It was the shot heard ’round the opera world when Roberto Alagna, after his final high B-flat of “Celeste Aida,” left the stage mid-scene in response to boos from the upper gallery of the La Scala audience. La Scala then fired the tenor for breach of contract, and Alagna subsequently filed a lawsuit against the house. One of the rare moments when opera bursts into the pop culture bubble, especially in Europe, his falling-out with one of the titans of the industry created a media fire that still won’t die out, even if it is now mere embers.
Three years later, the tenor says of the incident, “Nobody knows what happened, and we are now in process and we have a [law] suit. I hope some day the verity, the truth, will come.”
Alagna still holds to the explanation he gave following the incident: He left the stage to preserve his voice. “It was the right choice to do that in that moment. Because of that choice, I am still here today singing.” Not only is he still here today, but he has worked the incident to his advantage and—in spite of the story’s wildfire spread—remains opera’s perennial comeback kid.
“They wanted to boycott the night, the new direction of La Scala. And they used me for that,” Alagna says, offering his explanation for why the 2006 audience booed him that fateful night. “But I am [an] artist, [and] very sensitive obviously.”
That Alagna is in New York, the first weeks of rehearsals behind him for the Met’s new production of Carmen (which opened on December 31 and runs with alternating casts through May 1), speaks to his resilience—not to mention a keen sense of PR—in spite of his artistic sensibilities. Not one to shy away from discussing touchy issues—from La Scala to separation from his wife and ubiquitous singing partner Angela Gheorghiu to even the most taboo of topics: his salary—the man who sells more CDs in France than any other classical or pop singer is straddling one of the trickier bridges in opera today: the digital divide.
Born in 1963, Alagna was delivered in a defining year for mass media: Beatlemania spread on both sides of the Atlantic, a sprawling nation followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Vietnam became omnipresent on television sets the world over. Perhaps it’s this continual exposure to mass media and mass culture that has prepared Alagna for the near-immediate response to his actions at La Scala.
“I think today it’s more risky, more challenging to go onstage,” says Alagna. “In five minutes, everybody in the world can know which way you sang. It’s difficult, because if you have a bad night, [in] the past it was just the audience there and everybody forgot that. Today, no. You go to YouTube.” Of the over 800 videos of Alagna on YouTube, the La Scala incident ranks as number four with nearly 203,500 views.
Rather than fight the current, however, the singer flows with it: “If you want to give something, you can give very easily, and it’s fantastic to have the possibility to go on your Internet and to see or listen to a lot of singers. You can study with that. You can share a lot of emotions with everybody. It’s wonderful. You have both the advantage and the disadvantage. We must go with our epoch and accept that.”
Growing up on the other side of the digital media and mass communications precipice has helped to drive Alagna’s life and career. It was thanks to the 1951 Mario Lanza film The Great Caruso that Alagna discovered opera. The son of a bricklayer and a seamstress, Alagna was born in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, which boasts one of the highest unemployment rates of the banlieues and was a center for the 1968 riots. The integration of opera into film and television was instrumental in educating the self-taught tenor.
“I remember when I was young, it was a dream to have a possibility to watch a tenor and to study,” he recalls. “Then it was quite impossible. After that, the video came, and I remember when I bought my first video [La bohème with Shicoff and Cotrubas], I was there for hours studying, because on stage it was impossible [and on] television it was just one broadcast.”
It’s easy to hypothesize that his early exposure to discord in his neighborhood environment prepared Alagna for the pressures of his career. Seeing suburban factory workers strike in response to student clashes with the police isn’t drastically far off from leaving the stage of La Scala: what it boils down to is self-preservation and integrity, artistic and otherwise. The incident adds to his Mick Jagger-esque, “Street Fighting Man” persona—but spend enough time with Alagna and the press bravado gives way to a man who does not go for two days without singing, enjoys his work, and strives to bring opera to a wide audience.
“The first day we met for Carmen rehearsals, Roberto told me, ‘I love rehearsals!’” recounts conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “This is, perhaps strangely, very uncommon to hear, especially from a singer who has already done so many productions of Carmen. His enthusiasm, his energy, his commitment, his willingness to work as a team player and, above all, his generosity are very inspiring for everyone involved.”
