down to here last year.
[Demonstrates his vocal range.]
My voice gradually creeps upwards during the day.
To prepare a very low role, I would have to warm down.
That is the opposite of what a soprano might do. They need to make sure the voice is sitting high. I would need to hold mine down there.
You naturally return towards the range in which you speak.
Steve Pretty:
When you mentioned that some people speak with a placed voice and use the formant, you mean that they are projecting in a particular way?
Barnaby Rea:
Yes.
They are constantly speaking in the position where they get the most resonance and can cut through the orchestra and reach the auditorium.
Speaking in that placement helps to develop it, and it makes it feel natural to be there all the time.
You can sing without making the sound in the most ergonomic or productive way.
The goal is to find the most efficient and resonant place, using your own resonating chambers and the room.
Whether it works depends on your technique, the vowel, which part of the voice you are using and how the text itself affects it.
I’ll demonstrate a section from another Verdi opera. This isn’t the piece you’re seeing tonight, but it shows the range of what I do.
This is Sparafucile in Rigoletto.
[Sings an extract from Rigoletto.]
Then Rigoletto says some more things, and I come down to tell him my name again, to remind him that his father is called Sparafucile.
[Sings.]
That continues until the end of the scene.
Steve Pretty:
That’s amazing. It is an enormous range.
It must be difficult for those very low notes to cut through. Obviously that is partly about how it is written and orchestrated.
Barnaby Rea:
The role I am doing at the moment is Doctor Grenvil in La traviata.
With the smaller roles in a Verdi piece, he will sometimes use the voices almost like instruments within the texture of the orchestra.
Grenvil sits randomly quite high, so I have warmed up higher today.
If I were singing Sparafucile, I would prepare completely differently and spend time warming down.
A lot of Grenvil’s sung moments sit around F and G and above, going up to the F here.
It depends on the role.
My preparation for what I just sang would be very different from my preparation for tonight.
It also depends on style.
Verdi is much more concerned with creating a line and with beauty of singing.
More modern music, like the Alban Berg I performed here last year, is more about the character.
It moves crazily up and down to accentuate the character or the turmoil they are experiencing.
It is created in a more harmonically extreme way, rather than through the kind of beauty of line and pain you get in Verdi.
Steve Pretty:
When you talk about preparing today, what does a show day look like?
Do you get up and go to the pub?
Barnaby Rea:
Today was fairly quiet.
I worked on something else. I’m doing a French comedy in Romania at the beginning of November, so I’m learning some Ravel, which is completely different again.
The three main roles in this production of La traviata carry the majority of the show.
The six smaller roles are not double-cast, but the main three are.
We have ended up doing eight performances in ten days, including the dress rehearsal, which is a lot.
Steve Pretty:
For people who don’t know, double-casting means that two people share one role.
Normally that happens because it would be too demanding for one person to perform that many shows.
Barnaby Rea:
You wouldn’t want to put somebody through it for health reasons.
They could do it for a certain amount of time, but not as well.
If the singer playing Violetta tonight came back and performed it again tomorrow, it simply wouldn’t be as good.
The vocal folds would be slightly swollen and she wouldn’t have the same fine closure or dexterity.
If you kept adding performances, a singer with solid technique and a resilient voice could continue for a while.
But eventually there would be a breaking point where they needed significant time off.
With two days off, they can come back and perform as well as they did three days earlier.
Steve Pretty:
Even touring pop and rock musicians often avoid consecutive nights for the same reason.
Barnaby Rea:
Amplification helps in that world, but the range of some pop singers and the style in which they sing must still require rest afterwards.
Sometimes, because of their popularity and the scale of the production surrounding them, they may have to do more than is healthy.
People want their money.
In opera, singers are usually a little more protected. Otherwise you would start killing off their careers.
Highly successful singers can still become ill more often nowadays because travel is so easy.
In the past, an opera singer would generally do less work because they might have to take a boat across the Atlantic.
Now you can perform here and then sing a different Verdi opera in Germany the next day.
Steve Pretty:
It must be difficult to say no when you get those opportunities.
Barnaby Rea:
It is.
