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Times, August 2006 |
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Keeping up with the Jonas
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As leaving presents go, Brian McMaster’s
gift to himself as outgoing boss of the Edinburgh International Festival
takes some beating. “Honour tradition, but welcome the new” is the message
of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, which is the climax to the 2006
festival — and the tenor singing the hero of the opera, Jonas Kaufmann,
definitely represents something new. “I know many colleagues who are doing
nothing else but travelling all over the world, singing exactly the same
role, in every single theatre,” he says. “But for me that’s not real life.”
Can any opera singer — much less a tenor — have a real life? Kaufmann, who
almost seems to have risen to the top of his profession without anyone
noticing, is determined to make sure that he does — and to combine it with a
singing career that’s distinctly off the beaten track. “I remember once I
did a horrible production and I said to the soprano whom I was singing with:
‘Just go home and forget all about it.’ And she said: “You can go home to
your children. I don’t have children and I don’t have a husband. This is my
life and I don’t have anything outside of opera to fall back on.’ I’m very
happy to have both.”
When we meet on a balmy day in Kaufmann’s new home town of Zürich I’m lucky
to have squeezed an hour out of his sacrosanct holiday schedule. Before
Edinburgh, where Kaufmann will be singing a lieder recital as well as
scaling the Everest of Meistersinger, comes three weeks devoted to his wife
(also a singer) and three small children. “If I didn’t have that life to
ground me,” he says, “then I don’t think I could give the same quality on
stage.”
If Kaufmann ever lets the nice-guy image slip then it’s strictly for
professional reasons. “Sometimes you have to a be a little bit rude, to be
more accepted in opera,” he concedes. “If you’re just normal, and everything
is fine for you because you don’t want to cause trouble, then you become
part of the furniture and you become someone who doesn’t have to be treated
well. But from the moment you play the divo, and you say ‘This won’t happen
again because I’m leaving’, then everyone suddenly respects you more.
Sometimes it is really necessary, but it doesn’t mean you have to play the
same character in your private life.”
Could it be that he’s learnt some tricks from his frequent co-star, the
famously temperamental Angela Gheorghiu? “You know, you’re not the first
person to ask me,” he laughs. “But I can’t say anything negative about her.
Maybe if something is wrong with her assistants or the costume design and
she doesn’t accept it then it can be . . . dangerous, let’s say — but
everybody knows about that and I think that’s why they treat her in a
certain way.”
So successful were Kaufmann and Gheorghiu’s last performances together — in
La traviata at the Metropolitan Opera, New York — that New York magazine
christened the duo the “Brangelina” of opera. “It’s a little bit weird,”
Kaufmann confesses, “because when they were saying that I’m appearing like a
rock star on stage I would prefer them to talk first about the voice.”
No debate from me. Kaufmann’s unique sound — dark-tinted, almost baritonal
in its timbre — is far more of a USP than either the film-star looks (“yes,
the Latin lover type,” sighs Kaufmann) or his ability to get on with
Gheorghiu. And then there’s the sheer range of roles in which he deploys it.
Most young tenors are shied away from heavyweights such as Wagner, Verdi or
Puccini. Kaufmann sings all three, as well as keeping the lighter Mozart
roles with which he began his career. “But I don’t want to be called the
Wagnerian tenor of the German tenor or the Italian tenor,” he protests.
“About 25 years ago this system started whereby everybody was put into a box
and you had to specialise. For me the challenge is to use every single part
of your voice.”
It took a while for Kaufmann to realise exactly how to do that. Music was a
family hobby when he was growing up in Munich (“My grandfather was an
extreme Wagnerian,” he recalls), but he never thought that his sterling
efforts for the school choir might lead to a career. And even after
switching from maths to music at university and nabbing an apprenticeship at
Saarbrücken opera house, things still weren’t clicking. “After one year I
was completely destroyed I realised I didn’t know how to sing.”
The problem was that his husky tenor was being misunderstood. “Everybody
said: ‘No that’s too loud, that’s too much, that’s took dark.’ I was trying
to fulfil their ideas of what a young German tenor should sound like. But
you can’t put another pair of vocal cords in just to satisfy the ideas of
your teachers.” It was a new, American teacher who came to Kaufmann’s aid.
“He taught me to relax while singing — and to trust the voice. It sounds
simple but it took me a while to get it.”
The straitjacketing of voice types isn’t the only gripe Kaufmann has with
the German opera houses. “Everyone’s always talking about those crazy German
productions,” he says. “And there are a lot of productions that are way over
the top — just being modern for the sake of being modern.” If Kaufmann is
slightly bitter then it’s hardly surprising. One particularly wacky
production of Mozart’s Die Entführung auf dem Serail had the (notoriously
conservative) Salzburg Festival audience baying for Kaufmann’s blood after
he told them to leave the show if they didn’t like it. “I was waiting on
stage for five minutes on top of a ladder, in tails and a white plastic
overall, and the audience were shouting ‘Piss off’. But it was an
unacceptable production — the director was on holiday and we were sitting
there having to tough it out.”
Moral of the story? “Our business is to entertain, and you shouldn’t forget
that.”
Big things are now happening for the eloquent, articulate and throughly
grounded Kaufmann. In something of a coup for Covent Garden, he’ll be
appearing in its new production of Carmen for his first attempt at the role
of Don José. And although he’s tight-lipped on the details, he hints that
his first exclusive record deal is now on the cards.
The only question is: does he want it enough? “One of my conditions is that
they can’t rob me of my private life,” he says. But Kaufmann also knows that
he’s got to keep up with the times. “There’s no future in sticking with the
old things and repeating them all the time. Opera needs to modernise, but in
a stylish way.” It’s the gospel according to Jonas — and no one embodies it
better than him. |
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