86 Maida Vale Rd.,Roseneath,Wellington 6011 Christmas Eve 2019

Dear Everyone,

Ever the optimist, I shall start this Christmas Rundbrief before Christmas Day, though when it will be completed and sent is another matter altogether. The front grass has been cut and the house vacuumed top to bottom, so I shall rest virtuously at the keyboard while ‘Er Indoors makes some crackers and bakes a Sephardic orange and almond cake for tomorrow -nothing like something kosher for the greatest Christian festival- when Charles, Louise and Cousin Jane will come for Christmas Day itself and my tasks of cooking dead beasts and fowl, Oamaru spuds, fresh peas etc. will begin. Summer fruits and berries rather than the plum pudding of yore, but Charles is still keen to make mince pies in the morning. A classy whole-fruit, sugarless cake has already been made.

What an extraordinary year 2019 has been. The world has always been insane but it seems to have been getting steadily worse. The ultimate Deplorable crows on his Washington dunghill to the embarrassment of every sentient being, but the more objectionable he gets the greater become his chances of re-election, seems to me. Truly, there’s nowt so queer as folks, as we used to say in pre-LGBTIQ days. Across the Atlantic another mendacious buffoon with silly hair, albeit an entertaining one, triumphs over the jaw-droppingly inept Labourites. Throughout my life I’ve tried to be a loyal mild socialist but I keep getting thwarted by the idiocies of the Left. Have fun with Brexit, chaps. I don’t wish to seem smug, but I think we in New Zealand have a lot to be thankful for. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, despite the patchy success of her coalition government (not to mention her reluctance to pronounce the letter T –is her name really Jacinta?) shines at moments of crisis. Her reactions to dreadful events like the mosque shootings in March and the Whakaari/White Island eruptions recently have been so genuinely compassionate that you feel proud to have her. And the world has taken notice. Would that it would act in a similar way, especially with gun control. But there is hope. If there was any doubt about the rightness of a Swedish teenager calling the world’s leaders to account for an inadequate response to looming global catastrophe one has only to listen to the patronising sneers of a POTUS sulking at not being named Person of the Year to have those doubts dispelled. We Boomers and those following after have not done a great job with the planet. Let’s hope the rising generations will do better.

I am increasingly aware that my generation was a lucky one. Born exactly nine months after the return of the troopship bearing my father home from Italy, I grew up in a world rebuilding itself after the horror of WW2. Prosperity increased throughout the much maligned 50s which were not nearly as drab as some who weren’t there like to think, and despite some major blips along the way it really seemed that the world was bound to keep on improving. Unemployment was low, most could aspire to owning property, tertiary education was pretty much free. It was good to be a student during the 60s when so much happened. There was also much to protest about, notably our involvement in the Vietnam war. We even had a heresy trial! It’s hard to imagine people getting so steamed up about theology now, but at the time it seemed that this was really what universities were for. During my years in Switzerland and Germany Europe was doing pretty well too, having recovered astonishingly from devastation and it was a good time to be there. A few years later the Cold War ended. But, as always, things move cyclically and things go sour. What seemed like self-evident truths and liberal values are now called into question, money rules more than ever. Politicians have always lied of course but at least they used to pretend not to and were embarrassed

when found out. I’ve been sad to see in my lifetime a comparatively egalitarian society like ours (there was always a bit of mythology there, but still..) become one with a yawning gulf between haves and have-nots, just like so much of the rest of the world.

All right, musings of a grumpy old man are over now. But I have been reflecting on these things in the autumn of my days, especially with regard to my own career. Word got round that the Rigoletto I was in this (i.e. last) year (Count Monterone, yet another furious old man) marked 50 years since my first opera, Gianni Schicchi in Dunedin, and I was interviewed on Radio NZ. I was asked if, given my time over again, I would do the same thing? I replied that no, I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. So much that I’ve been lucky enough to do, on stage, in concert, in the recording studio, on television, simply couldn’t be done now. Cheap locals are unlikely to get solo gigs with the NZSO, for instance, NZ Opera seems to be enthusiastically shooting itself in both feet and Radio doesn’t make programmes. We really were on to a good thing for years when the legendary Helen Young ran Radio NZ Concert. When she retired years ago it was clear an epoch had ended. In 2019 she died: après elle le deluge.If you’re interested, you can hear the interview on podcast.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/upbeat/audio/2018724675/roger-wilson-celebrating-50-years-in-the-new-zealand-opera-scene

Well, so much for that. It’s now 5 January. Happy New Year everyone! The cat’s out of the bag and all can be revealed. As most of you will knowHer Majesty the Queen has been pleased to appoint Gillian Margaret Bibby as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her services to music and music education. High time too! She is naturally cock-a-hoop at getting this long overdue public acknowledgement of her years of selfless toil in the vineyard and is thrilled at all the kind (and true) things some hundreds of people have said and written. The investiture at Government House will be in the first week of May and we do hope that Miranda will be able to come over for it.

