On May 22nd, American tenor James King celebrated his 75th birthday with the German publication of a full-scale autobiography called James King: Nun sollt Ihr mich befragen. The rather Wagnerian sounding title (which roughly translates as “Now you should ask me”) is doubly appropriate because Richard Wagner was also born on this day. Possessing a voice of great power and brilliance — perhaps the last major example of the classic baritonally-based Heldentenor — Mr. King was celebrated in the Wagner/Strauss Fach. He also had in his repertoire a range of Verdi and Puccini roles, Don José, as well as many less standard parts like Palestrina, the Drum Major, and Captain Vere. For over a decade he has been at the Indiana University Music School, not far from Wabash College, where I teach the classics. As an opera lover and serious singer myself, I have been lucky to come to know Mr. King, who gave a recital for us in 1995 that showed his voice essentially unimpaired. He sang a mighty B flat in the final encore that would be the envy of any tenor before the public today. Four years later he sang a concert performance of the second act of Parsifal at IU, and plans are underway for a Walküre Act I in the upcoming season.
This past February we went together to hear the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Tristan with Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen. The Kurwenal of that production, Alan Held, was especially pleased to see his elder colleague again, since he had made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in a staging of Billy Budd that included several performances by Mr. King. “It was great watching him work and also over the years hearing him talk in the cafeteria over lunch, “ Mr. Held wrote when the visit was being planned. “What a great, normal outlook he has always had on life — something to be emulated by any opera singer.” During that trip I had the chance to talk with Mr. King about his career as a performer and teacher, and about his remarkable vocal longevity. He was as generous sharing his thoughts with Classical Singer as he has always been in sharing his clarion voice.
Classical Singer: It seems like a very long way from Dodge City, Kansas to being named Kammersänger in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. Was it, in fact?
James King: Yes and no. We had a fine musical education when I was growing up in Kansas. Everybody studied an instrument —I played the violin — and there were always concerts going on in the school and in the community. In voice there was no “show choir” nonsense to get one into bad habits; popular singing was much closer technically to classical. Some major singers today almost boast about listening to the Rolling Stones as teenagers. That I don’t get at all. How can you learn to make beautiful sounds unless you are hearing them at an impressionable age? What a terrible shame that musical education is being eliminated from the schools when we are richer than ever as a country. It’s a terrible shame! You get students now in conservatories who want to be professional opera singers, and they don’t really know much about classical music. It’s not really their fault; the culture is not supporting them in serious musical interest the way it did people in my generation. We have to find a way to get our government and private organizations to take their commitment to the arts as seriously as the Europeans do. This is an issue I talk about whenever and wherever I can.
CS: You began singing as a baritone?
JK: For over ten years I sang as a baritone, everything from the Messiah solos to Alfio. Can you believe that? “Il cavallo scalpita!” When I was almost 30 I just petered out completely once on the low notes in “The People Who Walked,” and it began to dawn on me that I might be a tenor. But it took a lot of very hard and sometimes frustrating work to perfect the technique. I give two people major credit. First, Martial Singher, a really tough taskmaster and a man of the highest intelligence and cultivation, who helped many singers of all types, over the years, right down to Thomas Hampson. He knew I didn’t have much money at the time, and he taught me gratis, which is hard to imagine happening today. I retain the greatest respect and affection for Mr. Singher, and my autobiography is dedicated to his memory. Second is Oren Brown, who is still going strong at 90-some. I talked to him on the phone recently and his speaking voice sounded like a man half his age. I do his falsetto exercises every day even now. They gave me the ability to blend the proper amount of head voice into the chest, extending the range to the high C. I always took it for granted that any tenor should be able to sing the top C, which after all is written in a number of the scores we do. But maybe I worked harder than I needed to, since now people who don’t have the note and never did make big careers. [Author’s note: This high C can be heard most tellingly on DGG’s live recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten, where in the finale Mr. King, at age 52, threatens to eclipse the combined sound of Mmes Rysanek and Nilsson.]
CS: Could you give a summary of your technical approach?