Nearing 50, Alagna’s youthful energy keeps him in roles that he sang 15 years ago. Again, thanks to digital media, he is also one of the easiest singers to chart in depth. Pit his 1994 Roméo et Juliette from Covent Garden with the 2007 Met simulcast of the same opera, and you can chart both the growth of the artist and his character, an exploration of an art form in the twenty-first century rather than the preservation of that same art form in the nineteenth century.
“Tenor Roberto Alagna is all youthful ardor and aching romance as Romeo,” Kevin Filipski wrote of the 1994 DVD release, a performance that catapulted Alagna into international stardom.
On the singer’s return to the role and Royal Opera House six years later, Tom Sutcliffe of the London Evening Standard wrote, “The glory of Alagna’s Romeo has various elements. His voice has grown and the visceral force with which it comes off the stage can be extremely exciting. . . . Physically his manner is perfect for Romeo. He still looks young, and there’s a marvelous gangly feel in his wish not to fight, and then ferocious energy in his furious attack. . . . He’s a really good actor as well as singer, his characterization organic, never stuck on. He takes expressive vocal risks.”
Seven years after that, when Alagna stepped in for an ailing Rolando Villazón in the Met’s production with Anna Netrebko, Mike Silverman of the Associated Press commented, “He has definitely lost some of the ease in the upper register that he displayed when he sang the role here a decade ago, but his singing was ardent and ultimately winning.”
While ageism may be running rampant in the audition room, Alagna is proof that singers can overcome the birthday candles lining up against them by allowing their roles to grow as they themselves grow personally. Take, for instance, his upcoming return to L’elisir d’amore in 2011.
“It will be strange to return to this character I sang when I was very young,” he says. “Maybe it will be not so fresh vocally, but it can be interesting to have another vision of this kind of character. Also, when you have maturity, sometimes you have a bit of more deep interpretation.”
Will he miss the youthfulness of his 1997 Nemorino? “The youngness is the most beautiful. You are spontaneous. You are also a bit ridiculous. But it’s okay because when you’re young, everything can work. When you are mature, it’s different. You must be careful because when you are ridiculous with maturity, nobody [will] forgive you. This is the difference. But okay, I like that. I like also to try to find another way to express myself, another way for phrasing, for vocality, [and] also just to be in the character in that moment.”
Don José is a similar homecoming for Alagna, who made his Met debut in the role in 2000. “I have known Roberto for over 15 years, since he was doing Roméo et Juliette at Covent Garden. I’ve always admired him,” says the new production’s director Richard Eyre. “He has a brilliantly strong and very natural voice that he uses with great intelligence. He has [a] real sense of drama, of how what he does on stage as well as what he sings reveals a character. And he has a determination, within the constraints of the operatic form, to bring a human truth to every role.
“I have been hugely impressed by working on Carmen with him. It is a role he has played in at least 10 different productions, and yet in every rehearsal he is fresh and enthusiastic and seeking new things in his performance and in the opera. He is full of invention and communicates his ideas with an infectious passion. He also has a generous charm and wit that embraces everyone that he works with.”
Nearly a decade after his first Met Carmen, Alagna’s career and life have teemed with events—a series of publicized watersheds and benchmarks—that have administrators, fans, and the press watching his every move. Though it’s the same story, his catalog of Don Josés has its own character arc—one that’s far from finished.
“All the time, when you’re a singer, you have an evolution because it’s the normal evolution of life. Some experiences, new experiences, you are a little bit more mature, and you see . . . life in another way,” the tenor explains. “Maybe today I am a bit more tolerant, you know? Even when people make very strange actions, I think you have all the time a reason for that . . . because we are just human beings. Sometimes it’s difficult to say why people are doing this or this, even in normal life. Even for stupid things. But I think all the time there is a reason for that. And for this I am very tolerant today.”
Plenty of recent news and blog stories come to mind when he speaks of this newfound tolerance. One can’t help but think he’s drawing on these experiences and his ensuing serenity to build on what he feels is the “most complex character” in Bizet’s opera.
“This character is very interesting because you can see the evolution of this guy in a real tragedy. But not just this. He’s also something from his soul, from his education, sometimes from his background. Maybe he had a very Catholic education, and because of this education, he received a lot of responsibility of the family, he was the chief of the family very young because the father was dead or I don’t know what, and I think that too much responsibility [is] on his shoulder. And because of this education, I think in the end this guy wants to save the soul of Carmen and he wants to save also his soul and maybe the humanity against the devil. Because in that moment, for him, Carmen [is] possessed by the devil, she’s the incarnation of the devil. And he wants to fight the devil, not Carmen. It’s very strange. You know these kinds of prophets that have illuminations. . . . It’s like now I [as José] know the truth; I want to save humanity. It’s a little bit like this.”
