Thomas de Mallet Burgess is a UK theatre and opera director whose work has taken him all over the world. For the past five years, he has been general director of New Zealand Opera, leading the company through Covid, upheaval and regrowth. He is leaving after the Auckland season of NZO’s current tour of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte to become artistic director of the Finnish National Opera.
Your name is rather ornate. What is your whakapapa?
I was born in beautiful Barnstaple, in North Devon, where my father’s family have lived for at least 400 years, and my mother grew up in London. We also have connections with Wales and France. Science enables us to go much further back, with the largest concentration of maternal DNA coming from Bangalore, India, Albania, and a particularly hostile tribe of Berbers in Libya.
You studied at Oxford. Was that predetermined or did you forge that path?
Neither of my parents went to university, but they completely supported my journey because they saw the value of education. My father’s family building business had been in our town for centuries, and he saw the world was changing and opening up, which meant different choices needed to be made.
Did Oxford meet your expectations?
Oxford was wonderful, because we were taught to think. Intellect is not feared there, it is respected. Free thinking based on research and conviction is encouraged. I read philosophy and modern languages, French and some Russian. Oxford isn’t just about academic work, and a multitude of things are pursued there at a professional level, like journalism, drama and sport.
Is it true that the first opera you ever saw, you also directed?
After Oxford, I moved to London when the arts were in a parlous state. It was the late 80s, and training for directors was limited, so I started directing by teaching myself. When a group of Trinity College students asked me to direct an opera, I said why not. That production was very successful, and [director] John Cox invited me to join the team at Covent Garden on an ad hoc basis. In retrospect, I see that was a wonderful way to come to the art form, because I was free of prejudice.
How did you teach yourself to direct opera?
My super power is intuition. Even if one doesn’t understand intellectually what is happening, one’s ability to intuit can be very useful in terms of exploring a piece and engaging with it. I also read a lot.
Was it daunting to learn a craft like opera in London?
Absolutely. In London, you’re very exposed. It’s a very competitive environment, with multiple critics reviewing work at a very sharp level and, if I’m being generous, I’d say a fair degree of my projects back then were experimental.
Are you alluding to specific harsh reviews?
One of my early productions was a baroque rock opera for students at the Guildhall. One critic said the production contained scenes best left to consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. The conductor, Christian Curnyn, and I were called “the Handel Vandals”.
How did you cope in the face of such vitriol?
It changed virtually overnight. Either I woke up one morning and knew how to direct, or the panel of critics changed, as suddenly I was lauded and feted. Although I did wonder, should an artist worry when they find increasing success? Did it mean I was no longer challenging the status quo, as it is surely the role of artists and art to question, to provoke people’s emotions, to connect audiences to something beyond us and ask who are we, as well as to entertain.
You’ve moved around the world. What were the stepping stones?
After meeting my wife, [soprano and music psychologist] Fiona McAndrew, in London – she’s so brilliantly smart in addition to her talents in music – we went to Cincinnati, where I took up a professorial position at an opera training programme. We stayed four years, during which time our first daughter was born. We’d gone to Dublin for the birth because Fiona’s family were there, and also because women are less likely to have a C-section in Ireland than the US, and a caesarean would have interfered with the work Fiona had lined up. Then 9/11 happened two days before the birth and the world seemed so fragile, so we moved to Ireland.
How did that lead you to Perth?
After the Global Financial Crisis, a banker friend said it would be 10 years before Ireland was back on its feet, and because Fiona had grown up in Perth, we moved there. I took a job running a well-funded cultural programme. I’d also had something of a crisis in my thinking about opera and I wanted to do something experimental. There was money in Perth, and a colleague and I started Lost & Found Opera. Our younger daughter was born in Perth, then this job at NZ Opera came up and I jumped in.
Would it be accurate to say NZ Opera was at a crossroads when you arrived?
It was virtually broke. It had major challenges with its principal funder, Creative NZ, which meant it was a company in need of a shake-up artistically and financially. A lot of people wrongly assumed it was a case of the new guy coming in with a radical agenda, but it actually just wasn’t working well, and changes had to be made.
Three board members resigned over the commissioning of a new work, The Unruly Tourists. What happened?
As I saw it, those board members resigned because they felt the company should be putting on more a mainstream repertoire, as opposed to developing new work. One of those board members had previously been executive assistant to Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera, a bastion of core repertoire and tradition. Relatively recently, Gelb announced the Met was to produce a new work to open each season, because the old warhorses weren’t performing at the box office as anticipated. So, we were ahead of the curve.
Are you a singer?
No. But I desperately wanted to be in my primary school choir and I auditioned as soon as I was old enough, but Mrs Saville said I couldn’t sing in tune.
Isn’t it diabolical to tell someone they can’t sing?
Yes, but thankfully, the world has changed, because art forms including opera do themselves no favours when they exclude people on the basis there is a certain level of knowledge or skill to be obtained. There is a place for everyone in all the arts.
If I was an alien, how would you explain opera to me?
Opera has the capacity to make us think and feel, and to understand realities that are, on the surface, removed from our own, but when we delve deeper, we recognise they are deeply linked to our own experiences. Opera can be funny, moving and disconcerting and, in the wrong hands, it can be dull. There’s no live performance without risk, but when the elements come together, opera can change how you feel and how you think. l
The NZ Opera season of Mozart’s romantic tragi-comedy Così Fan Tutte is on in Auckland (May 31-June 4), Wellington (June 14-18) and Christchurch (June 28-July 2).
