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The Spectator, 17 February 2018 |
Norman Lebrecht |
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‘I was really, really scared’: Jonas Kaufmann opens up about his #MeToo moment
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‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are
any topics he wants me to avoid, such are his minders’ anxieties. ‘Ask
anything,’ laughs Jonas. ‘I’m not shy.’
He is heading in from the
airport to see a physio — ‘these concerts, you have to stand there all the
time’ — before taking Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook on a seven-city Baedeker
tour: Vienna, Paris, London, Essen, Luxemburg, Budapest, Barcelona. I wonder
if he is aware that Wolf is a hard sell to English audiences. ‘Not just the
English,’ he replies. ‘Even in Germany promoters say to me, please don’t do
a Wolf-only recital, no one will buy tickets. People don’t know Wolf, so
they are afraid of it.’ They shouldn’t be, he says. ‘Wolf is a fantastic
composer, never too heavy, he ought to be as acceptable as Schumann or
Brahms.’
The foremost German tenor since Fritz Wunderlich, Kaufmann’s
presence or absence can make or break a season. His cancellations, which are
not infrequent, come with more detailed explanations than the usual
‘indisposed’. Kaufmann agonises over causing inconvenience. ‘When I cancel,
I am punishing myself,’ he says. ‘I know singers who hate to sing. They do
it because people pay them for it. For me, it’s the absolute opposite. If
nobody turned up I would still want to sing. It’s not easy to cancel. I know
how many people have gone to trouble to hear me.’
In the past year he
twice pulled out of the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss and tongues began
wagging about a jinx. Strauss, who mistrusted tenors, asked for his deathbed
cycle to be premièred by Kirsten Flagstad in 1950 and the set has belonged
to big sopranos ever since. Was Kaufmann not being greedy by coveting the
songs, maybe tempting fate?
‘Both times I cancelled I had a cold,’ he
says prosaically. ‘Maybe if I had swallowed lots of chemicals… I didn’t want
to risk anything.’
His reason for performing the songs was provided
by a musicologist friend working at the Strauss archives. ‘My friend saw the
autograph score of the Four Last Songs. The printed score says “for
soprano”. The composer’s autograph says “for high voice”. My friend said,
“This is something you could take on.”’ The set has been rescheduled for the
Barbican in May. ‘Hopefully,’ says Jonas Kaufmann.
Like Anna Netrebko
among sopranos Kaufmann stands alone at the summit of his Fach. Getting
there was not easy. He spent most of the 2000s under contract at Zürich
Opera. ‘Zürich was a safe harbour for me to try out roles in a friendly
environment. It was also insurance. If you got sick you still got paid. But
it was not a typical treadmill slavery contract. I sang Mozart roles,
Schubert’s Fierrabras, Fidelio, Verdi — Don Carlos, Rigoletto, Traviata.’
Prepared to take his time, Kaufmann was almost 40 before he hit the world
circuit.
He feels most comfortable these days in Paris and at Covent
Garden, ‘just because of Tony [Pappano], everybody wants to sing with him.
God knows what will happen when he’s gone.’ His home base is Munich, though
he frets for its future once the music director Kirill Petrenko moves on to
the Berlin Philharmonic. ‘Kirill is one of the very few — with Tony Pappano
and Andris Nelsons — who really know about singers. Such a pity he wants to
focus on the symphonic repertoire.’
Kaufmann makes no secret of his
discomfort with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. ‘The productions have not
always been that great. The HD [cinema screenings] are a big success but
many people don’t see the need to go to the show in New York any more. These
people are not going to come back. The Met can’t even sell out a Tosca.’
When Kaufmann, missing his children in Munich, tried to shorten his run in
the Met’s ill-starred Tosca, he was ‘disturbed’ to read in the New York
Times that he had cancelled. ‘It was not a cancellation from my side. I
asked for a reduced rehearsal period and fewer performances. But they wanted
all or nothing,’ he explains. He hates to be seen as a shirker.
America’s sexual harassment hysteria has left him confused. I ask if he was
ever targeted by predators. His response is swift and confessional. ‘When I
was a student,’ he relates, ‘there was a promoter who offered me a concert
in his series, which would have been fantastic for me. But the obvious
exchange, and he was very specific, was for me to go with him to a sauna
club, rent a cabin and give a full body massage.
‘I was 20 or 22 and
I understand that if you think this is your chance you probably think, go
for it. But I didn’t. I was really, really scared.’
He fears the
pendulum has swung too far the other way. In Santa Monica recently he was
about to sing a popular Richard Tauber encore, ‘Girls are Made to Love and
Kiss’, when he wondered if this was still safe. ‘If I have to ask myself
whether these tiny little erotic hints that composers gave in the 1920s are
inappropriate, half of our operatic repertoire can’t be played any more. And
it’s hard. We have so many people living alone because they cannot find a
way to approach someone.’
Kaufmann, 48, is (he assures me) not
single. After the end of a long marriage to the mezzo-soprano Margarete
Joswig, he formed a relationship with Christiane Lutz, an opera director.
They seem happy.
Ten months of the year he is on the road, waking up
each morning to test the voice, aware that thousands depend on its state of
health. After two rocky years, he is cautiously confident. ‘I believe the
voice is still quite fresh,’ he volunteers, with clinical objectivity. ‘It
feels like there are no limits. I have the impression I can go on for a very
long time.’
Jonas Kaufmann is touring Wolf’s Italian Songbook with
Diana Damrau and Helmut Deutsch and will present it at the Barbican on 16
February.
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