Born in Milan and raised in the shadow of La Scala, Carlo Rizzi grew up surrounded by the Italian operatic traditions of the past and steeped in the rapidly evolving realities of the present. Recently resigned from his post as music director of the Welsh National Opera, Maestro Rizzi has conducted in most of the world’s great opera houses and has made many prominent recordings. In December during a break in rehearsals for a controversial new production of Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera, he met backstage with Classical Singer to share his thoughts on the state of the operatic art.
Freeman Günter: How would you describe your approach to conducting?
Carlo Rizzi: When I conduct I try to be flexible and work with what I have before me, not some abstract ideal in my mind. Sure, I can go in with my idea, but I can’t just ignore the voice that I have to work with. If that voice has a maximum of 80 decibels, rather than 90, it would be stupid for me to think that’s not loud enough. Let’s try to compromise. Singers are performers, they’re not keyboards. Some have an inner tempo that is slightly different from somebody else’s. One thing that makes me very happy about this Il Trovatore is that we all really worked together on the music. I played many of the musical rehearsals myself, badly, but because I wanted just to feel how it feels. This cast is not the usual cast that you would expect for Trovatore. This is actually a very lyric opera. If you look what Verdi writes, it is all piano, pianissimo, triple p. Then you have “Di quella pira,” five minutes of forte, actually mezza forte. But both the arias of Leonora and the Conte di Luna’s aria are pure bel canto. It is very important to work with this. You cannot make the singers give their best if you do not leave any space to expand.
FG: Some conductors walk in with a performance already in mind, and they conduct that performance no matter what.
CR: I can understand why, believe me, because to try to listen and cooperate is much more difficult actually. The Met orchestra is really incredible, not only technically, but I always feel that they have a wonderfully positive attitude toward the job that they are doing. And they listen. This is 75% of the job. Yesterday, a singer was doing a diminuendo, and automatically they were following. This is making music together. And this is what, at the end of the story, the job is about. Sure, the conductor clearly has the lead, and has to give certain direction, otherwise he would not be there. But, I always find the best things happen when there is a communal effort.
FG: Opera is about music. Opera began as an art driven by singers, then came the era of the maestro. Now it seems to be controlled by the stage director. What do you think of this?
CR: I think that it’s very difficult to find the right balance, because, as you say, opera is music. You’re not going to sell a video without sound, no matter what the sets look like.
I am convinced that the various composers – Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Bizet, etc. — wanted to have a music theater. You can see it from their communications with the librettist; they were not just writing the music. Clearly they were thinking dramatically. During his life, Verdi tried very hard to find a new relationship between the word and the music. The fact that we have good directors to do opera is only a plus. But the problem starts when you have a director who doesn’t recognize that the dramaturgy of the opera is given by the music, not necessarily by the words. You have always to confront yourself with what the music says. If you forget this and you read the libretto just as a play, 90% of the time it doesn’t work. Otherwise this play would have been sold in Barnes & Noble and not performed as an opera.
Very often when you are hearing the music, “I love you,” doesn’t simply mean “I love you.” The subtext of the music is so important. Far too many stage directors don’t understand this.
FG: And they don’t even know that they don’t understand it.
CR: I’ve had many, many cases where I was looking at the director and thinking, “What the hell is he talking about?” It had nothing to do with the opera being performed.
FG: It must be very difficult for you to get a cohesive musical performance when you’re fighting a concept that goes against the music.
CR: Is impossible. Technically, yes, I can shut my eyes and conduct, but that doesn’t really work. When you have a situation that is against what the music is saying, then forget it.
FG: Things evolve and change. Do you think this will eventually change, and the primacy of the music will return?
CR: I think so. In a way it is already changing. The job of being an opera director is extremely difficult. I’m full of sympathy for the people who are really trying to make sense of this. It’s clear that today, more than in the past, the visual factor of the opera is important. And this also is true in the natural world. Thirty years ago, when I was watching the Italian news on the television, there was the guy with the piece of paper in front, reading the news. Today if this happened without having all the film, you’d think, what is going on? So today we receive much more information to our eyes than to our ears. And this is the way the world is going.
FG: And yet opera is still about the music.
