An orchestral man's oeuvre

Simon Rattle is best known as a conductor of symphonic works, but opera has also featured strongly in his repertoire. As he tells Nicholas Kenyon, Wagner is like a drug

When Simon Rattle raises the baton on Parsifal for the Royal Opera on 8 December, it will be only the third time he has ever conducted staged opera in a London house, a bizarre state of affairs for the leading conductor of his generation, who later next year becomes music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. A succession of intendants at Covent Garden (where he did The Cunning Little Vixen in 1990, and has been repeatedly invited back) and English National Opera (where he conducted a solitary Katya Kabanova in 1985) will doubtless gnash their teeth and say "not for want of trying", and there have of course been several concert and semi-staged performances in London with the London Sinfonietta, Glyndebourne, an Ariadne auf Naxos with the LSO, as well as the Parsifal at the BBC Proms in 2000.

But Rattle's now legendary ability to say "no", to wait until the conditions are precisely right for what he wants to do, has been one of the distinguishing features of his activities over the last 20 years. Instead of London, it is Amsterdam with Pierre Audi (Pelléas et Mélisande, Parsifal and, most recently, Tristan und Isolde); the Châtelet in Paris (Jenufa); Aix-en-Provence (The Makropulos Case) with Stephane Lissner; and Salzburg with Gérard Mortier and Hans Landesmann (Rameau's Les Boréades) that have provided homes for the small but precious number of Rattle operatic ventures.

Glyndebourne has had a relationship with him over more then 20 years, but that took a startling turn recently when the festival took advantage of the hiatus surrounding Nicholas Snowman's departure to cancel plans for one of the very few opera productions to which Rattle had committed himself, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in 2005. That any opera house in the world would turn down the offer of a Rattle new production these days is almost as bizarre as his reluctance to appear in London.

Still, one thing you cannot argue with in Simon Rattle is his unerring self-knowledge: his capacity to see where the opportunity lies, where the danger lurks, and where fruitful relationships can be built is at the heart of his music-making. Hence the 18 years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; the loyalty to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group; and now the relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic that has already been maturing for over a decade. However strongly opera has featured in his activity at different periods, it has been with the symphonic repertory that he has changed the musical world. It could have been different, and may yet be so.

Opera was a primary enthusiasm for him when he first came to London at the age of 16, and led to his first official performances at the Royal Academy of Music (as distinct from the unofficial concerts he mounted with such zest). He had been Steuart Bedford's assistant on The Cunning Little Vixen in 1973, and then, more surprisingly, his first appearance in the pit was for one performance of Offenbach's La Jolie Parfumeuse (not a work or indeed a composer to whom he has returned). He received his first major reviews for a double bill of L'Enfant et les Sortilèges and Stravinsky's Pulcinella in November 1974: "... greatest praise must go to the gifted young conductor ... One can safely prophesy a future for him in his chosen profession as long as he does not go dashing ahead too quickly," wrote Harold Rosenthal here. He was then invited back, after he left the Academy, for Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea.

John Streets directed opera at the Academy and was one of the few teachers there that Rattle liked (in a revealing phrase that's always stuck in my mind, Rattle said of Streets: "He had the speed of musical responses I needed"). Streets speculated a while ago on why Rattle had not gone into an opera house on a more permanent basis. "He wasn't very happy at Glyndebourne initially, and that possibly soured things. Would he perhaps have found the repertory a bit restricting? ... Now he is in control of an orchestra in a way that he can't possibly be, completely, in an opera house; there are so many other things to consider."

That issue of control arose again when I talked to Rattle earlier this year, after the Amsterdam opening of Tristan und Isolde, (which also revealed something of his attitude to Wagner as a background to next month's Parsifal). I asked him whether he had the same degree of it in an opera house as with an orchestra. "Look, this is absolutely not to do with control. It is completely and utterly to do with trust. I now know a whole lot more about this than when we talked before. It is so much better without hierarchy. The person in control could be the director, the diva, the conductor – whoever, as my wife says, has the biggest dick at any moment. But there is a quality of people knowing they have that power or influence and not using it, which is desperately important. People give their best only if they're supported and encouraged and when there is mutual trust.

"In Wagner, everybody has to go into an unnatural state, and admit immediately what's difficult. Now for me, coming into a work with strong traditional ways of doing it, the difficulty is that the traditional ways aren't necessarily the best ways to navigate this treacherous ocean. You would be a fool to cross the ocean of Tristan in a canoe, but equally a great majestic liner is not the only way to do it."

So, what is his approach, and how is it different from that "majestic liner"? "That misses a lot of the texture, and particularly the personal, intimate feeling, the grain of it. These are not large people shouting, there is a chamber music between the personalities. Now, I mean, if I could conduct it like Furtwängler, I'd be thrilled. But I can't. It simply doesn't come out of my imagination like that.

"I am far less twitchy about this than I used to be. The times are not the same and we don't hear it the same. Is there a reason why a composer as theatrical as Wagner would set sentences that take people five breaths to sing? I don't believe it. Now we have some evidence, we know the thing about Wagner saying the Meistersinger overture was taken too slowly, which does mean that tempos have broadened over the years, but it is also a matter of flexibility, tension and release, supporting the great structure with different weights and different centres of gravity.

"This type of art can make people pretty strange; if you dealt only with this music all the time you'd certainly feel you could do out-of-character things... it's a drug. And not an entirely beneficent drug."

I asked Rattle how he came to Wagner – it doesn't seem central to him. "Oh, don't be so sure. I had my Wagner period as one does, as a late teenager. I went as an assistant to one of the music camps and did the first and third acts of Walküre. I was the number-two conductor and many professionals came to play and sing. Norman Bailey was there, for instance, and a number of the Covent Garden orchestra members came to play for fun. When I was a student, there was Reggie Goodall at the Coliseum, The Ring and Tristan later, I listened to him endlessly; then bits of The Ring with Alex Gibson when I was in Scotland. There was a lot going on and I heard a lot.''

Is the relationship with a director generally a difficult one? "I've been pretty selective in with whom I've worked, and very lucky, too: Stephane Braunschweig for the Janaceks in Paris and Aix; the Herrmanns who did the Rameau; Deborah Warner at Glyndebourne. You do need someone who realises the musical implications of what they're doing. This was something Peter Sellars realised early on, and even though he drives you crazy, he knows what is going on in the music. He once said to me, "Oh, shit! If I change that move, it's going to change the way the viola plays, isn't it!?," which of course is true."

The idea of musical collaboration being at the heart of his activity is something that has become ever closer to Rattle's heart as the years have gone by. That is what made Birmingham work; that is what will make Berlin work. When collaboration is not on the cards, he is not interested.

The one major project at Covent Garden already confirmed after Parsifal is the long-awaited premiere of Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice. This was originally commissioned by the BBC as a culmination of the Sounding the Century project in December 1999, but Maw was happy to wait for Rattle to be available to conduct and for Trevor Nunn to direct, reuniting the team that triumphed at Glyndebourne with Porgy and Bess; it is scheduled for next December.

Parsifal, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000): 8, 11, 14, 17, 20 and 22 December. Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 19 December. A longer version of this article appears in the December issue of 'Opera' magazine. 'Simon Rattle: from Birmingham to Berlin', by Nicholas Kenyon, was published last month by Faber & Faber