A couple of years ago, I was rehearsing in London. I left the rehearsal for a 10.30 flight to St Petersburg and performed in Russia the next day.
It is difficult to say no to those opportunities if you are allowed to do them.
Another element of our lives is that we aren’t completely in control of what we do. If two things overlap, you have to beg the management to make them fit together.
The management has the production in mind.
They may not want you to do too many things because they worry you won’t be in good enough form for their show.
It is about trusting the artist and knowing whether they are capable of it.
Generally, opera is more protected in terms of days off.
The management also has a problem if it loses an artist. It has to call somebody else in, and that costs more money.
Steve Pretty:
There is a jump-in fee rather than a previously negotiated fee.
It is a very complicated jigsaw.
I’m going to ask you to sing a bit more, if you don’t mind. It is always nice to have as much music as possible.
Barnaby Rea:
I’ll do some of the Berg I mentioned, to give an example of the character.
It is in German. Let me see if I can pitch it out of my head, because I can’t remember it at all.
[Sings an extract from Berg.]
Then it goes into this crazily composed section that is beyond my normal range. You have to do it in falsetto.
Steve Pretty:
The volume in here is astonishing.
There is a sign on the door warning people to be careful of their ears, presumably for exactly that reason.
Barnaby Rea:
In the orchestra you see protective screens, the Plexiglas panels.
Steve Pretty:
You must be used to incredible amounts of noise.
Barnaby Rea:
More than I am, because you are in and around the instruments.
Steve Pretty:
I mean the voice itself. It’s just a voice in this room, but the sound is enormous.
Barnaby Rea:
You get it with low singers.
The leads might be singing “I love you” directly into each other’s ears, with that enormous voice, over and over for years.
You have to do the embrace while cheating slightly outwards.
If you sing directly into somebody’s face, you can cause a problem.
There is the practical matter of not hurting your colleague, but also, if I sing into the wings, the sound disappears into the wings.
Steve Pretty:
You have to cheat the staging.
Barnaby Rea:
That is another element of the technicality.
Within the drama and the singing, you are often cheating so that your head and voice are orientated out towards the audience.
You need to know which moments allow you to look sideways, upstage or across.
Sometimes you only need the conductor’s first beat in the bar. Then you can count for yourself, go off and do the scene, and return to the conductor when contact becomes necessary again.
It is a big organism.
The person with the stick is negotiating what may be 100 players in the orchestra during a large opera and trying to connect that with what is happening on stage.
Every singer is different.
Even within established core repertoire, one singer will phrase something differently from another.
The conductor has to breathe with them and understand how a phrase is going to end so they can bring in the next beat.
It may look rigidly controlled in time, but it isn’t rigid at all.
Steve Pretty:
It is a machine, but not in the money-making sense.
Barnaby Rea:
A living organism is a better analogy. Everything has to work together.
Steve Pretty:
It isn’t as strictly rhythmical as much groove-based music.
In pop, rock and folk music, the groove is often where it’s at.
Classical music, and particularly opera, is pulled around the beat and around the singer.
Barnaby Rea:
You need a good feeling for what you are doing, the direction you are going in and what the orchestra needs from you.
The conductor will tell you if you are dragging it too much. They might say, “You can’t do that. I need you to be here.”
But they are generally as sympathetic as possible to the fact that every instrument is different.
You may need to sing a phrase differently because your voice isn’t the same as Maria Callas’s.
Steve Pretty:
In my world, there may be one person standing at the front keeping time and the musicians stay with them.
But I think opera is a more hierarchical system.
From the outside, the composer is God.
Barnaby Rea:
Yes.
Steve Pretty:
The conductor is the Holy Spirit, or something.
Barnaby Rea:
That is a really great way of putting it.
The conductor allows the music to pass through, although everybody is allowing it to pass through them.
Steve Pretty:
Maybe the conductor is Jesus.
Barnaby Rea:
They filter and guide the whole thing, dragging it together and making it align.
There are times when a singer wants to do something that would only serve themselves.
The conductor has to say, “I can’t do that, because there are so many people down here and the whole thing needs to move in a particular direction.”
The time signature may be changing, or it may not be the colour the music needs at that point.
