Archie Drake has traveled to just about every corner of God’s green earth over a long life. Yet he has spent a considerable part of the last thirty-three years on the stage of the Seattle Opera. The bass-baritone’s performances with the company number thousands; he has sung hundreds of roles, ranging in length from the six notes of the Old Servant in Strauss’s Salome to the endless monologues of Wotan in Wagner’s Ring. Everyone who has ever worked with Seattle Opera knows and loves Archie, and his fans in the audience await him eagerly, season after season, show after show. Archie is the memory of Seattle Opera: he has been involved at every step in the history of this company. He fondly recalls working with colleagues like Anna Moffo, James McCracken, George London, and on such productions as Seattle Opera’s ’98 Tristan, the ’90 War and Peace, and even those first Seattle Rings back in ’75. Now, as the company prepares for a year of exile and a return to the Promised Land of its new home, McCaw Hall, a conversation with Archie reminds us of where we came from—and perhaps, where we’re going.

Archie comes from (and, when I spoke with him last June, was on his way to) Great Yarmouth, a port town on England’s North Sea coast. His family have all been mariners and seamen for generations. One Drake ancestor was the brother of navigator Sir Francis Drake, another the founder of Great Yarmouth’s Drake Stevedoring Company. Archie left Great Yarmouth to go to sea at the age of fifteen, but, he says, “It’s still a delight and a joy to go back there and walk on Great Yarmouth beach, and feel at night the northeast breeze coming in off the North Sea, and listen to the larks as you walk along the beach. I knew there was something magic about larks long before I ever read Shelly. They hover up there and sing their little hearts out, till they can’t sing any more.”

But when Archie was fifteen, rejoicing in that magical song was still a long way off. The year was 1940, and every able-bodied Briton had to do his part to serve his country. Young sailor Archie had what was known as “a good war”: he was in the thick of it, sailing as part of convoys and transporting troops and supplies all around Europe. Archie has enough gripping war stories to create a whole series of blockbuster movies: catching the dreaded “Black Water Fever” on the West African coast, gunning down German E-boats in the North Sea, sailing under smokescreen in order to surprise the enemy with the Normandy Beach invasion, returning home on shore leave only to have his house blown to bits by air-raids as he sleeps. And to hear him speak about the war is to live it again, as he recalls the people, the love, the hate, the terror, the excitement, with that spell-binding presence and voice that has mesmerized and electrified millions of opera-goers.

“It was the most formative experience of my life,” says Archie of the war. “Here’s what I find horrifying about it: war creates these intense negative emotions and also provides an opportunity to indulge them.” Archie remembers losing his uncle Ben, his childhood hero, to a torpedo; dragging the corpses of young women out of a bombed hotel in his hometown; and narrowly escaping death several times himself. “I became so enraged and embittered, particularly against Hitler and the Germans. If somebody had said to me, ‘Here’s a little switch. You push that, and every German would disappear off the face of the earth,’ I would have done it. I would have done it.”

The path leading from such experiences to the stage of Seattle Opera criss-crossed the planet several times, first in the merchant marine during the 1950s, later on tour as a singer. In the late ‘50s, Archie found himself working in Vancouver for a British shipping company, the first time he had lived ashore since childhood. He happened to join a singing group, and it wasn’t long before he had a chance to sing for Lotte Lehmann, in his opinion “the greatest singing actress that ever lived.” After studying with Lehmann, and Bill Eddy, at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West, Archie made his opera debut singing Belcore opposite Marni Nixon in The Elixir of Love. While he found opera fascinating, establishing a stable career in opera was (and still is) a challenge. Archie opted for the steady income that came with joining the Roger Wagner Chorale, part of the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program. And so he was off roaming the world again, in an airplane this time, bringing classical and popular American music to all corners of the globe.

Eventually, after triumphing as a last-minute replacement at San Francisco Opera, Archie was hired by Glynn Ross, Seattle Opera’s first general director. Archie made his Seattle debut as the jailer, Rocco, in Fidelio in 1968. He impressed Ross, who called Archie again with a different offer: would Archie move to Seattle and join the permanent group of Resident Artists? In those days, there were no Gold or Silver casts, or English captions, at Seattle Opera. Instead there were the National and International Series, with the world’s greatest stars singing the operas in the International Series, in the original language, and the Resident Artists singing the same operas, on different nights, in English translation. For a fixed salary and health benefits, Archie would be expected to sing major roles in the National Series, comprimario roles in the International Series, and to do all sorts of touring and outreach on behalf of the company. He remembers a production of Verdi’s Forza del Destino in which he sang the small role of the Marquis of Calatrava every night. On International nights he changed costume and returned as the buffo character, Fra Melitone, whereas on National nights he would return as the lyric bass, Padre Guardiano—and sing in English all night.

A challenge to stamina and memory, perhaps; but Archie has both in plenty, and rose to it. He appreciated the opportunity to sing roles he might not otherwise be asked to tackle; he relished the challenge of singing Wotan in Die Walküre at ten in the morning for an audience of 3000 school children. And most of all, he loved being part of this team that was working together to build something new. He is and always has been a team player: the happiest time of his life was a voyage across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, shortly after the war, with “a wonderful cook, a great skipper, and a crew that was like a band of brothers by this time, no tensions.” So in 1969 Archie joined Glynn Ross’s team with full enthusiasm.

