Nicholas Folwell, versatile baritone who spent 40 years at English National Opera – obituary
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Nicholas Folwell, who has died aged 70, was a popular and versatile baritone whose voice enthralled opera audiences around the country; he filled the Coliseum with his clear diction as Papageno in English National Opera’s Magic Flute with Joan Rogers as Pamina, gave a penetrating performance of Frank in the 1996 British premiere of Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt with the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, and at Glyndebourne played everything from Mozart’s cuckolded servant Figaro to Strauss’s bossy Major Domo.
Folwell was a thoughtful and kindly colleague, whose personality dwarfed his 5ft 6in height. He spent 40 years at ENO in roles ranging from the fool Tonio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci to the title role in the world premiere of Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert (1994). At the time this highly theatrical work, based around Ludwig Tieck’s darkly mysterious 18th-century German novella, underwhelmed the critics, but it was later shown on Channel 4 and has since been released on DVD.
More recently Folwell made a terrifyingly psychotic police chief Tiger Brown alongside Felicity Palmer in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s semi-staged performance of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at the Royal Festival Hall in 2013. The following year he was seen with Music Theatre Wales in the world premiere of Philip Glass’s 26th opera, The Trial (2014), in which, according to the Financial Times, he “channelled Don Giovanni’s Commendatore” in the role of the saturnine priest who delivers Josef K (Johnny Herford) to his doom.
It was not always a case of turning up, putting on a costume and singing. Folwell recalled that as the boozy monk Melitone in Verdi’s La forza del destino for Welsh National Opera in 1982 he had to spend 90 minutes being aged by 30 years before each performance, including a crooked nose, a bald wig, painted-on broken veins and a dirty habit. “It fools people at two yards,” he laughed.
Nicholas David Folwell was born in Middlesex on July 11 1953, the son of Alfred Folwell and his wife Irmgard, née Seefeld, whose German ancestry helped the bilingual baritone to master such Wagnerian roles as Beckmesser and Alberich. He was educated at Spring Grove Grammar School (now Lampton School), perfectly portraying the drunkenly comic Sir Toby Belch in a production of Twelfth Night.
From the Royal Academy of Music he joined the London Opera Centre and took private lessons with the bass-baritone Raimund Herincx. His professional debut was in 1978 as the Bosun in Britten’s Billy Budd for Welsh National Opera, where he spent nine years as principal baritone including playing what Opera magazine called “a sexually lively Dog” in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the 1980 Edinburgh Festival.
Folwell’s Royal Opera debut in 1990 was in the same work, though this time as the poacher Harasta, conducted by Simon Rattle. He first appeared at Glyndebourne that year, playing the villainous prison governor Don Pizarro in Beethoven’s Fidelio. In 1992 he was a well-rounded Figaro on the company’s tour, though it was another 20 years before he returned, as Antonio in The Marriage of Figaro, a role he sang most recently there in 2022.
He returned to Glass’s operatic music in 2018 with an outstanding performance as Gandhi’s friend Kallenbach in ENO’s Satyagraha; latterly he was coaching the company’s younger singers in diction. Meanwhile, on disc he made a malevolent and suitably biting Klingsor in Reginald Goodall’s 1981 WNO recording of Parsifal, and in 2004 released a collection of ballads called A Dream of Paradise in which he was accompanied by Phillip Thomas.
Nicholas Folwell married the soprano Anne-Marie Ives in 1981. They had two children. He is survived by his second wife, Susanna Tudor-Thomas, a member of ENO, whom he married in 1996.
Nicholas Folwell, born July 11 1953, died April 4 2024
