The Master Class

COMMANDOpera has long been of the opinion that you can only know your crown once you know your roots. In opera this thinking certainly is dictated to workings at the back of the house. Miss Joan Ingpen influenced the in house workings of opera in the postwar period in a way which was revolutionary. Perhaps the most critical of Miss Ingpens acheivements would have to be the introduction of long range advance bookings. Miss Ingpen passed away two years ago, and both the Guardian and the Telegraph in London offered excellent obituaries which make for excellent historical reading. COMMANDOpera could not determine whether the Guardian article written by Mr. Tom Sutcliffe is more informative than the unnamed Telegraph piece, so both will be included. It is hard to pass up an obituary with the inclusion of these words: ‘She had wonderful teeth that sparkled like diamonds when they caught the light’.

The Guardian article; 

Joan Ingpen, who has died aged 91, was in charge of opera planning at Covent Garden from 1962 to 1971, which includes most of Georg Solti’s time as music director. Planning, which involves casting, is the machine room of any opera – though boffins there have no public profile. But decisions about who does what when on stage can make or break the company. Working for the Royal Opera, Ingpen displayed an extraordinary memory of the repertoire and of singers and conductors needed to perform it, although before she went to the Garden she had never been employed inside an established performing company. As Lord Harewood puts it: “She had an extremely efficient, methodical and accurate sort of mind. She certainly liked to plan far ahead.”

Ingpen took over from Harewood, but not directly. He had left to run the Edinburgh festival, and Solti, represented in Britain by Joan’s agency, Ingpen and Williams, fell out with his successor. In those days, Covent Garden maintained a substantial ensemble of quality singers. Joan Sutherland, whom Ingpen represented from 1953, was eventually – after three auditions – honoured with a position in the ensemble. It was a point of great satisfaction to Harewood to be able, in the late 1950s, to cast two cycles of The Ring and a full slate of understudies entirely from company singers (except for the role of Siegfried). Many performances involved guest stars as well.

Ingpen’s ideal was to settle rehearsal schedules three years in advance, and when she moved on to the Paris Opera and eventually to the New York Met, she transformed their forward planning. Hugues Gall, who worked with her and Rolf Liebermann (the then Paris Opera director from 1972 to 1977) saw her as a key person: “Because of how she would organise future plans, she forced every other great opera house in the world to follow her example – which was very good, but also very bad. Paris and London had to join her ‘ride to the abyss’, or they would be caught out. She was very impatient and she was like a computer, knowing every tenor in the world, every singer’s schedule. “In 1971 Rolf took me to London. He said we had to convince her to join us, because having her on board would mean we would be able to go on holiday or away for the weekend without any anxiety. With her in charge and in the theatre from 9am to midnight every day, powered only by Player’s Navy Cut and glasses of red wine, we would have no worries.”

But according to Gall there were other considerations. Italian opera managers kept their options open, in case the voice of the century materialised. And Liebermann also wanted to be able to change plans – which Ingpen hated. Towards the end of her Paris stint, an economy drive obliged Liebermann to abandon the new Ring production from Peter Stein for which they had especially paid Alberto Remedios – star of the English National Opera Ring – to study the role of Siegfried in German for a year, without taking other engagements. Ingpen attributed the problems to interfering bureaucrats, and maintained that the English system of Arts Council arms-length funding was best. When she was poached by the Met in 1977, Liebermann handed her casting and planning responsibilities to Gall, and in a few months she trained him to do the job. It was, he says, generous and invaluable from then on in his career.

Ingpen’s Irish father was 70 when she was born, and disappeared in what was rumoured to be a clandestine British government attempt to rescue the Russian royal family. Her father was 39 years older than her mother, and had known her mother as a baby and given her a baby brooch. After the trauma of his unexplained disappearance, she had a nervous breakdown and, prompted by the troubles, moved her children from Tipperary to Sussex. She never remarried. Ingpen remembered: “My father was so unmusical that he recognised the national anthem only because people were standing up.” But she studied at the Royal Academy and some thought she should have been a concert pianist. By 1939 she was a typist in a marine insurance broker’s office. But she was also an inveterate London concertgoer, and later in the war she was organising forces entertainment (Ensa) tours for Walter Legge.