Ross, in Archie’s words, is “a visionary. He had this dream, he wanted to establish the Pacific Northwest Festival of the Arts. Not merely opera, but all the arts. There would be a site, down by Federal Way, with three theaters: an opera house, a concert hall, and a recital hall; then, built around this, in the park, sites for all the other arts.” In the end Ross may have “overreached himself,” as Archie puts it, but a successful team needs a strong leader with a great vision, and such was Ross. Archie recalls how “Glynn loved to get these schemes going:” partnerships with Vancouver Opera and Portland Opera, an exchange program with Sarajevo, premieres of new operas by Thomas Pasatieri and Carlisle Floyd, touring the state with Penelope, a piece featuring operatic voices and a rock band. Under Ross, Seattle Opera even produced The Who’s Tommy at the Moore Theater (offering Archie an opportunity to flirt with a nude Bette Midler, backstage). “That was Glynn, he wanted to get people interested, he used to say, ‘I’m not after your money—I want your soul.’”

Glynn Ross had worked at Bayreuth in the 1950s, and his plan for Seattle had always included the Ring. In fact, Wagner’s great cycle was to be the core of the projected Pacific Northwest Festival of the Arts, performed twice each summer, once in German, once in English. When I asked Archie if his intense hatred of all things German made it hard for him to perform Wagner, he told me about his experience returning German POWs from North Africa to Hamburg. “That was my first close contact with Germans, and to my surprise, I found out they were human beings. Some of them were very decent human beings. One of them had pneumonia, he was about three days from home when he died. After five years in prison. We buried the poor guy at sea.” Nowadays, he says, “When I get around to defining myself, I’m an earthling, that’s what I am. I’ve lost any hint of chauvanism, nationalism, or anything. That’s all gone now.” To Archie, the Ring simply means: “Once renounce the power of love for the love of power—with the mistaken notion that the more power you have, the more secure you will be—and you’re on the highway to disaster.”

Needless to say, the chance to sing the power-hungry Wotan, the greatest bass-baritone role, appealed to Archie, who sang the god in English in Seattle’s 1973 Walküre and 1974 Siegfried. He recalls a brilliant collaboration with Hungarian soprano Iby Laszlo, with her “lasar of a voice. I got the best reviews I’ve ever got in my life for that performance. George London, who staged me, told me ‘If you change your name and grow three inches, I’ll make you a world-class Wotan.’” Archie never managed to grow those extra inches, and by the time Seattle was presenting the full cycles he had switched over to Gunther. He never much liked the King of the Gibichungs: “Gunther’s a weakling, he’s shallow, insecure. Terrified of women. And what’s more, he drinks. His entrance, it’s drinking music!”

Archie sang Gunther every year except the summer he sang King Marke, when Seattle Opera produced both the Ring and Tristan und Isolde. Today, the company would never attempt such a feat; but in those days, opera production was entirely different. “We got ten days rehearsal. Whatever the show. What you have here today is an unbelievable luxury. Here it is, it’s not even June yet, the Ring doesn’t even open until August 5, and it’s like a BEEHIVE down there! It’s amazing.” And from those early days in Seattle Archie has stories to rival his war stories: stories of backstage mishaps and onstage triumphs, of colleagues feared (the tenor who injured him in three different shows) and adored (the dog in Of Mice and Men), of such unusual experiences as touring Washington state with Amahl and the Night Visitors and playing King Balthazar in blackface.

Archie Drake loves opera, always has. He finds it “basically an exploration of the human spirit. You can get more expression into singing than all the talking in the world. Did you ever get so mad at somebody that you couldn’t even talk? Next time that happens, sing to ‘em!” He trumpets no favorite composer, but does admit a special affinity for Benjamin Britten. Britten was born twelve years before Archie and about ten miles south. The first time Archie essayed Britten, as a voice student performing in Rape of Lucretia, he found that Britten’s notoriously difficult music came easily. At Seattle Opera he sang that old Suffolk salt Captain Balstrode in Peter Grimes, a role he was born to sing. Last winter he was devastated when, because of an injury he got while performing Barber of Seville the previous spring, he had to withdraw from the cast of Billy Budd. But his greatest experience performing Britten came on tour with the Roger Wagner Chorale, singing the War Requiem in Hiroshima. “I remember after the concert we went out and walked to Ground Zero, and it was like they could hear us.” No chauvanism left, just the magic of song.

I asked Archie about the future of Seattle Opera. He approves of our Young Artists Program, indeed enjoyed performing alongside them in Marriage of Figaro in 1999. And despite his long history with the current building, he can’t wait for the new house. Speaking of the present theater, he says, “Those upstairs dressing rooms, they’re like a dungeon! I work in a room that could have been designed for interrogation by the KGB!” But he also points out, “I think Seattle Opera could be encouraging young modern American composers. Let’s get three young American composers to each compose one short opera, do it on a competitive basis. The talent will always be there; as Carl Sandburg says, ‘Always the young strangers,’ the singers. But the young composers, they need more encouraging.”

A conversation with Archie Drake is always encouraging. Seventy-seven years old, still going strong, still dreaming about the future. A future which may include more work with Seattle Opera, and, for the sake of many a fan, will hopefully include memoirs. The immediate future, as we parted ways that June afternoon, included a trip to England, a walk along Great Yarmouth beach, the feel of the sea-breeze and the sound of that magical song of the larks.

-- Jonathan Dean

Originally printed in the 2001 Summer Magazine