Ed Lyon is known for his baroque interpretations as well as his passion for early music.

He has performed all over the world at such major theaters as the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Opera di Roma, Garsington Opera, Opera North, La Monnaie Brussels, Pinchgut Opera, Salzburg Festival, The Grange Festival, Grand Théâtre de Génève, and Oper Köln.

In addition to his operatic career, in 2020 he qualified as a psychotherapist in Cognitive Behavioral Hypnotherapy and has since trained in Mindfulness and Stress Reduction, Compassion Focused Therapy.

On Nov. 17, he will perform the role of Nerone in “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” with the Academy of Ancient Music, and Lyon spoke about the role with OperaWire ahead of the performance. He also delved into his work as a psychotherapist and his love for early music.

OperaWire: You are very well known for your baroque interpretations and you will be performing “L’incoronazione di Poppea.” What attracts you to Monteverdi’s music? And why do you think it has lasted the test of time?

Ed Lyon: What I love about Monteverdi is he is an extraordinary composer and he has the most brilliant relationship with text. I really believe that so profoundly because he was writing at a time when the librettist was the star. Monteverdi was discovering this new art form.

Obviously, with the church music, it’s a slightly different thing. You could be famous as a court composer in that way, but they developed this new style. So what’s interesting about “Poppea” for me is that I have been in it. I was in it a lot as a young man, but never as Nero because that’s not very accepted to have a tenor sing Nero.

But I’ve just sung my first Ulisse this summer at Garsington and I sang a few Orfeos over time. And what I love most about Monteverdi’s music is obviously the text which I find incredibly liberating. But one of the things I love about baroque music is the slightly improvisational quality. You have a set of rules and we all subscribe to those rules. But then, within that structure, everybody has freedom to express themselves.

I find often in later music there’s a sort of expectation and indeed, in certain cultures like in Italy there’s a culture around the Bel Canto and sound and it’s quite hard to spread your wings in that way because sometimes they don’t quite get what you’re trying to do. It’s the sound that comes first and then the rest.

And actually, for me, what I love about early music is I wanted to be an actor and when you do something like “Poppea” or “Ulisse” or Orfeo, you know, there’s that extraordinary ability to act.

In Act five, right of “Orfeo” there’s that big monologue where he just goes mental and you see this extraordinary character coming through. The same goes for the opening monologues in “Ulisse.” And I think you get the sort of unhinged quality of all these people in “Poppea” as well. It’s an interesting libretto because it doesn’t quite treat them as the monsters that they really were, which is sort of curious.

So I love the improvisational quality.

OW: Monteverdi of course wrote a lot of church music. How did that influence his operas?

EL: I’m obsessed with his choral music and with the madrigals. With the church music, what I love about that whole period of music is that they had quite a restricted harmonic palette and yet because it was restricted, they had to save what they did have for when it really mattered.

I think when you’ve got the full chromatic toolbox to play with in later music like Strauss, it just means that sometimes I find myself a bit not sure what to listen for.

Whereas I find in Monteverdi, you’re just gasping at the invention of it. It’s so astonishing when you hear this chromaticism in his madrigals and when you hear Monteverdi do something really cheeky. And that’s what really thrills me about his music. The level of invention within these restrictions is just thrilling. So if I’m going to do something, I’m going to save it for that word, or I’m going to save it for that intention.

OW: Monteverdi’s orchestral writing is very recitative-based. What do you look out for as a singer when you’re performing the works?

EL: My first “Orfeo” was rather grandiose. It was with René Jacob in Aix-en-Provence. He’s a very demanding person and everything had to be alla battuta. Now, I don’t believe that of Monteverdi and I don’t quite sign up to that. But, what I loved about it was the rigor of having to learn to sing it all a la battuta. Sometimes singers come to Monteverdi and they think it’s free. They think that bar lines don’t matter.

Laurence Cummings, who’s conducting “Poppea,” I’ve worked with him a lot and we’re great mates. I’ve known Lawrence since I was 16, so 30 years, and he talks a lot about tactus. And that we have to feel as a unit, not just the singer. But everybody has to feel a tactus. There is a pulse that goes through the entire piece. And if everybody has a sense of this tactus, we don’t actually need a conductor because we’re all aware of the pulse and we all learn the music so it fits on the pulse. Once you’ve learned exactly what he wrote, you can then play with it. You can stretch and you can decide where you want to go, both as a continuo player and as a soloist. And the more that you rehearse, and the more that you do that, the more organic the creation is.

