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The Telegraph, 14 Jun 2014 |
By Serena Davies |
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Jonas Kaufmann: the world's greatest tenor
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He is fluent in four languages, with an unparalleled vocal range and the instincts of an actor. Meet opera superstar Jonas Kaufmann
Jonas Kaufmann is rehearsing the death scene from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.
In the interest of avoiding spoilers for those who don’t know the French
18th-century story by the Abbé Prévost, I won’t say whose death. But Manon
Lescaut (which has formed the basis of a classical ballet and two
19th-century operas) is a tragic opera, and Kaufmann does operatic tragedy
in a manner to rip your heart out. The 44-year-old is almost certainly the
greatest tenor in the world right now, a dashingly handsome German with an
extraordinary voice, whose career is reaching new peaks with each year, even
month that passes.
In February Kaufmann ‘provoked one of the greatest
ovations in recent memory’, according to the news agency Bloomberg, at the
New York Metropolitan Opera House, for his interpretation of the tortured
poet Werther in Massenet’s opera of the same name. In April he sang
Schubert’s wonderful melancholic song cycle Winterreise to a capacity
audience at the Royal Opera House (the first singer to have been given a
solo recital there in over a decade – when he did the same concert at the
Met it was the first time it had had a solo performer since Pavarotti in
1994).
And now Covent Garden is putting on a new production of Manon
Lescaut, an opera it hasn’t done for 30 years, with Jonathan Kent directing.
Kaufmann will play des Grieux, the lovelorn hero of this tale of a wayward
beauty who neglects her true love to be seduced by riches. Des Grieux ‘is
the most difficult and challenging role for the tenor that Puccini ever
wrote,’ according to Antonio Pappano, Covent Garden’s musical director.
It will be an apt showcase for Kaufmann’s talents. What makes him great
is that his voice is not only beautiful but uniquely versatile, which means
he can do both the lighter tenor roles of Verdi and Puccini, and much of the
big dramatic singing demanded by Wagner (and a lot else between). This is
partly because he is a linguist, fluent in English, French and Italian. And
it is partly because his voice has an exceptionally rich lower register –
yet he can also sing out amazing high notes that, in Pappano’s words,
‘blossom and shoot out and are big and generous’. His talent leaves him
comparable to Plácido Domingo. ‘There’s been no one since Plácido that has
the freedom and breadth of repertoire that Jonas has,’ Pappano says.
And there is also the fact that, like Domingo, Kaufmann is an excellent,
instinctive actor. ‘He brings a protean talent in that he can shift and
change,’ Jonathan Kent points out. ‘For instance we were rehearsing a very
difficult scene [in Manon Lescaut] at the end of Act II where the two lovers
know they are about to be trapped… I’d ask the performers to do the chaos of
panic, with people running round not knowing how to escape. Jonas brings
endless invention to that and he can do it while singing. He can think on
his feet. He can throw himself around the room and still hit the notes.’
Kaufmann is 20 minutes late for the section of rehearsal I have been
invited to, which leaves only another 20 before the lunch break. He
apologises gaily, and no one murmurs. It is a modern production (designed by
Paul Brown) and the death scene is taking place on a broken flyover, a vast
piece of stage machinery currently inhabiting one of the opera house’s even
more vast rehearsal spaces. Kaufmann shins up the ladder of the set,
wobbling it for fun as he goes, and pulls a face when he gets to the top.
Then he takes the soprano Kristine Opolais in his arms and gets serious.
As he and Opolais practise various positions of collapse while singing
the opera’s closing moments, he is two people, shaking with laughter one
moment, then racked with wholly convincing torment the next. And he is
dominant: directing as much as Kent does. ‘Are you singing my line?’ Opolais
says at one point. ‘You’d better be quick or he’ll sing the whole act,’ Kent
says, laughing.
This is a tenor with the world at his feet, perhaps a
little cocky, but not at all lofty. ‘I really got lucky, in a million ways I
got lucky,’ is how he describes it when we meet at the end of the rehearsal,
five hours later. Sitting in a rather more cramped corner of the opera
house’s backstage area, initially I have the sense of an overgrown boy
opposite me; a feeling exacerbated by the length of his Byronic curls –
despite the greying at the temples – and his outfit of a casual grey T-shirt
and jeans. He is about 5ft 11in and slim. His speaking voice is deep and
loud, as if he is permanently projecting.
Kaufmann was born in
Munich in July 1969 to an insurance broker and a kindergarten teacher who
were East German by origin. His parents’ families had fled their respective
parts of the German Democratic Republic in the early 1960s. They would visit
their relations in East Germany when Jonas and his elder sister, now a
teacher, were children. ‘[My relations] thought each second the Stasi would
smash down the door and come in,’ he remembers.
His family rented an
apartment in a block in the Bogenhausen district of Munich that was
constructed expressly to help cope with the influx of East Germans. It was
here that he grew up. His paternal grandfather, a banker and devoted Wagner
fan, lived in another flat in the same block.
Kaufmann describes
their lives as ‘conventional’, but the family had an exceptional passion for
classical music. ‘All my family members played the piano,’ he remembers.
