In her most celebrated TV character, the desperate, delusional but indefatigable social climber Hyacinth Boo-kay (as she insisted on pronouncing the name Bucket), Dame Patricia Routledge played a woman anxious to be thought of as a music lover (though she couldn’t tell her Chopin from her Mendelssohn) and given to burst decorously into song (albeit off the note).
‘That bit was difficult,’ she says now of the dodgy pitch. And it was difficult because Patricia Routledge wasn’t just a star of small-screen comedy. For much of her career, before the TV beckoned, she’d been seriously involved in music as a mezzo-cum-contralto singer. A successful one. Working with Leonard Bernstein. Doing operetta, Broadway musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan… invariably on the note.
Even the Pope was a fan
The fame of Keeping Up Appearances – with worldwide broadcasts in the 1990s and a fanbase that allegedly extended to the late Pope Benedict (his Hyacinth impersonations, it was said, cheered up the daily business of the Vatican) – meant that Routledge’s distinguished singing past was virtually forgotten.
But in recent years she’s made occasional appearances onstage to talk about it. And now 95, leading a quiet life in a genteel Chichester retirement home, she's talking to me.
About the voice. About her love for music. And about her perhaps unlikely friendship with Dame Janet Baker, to whose voice she’s been in thrall for decades – taking care to include the mezzo’s Elgar Dream of Gerontius in her last batch (there have been two) of Desert Island Discs.
‘We first met in 1966 in New York,’ says Routledge, ‘where I was in a play, and Janet was making her concert debut at the Town Hall. I’d been at university with the baritone John Shirley-Quirk, so we had a friend in common. He encouraged her to come and see my play. And afterwards we went out together to some dubious Irish pub-restaurant, where we talked for hours, as though we’d known each other for a long time.’
Childhood dreams of sports car and romance
Nearly 60 years later, it really has been a long time. The two dames have been talking on the phone just before I arrived at the care home (it is Dame Janet’s birthday). And on reflection, their friendship isn’t really so strange in that it exists between two strong, formidably accomplished women brought up in the north of England in the 1930s with no-nonsense Northern values of hard work, integrity and the determination to succeed.
For Routledge, home was Birkenhead, where her father was in gentlemen’s outfitting and her earliest ambition was to be a school headmistress by the age of 40: an achievement she somehow imagined as glamorous and involving ‘a red sports car, with romances all over Europe’.
Instead, she went into theatre, making her stage debut at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1952 – but that was ‘after a year of turmoil wondering if I should become a concert singer. I’d done a good deal of singing at school; and then, in London, I studied privately with the head of lieder at the Guildhall, Walther Gruner [whose other students included Geraint Evans and Benjamin Luxon]. But in the end, I chose acting because I found that assuming another personality onstage was less terrifying than being myself on a recital platform.’
'I needed adventures'
As things turned out, Patricia Routledge also realised – quickly enough – that singing and acting didn’t have to be alternative careers. Musicals and operetta beckoned, with a slew of Julian Slade shows and assorted forays into G&S that nearly altered the trajectory of her life.
‘I was invited to join D’Oyly Carte – a company that, looking back, seemed stuck-in-the mud in its approach to staging but at least it honoured the material, which some don’t. You can be too clever and untruthful.
'So, I was rather pleased when it summoned me for an audition at 10am on a Monday morning, and offered me a job. But then I decided to say no. It required long-term commitment, and I needed adventures.’
Gilbert and Sullivan in Central Park
In the course of the adventures, G&S resurfaced fairly often. During 1966 Routledge sang the title role in Iolanthe, Mad Margaret in Ruddigore, and Melissa in Princess Ida for a radio series of the Savoy operas conducted by Stanford Robinson. And in 1980 she played Ruth in a glitzy if unorthodox Pirates of Penzance that ran in the open air at New York’s Central Park. Take a look at Patricia below:
With a cast including Kevin Kline and rock star Linda Ronstadt, it was a long way from D’Oyly Carte and, as she remembers, not immune to ‘crazy ideas’. But ‘it was magical when the moon shone on the lake. After New York it came to London, but without me. By then, I’d had enough.’
The wider world of operetta, though, was a recurring feature of Patricia Routledge's life. She sang Noël Coward, not least in a performance for The Master’s 70th birthday when ‘there were more stars in the audience than onstage’. In 1978 she took the title role in Offenbach’s Grand Duchess of Gérolstein for the Camden Festival.
