"I used to think my dad was a superhero who fights dragons and tears down walls with his voice," says Lawrence Richards at the beginning of his documentary Son of Cornwall.

The superhero idea was not an unfounded childish fantasy, for Richards' father is the opera tenor John Treleaven, who killed many a dragon in Wagner productions, as the plentiful photographic material illustrating Richards' memory shows.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the society department at FAZ.NET.

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Excavated from old family albums, newspaper archives and magazines and digitally provided with spatial depth, the testimonies look back on an eventful life, which the son only knows in broad strokes.

Because when he was a child, his father was hardly at home.

The job came first.

William Lloyd Webber first brought Treleaven to London, after training as a tenor he appeared as a tenor at the major opera houses in Barcelona, ​​Frankfurt and Amsterdam, as well as in America and Australia.

When John Treleaven wants to travel to his native England for a concert, Richards uses this as an opportunity to get to know his father again.

The joint road trip along the Cornish coast leads from one memorial site to the next, beginning in the fishing town of Porthleven, where Treleaven grew up in a fishing family;

at the age of 17 he was discovered singing in the harbor basin.

Richards approaches his father's public and private person through elegant directing ideas, for example going swimming with him in the very same harbor basin.

The retired operatic tenor shows that he can still master the breathing technique for an aria while bobbing in the water, and then explains that he learned the technique right here, where the kids were trying to outdo each other in long dives.

The two also visit their father's old friends, such as mezzo-soprano Sally Burgess, who looks back with them on the success of a 1986 performance of Carmen at English National Opera.

"This opera production had almost cult status at the time, it was a turning point in directing towards telling the story physically," recalls Burgess.

But the film director is not only interested in rehashing anecdotes or conveying music history.

Rather, “Son of Cornwall” is a soul-searching of the artist: was career worth putting family second?

How much do you sacrifice for art?

And what price is too high for fame and self-realization?

Richards asks his father all of these questions in calm conversations over the course of the trip.

The deepest confession takes place in a small church - and at the same time it is the moment when one wonders whether the son is not interfering too much in the father's privacy, staring too long at the tears that the man sheds in his remorse.

However, the level-headed tone of the conversation suggests that this is not about exposure.

Rather, Richards tries to learn from his father's mistakes for his own life and not to repeat the worst missteps, and one enjoys watching him in this learning process.