It is amazing to observe all these talented people trying to make a piece together.
Everybody contributes their element of the art, and it builds into this massive thing.
Steve Pretty:
Even backstage, there are enormous sets and huge numbers of technicians.
I want to ask you one other technical question.
People often don’t understand why there is so much vibrato in opera. That is perhaps the cliché of the operatic voice.
Barnaby Rea:
There is also opera that uses a lot of straight tone.
I haven’t done a great deal of it myself. It is more of a specialist area.
A lot of it is done in England with Baroque music, the earliest form of opera.
You might begin a note with a straight tone and then allow the vibrato to emerge.
That is an effect associated with the style of the repertoire rather than the basic singing technique.
It is different from Verdi, for example.
Steve Pretty:
Is the amount of vibrato partly about style and partly about projection?
Barnaby Rea:
Vibrato shouldn’t interfere with the sound. It should be part of delivering it.
Steve Pretty:
It assists in getting the sound out?
Barnaby Rea:
It should be part of the technical setup and emerge naturally.
If the pressure and support are balanced, it should come out evenly.
When you hear a very wide vibrato, it may be because somebody who was incredible in the past has sung a huge amount of repertoire and is now older.
The control has changed slightly.
They don’t intend to create that wide vibrato, but the voice has miles on it, like a sportsperson’s body, and can’t do quite the same thing any more.
Ideally, vibrato should be even and not something you consciously notice as an audience member.
It helps transfer the sound out into the room.
Steve Pretty:
Since we’re here for hours, can you give me a few tips?
If somebody told me I had to sing in an operatic style tomorrow, how should I approach it?
Barnaby Rea:
You’re asking the wrong person in that sense.
The most important thing is constant airflow.
You create that using the diaphragm and the support down here.
You breathe in and create a degree of firmness around the outside, so that the air has something to bounce off.
To get technical, I got into trouble the other day for scooping in recitative.
The idea is that every note should begin on the pitch. You should already be on the pitch at the onset.
[Sings.]
I do a lot of comedic roles, so I sometimes get into the habit of allowing the style to inform the way I approach a note.
That isn’t always the best way to do it.
You should look for a fine closure of the vocal cords.
Have a picture of the note in your mind, breathe in and let the sound out.
Steve Pretty:
I feel as though I’m choking it a bit.
Barnaby Rea:
Try to remain loose here.
This is like somebody who has never taught before attempting to teach.
It would be amazing if I actually knew how to do it.
Steve Pretty:
Breaking down your own technique is interesting.
Barnaby Rea:
It’s good practice for me to understand it slightly more.
Speak. Say hello.
Steve Pretty:
Hello.
Barnaby Rea:
There is a natural buzz in your voice.
Play around with where you feel that buzz in your face. Find the place where your speaking voice is naturally most resonant.
Where do you normally speak?
Steve Pretty:
I think I normally speak here.
Barnaby Rea:
Speak slightly louder.
Steve Pretty:
Speaking slightly louder.
Barnaby Rea:
It is almost like shouting.
Steve Pretty:
I can project. I can talk quite loudly.
Barnaby Rea:
When you project, pick a vowel and allow it to travel.
If you relax here, you will naturally begin to produce vibrato.
That is already clearer and more resonant than what you were doing before.
Then it is a case of practising and discovering where the resonance feels strongest.
If you want to get really technical, you need to lower the larynx while stretching upwards and finding space in the back of the head and at the front.
Steve Pretty:
Thinking about trumpet technique and the little singing I did back in the day, a lot of it involves visualising something and thinking about how it feels and looks.
You can’t necessarily control those internal things consciously, at least at first.
Eventually, you want the technique to become unconscious.
That must be especially important in opera because you also have to act.
Barnaby Rea:
If you fall out of character, it becomes a problem.
There will be moments where you think, “This is an intensely technical passage and I need to concentrate on it.”
But you still need to communicate the emotion.
You want the technique to become as close to second nature as possible, so that you can concentrate on all the other elements.
You still need to deal with pitch, rhythm, your connection with the conductor and your acting performance.
Singing is the first thing you need to establish.
That is why people begin learning very large roles a couple of years in advance.