Next, 1988 brought a TV film of The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Jonathan Miller and conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. Cast as Mrs Peachum, she recalls it as a ‘difficult role because it needs two separate voices. When Mrs Peachum speaks it’s all cor-blimey, but when she sings it’s pure Mozart. And it didn’t help that Gardiner conducted from another studio.’ So, she was following his beat by monitor? ‘Oh no, he followed mine,’ she replies with a corrective firmness entirely worthy of her sitcom alter-ego.
Working with Leonard Bernstein
Something else she did with Miller was his Scottish Opera staging of Bernstein’s Candide, also in 1988. Her role, the irrepressibly exuberant Old Lady, won her an Olivier Award. And it cemented a relationship with the composer that had started 12 years earlier, playing the female lead in what turned out to be his legendary Broadway failure, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
She’d been in a Jule Styne musical called Darling of the Day that ran on Broadway in 1968 and featured Vincent Price, who’d never done a musical before. Asked if the horror movie star could sing, Patricia Routledge replies, ‘Not really.’ But her own vocal performance won a Tony Award and the interest of Alan Jay Lerner.
'It was tragic'
The celebrated lyricist of My Fair Lady was now planning, with Bernstein, a musical pageant about the history of the White House - also known by its street address as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Presidents and the First Ladies would all be sung by the same two singers. And an invitation duly came for Routledge to perform the Ladies; which she did, albeit amid mayhem and catastrophe.
‘It was tragic,’ she recalls; ‘the mismatch of the century between Bernstein and Lerner, who seemed to be completely at odds about what they were writing. For Lerner it was a Broadway musical, for Bernstein it was a futuristic opera. And they could only work on it sporadically because Lenny was conducting around the world.
‘It was hard to go onstage and do a show you knew was already dead'
‘The result was worthy: too didactic, too political, not the stuff of musical theatre. And it was far too long: four hours when the previews opened in Philadelphia. There were desperate revisions as we moved on to Washington, but we could all see that it wasn’t right. When we reached New York, it opened on a Tuesday [4 May 1976] and closed the following Saturday.’
How did that feel? ‘It was hard to go onstage and do a show you knew had already been killed by the critics, but when it folded there was great sadness. So much work had gone into it. And there were some very good songs, some of them written for me.
'There was never a cast recording, but I did record “Take Care of This House” which I sang at a tribute concert for Lerner at Drury Lane. There was another, “Duet for One”, that was intended to stop the show. As I believe it did.’
In fact, Routledge’s performance – especially in ‘Duet for One’, which involved her playing two characters at once, with a rotating wig – was virtually the only thing about the show the critics liked. And it ensured that she and Bernstein remained firm friends, ‘which I valued. He would come to see the shows I was in and invite me to his concerts. I went over to Tanglewood for his 70th birthday. But he couldn’t be persuaded to try Pennsylvania Avenue again.’
From Hildegard of Bingen to Myra Hess
As the decades rolled on, so did Routledge’s connections with the world of classical performance. She narrated Walton’s Façade, did Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals with the Nash Ensemble, played Hildegard of Bingen in a TV biopic, and toured an entertainment about Myra Hess in wartime with the pianist Piers Lane.
On the musicals front, she played in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Carousel at the National Theatre. And more recently, an old recording from the 1960s of her singing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ from The Sound of Music acquired cult status online after it was played at the funeral of Betty Boothroyd, sometime speaker of the House of Commons and another no-nonsense Northern woman who was a longstanding friend.
- The Sound of Music is one the greatest stage musicals of all time
As you’d expect of someone in their 90s, active music-making isn’t so much on the cards these days, though there’s a sort of substitute in the form of the Patricia Routledge Foundation which supports classical concerts – its decisions governed (as she’s keen to say) by a group of trustees rather than her own taste.
But her taste is clear to anyone who roots out her old Desert Island Discs selections: Schubert, Shostakovich, Holst, John Rutter… plus, of course, Dame Janet Baker. Though neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin feature, she can tell the difference: Hyacinth Boo-kay be damned. But in her choice of luxury, the ghost of Hyacinth does linger: she requested china cups and saucers with a silver teapot.
‘That was not a joke,’ she says when I suggest it might have been. ‘And it would still be what I ask for.’ Even desert islands have appearances to keep up.