CR: Exactly. But, I think that you have to do something new sometimes. Now, the problem is to determine what “new” means. If new means just to do something crazy, then pack it in and go home. But sometimes it is very interesting. Some directors try to underline certain aspects of the drama, and as long as it doesn’t go against the music, that’s fine by me. In fact, I don’t think of it as ‘traditional’ production or ‘modern’ production, I think of it only as good production or bad production. It depends on the opera. If you do an opera like Norma, or I Capuleti e Montecchi and you don’t have the singer, forget it. You can do it in the Palazzo Vaticano and will still be a dead opera. These operas are born to be vehicles for certain kinds of voices, and nothing will change that. Der Rosenkavalier for me is an opera that cannot be updated. It would be idiotic. But an opera like Elektra is different because what is important is the growing of the relationships between all the different roles. And I don’t find that it is blasphemous to update operas if it is done the right way. But I repeat, there are certain operas that can never be updated. In Italy, we say “troppo es tropia,” which means too much is too much. But I think it is important sometimes to challenge the public, but in the right way. It’s important for me to see the opera not just as a vehicle for singers, or for the conductor, but as a global piece of performance. When I go to the opera, I cannot anymore close my eyes and listen to the music; the music is infested by the presence of what I don’t want to see.
FG: Yes, yes! (laughing) Do you think that singers today are generally well-prepared?
CR: I think that in America singers are better prepared than in England, possibly because there is more competition.
In England there seems to be an attitude of “Oh, we are in England, we speak English, and even if I speak Italian wrongly, or pronounce the German wrongly, it doesn’t matter so much.” I think that it’s necessary for all singers to think internationally.
FG: What do you look for when you audition singers?
CR: Number one, the voice. And immediately you understand this from how a singer opens the mouth. But it is also true that the quality of the voice does not make the singer. I think this happened naturally only for Pavarotti, that his voice is just fantastic. But for many singers, the sheer quality of the voice itself may be not an incredible thing. I mean, clearly, is a good voice, but does the singer have the capacity, really, to be an artist? How does the singer give the voice to the public? What of the expression, the use of the words, the musicality?
FG: So you take all of that into consideration too when you hear a singer?
CR: Absolutely. Of course, clearly, the best thing would be to have the tall, slim tenor with the fantastic voice, extremely musical. (He laughs) It doesn’t quite come like that. So we have to balance off the different things. Very often some producers don’t want certain singers because they’re rather large size or they’re small. I can understand to a certain extent. But let’s not forget that the stage is fiction. Somebody that you look at from a distance of 30 meters with lighting and a great costume can look much more glamorous that the same person at ten centimeters in street clothes. Honestly, between a fantastic voice and a fantastic singer — a short tenor or a large soprano — and somebody else, I would go for the voice and the musicality.
FG: Yes. When Verdi was putting together Aida, he was discussing the libretto with Ghislanzoni, who said, “Perhaps we should change these words praising the beauty of Aida. What if the soprano is not so beautiful?” Verdi said, “In the theatre, all women are beautiful.” And he wasn’t being facetious. If the mise en scene and the music set her up to be beautiful, and the voice and the singing are beautiful, then she will be perceived as beautiful. And if we’re just working with television, then we’re on the wrong track, anyway. Do you have singers that you particularly admire?
CR: Many of them. For me the important thing is to have a singer that grows, that gets into the score rather than just producing the sound.
FG: In what areas do you think the young singers that you work with are well-prepared and in what areas do you think they could use improvement, generally?
CR: Clearly, most of the preparation goes to the vocal training, and this is ok. But this is only the starting point. This means that you have the means to do the job. But then, being an artist, that is another story. It’s just like, for a conductor, the difference between merely getting through a performance from beginning to the end, and giving a real interpretation.
One thing that I really think is vital is the way the singer pronounces the different languages. We have a phrase in Italian that I don’t know how to translate into English: porgere la voce. Many singers of the past were able to do this. It is a kind of gesture or movement toward the public, a putting the voice forward, a way of presenting it to the public. Very often, this does the trick. I think that many singers stand there without this feeling of going out to the public as if to say, “now I’m going to present something to you.” This is not a question of the voice, it’s a question of….
FG: The way that it’s offered! I remember Maria Callas, in the masterclasses, would constantly say to the students, “Make the music more generous.”
CR: This for me is the point. Very often, I tell them, “Don’t just say the words. Pretend you have a five-year-old child in front of you. When you talk to a five-year-old child you have to express everything more clearly.