Of course this called for an impromptu New Year’s Day party which some of you attended, but also many could not because of its being holiday time. But what a great gathering of family, friends old and new, piano families past and present.

Unfortunately her health remains rather delicate and life has not all been easy. But she retains a pretty hefty teaching load and has had some considerable achievements. The poster above represents 5 very intense days in Auckland over Queen‘s Birthday weekend of teaching, teacher-training, master classes and general gurudom for the music schools in Albany and Remuera at which former star student Ludwig Treviranus is a leading light. She was in terrific form but was exhausted afterwards, taking a long time fully to recover. Incidentally, she hasn’t deliberately changed her hairstyle. Her hair, long and straight all her life, has in the last year or so turned curly unbidden and in a rather becoming way.Her other major activity has been work for the Promethean Editions Lilburn’s piano pieces. She wasn’t the editor exactly, but has been called ‘curator’ of this book for which she selected pieces from the Complete Works for Piano suitable for Grades 5-8. This also involved writing an extended introduction on the composer and the works, with descriptions and suggestions for performance, including fingering. This was a very big labour, one she was uniquely equipped to do, and the result is something which will be a boon to teachers and students home and abroad. Again, the intense work was tiring but the result is a very satisfying one of which she is rightly proud.

Her most dramatic incident of year was when she came to a meeting of our little French-speaking coven in the elegant salon of our head-prefect, an equally elegant octogenarian French diplomat widow. Showing off her much admired new Allbirds shoes by doing a dance step, she miscalculated the traction of the soles, tripped over a floor rug and hurtled sideways onto an antique table. The precious Limoges vase on top was unscathed, not so the table itself which broke as did two or three of her ribs. Not complicated, but very painful and inconvenient for the next 6 weeks. People mutter about our ‘broken public health system’. I am constantly astonished at what wonderful service we get, all on the house.

As mentioned above, I had a small part in Rigoletto mounted by the little home-grown company Eternity Opera with whom I’d done three other shows over the last four years, the sort of thing that seems to be my fate in the autumn of my days, i.e. furious old men who come on briefly, make a very loud noise and depart. Suits me fine. Actually, truth to tell, the picture below was taken in the 2018 Madame Butterfly, very un-Japanese, in which I was the Bonze, another furious old man. I supplied my own hat and late parsonical father-in-law L.V.Bibby’s heavy black taking-funerals-at-Dunedin’s-bleak- crematorium overcoat for both shows so I looked the same as Uncle Bonzo and Count Monterone.

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Charles rolls his eyes whenever I wonder aloud after a performance if I’ll ever be up there doing it again, claiming I’ve said this at the end of every year he’s been alive but something always crops up. In my twilight years I can’t really expect to be in great demand even if I am still well capable, so I did feel really lucky to get as much performing to do in 2019 as I did. Apart from the opera there was a particularly busy month with a St John Passion in Gisborne, a Creation in New Plymouth, Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle in Wellington and what will, I imagine, be my last Winterreise in Palmerston North with pianist Guy Donaldson. I’ve had such a lucky life to have had the chance of doing so much of this most satisfying kind of music-making, the song recital. I’ve lived with Schubert’s mighty cycle all my life, performing it with such fine pianists as Maurice Till, Bronwen Murray, Gillian (x3), Terence Dennis (x2) and now Guy. It’s a young man’s cycle of course, but I think an old man can add his own perspective. This last one went, dare I say it, pretty well. Funnily enough, I’ve never had the least trouble memorising the 24 songs. Would that operas came so easily. The good thing about the out of town gigs was that Gillian could come too. There are Safe Houses with old friends in all three places and it made a good little busman’s holiday. I worry about leaving her alone when she is reliant on me for so many things so this worked out well. This means, of course, that I don’t have the luxury of illness, accident or death. Luckily my one mishap, a tumble from our plum tree, was a good deal less serious than it might have been. For impressive hospital Emergency Department, see above.

A highlight of the year was a quick visit from Miranda in May. Eliana, now 8, was at school so couldn’t come too, but we do see her on Skype fairly often. She’s really enjoying school and is proving as much of a bibliophile as her mother, unswerving in her desire to be a vet, even to the extent of having her tertiary study all planned out. I owe her a couple of Messy stories: my late sister Elisabeth/Boofy used to entertain me endlessly when I was little with wonderfully inventive stories about a girl, Messy, black sheep of an otherwise blameless family, who was always doing truly

disgusting things. I tried to maintain the tradition for my children, though never as successfully, and now I am beholden to carry this on to the next generation.