She was also associated with Legge in the early stages of the Philharmonia Orchestra, which he launched in 1945. Legge worked for EMI and, to avoid accusations that he was financially benefiting from the orchestra at the expense of EMI, he got Ingpen, who by that time had set up her own agency with a loan of £100, to hold 40% of the Philharmonia stock while he took an equivalent share in Ingpen and Williams. In 1950, with the orchestra’s reputation secure, he forced her to sell back the stock. Ingpen and Williams combined the name of her first husband, which she always used professionally, and her maiden name, which she gave to her pet dachshund after the war. She was briefly married to Alfred Dietz, an artists’ agent, but the love of her life was the actor Sebastian Shaw, whom she represented in the 1950s and with whom she spent 40 years until his death in 1994: in fact she changed her name to Shaw.

Among her Covent Garden finds was Luciano Pavarotti whom she heard in Dublin. She hired him to understudy the ailing Giuseppe de Stefano as Rodolfo in La Bohème, and he went on to sing all but the first performance. It was a significant step up in his career. James Levine at the Met took her on after Placido Domingo told him about “this Englishwoman in Paris who always gets me to rehearse more than I mean to”. As with Solti, her view of singers tallied with his. When she arrived in New York, she joined a long roster of her fellow citizens including John Dexter as director of productions, and it was a period when the Met briefly woke up to theatrical values. In her time with Solti at the Garden, she had engaged Dexter to make his opera debut staging Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. “The idea of going somewhere that is not state-run appeals to me very much,” she told me at the time. “I think the Met is now one of the most interesting places going.”

Ingpen was always ready to go that extra mile. One of her favourite stories concerned Wolfgang Windgassen phoning to tell her he could not sing Siegfried at 6pm at Covent Garden. “I phoned round Europe and found a substitute and went to Heathrow to meet him, to be confronted by a sign saying the flight would be an hour late. I got a Hounslow police escort to rush him through the traffic, but even so, I needed colleagues at Covent Garden to persuade Windgassen that he had enough voice after all to get through the first act.” It did not always work. In Paris in 1971, when Frederika von Stade cancelled a run of Cenerentolas, Ingpen got Teresa Berganza to do one performance – but there was nobody to do any of the others.

Her love of voices was conditional not absolute. “There has to be content. It’s got to mean something – it’s not birdsong!” She was never a Callas fan, and though she liked Domingo, her choice tenor would always be Julius Patzak. “Even when he was past his best, his Florestan was something you could cry at.” An interesting judgment from someone described by a colleague as having “a hard-edged diamond brain”.

Joan Mary Eileen Ingpen, concert agent, casting director and opera planner, born January 3 1916; died December 29 2007.

The Telegraph article;

Joan Ingpen, who died on December 29 aged 91, was a legendary figure among opera impresarios who co-founded the Philharmonia with Walter Legge; introduced the musical world to Georg Solti, Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland; and played major casting and administrative roles at three of the world’s leading opera houses: Covent Garden, Paris Opera and the Met in New York. She was, said Bernard Holland in The New York Times, “a walking cross index of opera singers and roles”, knowing who could sing what, who was scheduled to sing what and who might be available and when. Although she kept lists on faded legal pads and introduced computerised planning to the Met, most of her knowledge was kept in her mind.

It was in 1963, while working at the Royal Opera, that Ingpen heard Pavarotti in Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Dublin Grand Opera Society. She engaged him as understudy for the ailing Giuseppe di Stefano as Rodolfo in La Bohème with the promise of a Covent Garden debut in the final performance. In the event, Pavarotti sang all but the first of the 27 shows, launching a career that lasted until his death last year. One of her last – and happiest – finds, she said, came in the mid-1980s when she “discovered” Anne Sofie von Otter. Joan Ingpen’s abiding legacy will be Ingpen & Williams, the management agency that she founded in 1946. The most prominent London concert promoter at that time was Ibbs & Tillett, and Ingpen felt that any respectable impresario should similarly have a double name, giving the impression of being a solid partnership. But, being unable – or unwilling – to find anyone to work with, she took the name of her dachshund, Williams. This arrangement had the distinct advantage of the dog being unable to answer back.

Georg Solti was one of the artists she introduced to Britain, having worked with him at Ensa, the armed forces’ entertainment organisation, in the latter years of the war. Rudolf Kempe was another, and so was Joan Sutherland, whom Joan Ingpen first heard in 1951 when the Australian was studying at the Royal College of Music. Change came in 1961 when, having secured for Solti the post of musical director at Covent Garden, Joan Ingpen found herself entreated to join him. “Solti rang me up and said, ‘Sell your business and come to Covent Garden’,” she recalled in an interview with Opera News. She had recently been joined in her business by Howard Hartog, a brusque and autocratic champion of contemporary music and a man of few words, who was willing both to buy the company and to maintain its name.