So when we did “Orfeo,” when we did “Ulisse,” and when we will do “Poppea” on stage at Garsington in 2028, Lawrence doesn’t conduct. And he won’t be conducting when we’re at the Barbican. Sometimes he’ll nod to bring people in if there’s something where we all need to come in. But essentially, he feels that we all have to take responsibility for the tactus. So once you’ve done that, you can improvise because everybody has a structure. Everybody has this inner pulse.

“Poppea” funnily enough, I think is much easier than “Ulisse.” In “Ulisse,” all of the mortal’s music is really quite dry recitative. Whereas there’s much more arioso and duets in “Poppea.” It sort of comes alive quite a lot. And I think that’s true in “Orfeo” as well. Act five is the point where you have this sort of dramatic monologue which I think is the really exciting bit as an actor. You get this musical structure onto which you can project your emotions. And that’s wonderful when everybody is feeling the pulse together.

OW: Do you find later music restrictive?

EL: The thing I find restrictive about later opera is if there’s somebody at the front doing this, they’re telling me how fast or slow it goes. Now, I might not feel like that on that night. I might feel that it’s much slower. Some conductors, particularly the ones who do the early music, they will often go with you. I find in later music, maestro tells you how fast it goes and as an artist, that sort of restricts you. If I don’t feel the emotion at the speed that you’re going, then there’s automatically a disconnect for me as a musician and as an actor and as an interpreter. I’m no longer interpreting, I’m following. Whereas the magic of Monteverdi is that everybody gets to interpret all together all the time. No two performances are the same. Nobody’s making exactly the same decisions.

What I loved during “Ulisse” was hearing. We had this wonderful harp player and as the run progressed, I heard him just choosing different colors. And that’s exciting. That’s music making. And I think sometimes as opera singers, we don’t feel like collaborators. We can sometimes feel like the people who follow.

And also the thing I love about earlier music is that we don’t have to shout. We can invite the audience in to listen. We can whisper if the acoustic’s good enough. We can make it incredibly intimate or we can sing out and that can be incredibly exciting as well.

OW: What you describe is chamber music.

EL: I did a recital that was like a preparation for one at Wigmore Hall next December. And the irony of that is that this will be the second song recital I’ve done in my career. But that is the closest we really get to chamber music. And what I find very exciting in baroque music is that I know the names of the people in the English Concert. So I get to say hello to the instrumentalists and we know each other.

Whereas, I think it’s much more difficult for those sort of relationships to occur with full opera orchestras, particularly when they’re in the pit. They’re the underground and they’re leaving while the applause is happening. There isn’t that complicity in the importance of making the music.

OW: Going back to “Poppea,” what are some of the challenges of the piece and what are some of your favorite moments in this piece?

EL: I think my favorite is an amazing duet for Nero and Lucano. And I’m looking forward to that having sung Lucano a lot, because I think often people sometimes worry about using tenor voices for Nero because you get those lovely dissonances. But then what you get with a tenor is you get a tenor duet in the middle. So two tenors singing in the set and you get that similar sort of excitement and dissonance. So I’m really looking forward to that.

And then it’s all the scenes with Poppea, because it’s so sexy and so raunchy. She is a real piece of work and there is that erotic charge I think is quite daring.

But the person who’s singing Poppea with me is an extraordinary soprano called Anna Dennis, who was a contemporary of mine at the Royal Academy of Music as well. And I’ve known Anna for nearly 30 years. And that’s another layer of complicity which I’m really looking forward to, which is that sense of trust. So I think that I’m really looking forward to doing those duets with Anna.

OW: Tell me about your work as a psychotherapist and how that informs your performances as well as expectations for your career?

EL: Yes, I’m a psychotherapist as well when I’m not singing. And one of the things I’m often working with my singers, is often talking about safety and what safety in the nervous system allows us to do vocally given that our vocal system is directly related to our safety systems. So when you are with a colleague who you adore, and there’s a musical director who is determined, then there’s a real opportunity for making something that’s as good as you can.

Also as with most therapists, the wounded healer, I’ve never found the industry easy. I’ve always found it a challenge to bring myself to it again and again, through successes and through some much less successful things that I’ve done and that assault on your self-esteem that singing often does. And what I found for myself is, it’s allowed me to have a huge amount of compassion for where my successes have been and where my failures have been. It’s allowed me to see that it’s not always my fault when things aren’t right.

