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The Guardian, 10 Dec 2021 |
Stuart Jeffries |
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Jonas Kaufmann: ‘If this goes on much further we will soon have to close theatres’
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The greatest tenor of his generation talks cancel culture,
booing fans, and problematic roles
‘I don’t want a lot
for Christmas,” whispers Jonas Kaufmann into my ears. “Make my wish come
true / All I want for Christmas is you.” I don’t know whether to laugh
or hit shuffle. It’s three hours before my interview with the world’s
most celebrated singer, a man with a voice as golden as Pavarotti’s but
with Hollywood looks, and I’m preparing by listening to a Kaufmann
mixtape.
The 52-year-old’s peerless voice still in my ears, I
stroll through Naples towards Teatro di San Carlo – the world’s oldest
continuously active opera house, and where last night he sang Verdi’s
Otello. His is a voice built for Italian opera: “I have a German
passport,” he once said, “but an Italian voice.” The New Yorker critic
Alex Ross described it as having a baritonal strength in the lower
register, cleanly struck high notes (including a top C in Otello), a
tenderly shimmering mid-range – all laced together in a luxurious
legato.
But what I’m listening to is a switchback ride from
schmaltz to sublime. Sublime? Morgenlich Leuchtend from Wagner’s Die
Meistersinger. Schmaltz? The 49 songs of his newly expanded crossover
yuletide album, which some will love finding in their stockings, though
not the critic who said all he wanted for Christmas was a flux capacitor
to send Kaufmann back in time to before he recorded it.
At the
Gran Caffe Gambrinus opposite Naples’ 18th-century opera house, a genial
German in jeans and jumxper greets me. He claims to have put on weight
during lockdown, but Kaufmann looks fit and well, strutting like
victorious Otello to a table, and ordering a late breakfast in idiomatic
Italian. Neither waiters nor customers seem to recognise him – perhaps
they’re feigning indifference to the presence of the German who sings
their canon better than the natives.
We are meeting because
Kaufmann had been due to come to London next week to perform Christmas
with Jonas Kaufmann at the Royal Albert Hall, but, a fortnight after our
meeting, and only a few days before the scheduled concert, increased
Covid travel restrictions force its postponement. “I hope to see you for
the new date, and wish you all a very happy Christmas”, writes Kaufmann
in a message posted online. The last time he was on that stage was when
he became the first German to sing Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of
the Proms in 2015 (he waving union jack boxers, fans hurling knickers on
to the stage in return).
Does he see the contradiction between
being the Tom Jones of tenors and a serious artist? “Oh no,” he laughs
boomingly enough to make me worry for nearby crockery. “I’m enjoying
myself too much to worry about all that. I’ve grown in self-confidence
over the years. If you’re afraid of such things, you’ve no business
being on stage. If I didn’t like performing in public, why would I do it
so much?”
That said, on the first night of his performance in
Otello at the Teatro di San Carlo the previous week, there were boos.
“They weren’t booing me,” he clarifies. “I talked to many people
afterwards who complained mostly because Otello is not black. And that
was the director’s idea.” Let me get this right: they were booing the
director because you’re white? Kaufmann nods.
What business does
a white German have playing Otello, though? “I know it’s a very hot
political topic,” says Kaufmann, unfazed by the question. “I personally
see more racism in the idea to forbid people to pretend to be another in
our modern society. Because nobody is mocking. Nobody is wearing
blackface as they did 50 years ago.
“It’s very difficult to see
where should we stop and what should we do. If this goes on much further
we will soon have to close theatres.”
Maybe that’s an
exaggeration, but certainly Otello, like much of the canon from which
Kaufmann has made his illustrious career, is a minefield of racist and
sexist attitudes. “Oh my God, yes! You should have to put warnings
everywhere. I’m killing my wife! I mean, come on – is this appropriate
for children to watch? But I think even children understand it’s a
fairytale and very terrible things can happen in fairytales.”
One
solution is to detoxify operas by changing their narrative frame. Amélie
Neirmeyer attempted as much in her 2019 Bayerische Staatsoper production
of Otello in which Kaufmann also sang the role. In it, Desdemona
survives. “Many people loved it because it was, as it were, a
psychoanalytical session with Desdemona recalling what happened.”