Freed from the shackles of selling classical musicians to promoters, she moved to the Royal Opera as controller of opera planning, bringing to the post her agent’s understanding of the operatic milieu and the pressure they were under to increase singers’ fees. Forward thinking had until that time been a somewhat alien concept in Floral Street. “The coming season was just about planned,” she recalled, “but that was about it.” She immediately began making long-term plans with Solti, engaging singers and developing the Garden’s repertoire. She also became known as one of the few people able effectively to deal with the fiercly impatient musical director. “We called him Soltissimo, because he always wanted everything yesterday,” she noted. When Solti left Covent Garden in 1971 Joan Ingpen made clear her displeasure at the prospect of working for his successor, Colin Davis, feeling that the post should have gone instead to Charles Mackerras. She worked for one season with Davis, “but I think he was pleased to see me go”.

She was reunited with Solti, by now at the Paris Opera under the general direction of Rolf Liebermann, where she continued in much the same vein as she had in London, until Placido Domingo persuaded James Levine to bring her to the Metropolitan Opera, New York, which in 1981 was recovering from a bitter industrial dispute. It was not to be a happy assignment, with The New York Times describing Joan Ingpen as “a martinet with an obsession with fixing casts in cement for years in advance”. It also was not long before she encountered difficulties in pinning down the notoriously vague Levine, then the Met’s music director, and the Swiss conductor Peter Maag considered her to be “cavalier”. After three years she was not sorry to return to Europe with the role of “liaison officer and talent-scout” for the Americans.

Joan Ingpen was a formidable character, with a razor-sharp memory, a remarkable eye for detail and – at times – an icy smile. To be in her presence was an unforgettable and occasionally intimidating experience. She was blessed with what one former colleague called a “hard-edged diamond brain”. She could also be a powerful negotiator when discussing casting or negociating a singer’s fee. Her affection for opera singers was plain for all to see, and she would accept only the very best from them. “I really love them,” she once said. “But, of course, they tend to be more highly strung than actors because everything depends on those two little vocal cords and their life is a perpetual worry.”

Joan Mary Eileen Ingpen was born on January 3 1916 in London of Irish stock. Her father was said to have been sent on a mission to Russia just before the Bolshevik revolution, and was never seen again. Although she was a competent pianist, young Joan learnt to type and began her working life in the office of a marine insurance broker. Much of her social life in London was taken up with concerts. It was at one of these that she met Walter Legge from EMI, who persuaded her to join him working at Ensa. After the war the two of them co-founded the Philharmonia, with Joan Ingpen taking a 40 per cent share in the business. However, as the orchestra’s reputation grew, Legge was anxious to steal the limelight, and they fell out bitterly, in part over Legge’s paranoia that Ingpen might be passing on information about his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and the orchestra to Ingpen’s first husband, the Austrian agent Alfred Dietz. “He was a very strange man,” Joan Ingpen recalled of Legge. “Wonderfully enthusiastic to work with, but he had to be emperor.” In 1950 Legge bought out her share in the orchestra and they went their separate ways. Fortunately, Ingpen had established her agency in 1946, and now gave it all her energy.

Undoubtedly Ingpen could be as much a prima donna as any opera singer. On one occasion Pavarotti is said to have kept her waiting in his living room while he cooked pasta and took phone calls; she is said to have retaliated by keeping him off the stage at the Met for a year. On another she publicly denounced as “canary fanciers” that vociferous section of the Met’s audience which insists on seeing ageing singers return beyond their prime. In The King and I, Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette’s unauthorised tale of Pavarotti’s career, Joan Ingpen is described, not untruthfully, as “a tough lady with one of those buttery yet impregnable English accents, supported on the foundations of a steely alto voice” (NOTE; I was curious as to who actually wrote these delightful descriptions, and Miss Midgette kindly responded that she indeed was the author as I had suspected).

Today Ingpen & Williams remains a leading player in classical music management, with a roster of artists that includes Pierre Boulez, Alfred Brendel and a host of well-known singers.In retirement Joan Ingpen lived quietly in an apartment in Brighton, where she kept a Hockney design for a triple bill at the Met – Parade, Les Mamelles de Tirésias and L’Enfant et les Sortileges – adorned with the letters JOAN. She had wonderful teeth that sparkled like diamonds when they caught the light.

Joan Ingpen, after two divorces, spent her later years with the actor Sebastian Shaw, who died in 1994. She had no children