To an adult, “Hi,” you say, “Sorry I didn’t catch your name.” To a child you say, “What is your name? Wonnnnderful…” It is a different way to talk, much more forward.
FG: I think a lot of young singers don’t really know how to study a score. Do you have any suggestions on how to assimilate and truly learn a score?
CR: Number one, clearly, to see if one can sing it. But also, after that, is very important to know what is happening. Very often some singers know the sound that they have to make to produce the words, but they don’t know literally what each word means, or what the other singer is singing. This is a little bit strange. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes it is necessary to explain this. So I think the important thing is to see your role, however small or big it is, in the context of the entire opera. I think that at this point what comes in is actually the natural gift of understanding and feeling what the composer wants. Some people have it, some people don’t have it. Some people can learn it; some people never learn it. This is why certain singers are fantastic artists, why certain singers are just normal artists. It is a question of gifts. I advise young singers to be prepared not only from the point of view of the vocal preparation, but to give something to the public, or to the audition panel. Not just “aaaa!”
FG: Do you enjoy recordings? Do you find them beneficial to learn from?
CR: Oh, definitely. I listen to almost everything. Some great artists have given us an important legacy of voice and interpretation, so why not benefit from this? A painter would go study the paintings in an art museum. A writer would read all of the literature to know about it, not to copy.
FG: You travel a lot. How do you stay healthy on the road, and how do you keep your life centered? How do you manage to feel at home wherever you are enough to concentrate?
CR: In New York I am lucky because I have my own apartment. It is a great city. I really love it. But the important thing is actually to know where your limits are. Everybody wants to do too much, and this is a natural process in the career of every artist. If you want to break through, it is not necessary to do everything, it’s just necessary to do what you do well. I found in my experience that this is the most important thing. Know your limits. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to tell your limits to other people. In general, I found that the best thing is to be honest. If I make a mistake, I stop and say, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. Let’s start again.”
All this requires you to be at peace with yourself. Everybody’s insecure, and that’s part of human nature. But it is one thing to be insecure because you don’t know your job, and quite another to be insecure because you can do it in a different way that is better. I always want to know I have done everything possible to prepare myself for the job.
FG: It seems to me that singers in general are far better prepared for the demands of bel canto than they were at mid-century when Callas was active. You could have a Norma cast in which only she, and maybe the mezzo could really handle the bel canto honestly, and the men would have to fake or simplify the coloratura. Today the whole cast can sing all the notes.
CR: (laughs) This is true, but the fact is that it is still very, very difficult to get a unified performance. You know, with Norma. To have the right Pollione, the right Adalgisa, the right Norma to do the trio… this is no easy task. When I do an opera like Norma, I really listen to every possible recording, just to study that word that can be a very terrible thing: Tradition. A certain singer will say, “Oh, but Callas did this or…” Maybe so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that for the present singer it will (A) be beautiful and (B) suit your voice.
Again, every voice is different. But you have to see it case by case. In Rigoletto, for instance, I like certain unwritten and interpolated high notes, and I hate certain others. Some fit extremely well the dramaturgy of the opera, and some are a disaster. They are extremely vulgar.
FG: Do you think we’re getting better than we used to be at sorting out what’s good in tradition?
CR: We have very good studies today, books about what was done at the time, but at the end of the story, the truth is down to personal liking. This is where I find a big problem. If I say to a baritone, “I don’t like it,” and they say, “I like it. It’s nice,” what do you do? Sometimes what singers don’t realize is that we are in the new millennium, and is no longer true the public just wants to hear an animalistic scream. I mean, if you have the voice and notes, great, use them. But often a softer, loving, youthful cadenza would be much more effective. It depends also on the singer that you have. I don’t think that I’m always right, but I’m right very often, otherwise I wouldn’t be up there.
FG: It seems to me that opera is bigger now than it’s ever been, there are more companies, and the audiences are getting younger.
CR: Singing is primal, a part of human existence. When we were all chimpanzees, it was a communal activity. Singing was central to the early practice of magic. The shaman was singing. This is such a powerful form of art. The idea of a lady saying, “Oh I’m dying, oh I’m dying” for fifteen minutes without ever actually dying seems silly. But is never silly when is being sung on the stage. This is the great thing about opera. This is why I think opera will never die.
