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Limelight, August 2017 |
by Laura Tingle |
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Jonas Kaufmann: Wagner & Me
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Two Wagner operas lie at the heart of the tenor's repertoire. We grilled him
on all things Wagner ahead of his Aussie Parsifal.
When Jonas
Kaufmann made a triumphal return to the opera stage in January after a long
lay off with throat troubles, it was as Lohengrin on the massive Bastille
stage of the Paris Opera. The huge production – which first debuted at La
Scala in 2012 – featured enormous sets and choruses but, perhaps more
notably, in yet another marker of how far the staging of opera has moved
from the days of the ‘singing sofa’, the world’s greatest tenor sang one of
the most haunting moments in the opera, Mein lieber schwan, lying in a
foetal position, facing the back of the stage – and it worked.
When
Kaufmann returns to the Sydney Opera House to perform Parsifal in August –
and for what could be the last time we see him here – the dynamics will be
very different. We will not just have moved from Richard Wagner’s middle
period to his final opera, or from the story of Lohengrin to the story of
his father Parsifal, but to a concert performance of an epic five-hour
opera.
The man frequently described as the greatest tenor in the
world contemplated those differences when he sat down to talk to Limelight
at length earlier this year, backstage at the Bastille, fresh from his
triumphal return in Lohengrin. Bounding into the room full of energy and
enthusiasm, he engages thoughtfully in a survey of his recent career
travails, all things Wagner, and the transitory nature of performance. He
happily breaks the strict time limit put on our interview by his publicity
team, and things only really wind up when the equally renowned bass René
Pape – who is playing the King in Lohengrin – comes in wanting some
decisions from Kaufmann about which pastries they are going to indulge in
for afternoon tea.
To Kaufmann, performing Parsifal in concert format
hardly matters, given the material he will be working with: an opera which
he says is probably the perfect one. “I mean every chord, every bar is just
placed in the right place, time and moment,” he tells me. “At the time,
Wagner was very interested in different religions and the idea was to do an
opera on each of those – an astonishingly wide look from him compared to the
other strange thoughts that he had!”
But do we lose anything by
watching a semi-staged production? Kaufmann doesn’t think so. “The music is
so descriptive. You see all the images without seeing anything. So I don’t
feel at all that it could be a problem and I’m very much looking forward to
it. Honestly, there is not much action in Parsifal. I mean, I probably could
describe in less than ten sentences all the action that happens on stage in
those five hours... because there’s nothing. It’s the ritual…The kiss is the
one thing that is missing if you don’t have any contact with Kundry.”
Opera Australia’s artistic director Lyndon Terracini agrees, saying
Parsifal is “some of the most sublime music ever created by a human being.
You become so absorbed you don’t want to be distracted... The kiss is
obviously one of the most sublime moments in the opera. It’s really up to
Jonas and Michelle [DeYoung, the American mezzo-soprano who will sing
Kundry] if they do.”
Parsifal is a role Kaufmann enjoys. “There’s a
big development between the three acts which is kind of fun because most of
times you don’t have that in Wagnerian parts. There’s usually not so much of
the change throughout an evening,” he says. “But here you have this super
innocent, fresh, young guy that doesn’t care, that doesn’t know any rules,
any society and it’s just fun for this first act to just be super
straightforward. This idea – to go on this mission and see what happens and
‘maybe I can succeed’ – this naivety makes it easy for him to enter the
castle and ultimately face Kundry. It’s difficult then to have this moment
of the kiss of knowledge... all the data is suddenly there – it’s a very
interesting moment.”
“The last time I did it was in New York in this
spectacular production at the Met. I described it as this transcendent
journey and it was. Being on stage you were carried away and you had no
sense about time and location or anything. When I looked at it later – I
watched the DVD – I only realised how super slow everything was. I had no
clue! I didn’t feel it at all. It felt just perfect! And it was, probably!”
he says, laughing.
I am talking to Kaufmann as he finishes his run in
Lohengrin in late January. By the time he takes the stage at Bennelong
Point, he will have debuted in Otello at Covent Garden, sung La Forza del
Destino and Andrea Chénier in Munich, and Tosca in Vienna. In March, he
announced that he is going to largely restrict himself to European stages to
minimise his time away from his family (to the deep chagrin of the New York
Met given his withdrawal from their highly anticipated new Tosca, which is a
centrepiece of the 2017/18 season). So Australians can count themselves
doubly lucky that he is coming to Sydney for Parsifal.
The demands of
Lohengrin and Parsifal on a singer are very different. In comparison with
the gradual development of Parsifal’s character, in Lohengrin “the tricky
thing is probably all this on and off,” says Kaufmann. “You have a chunk of
the First Act, then you have a long gap. You have a chunk in the end of the
Second Act and it’s not easy. I mean you don’t sing much but what you
sing... it’s never something mediocre! It’s something heroic – ‘pa pump um
pah!’ – then suddenly ‘hmmm’,” he says making soft singing noises. “You
don’t have any time to warm up.”
