Lord Of The Ring

Ahead of touring with the NZSO, Simon O’Neill reflects on his storied international opera career and why singing Wagner is okay, despite the composer’s reputation.

- Elizabeth Kerr

Simon O’Neill was walking up Broadway in New York in 2001 when he took a phone call that changed his life. Only 20 minutes earlier, at the end of an audition for a minor role in a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, he was asked if he would like to sing some Wagner. Luckily, he’d been working that year with the Auckland-born Wagner specialist Sir Donald McIntyre. O’Neill turned to the back of his book and sang Siegmund’s Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater from Die Walküre.

“I sang it okay,” O’Neill told the Listener “and I thought I might have a chance of getting that part in the Mozart.”

That phone call, from his New York agent, was to tell him he didn’t get the part, but that he was, at 32, the official understudy for Plácido Domingo at the Met.

As Domingo’s cover for the role of Siegmund in Otto Schenk’s famous production of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second of the four operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle, he sat in the wings at the Met stage, “just watching. I studied the man, watched his stage work, how he related to people. He became my mentor.”

Doors opened to more auditions. He was double-cast with Domingo: they shared the role of the hero Siegmund, the mortal son of Wotan, king of the gods, in the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden in 2007. Then, in 2012, an upgrade. Domingo retired from the role and now O’Neill is Siegmund: he has played it at the Met, La Scala, twice in London, three times at the Berlin State Opera; just last month he sang it for the 80th time, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.