Kaufmann sips his coffee, and adds: “It is very difficult to combine
the music of Verdi with this idea.” Was the libretto amended to
accommodate the plot twist? “ No. She stands up while she sings her last
phrases and secretly escapes.”
Kaufmann learned early in his
career that classical music has a problem with sexual power dynamics off
the stage as well as on it. He experienced unwanted sexual advances from
a concert promoter. “It was made very clear to me that if I went with
this man to a sauna, I would be given a solo recital in one of the big
concert halls in my home town, Munich. I was a student in my final year
of conservatory. I don’t know if it would have happened if I had gone
for the offer.” He laughs ruefully. “But I still see myself in the seat
of that Mercedes S class sweating and thinking: ‘What shall I do?’”
From Verdi’s tortured title character, Kaufmann next takes on a no
less troubling outsider, Britten’s Peter Grimes. He will sing the role
for the first time in Vienna’s Staatsoper in January. Very few tenors
have the range to go from 19th-century Italian opera to the 20th-century
jewel in the English operatic canon. Acclaimed Argentinian tenor José
Cura, I tell Kaufmann, once said he was scared of singing Grimes because
the score is so tricky and demanding. “I don’t find it so. What I do
find difficult is understanding the character. Is he guilty of these
crimes? Honestly, I don’t know.” Later, in 2022 – he won’t tell me where
or when – he will expand his repertoire further by singing Wagner’s
Tannhäuser for the first time.
Kaufmann has no desire, however,
to take on the risk of singing in new operas. “Most of these
compositions are done once and forgotten. There are some exceptions, but
the complexity of modern music is just too much for most audiences to go
home with a smile or even with a melody. A new opera hits you in your
face and it might be very impressive, but the endorphins that you have
sometimes when you hear a beautiful aria? They’re not there for sure.
That makes it difficult for these pieces to join the repertory.”
What if someone wrote a new opera with your voice in mind? He tells me
of a fellow singer for whom this happened. “The result was disastrous.
It almost broke their voice. No, I’d better stick to my good old Verdis
and Puccinis. I’m still not fed up with that.”
And he believes
that audiences, too, are far from fed up. “The fascinating thing about
opera is that is a bit old fashioned, a bit mysterious, a bit
different,” he says. It should take a leaf from the Game of Thrones’
playbook. “Series such as this are so successful not because they are
modern but because they create a different world in such a fantastic and
perfect way that you dive into it and you start to forget it is fake.
This is opera!
“Having said that we all know that opera can’t
stand still. We are not bearers of a museum piece. It has to be alive.”
Christmas with the Kaufmanns promises to be as traditional as his
take on operas. At the age of eight, he won a prize at a local newspaper
for his description of a lavish family Christmas. Now with his second
wife, the opera director Christiane Lutz, and their young son, as well
as his three children from his first marriage, he hopes to celebrate a
family Christmas. “My older boy has been very sick and therefore not
vaccinated and can’t travel, so maybe we will be in Germany.” Despite
that constraint, he is happy that Germany and also Austria – where he
has a home – are clamping down on the unvaccinated. “So many people seem
to think of not being vaccinated as to do with freedom. My logic is
different. If you live in a city you don’t walk around naked because it
would harm somebody, or traumatise a child. Because it’s selfish. The
same is true with vaccination and mask wearing. Would you put others in
danger by not being vaccinated or wearing a mask? It’s for the
community.”
Kaufmann’s Christmas season was meant to kick off at
the Albert Hall, but speaking to me before the concert’s cancellation,
he had already half-anticipated the bad news. “The logistics of the
orchestra and me getting PCR tests in time are very tricky indeed.” And
this was before the latest government rulings required a negative
pre-departure Covid test in order to enter the country. “ I really hope
to be there. There are so many English-language carols and Christmas
songs I want to sing in London.”
Alas. Fingers crossed that next
year Kaufmann will get another chance to spend his Christmas – in the
nicest possible way – showered in festive undies in London.
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