Coming back to the same production,
does his view of a character like Lohengrin change? “It does. It changes
constantly I would say. There is always something to add, always another
level and another angle that suddenly you discover. When you do a role too
often or in too short a time there is no time to mature and to digest. You
just duplicate. You over and over repeat the same thing. If you have a gap
of a year or two then come back, it’s a different story.”
He likes
the Claus Guth production in which he has just sung Lohengrin. “I had some
difficulties [at first] because the problem is at the beginning – you play
this fragile person and at the same time sing so heroically. It’s tough to
bring the two together. The idea is that he doesn’t know himself, or isn’t
quite sure how he ended up coming there and just has bits and pieces in his
memory left... He’s all the time reacting, thinking, ‘oh God, is it really
true?’, ‘is it magic? It is only in Act Three, once everything seems to be
smooth and he remembers everything – my personal opinion is he remembers
because he’s actually showing off to Elsa – and this is the big mistake.”
Kaufmann’s extraordinary versatility across the German, Italian and
French repertoire means he doesn’t necessarily return to roles as often as
he might otherwise. So does the fact that he may only sing any particular
part on stage 20 or 30 times in his career increase the sense of the
transitoriness of the performance?
“This is one of the advantages
when you try to keep your schedule as versatile as possible. Yeah, it’s
true. I don’t know how many times I will sing it again. I don’t recall how
many times I’ve done it so far. I would estimate maybe around about 25 or 30
shows? But you are right, each of those is precious and, especially if you
have the right ingredients, you can be as satisfied as the audience by just
being able to perform it in this environment.”
There is also a
constant demand for Kaufmann to move into other repertoire, and that must
ultimately mean having to give up some roles in order to take on others.
“Lohengrin certainly not. I just spoke last night about the possibility to
maybe do a Magic Flute again. I mean, there are parts that I will probably
never touch again: Così Fan Tutte? Stuff like that, or the whole Rossini
repertoire. But Lohengrin…”
For Kaufmann, it’s not just scheduling,
but also if a part is so demanding it could “ultimately change your
instrument so radically that unfortunately you turn around and you realise
that some other parts have become impossible.”
“I always tried in my
career so far to open new doors without closing the ones behind and it
worked very well… but the advantage is that I’m in the luxurious position of
having convinced opera directors and managers to let me have a career in the
Italian, French and German repertory, and not only concentrate on one of
those, which usually is the case. ” In fact, he argues, “the versatility in
the repertoire helps me to keep the flexibility in the voice.”
Of
course, the big Wagnerian question for Kaufmann now is when he will take on
Tristan und Isolde. He announced earlier this year that he would begin what
he tells me is the path to the full opera, a concert version of Act Two with
the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Many tenors before have done the thing – and
I will do it as well – of singing a concert of the Second Act of Tristan
first,” he says. “Act One – I don’t want to say it is non-existent, but it’s
really not much. Act Two is a beautiful endless love duet more on the
lyrical side than on the super-hard heroic side. Act Three is just crazy.
It’s long, long, long and no one can help you there. So Act Two is a good
start. I think this is one I will have to start earlier to learn and think
about because it’s psychologically a very interestingly put together text.”
“In general, I have a very good memory so learning is usually not an
issue. It comes very natural and very fast. Also, absorbing the information
is very easy. For instance, when we talk about Otello now, learning the part
is not the point,” he says. “It’s much easier to find an appropriate
interpretation once you have the ingredients – when you have a partner and
when you are on stage. If you have mastered it vocally you can follow your
instincts as an actor and it makes it much more vivid and alive than if you
would come up with a plan and try to follow the theory.”
“When you
read a line from a Verdi opera, and you are good enough in Italian, you know
immediately what it means and what the intention is – and maybe you even
read between the lines what it ultimately means. But if you read a Wagnerian
text as a German, I guarantee you read it a second and a third time before
you get an idea of what he actually wants to tell you! Not every line,
obviously. And Lohengrin is an exception. It is a super-straightforward
text.”
“But in the Ring, for instance, the constructions that he
makes – sentences that never end, words that Wagner created himself in order
to describe things where he believed there was no word, or where all the
words that would be appropriate didn’t fit into his rhyme! It is sometimes
really tough even as a German to fully understand what he means.”
So,
with all his current success, why tackle the Everest that is Tristan? “There
are so many parts that I have done already – like this Parsifal – that I
don’t do often enough and I ask myself sometimes – only because I am capable
of doing these things – do I really have to do them all? Because it would be
such an easy out to do [only] what you’ve done so far and it’s good for the
voice. But it is those challenges that also keep me alive and keep me fresh
and focused.”
Jonas Kaufmann sings three concert performances of
Parsifal with Opera Australia at Sydney Opera House from August 9 – 14.
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