|
|
|
|
|
The Times, January 19 2015 |
Anna Picard |
|
Jonas Kaufmann: is this the tenor your mother warned you about?
|
|
Set to smoulder again at Covent Garden, the superstar reveals why
fame means he can no longer join his fans for a pint
A
special kind of hysteria has attached to Jonas Kaufmann, the singer now
routinely called “the world’s greatest tenor”. Opera lovers are well
practised at suspending disbelief, mentally airbrushing extra pounds and
other infelicities. When a voice is versatile enough to adapt to the
different demands of Schubert’s lieder, Wagner, Verdi and verismo, it is an
event. When that voice belongs to someone tall enough and handsome enough to
convince as a leading man in the era of high definition, someone who can
act, the superlatives explode.
One Australian critic recently
described Kaufmann as “the sort of man your mother warned you about”.
Perhaps she was confusing him with the damaged or damaging men he plays on
stage: poets, painters, revolutionaries, renegades, flawed pilgrims and
frisky gods. In person, during rehearsals for David McVicar’s new Covent
Garden production of Andrea Chénier conducted by Antonio Pappano, he’s the
sort of man any mother would be happy to audition as a son-in-law: polite
and earnest; more history teacher than heartbreaker.
In much of
mainland Europe, where opera is more integrated in the wider cultural scene
than it is in the UK, Kaufmann is as famous as, say, Benedict Cumberbatch is
here. Save for a remark to The Times some years ago about being typecast as
“the Latin lover”, he has had the grace not to complain about the adulation.
Yet recent speculation about his private life, including rumours of a
liaison with Madonna, has made Kaufmann uncomfortable.
He is 45 but
seems much younger in conversation, almost boyish, and rubs his hands across
his face or through his hair while he thinks about the answer to a question.
He speaks quickly and emphatically with the controlled candour that marks
his self-authored website. He talks less about the voice than most singers
and more about the psychological flaws in the characters he plays but admits
that “it’s easier to sell erotic passion that just explodes like a flame”.
Born in Munich, Kaufmann learnt his craft with the opera companies of
Saarbrücken, Stuttgart and Zurich, slowly nurturing a bright, attractive
voice into something darker, more lyrical and more dangerous. In 2004 he
made his Royal Opera House debut in Puccini’s La rondine, a low-intensity
vehicle for the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu. By the time he sang
Maurizio to her Adriana Lecouvreur, in 2010, the balance of power had
shifted and he was the star. Now the vehicle is his.
Andrea Chénier,
Giordano’s 1896 opera of love in the blood-spattered streets of
post-revolutionary Paris may have a certain bodice-ripping appeal but it’s
unlikely that Covent Garden would stage it without him. The leading role has
been associated with the greatest tenors of history, from Gigli and Caruso
to Corelli, Del Monaco and, in his prime, Plácido Domingo. Tellingly, the
singer who created it, Giuseppe Borgatti, went on to become his country’s
greatest Wagnerian and the first Italian to perform at Bayreuth.
When
we meet, Kaufmann has spent the morning trying to locate a balance between
Chénier’s idealism and the frank sensuality of Giordano’s music, when
Chénier discovers that the woman he dismissed as a flibbertigibbet is the
anonymous author of the rose-scented letters that have made such a profound
impression on him. I raise an eyebrow sceptically. “You’ve never had that
coup de foudre or whatever they call it in English?” he asks. Not often, I
mumble. “Of course not often,” he cries, “but opera is about extremes:
either full passion or misery and death.”
Unlike most opera singers,
Kaufmann says he isn’t plagued by lacerating self-criticism and sleeps well
“99 per cent” of the time. He’s a quick study. He arrives to rehearsal fully
prepared and regards anything less as “irresponsibility”. On acting, a
passion that predated his decision to change from studying mathematics to
music, he says there is no German phrase for “park and bark”, but he laughs
when I suggest that old-school, stand-and-deliver opera singing would not be
permitted in the land of Regietheater (so-called director’s opera) and high
concept modern-dress productions such as Martin Kušej’s recent and notorious
rubber shark Idomeneo: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It existed of course
also in Germany.”
Kaufmann argues that “Regietheater in its purest
form is fantastic. You can focus totally on the interaction of the
characters, on the energy, on tiny details. You’re not distracted by
chandeliers and pomp. However, it has to be worked properly, so that there
is something that carries through, that keeps the flow, that holds the
tension. If there isn’t, it doesn’t work. It’s just something ‘cool’.” From
the muslin-draped Merveilleuses (flamboyant aristocratic ladies of the
1790s) flitting about backstage today, this will not be an issue in
McVicar’s lavish period-costume production.
