It was Bryn Terfel's suggestion. The opera superstar could have insisted his first full scale opera at Grange Park featured a classic role: Puccini's Scarpia perhaps, or Wagner's Wotan, Mozart's Don Giovanni or Verdi's Falstaff. But Bock and Harnick's Tevye?
The idea that the base baritone would be perfect as the Jewish milkman in Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's 1964 hit musical occurred to Terfel after Grange Park's founder Wasfi Kani persuaded him to sing If I Were A Rich Man in a recital at the Hampshire venue. During the run up to that evening Terfel and Kani had been discussing the possibility of performing a full scale opera.
But they couldn't settle on which. Terfel suggested Cardillac, a relatively obscure work by Hindemith. "I said I was happy to do it as long as he bought three thousand seats," remembers Kani sipping tea in a pub near her Kentish Town home. Terfel had also came up with Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (which coincidentally he is about to perform next year at the English National Opera with Emma Thompson). But again Kani's response was less than enthusiastic, if characteristically emphatic.
"I said 'this is a summer festival. I can't put on a piece about chopping people up.'" And then the penny dropped. With applause from Grange Park Opera's audience still ringing in Terfel's ears after his recital performance, he said to Kani, "I've found a piece we both want to do."
But if the idea to perform Fiddler on the Roof was Terfel's, it was made possible by Kani. It was she who suggested Terfel should sing If I Were I Rich Man. For the musical, based on Sholem Aleichem's shtetl-set short stories, had a huge influence on this arts and opera maven.
"I want you to have a picture of me and my little Indian family dressed up to go to mosque when we lived in the East End," says Kani. She says this with an exuberance that is part force of nature and part self-effacing charm. I do as I'm told and start imagining her family in their Friday prayers best.
You do as you're told when in Kani's company. She has the kind of persuasiveness you need to raise the funds necessary to convert a derelict building in bucolic Hampshire into one of the country's most prestigious opera houses. Since the venue's first summer season in 2002, tickets at Grange Park have become one of the most sought after in - to use both senses of the word - the country.
"I was born on Cable Street in 1956," says Kani. "We were probably the only Indian family in the East End. We lived in a house rented from a Jewish landlord; my mother worked in a Jewish sweatshop. After school I couldn't go home because my mother was still working. So I used to go to the synagogue across the road and they'd always give me this little jam sandwich."
As Kani says this, I am still holding on to that image of her family as best I can. It is only later that I realise that Kani literally wants me to have a picture, as opposed to imaging it. Not long after our meeting it arrives in my e-mail inbox. It's a wonderful black and white family portrait of an Indian couple and their four children. "That was my first experience of a synagogue," says Kani. The story of her parents' arrival in the East End as refugees was very different from that of their Jewish neighbours.
They had come from the Indian city of Agra. The family home had a courtyard with a pillar for tethering the family elephant. The stone wall surrounding the compound had recesses where the family's sedan chair carriers would wait when Kani's forbears were to be carried around the city in the way higher castes were.
They arrived as Muslim refugees from India after partition. Eventually they moved to a council flat in Kilburn. And it was here that Kani's mother bought a little record player, though they only ever had had one or two records. One was Fiddler On The Roof. "I used to listen to it all the time," remembers Kani. "I was entranced by the music. And I knew - know - the words to every single song. It was something quite extraordinary."
This wasn't the only influence on Kani's musical education. By the time they moved to Wembley, Kani was having regular violin lessons. "I used to have them with a Jewish family in Highgate, the Albermans. They were related to [novelist and opera librettist for Richard Strauss] Stefan Zweig. They were an unbelievably musical and cultured family. And I think I am sitting here today because of them. They helped me love music."
Opera isn't exactly brimful of Jewish themes. Works inspired by the bible swell the numbers to a few. But with Fiddler being joined by Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila at Grange Park, Kani has hired a consultant.
"He's Elkan Pressman of the New North London Synagogue," says Kani. "The last thing I want to happen is for 250,000 Jewish people to turn up on my doorstep and then we make some terrible faux pas about the ritual of the wedding in Fiddler."
Kani is clearly aware of her potential Jewish market. Although even she can't expect every Jewish man, woman and child to turn up. Then again it wouldn't be surprising if there were a part of her that wouldn't settle for anything less.
Tevye is a role with plenty of songs, - sorry, arias - for Terfel. But it is also hugely demanding. The Jewish milkman is pretty much in every scene. Kani and I try to remember which of them do not require Tevye to be on stage. "The Matchmaker scene," says Kani. And then, as if the record in the Kilburn council flat was playing in her mind she sings, "Matchmaker, matchmaker...." And the voice is in key, in tune and above all, cultured.