Like I was saying about safety, I’ve been in environments where conductors or directors have made me feel unsafe or not appreciated, or not wanted. And guess what, I don’t sing as well. I also believe quite strongly that if we’re in a title role or in a major role in a show, you have a duty. I think the whole cast can be affected by how those people behave. So I’ve always made a real effort to make sure that I’m letting my colleagues know that they’re appreciated or noticing things that they’ve done. I want to create that sense of complicity that I’m a bit obsessed with. I want to create this sense of a communal creative process, a collaborative process. So, in that respect, it’s been lovely because when I have had the opportunity to do that, it’s always been a really nice experience.

So I think that’s really where my therapy helps me. It gives me a sensitivity to the environment. It gives me a compassion for what I need.

OW: How do you see it for young singers now?

EL: I think, the main thing for young singers I’m often talking about now is that, is a lot of them have a different attitude. When I went into the industry, there was a notion that I’ll work. I didn’t ever question whether I’d work. I questioned whether I’d achieve what I wanted to achieve. But I was never worried about actually making a living.

Whereas now these guys come into it and they just know that very few of them will be able to support themselves entirely from singing. They’re very sanguine about it. It’s helped me to see that I need to invest in more than my singing. Which is very contrary to what a lot of very successful singers will tell you because they’ll say, “No, you’ve got to be single-minded and focused” and it’s a very neoliberal capitalist kind of point of view.

And I just don’t know if that works within this industry.

OW: Do you think that having a specialized repertoire gives you an advantage over if you were doing Verdi and Puccini and Donizetti?

EL: But how many “Traviata’s” are happening every year? That’s the other side of that coin. I think in many respects it has helped me, but I know, as a younger singer, it was a real pain in the ass because I felt pigeonholed. And I think historically people who sing early music are thought to be people who can’t sing anything else. And there’s a core repertoire and opera houses are a bit dismissive, still, of early music.

They think they can just get some young singers in to do that. They think they don’t need the grown-ups for that. Just get some cheap young singers in. It’s easy. And, of course, then we do the music a disservice. Because actually, what happens is when you get somebody very experienced doing early music, they bring age and experience and ideas and gravitas and choices which a young person can’t bring in the same way that they do in later repertoire. I totally get that with later repertoire, you have to wait for more mature voices.

But what I found as well is that, I’ll go and sing other music like Mozart and because I’m famous for singing early music, people will say, “I can hear Ed Lyon’s early music. There was a very early music approach to this Mozart.”

And no, it wasn’t. It’s just that people are basing that on the fact that I sang a lot of early music. If I’d sung a lot of Verdi, you’d sort of say, “I can hear the Verdi in his Mozart.” It’s nonsense in that respect.

On the positive side I think it does help to have something where you really know it very well, where you have a real insight and we can’t be complete jacks of all trades. I don’t believe you can be a consummate Mozart singer and a consummate Wagnerian at the same time because the skill set is so wildly different.

I think countertenors become so good because they cover a lot of their repertoire and they’re always in it. So the coloratura stays really sparkly. Whereas I’ve had to at times go and sing, you know, Wagner or something like that, or I’ve had to go and sing some Beethoven or some modern music and then when you come back to the Baroque, it takes time to get back into that flexibility.

And I think later repertoire can often take away that flexibility. But I think what it gives with one hand, perhaps it takes away with another. I think it’s great to really be in your repertoire and sing what you love. Because if you’re singing something you don’t love, the audience will hear it and they’ll not be moved. They’ll know that you’re not into it.

OW: When you started singing, did you know that you wanted to do baroque and early music?

EL: Yeah, I think that came out of a desire. I grew up in the 90’s and I got very into choral music, very into Bach and very into Händel. There was a lot of amazing stuff coming out and there were such greats as Christopher Hogwood, John Elliot Gardner, William Christie, Rene Jacobs, and Ton Koopman. And every week there was a new recording of something, either of a great work or of a work that you’d never heard before. There was also work with period instruments that you’d never heard like that before. And I just loved it. It just seemed so exciting and investigative and it was thrilling.

So I think that’s why I wanted to go into it. I came to romantic music much later in my life, and I still wouldn’t necessarily pick it. You know, I can enjoy it and being in Wagner is just one of the most sensational experiences. But would I put it on my earphones? Not much. Whereas I absolutely would listen to some Bach or I absolutely would listen to some Monteverdi or some Pachelbel or some Vivaldi. And indeed much earlier like Renaissance choral music. That’s my lifeblood and It’s my sort of go to.