‘To Grimes’s hut! To Grimes’s hut!” Thrilling and powerful as a winter storm, the Welsh National Opera chorus at full blast engulfs me as I enter the rehearsal room in Cardiff on a cold March morning. To the beat of a blue plastic drum, the Borough’s villagers march, leading us to a spartan, grey concrete home, where a fisherman, Peter Grimes, is in a towering rage. Menace flashes across his face as he looms over his young apprentice. I am terrified.
The director cuts and Nicky Spence, who is making his role debut as Benjamin Britten’s troubled outsider, breaks the tension with a funny one-liner, making everyone laugh. That is par for the course for the Scottish tenor, 41, who is one of life’s entertainers — witty, warm, sometimes outrageous. As we chat over coffee and share an apple snegl at a nearby Danish bakery after rehearsal, he keeps the staff chuckling with pastry-based innuendos, praises the latte art and professes his love of podcasts that offer “lightness, fluff, chitchat”. Yet here he is playing one of the most complex and tortured men known to opera, having already made his name singing a host of Leos Janacek’s tormented souls. What is it, I ask, that draws him to dark roles?
“Peter Grimes has millefeuille-like layers,” Spence says. “That’s why I love playing these very complex characters. He is misunderstood and misanthropic. He’s not always able to find his voice to say exactly what he wants to at the right moment, but he is a dreamer and he has all these ambitions. In my view he has a history of abuse [being abused] and he has low self-esteem. What we see is somebody trying to put the pieces back together within a pressure-cooker community.”
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Singing in the chorus of Peter Grimes as a student proved to Spence the thrilling power of opera. “I was just bowled over,” he says, and he became obsessed with Britten’s piece, “like every British tenor does”. Yet while singing Grimes is a personal milestone, Spence is also alive to the production’s wider significance. WNO is still fighting for its future, following big funding cuts from the arts councils in England and Wales. Cue departures left, right and centre. The chorus is down from 30 to 23 full-time members (although there will be 48 singers for Peter Grimes) and its members recently voted in favour of industrial action in dispute over further proposed cuts to jobs and changes to their working conditions.
“I feel as if the timing of this piece, which has so much community heart, with 50-odd chorus members still on stage, is heaven-sent. It’s the biggest ‘F*** you’ to the Arts Council and to anybody else who is trying to deconstruct the art form on our merry island,” Spence says. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking. Once we start stripping this away, it’s so difficult to put back.”
He sees the future of opera in the UK as bleak. “The blame very much lies with the fact that people are closing their eyes to things being deconstructed,” he says. “It’s a huge issue. I think it stems back to music education. Access and the gateway to music have been taken away at such a young age, where it used to be part of everybody’s daily diet. We need to get back there. The government has said they’re going to try and we need to start seeing that now.
“The fact I became an opera singer happened by accident. The biggest hurdle in diversity is [people from] lower socioeconomic backgrounds and the fact they don’t have access to the arts.”
Briefly, some background. Aged ten, Spence “was smoking Regal King Size on a roundabout in Newcastle”, with an absent father and an unwell mother, but a move to Dumfries and Galloway offered him a “softer upbringing”. He found his way first to musical theatre, then opera, winning a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Now Spence is setting up his own undergraduate scholarship for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who show “entrepreneurial spirit and spark”.
Spence has spark and spirit in spades. Universal early on spotted his potential as classical crossover’s latest bright hope, but two albums into a five-album, £1 million contract, Spence turned his back on it. He returned to his teacher, John Evans, with whom he still studies today, and launched himself into the British opera scene. That posed a new set of challenges. “When I used to do auditions I would think, what do they want? What are they looking for?” he says. “Then I had a turning point and said, ‘This is what I’m offering.’ Even if it wasn’t what they expected — that a slightly obese, balding man was going to play whatever.”
If appearance were on Spence’s mind, did he ever feel under pressure from casting directors to look a particular way? “I might have done back in the day, but not any more,” he says. “It’s not interesting. The thing is, I’ve had such a great career by not looking like a god. I would have been stuck singing Tamino [the hero of Mozart’s The Magic Flute] for ever if I was a walking six-pack. I remember when I did The Magic Flute one of the first times, the designer looked at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I drew this image before I knew.’ And I said, ‘Knew what?’ Basically, you know, insert ‘you look like a small bungalow’. But I think, as long as I can move, I can be as sexy as anybody else.”
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That was a good 15 years ago now, Spence reckons, and something he has not experienced since. But he believes the industry still shames people because of their size — echoing the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, who spoke to The Times in 2019 about losing roles because of her weight. “It still does go on, absolutely,” Spence says. “When I was younger I was always active to show that I am not fat because I’m lazy. I’m fat because I have trauma attached to food. That’s my own shit, if I want to deal with it. But you find me somebody sexier than Jamie Barton.”
Knowing his own worth stood Spence in good stead, but many early career opportunities for young singers have been lost in recent years, with the end of Glyndebourne on Tour and the scaling back of ENO and WNO. Does he think he would have found the same success if he were starting out today? “I’ve got no idea,” he says. “Probably not. I was so lucky I got my first gig out of the National Opera Studio at English National Opera in the lead role [in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys]. I was so bloody lucky. I’ve been at work since.” He pauses and reconsiders. “I would have made it work. I’ve got the hustling spirit. I am a hustle dog.”
Hustler he may be. Hard worker, for sure. I would add to those qualities resilient. Life has not always gone his way. Take 2022, the year Spence married the pianist Dylan Perez. The day after their wedding, Spence was on his way to Berlin to sing in Janacek’s The Makropulos Case. He fell down the stairs at the airport and broke both his legs. Following surgery to reattach his thigh muscles, which had snapped, Spence met the brutal reality of the freelance singer’s life. “I was replaced immediately for all my gigs. I was like, oh, nobody really cares if I do it.” After months of recovery he was back in business and turning 40 “felt brilliant”. But even as he and his husband prepared to have their first child by surrogate — born last year and clearly now the centre of his world — there was more trouble in store.
“Before I had my child, I had almost a nervous breakdown and it was so horrible,” he says. “I’ve always had quite amazing mental health and then suddenly I was absolutely shitting myself. I think it was because I’ve always worked against something in terms of trying to be an opera singer and then suddenly all my dreams were coming true at once: a great career, an amazing husband and we were having a baby. I was crying all the time.”
No stranger to therapy, Spence took the time to explore what was going on. “I started to see a pattern,” he says. “Before every opening night I would get ill, because of this almost self-fulfilling prophecy that it was such a huge thing that had to go well.” He has now changed his mindset. “I don’t feel like I need to prove myself in that way any more. I’ve taken a bit of ego out of it and I’m having a much better time. I don’t get ill as much. I’m just a little freckle on the heaving bosom of opera.”
Peter Grimes opens on Apr 5 at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, and is on tour Apr 30–Jun 7, wno.org.uk
