| Since Jonas Kaufmann's performance of Die schöne
Müllerin had been ausverkauft for months, press seats too, I was more than a
tad thrilled to get a last-minute seat. Huge thanks to my fellow blogger
‘Hariclea' from Opera is Magic!. It was certainly a sought-after event.
Audience members included ambassadors, royalty and Angela Gheorghiu, who's
currently rehearsing with Der Jonas for Adriana Lecouvreur at Covent Garden.
Usually at the Wigmore Hall I sit right at the back. Yesterday I sat right
at the front on the extreme left, just a few metres from the performers —
this has prompted some reflections on the way we experience sound in
London's best-loved recital hall. And I had an extremely good view, which is
no bad thing either. (New nickname for him: Traumschiff. Dreamship. I'm
assured it should be "Traumhaft", but Traumschiff just sounds better.)
At such close range, Kaufmann's nervous energy was palpable from the
moment he set foot on stage. But there could be no more calming, solid and
supportive presence than that of Helmut Deutsch, possibly the world's finest
Lieder accompanist, whose partnering made this recital into true chamber
music. His profound understanding and empathy for the piano's role — often
portraying the brook itself until the watery depths take over the voice near
the end — offered perfect balance with breadth and depth. Kaufmann stood in
the bay of the instrument, blending his sound with that emerging from the
Steinway.
You can't really blame him for looking nervous and very occasionally he
sounded it as well. But what I love most about his singing, apart from the
rich beauty of tone, is that it is all about character. He's an opera star —
not just as singer, but as actor — and it shows. And he's the ultimate in
living, breathing German romanticism: the aesthetic is king and the text its
consort, with the music the magic that breathes in the life.
Now, there are as many ways to sing Die schöne Müllerin as there
are Lieder singers. Some tell the story as if from outside it; certain ones
can't resist making it all desperately ironic. Others relish the moments of
mimicry, poking fun at the pompous miller and the pathetic, ghastly, spoilt
girlie who chews up and spits out our young hero's heart; alternatively some
are all innocence and fun before the tragedy kicks in. Kaufmann, though,
went for the tragedy. His young miller came over entirely believably from
the first lines of ‘Das Wandern': this miller boy takes himself extremely
seriously and fancies himself as an artist, playing with the portraits of
water, wheels and millstones for the sake of word-painting them in music.
There's to be little laughter in his tale. Anyone who's been through a music
course at an academic institution has known a lad or two like this. It makes
sense: when we reach the mid-point of the cycle, we realise that the boy is
indeed a musician, because he hangs his lute on the wall and wonders what
songs he may draw out of it in future...
But there's more. I thought I knew Die schöne Müllerin
backwards, but in the fourth song, ‘Danksagung an den Bach', I found myself
scrabbling for the words. That knowing gesture, submissive, bittersweet,
proud — did that mean what it seemed to mean? It did. "Well," says the
translation, "however it may be, I accept my fate: whatever I seek, I've
found..." So there's a reason for Kaufmann's darker-than-average portrayal
of those normally ecstatic first songs. This boy knows he's doomed. He's
being sucked into the brook to his death, stage by stage; this is the
personality of one who can become, as he later is, obsessed by love,
jealousy, the colour green and the notion of fate. As in his magnificent Don
José, Kaufmann shows us the seeds of the tragedy in the hero's fatal flaw,
from the word go. Is this true to the work? Yes, of course it is. The text
is full to busting with premonitions of death, loss and drowning. It's just
that the vast majority of performers don't bring this out.
As such, Schubert's miller has a death-consecrated heart. Forty or so
years later, did he mature into Tristan? It couldn't have been clearer. The
heart of German romanticism started here, in Schubert's babbling brook,
aided and abetted by Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (another of
Kaufmann's stun-gun roles) — indeed, listening to Kaufmann, you could see
the whole of the 19th century unfurling at the feet of the
composer whose friends used to call him the "little mushroom" before his
death at the age of mere 31. Everything falls into place. In the final
Wiegenlied, as the brook bids 'gute nacht' to the drowned hero, Kaufmann's
almost-whispered words bade farewell to the heart of every listener,
speaking to the part of us that can't help but identify with the tale, like
it or not — a profoundly uncomfortable reminder of our own humanity,
stripped of its usual postmodern pretences.
As for the voice — it's the quiet ones you have to watch. Kaufmann can do
ample con belto when he wants to: I've heard him let that voice off
the leash at Covent Garden and it is an unforgettable sound. Last night, he
did so only very occasionally, often reserving volume for final verses where
it achieved maximum contrast with the hushed tones that went before. But the
myriad colours of quietness far exceed those available at fortissimo, and
this is something the greatest of musicians always understand and exploit.
At the softest moments, Kaufmann seemed to squeeze his voice almost out of
existence, singing from head rather than chest, seeming virtually to take
air in rather than expell it. It almost made me wonder whether he was simply
more at home in lower registers, but he sang out at the top just enough to
prove that that's not the case.
I don't know what it takes to make the Wigmore audience give a standing
ovation. Kaufmann deserved one, but it didn't happen. (Another colleague has
gently pointed out that this might be to do with the waiting list for hip
replacements.) He gave one encore, an exquisitely hushed Schubert
comparative rarity — according to Hariclea, though, in his Paris concert he
did four. It's possible the Wigmore regulars are so scandalised by the idea
of even one encore after something as ‘sacred' as Die schöne Müllerin
that they hesitate to encourage such frivolity. Personally I'd have liked
him to continue for at least another half an hour.
Something magic must have happened, though, because I came out tweeting
in German — and my German is usually appalling, so some interesting buttons
must have been pressed at a deepish level. The great feeling is, though,
that we can still look forward to hearing him in the rest of the Lieder
repertoire — someone, please give him Schwanengesang,
Winterreise, Hugo Wolf, Brahms — and of course to the distant future in
which he may perhaps become the world's greatest Tristan.
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