Miranda’s career at the University of Idaho continues to flourish, as does Sean’s, though they’re under all the same threats of funding cuts which are so horribly familiar to us here and everywhere else in the world. She’s on sabbatical leave at the moment and is busy working on her second book, one of several such proposals she has lined up.

Charles continues to have a great time at the Zoo. He was promoted to more of a middle-management position which means he does less hands-on (as it were) work with school parties. He also applied successfully for funding for a project concerning the preservation of kea (that’s our wonderful but endangered mountain parrot for you Ausländer). I’m not sure exactly what this will involve, but so far he’s had a conference in Te Anau, not too bad a fate. He also did quite an ambitious Fiordland tramp from Martin’s Bay and up Lake McKerrow and the Lower Hollyford. I envied him this, having always wanted to go there in the footsteps of my father who went on some intrepid expeditions in the 1920s. I did try – in 1966 I think- but we were thwarted by rising rivers. So was Dad’s party but they were assisted over the Pyke River by the legendary Arawata Bill and his horse.

A great thing about having a son at the Zoo is that it is easier to get into the very popular Close Encounter experiences. In 2018 it was with the red panda, last year, while Miranda was here, it was the lemurs He composed a rather charming Lemur Song but he doesn’t want it made public yet. It would be great if they made a really good recording of his dozen or so songs, including the Giraffe Serenade you can probably find on You Tube. Charles gave us vouchers for the cheetah so we must book that too.

What else for 2019? Unsurprisingly, at my advanced age, friends tend to die and I have had to go to an inordinate number of funerals, 12, I think (4 of which I had to sing at). Some dear old friends like Andrea Oliver, several colleagues of long standing including Guy Jansen, a tremendous innovator in NZ choral music, and Les Dorizac, piano tuner and comic tenor, a former pupil, Glenn Rush, and an important person from my childhood, Semisi Ma’ia’i, who was a favourite family friend in Dunedin while he was at Medical School and I was a nipper. He became a venerated GP and also a respected compiler of Samoan-English dictionaries. I lost touch with him for about 50 years, then he turned up here in Wellington, living in retirement in the high-rise at the top of Maida Vale Rd. He was 92 and a lovely, kind, remarkable man of great distinction.

Semisi in 1961 with my nephew Douglas Elliffe (now a Professor of Psychology). More recently.

Another very important friend and influence from my youth was Nola Leov, sometime Associate Professor of French at Otago, one of my favourite teachers and indeed favourite people in the world, who died in her 90s. A chirpy, friendly little woman who wore her erudition lightly. We’d remained in touch throughout her long retirement in Nelson where she devoted herself to copious writings on family and local history.

Nola Leov ca.1969, with Elizabeth Goulding, also a lecturer in French who died round about the same time, and Bunty Herd, a remarkable woman who was married to Eric Herd, my Professor German, and died some years ago.

Thanks to Jetstar, erratic but extraordinarily cheap, we had a couple of trips to Dunedin, one at the time of the Registered Music Teachers’ Conference in January (hence tax deductible), and we stayed on for a week, living with Gillian’s sister Lauris and spending some time with my elder brother Gerald and niece Judith, as well as making excursions to North Otago and to my beloved Taieri Mouth.

We had another week there in October when Gillian’s brother Martin came over from Sydney and the three surviving Bibby siblings were together, something that doesn’t happen very often. I love being back in the haunts of my youth. A couple of years ago we did seriously consider selling up and returning there, but I don’t think it will happen. I’d be unhappy so far away from Charles and in any case property values have risen so dramatically in Dunedin recently that I doubt that we’d be any better off.

Oh dear, now we’re into February and still not done. What happened in January? Not a lot. Weather has been pretty cool for a Wellington summer, all the better for Gillian who wilts in the heat. This meant that we had to decide, with sorrow, not to go to aforementioned Ludwig and Dakyong’s wedding to the north of Auckland where it was likely to be warm and humid. Charles and Louise represented us there and luckily there was another family celebration chez Treviranus in Te Marua a week later which we could attend. And our plum tree produced the biggest crop ever and I now have 22 jars of them preserved as well as lots given away to friends and family.

Not a lot lined up for me professionally in 2020 but we live and hope. A concert in Hastings with my gal pals, a guest slot with the Whanganui Music Society to celebrate its 75 th year, one minimally paid, the other not at all. Ah well, such are the sunset years.

A bit late to wish you all a Merry Christmas Happy New Year but I hope February 2020 onwards will be full of good things for you as well as for the world. Have a good Easter!

Roger & Gillian