Wandering through the native plants in his Arrowtown backyard, Austin Haynes is in his element.
He and his family started planting the trees and shrubs about 10 years ago to mark every time they returned together to their Arrowtown property from their other home in Melbourne.
"Now they’ve been trained they are taller than me and I’m like six foot four."
The self-described plant nerd also likes nothing better than going for a walk along Arrowtown’s walking tracks trying to identify as many different plants as he can.
"It’s really beautiful to walk through."
It is a world away from his other life as an emerging professional opera singer and English literature academic.
But it is his academic career which has brought him back to New Zealand, from his base in London, for a few months. He is studying for his PhD at Victoria University Wellington on the history of te reo translations of English literature between 1870 and 1940 and needed to spend time in Wellington researching.
"It’s like a combination of my love for English literature, my love for te reo, and my love for song as I’m looking at people who translated songs and people who translated text like Shakespeare into te reo around the start of the 1900s."
Given he was in the country, he decided to also enter the Lexus Song Quest thinking the experience would be fun. He succeeded in getting through to the semifinals alongside nine other New Zealand singers who will present their repertoire before the international head judge, Grammy Award-winning South Korean lyric coloratura soprano Sumi Jo, this weekend.
"The things that fire me up are words and music."
It is a chance to showcase his love of singing and performing in his home country. He has already had success in Australia where he grew up, including winning the prestigious 2022 Herald Sun Aria competition in Melbourne, and in Oxford, England where he studied for a BA and master’s in English literature. Later this year, he will begin a master’s in voice at the Royal College of Music.
He has performed solo repertoire across Australia and the United Kingdom with ensembles including the Brandenburg Orchestra, the Oxford Bach Soloists and Instruments of Time and Truth.
At the semifinals Haynes will perform repertoire from the 17th and 18th century in English, German and French. During those two centuries parts were sung by men with high voices who were castrated before they hit puberty to retain the voice.
"They stopped doing that in the 19th century when they stopped having those high voices for men. I’m like the medically non-invasive version of that where I just sing in falsetto."
He chose to be a counter tenor so he could sing the music he loved from those centuries.
"I went through a voice change as a teenager so my voice got lower but I can do stuff in my throat which means I can sing an octave higher — the range for a woman alto."
As he has been singing like that since he was 14 or 15, he finds it is his default voice when he is singing.
He does not often get to perform 19th century music as a result so he has selected a song by Schubert called Memnon and a French song called Infidelite by Reynaldo Hahn to perform for the Lexus.
"So it's exciting to be singing stuff by Schubert and Hahn."
The other pieces he has chosen for the competition that suit his current voice are Vivi Tiranno, an aria by Handel from an opera called Rodelinda, and O Mirror of Our Fickle State by Handel from an oratorio called Samson.
Haynes has always been in his element performing.
"It’s always been a sacred experience for me. The mind stops being so busy. In practice my mind is always so busy because I’m micro managing everything, I’m listening to myself, thinking can I make that better but when I’m on stage with an audience what I sing is what I’ve sung. I can’t think about it, I just have to tell the story.
"It can be quite tiring sometimes. After the performance I realise I’ve spent a lot of energy telling the story. It’s a more intense experience to everyday life and I really love it ... one of my favourite things to do is be on stage."
And it has always been that way for Haynes.
"Or they say I’ve always been really noisy. Apparently as a toddler I’d open up cupboards and sing into them to check out the acoustics — the pantry sounds better than under the sink and everybody should know that."
His Nana and her grandfather were very musical and she was always very keen that Haynes be musical as well.
"My parents love music although they're not musicians themselves. They love ABBA, Bette Midler, Dusty Springfield, that’s the type of music I grew up with."
When he was 7 years old he began to sing with choirs and get lessons and has never stopped.
"I realised in the last few years it is the one thing that consistently brings me joy. It brings me peace and a sense of purpose as well."
In 2020 he did not sing for 10 months, the longest period he had gone without singing in his life, and he was "so miserable".
Until age 13 he was more of a musical theatre performer but he was also singing in a church choir and a classical voice choir.
It was not until he discovered the music of the 17th and 18th centuries in his late teenage years that his affinity for opera and classical music developed.
"It was the first style of music that I felt spoke directly to my soul. The music of those two centuries is like the Baroque period, it’s such an exciting body of music, it has a volatility to it, a kind of language of emotion that I find really compelling."
So when the opportunity to study at Oxford came up, he could not refuse as he was offered a music scholarship as well as a place in the English undergraduate programme.
"That looked to me as a way to unite those two parts of myself, the academic part and the music part. I felt so lucky as Oxford is one of the few places in the world I can go to a tutorial at 11am, rush to a rehearsal at 12.30, then go to a lecture and that evening do a concert. It’s like this insane town with all the nerds packed in. It was incredible."
Now based in London, Haynes is pursuing a singing career alongside his academic career. He paused his master’s degree to make his debut opera performance in a Singapore production of the opera The Butterfly Lovers last year.
"It was really exciting. I was 22 and never would have expected to be doing a professional opera debut at all let alone as the male lead at that age."
He was called in to the role with only five weeks’ warning after the lead singer snapped a knee ligament. The Melbourne company behind the production had heard of him through the aria competition.
"I had a week to learn the music and get to Singapore and put my life in the UK on hold. It was nerve-racking."
Having never done professional opera before he required a lot of help from the directors as he had to learn how to act wearing a traditional Chinese robe, balance a 2kg wig on his head and move in the choreography and style of Chinese opera.
"It was amazing, a highlight so far."
It was a great learning curve on so many levels including how to pace himself over five weeks of rehearsals and performances.
"If I have a bit of a wobble now before a concert, I just go to myself ‘well you did that’."
The nerves are a normal part of the experience, though.
"It tells me that I know that it matters that I have an obligation to tell a story and to honour the piece, the composer and the audience."
That is what he likes to communicate to people when performing.
"This person had an emotion and wanted to tell us the truth of the emotion in this song, so I’ve succeeded if I’ve conveyed the human message of it."
Having his family’s home in Arrowtown to escape back to whenever he gets a chance is important to him. The family first moved there just after he was born and while they moved to Australia for work, they retained their home and returned whenever they could.
"I got to walk along the Yarra and listen to tuis, what more could you ask for?"
For Haynes it is an opportunity to reconnect with family he does not get see much now that he is based in the United Kingdom as well as indulge in all the nature walks he can. He also loves a good old-fashioned road trip around the region.
Family is also the reason behind his drive to learn te reo, as while he is Pākehā, there are people in his life who are Māori who he wants to be able to support and he had ancestors who spoke the language.
So during lockdown with extra time on his hands and companies offering te reo classes online, he set about learning the language. Now he also teaches te reo online and writes and translates poems.
"It’s a language for all of us. We all have a history or connection to it whether we are Pākehā, non-Māori, Māori. I’m big about helping people see the joy in the language."
Bringing his love of te reo into his research has seen him spend the past few months at the National Library and Archives.
"I’m having the best time. I’m looking at some wonderful people who were very creative with the ways they used literature to bring together te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā."
It continued to surprise him how many and the different type of people who spoke te reo in the 1800s and early 1900s. For many Pākehā it was a necessity back then.
"It’s wonderful to be looking at people who spoke English and te reo equally well and were excited about living in two worlds and having two toolkits for understanding the world. Maybe that is where we are heading in the future."
• Sumi Jo will select five finalists at the semifinals this weekend who will go on to perform with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Final Gala in Wellington on Saturday, August 3.
TO SEE
Lexus Song Quest semifinals, Saturday and Sunday, and the Grand Final Gala, August 3, Wellington.