The music needs to become so deeply ingrained, with the visualisation somewhere at the back of your brain, that you aren’t consciously thinking, “How do I do this moment?”
It simply happens, so that you can act at the same time.
Steve Pretty:
I have heard opera singers talk about learning repertoire.
Is that why you have a large amount of music ready to go?
If you were called to do a part tomorrow, even if you hadn’t performed it before, you might already have some or all of it in your bag.
Barnaby Rea:
That depends on which elements of the job you are good at.
My wife was recently called to take on a role she had never performed before.
It wasn’t quite a jump-in, because that would mean being called on the day of the performance.
But she was called on a Friday and had to begin rehearsing on the Monday.
It was a sizeable amount of German text and music.
She is a sort of musical savant. She was practically learning to speak and play the violin at the same time.
She has a level of musicality I will never understand, perhaps closer to yours.
Steve Pretty:
Not really.
Barnaby Rea:
She is capable of stepping in and learning something like that.
I usually need to say no because learning is the thing that takes me longest.
Once I have learned something, you can throw me in anywhere.
If I have performed the role within the last seven years, I’m generally happy to jump into it, as I’m doing with a Verdi piece in Germany this month.
As long as the music is still there and it doesn’t require too much relearning, I’m fine.
I don’t mind the live-action hilarity of not knowing exactly what might go wrong.
From an acting point of view, I thrive on that.
The mechanics of learning the music are what I need to make sure are secure.
Steve Pretty:
Other people have that musical gift and can absorb the material very quickly.
Perhaps your greater instinct is for performance rather than the learning side.
Barnaby Rea:
I have plenty of musical ability as well, but compared with my wife, yes.
You need to know your strengths. Everybody has them.
Learning the material is also the thing you can control.
There are two things you can control in an opera rehearsal: punctuality and preparation.
Turn up on time and know your music.
You are as good as you are. They hired you. Perhaps they didn’t know exactly who you were, and perhaps they won’t like you by the end of it. You can’t control that.
You are the artist you are at that point in your life.
There must be a reason they hired you. They saw your CV or heard you.
The job may go brilliantly or it may not, but you can control knowing the music and arriving on time.
Steve Pretty:
That is a good rule for life generally, or certainly for being a musician.
Barnaby Rea:
I’m not claiming I always live by that mantra.
But I have to make sure I have the foundation learned because there is a lot of pressure.
Screwing up publicly in front of a large number of people is not fun.
Steve Pretty:
Especially in a huge production.
Barnaby Rea:
It also isn’t conducive to being employed again.
Every job involves producing the goods and giving the audience a great night of entertainment, but you also want to perpetuate your career.
The administrators may be watching. You need to produce the goods to get the next job, whether it is here or somewhere else.
You never know who is sitting in the audience.
Steve Pretty:
You never know where the next job will come from.
Some of the biggest jobs I’ve done have come from pub gigs.
The closest I came to the Olympics came from doing a gig in a pub.
Barnaby Rea:
I have got gigs from chatting to people who liked me.
Then you think, “You don’t actually know whether I’m any good. This could be really great or really disappointing.”
But ultimately, a gig is a gig.
Steve Pretty:
That has all been amazing and really interesting.
There is one thing I try to ask most guests.
I spend my life, as you do, making noises for a living. It feels like a strange but great way to exist and make a living.
What is the point of music?
Barnaby Rea:
What is the point of music?
Steve Pretty:
Don’t make it too broad or sweeping.
Barnaby Rea:
Music can be an enormous release for people.
As an audience member, it can take you away from the reality of your life.
It can also do that for the performer. You can get lost in it.
There is an amazing euphoria you can get from performing, either in a selfish way or through connecting with other people.
The best moments on stage are when you feel everybody is together, building the piece.
Music has the ability to take people away from the troubles in their lives and transport them to a different plane.
Somebody might come because they love opera, jazz or whatever the music is.
That may be the one evening in the month where they get away from their job and the pressures of their life.
You can help people have a great time, which is a pretty cool thing.
Steve Pretty:
It is a great privilege to be able to do that for a living.
You don’t always think about it while you’re doing it. You finish the show and think, “That was all right. Pub.”