Far from being self-centered, Alagna examines the other characters both independently and in context with his own—an apt analysis for an opera about identity and fate. “Maybe Carmen also had a very difficult background as a gypsy. Maybe she had a difficult life and, because of that, gypsies can feel a lot of pressure in every [new] country. And something very important: Don José is from Navarra. [Carmen]’s a gypsy from Navarra, too. And in the book, she says to him, ‘You know, I am Navarraise too.’ And Don José says, ‘No, what? You aren’t Navarraise. You are a gypsy.’ And I think this is the key of this character—I am sure. Sevilla is very far from Navarra—in that time, it was like going to Siberia for jail because he killed somebody and they said, ‘You have a choice: jail or army.’
“I saw a lot of productions where José is very naïve, very shy. It’s not this, in fact. In fact, why [did] he [try] to avoid Carmen at the beginning? Because he doesn’t want to have another trouble to go back to jail. It’s only for that. But he’s attracted also by this girl. He’s a very Latin guy and he’s very macho, you know? For him it’s hard to say to this girl, ‘I love you,’ because he never said that, even to his mum. Can you imagine this kind of guy, very powerful, simple . . . and very rustic at the same time?”
In fact, it’s hard not to imagine a bit of José in Alagna—or José as Alagna interprets him. Just as the conflicted brigadier finds it hard to say “I love you” to the object of his obsession, Alagna says it’s difficult to say the same words to his daughter. In a recent concert, he sang her a song he’d composed for her, blowing her a kiss through tears before jumping into a bright, up-tempo number. “You can understand how difficult is the life of the singer onstage . . . and thank God I have the possibility to do this onstage because, for me, it makes me more rich with my emotions. . . . She can understand I love her and it’s easier for me to say to her something onstage than backstage.”
The song was part of a concert to promote the release of Alagna’s 2009 CD, The Sicilian, a concert that was recorded on both CD and DVD. Lauded for his French rep and consistently praised for his phrasing, it’s no surprise that Alagna turned to the other roots of his family tree. Call it crossover—but remember that at one point, opera was itself considered a crossover.
“The most important [thing] is to please people,” Alagna says. “You receive a gift from nature, from God, from the devil, I don’t know. . . . You receive this gift and you must only use this gift for the minority? I think it’s not fair. You must use this gift for the largest public in the world. Your mission when you are an artist is to reach the heart of the others, to give emotions. And not everybody likes opera. And sometimes you must do something more.” His sincerity in these programs speaks to why he is a chart-topper in France in both the classical and popular worlds. It could be that the tenor once hailed as the next Pavarotti is, like the late Luciano, finding his own way to that title.
“The tenor voice, it’s a special voice. The tenor voice, it’s the popular voice. Because it was something new, the tenor was new,” says Alagna, citing Gilbert Duprez—and his innovative chest high C—as the basis for the tenore di forza and later dramatic tenor, a role that Alagna now embodies.
“The real, modern tenor is new, is a mutation,” he continues. “And because of this mutation, because of this very modern way, the tenor is the most popular voice. For this reason, sometimes the tenor record[s] the CDs or make[s] the movies. [It] is all the time the tenor, because it’s a popular sound. Caruso, . . . Pavarotti, Gigli, Corelli, del Monaco, Kraus . . . [all] sang songs. Because it is in the nature of the tenor, the tenor is made to please people.”
If performing is, as Alagna described it, a religious experience (“It’s like a prayer, when you go to church with everybody and you pray. It’s the same order.”), then the fraction of his time which he devotes to this rep is, as he says, “the real communion” with the audience. Such a communion crosses over into his classical rep, allowing Alagna to grow as much as his characters or audiences.
“I discover a lot of my personality singing characters onstage,” he explains. “For me, it was like therapy sometimes. For example, Cyrano de Bergerac was a real therapy for me. Because I have a complex like everybody, and Cyrano was the same. And when I played this character—phew!—all my complex went away. And also when you have some reaction in life, opera can help you to be better in life. The music, it’s so fantastic. It goes directly to your soul.”