Kaufmann has researched
the real Chénier, a poet and “revolutionary at the first hour” and the
prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, who commissioned the execution of Robespierre
only three days after Chénier was guillotined. The history is one of
“terror, absolute terror”. Kaufmann is protective of the characters he
plays, from the betraying Alfredo in La traviata (“you can only explain it
with innocence”) to suicidal Werther (“I think Freud would have a lot to say
about this”) and self-important grail knight Lohengrin (“he fully
understands that he has made a mistake, that he is the one to blame, and
that’s why he’s so aggressive”).
He is dismissive of “shiny,
shimmering” heroes and more interested in “weakness”. Chénier is a work in
progress, but Kaufmann is intrigued by the poet’s readiness to die for love:
“Tony Pappano always says that since Tristan we all know what it means to
promise each other to die together rather than being separated.”
As
his career has gathered speed, Kaufmann says he has “to live faster”. The
German idiom for this level of activity translates as “dancing at too many
weddings”, but he hasn’t lost his appetite for dancing. During the Chénier
run, he will be selecting takes for a forthcoming disc of Puccini arias.
Lieder remains central to his work and he enjoys the challenge of
establishing an atmosphere in “the first moment, the first phrase”. In 2006,
when he sang Don José at the Royal Opera House, he enjoyed a low enough
profile to be able to join a group of fans for a pint of beer. “I probably
couldn’t do it now,” he says, ruefully. He says that he isn’t the sort of
person that people recognise on the street. (It helps that his dress code is
normcore jumper and jeans.)
Attention on his private life has
intensified since the end of his marriage to the mezzo-soprano Margarete
Joswig was announced in a joint statement last April. With three children to
protect, he has been necessarily discreet, to the frustration of the popular
press. Hence the rumour about Madonna and their plans to record a duet. “I
think it came from Italy originally,” he frowns, “but they claimed they saw
us here at an exhibition in London.”
So was he at an exhibition in
London with Madonna? “No. I wasn’t. Everybody just copied it from somewhere
else. So in Russia, even, in every magazine, it was this big, big thing with
pictures of us.” Pictures of them together? “Of course not. There is no
picture of us together because we’ve never met. I even thought about
contacting her management to say, ‘Listen, it’s not me that’s spreading
these rumours.’ ”
He was less distressed by the idea that he might
sing with Madonna than by the speed with which a fabricated story spread:
“It is something so uncontrollable that you wonder what comes next. Because
this was positive gossip. It was not something very mean or nasty.” You
mean, they didn’t say you were a heroin addict? “Exactly, but that could
happen. And then people would believe it.”
Few of Kaufmann’s
characters laugh, much less enjoy a happy ending. (Strauss’s Bacchus and
Puccini’s Dick Johnson are exceptions.) This morbid trend will continue as
he adds Radames (in next month’s concert performance and recording of Aida
in Rome) and Turridu and Canio (in the Salzburg Easter Festival double-bill
of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci) to his repertoire. His debut as
Otello has been confirmed for the 2016-17 season.
As to Wagner’s
Tristan, probably the most technically, physically and poetically demanding
of tenor roles, he says, “I think I’m almost there and it might be a good
idea to start studying it because the last act is very hard to memorise.” He
has spoken previously of fears that other doors might close when that one is
opened. Why? “Because if I study Tristan I’m certainly not going to sing it
only one or two times. This is a kind of drug. If you like it, if you let
yourself go into this world, it is something that is unique.”
By way
of an antidote, his most recent recording is a tribute to the hedonism of
the 1920s and 1930s, Du bist die Welt für mich. While his paternal
grandfather loved Wagner, his maternal one had a fondness for the popular
classics of his student days, when his future wife visited him in Berlin. “I
remember he told me what a disappointment it was,” smiles Kaufmann, “She
promised him that she’d come, he picked her up at the train and she came
with her mother. Because Berlin had such a bad reputation.”
The music
Kaufmann chose was deliberately escapist: playful Viennese operetta arias
and songs from German movies, their orchestrations transcribed from old
recordings, the original scores having long been lost or swamped in “cheesy
arrangements” from the 1960s. It was “like a time machine”, he says.
“Everybody was swinging in the corridors. Everyone had a song on their lips.
It was crazy how much this influences your mood. So only then did I think I
understood how powerful this music is, and how seductive.”
With that,
he goes cheerfully back to work, back to death and misery and a passion more
powerful than the guillotine.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|