Then you meet somebody afterwards who says, “That changed my life a little, even if it was only for tonight.”
You remember that is part of what music does.
Barnaby Rea:
You get stuck in the grind of doing it and forget that it can be important.
Steve Pretty:
That is partly why I ask the question.
Like you, I didn’t do a music degree. I did a philosophy degree.
I have always thought that I love music and believe it is important in all sorts of ways, but there isn’t a single clear answer to why.
Whenever I ask the question, people give very different answers.
But music does have transformational power for a lot of people. It speaks to people in a direct way that many other things can’t, perhaps even words.
Barnaby Rea:
I had a friend I don’t see much nowadays who used to say, “Imagine if our lives were constantly musically scored. Think how much more you would feel.”
It would be confusing if everybody had a live musical score and you could hear everybody else’s.
Perhaps you would need headphones, or you could watch it afterwards.
Steve Pretty:
What is interesting is that the invention of the Walkman in the 1980s made that possible.
For the first time in human history, people had personal music they could listen to while moving through the world.
Barnaby Rea:
That’s amazing.
Steve Pretty:
Thank you so much.
Where can people find out where you’re performing next?
Barnaby Rea:
My website is barnabyrea.com. That has all the information and links to my social media.
Everything is some variation of Barnaby Rea.
Steve Pretty:
International singer extraordinaire.
I’m really looking forward to tonight.
Barnaby Rea:
It’s going to be fun. This is a classic production and it has been running for a long time.
It is nice to become part of something like that as well as creating something new in a new production.
You walk into something that legends of the industry have already performed in.
I’m pretty sure Pavarotti sang in this production in 1994 when it first opened.
That may be completely untrue, but I had to say Pavarotti because he is one of the few opera singers who crosses over into wider public recognition.
There are genuine industry legends who have performed in it, including recently.
It is fun to become part of that history.
There is a production of La bohème where the inside of Colline’s coat has the name tags of everybody who has performed the role.
At the end, he sells the coat to get money to buy medicine for Mimì, even though it is too late.
That production has been running for something like 47 years.
Steve Pretty:
That is great.
Barnaby Rea:
It is pretty cool. Maybe one day.
Steve Pretty:
Things to aim for.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Barnaby Rea:
I enjoyed it.
Steve Pretty:
Huge thanks once again to Barnaby Rea for that fascinating chat about opera.
I particularly loved the way he explained how he uses his voice.
I have interviewed several singers on this podcast over the years, but the operatic approach is completely different. Thanks to Barnaby for sharing those insights.
As I record this in mid-May 2026, you can currently see him at the Royal Opera House in London in Peter Grimes, which is a wonderful opera.
You should go and see him there. There are links in the show notes where you can find out more about his work.
Meanwhile, thank you so much for tuning in once again.
I have a big show at Wilton’s Music Hall coming up on 19 May. If you hear this in time, do come along. It is going to be a lot of fun.
I have Jim Bob, the frontman of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, a massive cult 1990s band.
You can call them a cult band now, in 2026, but at the time they were huge.
They headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and were later banned from the festival. I think they may be the only band in history both to have headlined Glastonbury and been banned from it.
I will talk to him about that, and he is going to play some of his brilliant music.
We also have the Ocean Songs project, which I have talked about on the podcast before.
That features Lottie Pendlebury from Goat Girl, Nic Pendlebury, who is head of strings at Trinity Laban here in London, and Colin Riley, who is a wonderful contemporary composer.
They are going to be there along with many others.
Please come along on 19 May if you hear this in time.
If not, sections from that show will appear in the podcast feed over the coming months.
Sorry again for the delay. I hope I will now be back in your ears more regularly as things begin to settle down a little.
There is all sorts of exciting stuff coming up over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Do sign up to my mailing list at originofthepieces.com.
I am really pleased with the website. You can find all the previous episodes, watch videos and short clips, listen to everything, and search by tag or by the map showing the different places around the world where I have recorded or spoken to people.
Go to originofthepieces.com and sign up.
Meanwhile, thanks so much for listening, and stay musically curious.
I’ll see you next time. Bye.