So long, Arch

After singing in the performance of Macbeth in Seattle last Saturday night (as Lady Macbeth’s Doctor), Archie Drake had a major heart attack; he was taken to the hospital, held on for a while, but in the end gave up the ghost. Our Seattle Opera contingent in Copenhagen was extremely sorry to hear this news (we’d been getting updates on email all week), although in a way it’s what he would have wanted, because he was singing up until the very end.

Archie, pictured above in the role of Luther in Tales of Hoffmann (another great photo by Rozarii Lynch), was still singing at the age of 81 last week; he was a special favorite of the Seattle audience, and people were still commenting how great he sounded in these recent performances of the cursed Scottish opera. (Of course it was THIS opera that was his last.) I’ve always been extremely fond of Archie, who sang Lillas Pastia in my own first Seattle Opera production as title guy (Carmen in 1995). He’s been with the company since 1968, sung hundreds of roles, thousands of performances, and was always great fun to have around, as entertaining offstage as he always was onstage. One of his fondest memories was playing Wotan in a Seattle Opera Ring back in the 1970s. The director of the production was a great Wotan himself, bass George London, and apparently he understood that Archie wouldn’t make a career out of singing the king of the gods: London told Arch, “If you’ll change your name and grow three inches, I can make you a world-class Wotan!”

A few years ago I did an interview with Archie, obstensibly about the early days of Seattle Opera, but we ended up talking even more about his pre-Seattle Opera life. Born in 1925 on the North Sea coast of England, he had fought in the British Navy in World War II and after the war worked in the British merchant marine before becoming an opera singer and working up and down the west coast of the US in the 1960s. He lived a really fascinating life, and was a Seattle treasure. He’s reputed to have been working on some memoirs, and I have truckloads of material from this interview which was never published. It is my great hope that the story of his life will be told in more detail very soon.

In other news, I was happy to hear (again, via email) that my mother’s surgery was successful the other day and that she is once again walking without pain. I look forward to seeing her in northern Michigan, in a few weeks’ time.