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International conductor and part-time tennis coach, Rita Paczian, of Army Bay, will take her place at the front of the NZ Pops Orchestra next month, where some of NZ’s most talented artists will perform everything from Elton John to Dvorak and Lehar. Although Rita has performed all over the world she told Hibiscus Matters reporter Jannette Thompson that New Zealand definitely feel likes home now …
I was born in Bielefeld, near Hanover in north Germany. My mother was a pianist who became a housewife and my father was a school teacher who painted watercolours. My older brother and sister took piano lessons with a terrible teacher who made them hate it. So when my turn came, I decided, “Hell no”. Instead, I played sport – I loved everything from athletics to table tennis, basketball and soccer. Then one day, Mum brought home an electric organ.
I would secretly play around on it and when she heard me, she decided I had to have lessons. I was 14 but I made up for the lost time by practising the church organ for many hours a day.
When I finished high school, I applied to universities to study sports or music and was offered both. It left me with a difficult choice because I was tempted to study sport in Cologne and my parents said if I studied music I’d be starving all my life! But, I was proud and young, so I went to study music at Luebeck, a historic town on the Baltic Sea. I studied church music which included organ, piano, harpsichord, singing and music theory, and specialised in conducting. When I was in front of an orchestra, I became part of a team and it opened up a huge repertoire, from chamber music to opera and symphonies. Conducting was still a very male-dominated domain in the 1990s and I found that to be ‘equal’ I actually had to be better than male competitors. Germany was still a slightly chauvinistic country in those days and most famous conductors were arrogant tyrants. But I was fortunate to be chosen for a master class with Leonard Bernstein – the only woman in a group of 100 students. It was a wonderful opportunity and he showed us that there was another way. When he was there – he’d often be too drunk to attend classes – he was very gentle and polite, and would subtlety correct people rather than humiliate them. His classes were great fun and he remains one of my favourite conductors.
Nowadays it is totally different. Leading an orchestra is about mutual respect, being encouraging, giving instruction when needed and valuing the musicians’ interpretations. The musicians I work with are under-paid, but I have a waiting list for both my orchestras, so it shows it is not about the money. The reward is in working together, giving our best and seeing the delighted faces of the audience. The role of the conductor is hugely important – no two pieces sound the same under different conductors; there will be differences in tempo, rhythm and expression. What I love about conducting is the challenge of always trying to do the music better. I love beautiful melodies and harmonies, whether they are classical music or not, but Verdi’s Requiem and Strauss’ Four Last Songs are among my favourites.
In 1992, a friend and I arranged a four-week backpacking trip to NZ. At the last minute she couldn’t make it so I came on my own. As I hitchhiked from Cape Reinga to Bluff I met some amazing people. I was used to triple locking doors and yet here, people thought nothing of lending me their car or inviting me home to dinner. I fell in love with the nature, the climate, the space and the fact that women were treated as equals – and decided to emigrate. I returned a year later and approached universities and the opera company in Wellington (now the NZ Opera). I had a video of a recent performance of Verdi’s Requiem that I’d conducted, and within five minutes of viewing it, I had a job; but the catch was it was only for four weeks. When I accepted, my parents thought I’d lost my mind, particularly since I had a secure job in Hamburg.
Immigration wasn’t straightforward and if it hadn’t been for friends, I think I probably would have starved as my parents had predicted. I did two operas during my first six months in Wellington and then, to meet immigration rules, took a steady but poorly paid job at the Nelson School of Music and did a lot of freelance work. I became music director of Bach Musica NZ when it was still an amateur ensemble. It is now professional, comprising a 40-voice choir and orchestra.
Music hasn’t made me rich by any means, but it has given me an amazing career and I’ve been involved in projects all over the world. One of the most memorable was in South Africa, when I conducted the second-to-last performance of an orchestra, which was to be disbanded as the apartheid system came down. The concert was held in an outdoor cricket stadium, in front of an audience of 25,000. It was very moving, both because of the size of the audience and their response to the music.
When I arrived in NZ I was 31 years old. In 1999, when I worked with the Waikato Symphony Orchestra, I met an oboe soloist who apparently had been dreading the thought of working with a German woman conductor. But at that first rehearsal we realised that we were on the same wavelength. John, who was then a Professor of Biology at Waikato University, and I are now married and play in Hausmusik NZ together. It’s a chamber music ensemble that plays mainly baroque music on period instruments and we tour regularly. We moved to Army Bay four years ago, and we love it. It is 50 percent drier and warmer than Titirangi where we were living and our house overlooks Shakespear Park. I can take our dog Stella on long walks and there is more time to read. In 2012, I founded the NZ Pops Orchestra, which crosses all musical boundaries.
For my 40th birthday, John gave me 10 tennis lessons. I picked it up quickly and loved it, and my coach suggested that I’d make a good coach myself. This was just before we moved to Australia for a couple of years. I did my coaching qualification with Tennis Australia and coached three small clubs on the Sunshine Coast. When we returned to NZ, I ended up with two fulltime tennis coaching positions – at Pompallier and then West Harbour where John was the racket stringer. We were still doing music, which meant we were often doing 12-hour days. It became too much, and now I just do private coaching at Massey and Gulf Harbour. What I really enjoy is to play – at the end of January I won the over 45 women’s national singles championship in Napier.
I think we can all try to make the world a better place. NZ was once a role model in terms of the environment, health and education, but this is going down the drain. Poverty is a growing problem here. At school, in Germany, we were drilled to think socially, to be vigilant and to never have an opinion that couldn’t be backed up by good argument. We were taught to think inclusively not individually, and it is no coincidence that Germany has taken so many refugees.
As part of the generation growing up after the war, we questioned our fathers and grandfathers, but they couldn’t talk about it, even though I know my own father never killed anyone and nearly starved to death. When I came to NZ I was expecting some rudeness about the past, but it has been absolutely the opposite. I was involved in an Anzac Day concert a few years ago when my father was visiting from Germany. When I introduced him to the president of the RSA, who was on crutches as a result of war injuries, he embraced my father. It was very moving to witness that level of forgiveness.
