‘If anybody had made a film of my year,’ says John Tomlinson, our latest musical knight, as he lolls on a sofa on the top floor of the Royal Opera House and enjoys a gentle chuckle, ‘I suppose it would have been called My Left Knee!’
It has been a memorable year for the world’s greatest Wagner bass, who returns to Covent Garden on Sunday to sing Wanderer (Wotan, by any other name) in Keith Warner’s new production of Siegfried. He received the knighthood in July, and last month saw the release by Warner Classics of a four-CD set featuring Tomlinson in various celebrated roles. After Wanderer, he sings the King Fisher in a Garden revival of Michael Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage before he switches houses in December to English National Opera and Britten’s Billy Budd, in which he plays the bullying master-at-arms, John Claggart.
But it has been a painful year, too.
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