‘There was always a piano in the room. My parents had subscriptions to
everything available. Concert series, opera, theatre. They took us too. We
got used to that.’
The first opera Kaufmann saw was Puccini’s Madame
Butterfly, aged seven. ‘I thought it was real,’ he says. ‘I was destroyed
when [Butterfly] came out for the curtain calls and she wasn’t dead any
more.’
He says he was – like all the other children – sitting next
to the radio every Friday afternoon to record his favourite songs from the
pop charts as well. But it was classical music that was his ‘normal’. He
started singing in choirs as a child – at first because his hands were too
small for the piano. He continued after his voice broke, and remembers
facing down the derision of his schoolmates as he did so. ‘I was 17 or
something, and we did a concert and I sang some arias. The whole room
started laughing and giggling. They had never heard anything like it
before,’ he says.
Despite his talent for singing, Kaufmann says, ‘I
never thought I was something special. I never thought about music as my
profession, it was just great fun.’ And so, following the advice of his
father to make plans for a serious profession with a secure income, he
enrolled as a maths student at the University of Munich after secondary
school. Realising this wasn’t where his passion lay, he rebelled and
switched after two terms to study to be a singer at Munich’s Academy of
Music and Theatre.
Years performing in the smaller German opera
houses followed; he graduated to the larger European ones by his late 20s.
He got his major international break when he sang opposite the most
in-demand soprano of the day, Angela Gheorghiu, in Verdi’s La Traviata at
the Met in 2006. The world-class engagements have come along steadily ever
since.
As a result of his popularity with opera houses and festival
organisers, his life is now frenetic. In the next six months, until the end
of the year, Kaufmann’s schedule will take him to 11 countries, from Europe
to Japan, America and Australia. He will return to Munich, which remains his
home, three times for work. This has been the pattern of his life, with
minor variations, for about the past 10 years. It is like being a pop star
on permanent tour.
He gets to Munich when he can. ‘I do a new
production there each year and also one revival, which is a total of about
eight weeks plus some time off, like a weekend, when I would go back,’ he
says. ‘The maximum I would be back home would be 20 to 25 per cent [of the
year].’
He says his peripatetic existence means he is too busy to
take exercise. ‘Keep fit? I sing!’ he says. (Though he does do some yoga.)
And as for his downtime… ‘What downtime? What are you talking about?’ He
laughs heartily. ‘Yes, I go skiing,’ he admits. ‘I go sailing, I go hiking,
but for very short periods in the year. More to relax, and not to stay fit
and healthy. Maybe a couple of weeks a year. This summer I will have three
straight weeks off, which is great, I haven’t had that in years. There are
usually about 10 days during the year and that’s it.’
It is a life of
total focus and absorption, that extends to such details as drinking salt
water during performances to put off the threat of low blood pressure, which
can cause dizziness. It comes too with an arguably valid anxiety about
health (he had a lymph node removed in 2011) that has given him something of
a reputation for cancellations.
That is one reason why he bucks hard
against the pressure opera houses now put on their stars to sign up to shows
taking place in five years’ time. Another is that he can’t know what parts
his voice, which is developing all the time, will be ready for that far
ahead. ‘I can’t find enough singers to go on strike to say we’re not going
to sign anything over two years. But it has become insane, I think. The
thing to do is to say no to almost everything and there will still be
something that comes up at the last minute.’
I ask Kaufmann who his
second pair of ears is, the person he turns to for frank criticism. ‘I have
some friends, I have some coaches, I have a wife who is a singer too, you
know,’ he answers. The catch with this is that he announced the end of his
marriage to the mezzo-soprano Margarete Joswig on his website in April.
Their union had lasted the better part of two decades, the pair having met
at the opera house at Saarbrücken at the start of their careers; and they
have three children together of eight, 11 and 15.
The split, it
seems, is a casualty of his career. ‘We have agreed it doesn’t make any
sense to tell anything about it,’ he says now. ‘But I’ve talked about the
circumstances actually. I’m not the only one sitting in that boat. All
musicians who do this kind of job have this struggle to combine private life
and work. I’ve been pointing that out in almost every interview. That’s the
way it is.’
Yet, of course, Kaufmann loves opera, despite its
constraints. He quotes Herbert von Karajan’s description of the experience
of performing classical music as an exercise in ‘controlled ecstasy’. ‘When
you are performing you should forget about everything around you,’ he says.
‘You should forget that you are a singer, that you are on stage. You must
think that your colleagues are real people… and that there isn’t an audience
attending. You can come to a point that you can do it so convincingly that
you believe it is you who is saying this, you who is suffering.
‘I
think it’s great [to perform like this] but not every musician has it, and
not every musician is seeking it, actually. There are musicians who are
brain-guided; they seek perfection, not passion.’
With this our
conversation comes to a close, and Kaufmann bounds up out of his chair at
the realisation that a friend of his is at a nearby pub and is keen to see
him. As he leaves, the press officer shows him an advertising board for the
new season which shows a grainy close-up of Kaufmann and the soprano Anna
Netrebko in an embrace. It must be about 5ft high. ‘Oh I love that,’
Kaufmann says (he’d like a copy). ‘See,’ he gestures to me. ‘The passion!’
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