Crowd-pleasing roles like Romeo, Don José, Canio, Edgard, Des Grieux, and Rodolfo offer Alagna the opportunity to directly connect with audiences through either the beauty of Bel Canto or the heart-on-the-sleeve emotions of verismo. While he may seemingly ignore the new music/indie classical movement (“Who is composing today opera?” he asks. “Nobody.”), his preservation of traditional opera is true to himself. His brothers, David and Frédérico Alagna, both over a decade younger, are on board with this mission with the 2008 opera Le dernier jour d’un condamné, a work that hearkens more to Massenet and Berlioz than Philip Glass or David Lang.
“Can you imagine those young guys losing time to write an opera? They can do pop songs or rap or something like that. . . . And this opera, it’s a wonderful one. They just made the competition in Hungary with five operas . . . and the winner was my brother with this opera. There were four prizes, [and] he received three. And the most important for me was the prize from the public—public choice.”
Such a desire to go back to basics leaves Alagna in a unique position as a champion of the old school while captivating new audiences. Previously wary of the German rep, he is now taking on Wagner bit by bit, starting with a biopic of the composer in which he plays the small role of Joseph Tichatschek, the original heldentenor.
“It was just the duet of Lohengrin and the beginning of Tannhäuser. But it was fantastic to do this, because I was like a student, you know? Because I don’t know the style, I don’t know the language, and it was very, very important for me to study that. It was fun. I don’t know if some day I will sing something in German, but I would like [to]. I love the German repertoire.”
Furthering his tango with the Teutonic, Alagna is looking at the French version of Weber’s Der Freischütz (arranged by the tenor’s favorite composer, Berlioz) and will soon sing his first Otello. “I am never ready for nothing,” he says when asked when he knew he was ready to take on one of the most demanding roles in the tenor rep. “For me, all the time when I receive a new proposal, the first reaction is to say, ‘Oh my, it is not for me. I can’t do that.’ They proposed me Otello many, many times. All the time, it was . . . ‘maybe it’s too early.’ But you know, sometimes it’s too early and soon it’s too late.”
Like Lanza and Pavarotti, Alagna will also do more film work—this time, ironically, in a movie inspired by the history of La Scala. And while Lanza died a scant few years before Alagna was born, he was able to speak with Pavarotti on his career, famously receiving a large amount of advice in a short answer. “In fact, he was very clever, Luciano, because he had a very correct instinct. Pavarotti spoke like a great sage. He had the serenity of these great people,” Alagna remembers. “And when he spoke, he told me, ‘Is better not to give you advice, because you’re doing right. If I give you some advice, I will put trouble in your mind, and I don’t want that. Continue to do what you are doing. Careful with the repertoire, and that’s all.’ He told me that. And I think today, when I have young people with me asking me something, I try to say the same, like him. Because it’s true—you can give some trouble. When it doesn’t work, okay, you can try to help. But when the voice is working, why are you giving . . . advice? It’s the most dangerous thing. . . . Giuseppe di Stefano was very charming when he said, ‘Don’t give me advice, because I can be wrong myself.’”
So now, on the other side of the conversation he once had with one-third of the Three Tenors, how does the so-called Fourth Tenor advise singers looking to discover their voice and become more in tune with their instruments?
“I will tell you something very stupid, but I am convinced it is like this,” he says. “I think when you are a singer, nature made the right programming in your computer. Your instrument is your body, you know. And I think you must learn how to play with this instrument. This is the most difficult. But because you are a singer, by nature the programming is made. And the problem is when people are trying to give you advice, you put problems in this instrument and it doesn’t work. And to be a singer, you must put away everything and [find] the naturality of your instrument. This is the most important.
“But it’s difficult, because it’s a miracle, the voice. Nobody can explain the voice. Everybody speaks about technique, about this, about this—it’s only blah, blah, blah. Nobody can learn [from] another one. In fact, you have to learn with[in] yourself. You have to listen to each part of your instrument. You have to [meditate] a lot to understand what’s happened with you. And after that, you have to manage this instrument that is growing older and older. You have the deterioration of the instrument.
“The technique is to sing tomorrow like yesterday. In fact, it’s like when you do makeup, you know? You start to have a problem here, and you put makeup. This is the technique. But the voice is a miracle, not something you can teach.”