JK: I’ve been singing steadily now for about sixty years, so I’ve thought about these questions more than most. Despite my being well known in German opera, my technique has always been based in classic Italian ideas. For me, the little Lamperti book says it all. [Vocal Wisdom by Giovanni Lamperti, Taplinger, 1957. Available at Amazon.com. Editor] You have to learn always to float the tone and never push, which takes complete freedom in the throat and jaw, and a tongue that is like a floppy piece of liver. (Have you ever noticed how unorthodox Placido Domingo’s tongue position is? I’ve seen him talk about it himself in print.) And it is crucial to find and maintain the proper breath pressure on every note throughout your range. That’s ultimately what made Bjoerling such a great singer. He was uncannily perfect in this question of breath pressure. I also believe very much in the low larynx, which is associated with the Melocchi method, but is just good basic technique to me. I first appreciated the importance of it from Ralph Erroll’s teaching when I was in college at LSU. Learning to cover properly in the passaggio is tricky too, because while the vowels must become darker, you have to find a way to keep the voice brilliant once you have gotten up and over. Birgit Nilsson used to tell me that she felt the tone was placed right in the middle of her forehead, and that the sound came out from the top of her head. I feel it come through the nose, too. You take in the breath primarily through the nose, not the mouth — mouth breathing leads to gasping — and then you feel the tone flowing out through the whole system.
I never vocalize from the bottom up, always from the top down, by thirds, beginning in falsetto. That kept me from the big danger of pulling up too much weight, which will end up killing you over time. But I come back to the basic concept of floating the tone, and I would add to it expressing the words — le parole sulle labbra. No matter what the basic quality of your voice is, from lightest to heaviest, that is what a good singer must do. I could sing very loud — and in recitals people sometimes tell me they feel I sing a little too loud — but I never push. People who do aren’t singing at 75, believe me. If you think of my two tenor age-mates who are still active, Nicolai Gedda and Carlo Bergonzi, you will see that we have in common this quality of never forcing the tone.
CS: When did you first sing as a tenor?
JK: I was 34 before I made my professional tenor debut, in 1961. I had an audition for the Met in 1959, but they weren’t willing to bet on a tenor who was so recently a baritone. (A funny story about that audition. On the train to New York from Philadelphia I struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be Giorgio Tozzi, and now all these years later we are colleagues in the IU music faculty.) My first tenor role was Don José in San Francisco, in an off-season young artists performance that had Marilyn Horne as Carmen. It went well, and I was asked the same summer by Cincinnati to step in for Sándor Kónya as Bacchus in Ariadne with Eleanor Steber. I didn’t know the opera at all, and went out and got a recording to see how it went. That’s how I first came to sing one of the parts I became best known for. Then there were two other bits of strange luck in 1961. I had come in second in something called the American Opera Auditions competition, which had as the first prize a European debut. It turned out that the man who won couldn’t go, so I ended up doing Cavaradossi in Florence, which some of the books list as my formal debut. There was a person from the Berlin management in the audience, who thought of me when Kónya later cancelled this season with them. Berlin was then my introduction to the German-speaking theatres, which used to be such a great training ground for young singers from all over. It is much different now, I think because they feel they have to hire more of their own.
So you can see that it was a lot of hard work followed by a series of good breaks. I did give up a secure academic career at the University of Kentucky when I went to Europe, though, and I couldn’t be certain how it would all turn out. Working that hard for so long to get the voice in the right place is a luxury that young people don’t seem to have today. And it hurts the men the most, since their voices mature later. (By the way, I feel very strongly that the age limit for men in these competitions should be significantly raised.) Everybody has to make a living, and many promising people either give up or strike out on careers before they are really ready and they come to grief. In his Christmas card last year Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was reminiscing about our work together and said that there are no true heroic tenors singing in Europe today at all.
CS: It is interesting that having begun as a baritone you became famous for the stratospheric Strauss tenor roles.
JK: Especially since throat doctors tell me that I do have baritone cords. But I could always sustain a high tessitura with power as long as the part was not too long. Bacchus in Ariadne suited me perfectly, and I sang it more than any other role, over 300 times. I also loved doing the Kaiser in Frau. What colleagues! Rysanek, Ludwig, Berry, and later Birgit Nilsson in Vienna, with Strauss’ friend Karl Böhm as our conductor and mentor. I think those performances in the first season at the new Met (1966-67) have become a bit of a legend, although what I chiefly remember is what Rudolf Bing paid me — which you would hardly believe if I told you. The fee per performance did not reach four figures, and Mr. Bing said I needed more experience in the house before he would consider raising my salary. So I ended up with a European-based career, and still feel most at home in Vienna, where I sang for thirty years and am an honorary citizen. Both the President and Chancellor of Austria sent warm greetings on my birthday.
No doubt the business side of the profession has changed drastically since those early days in New York. I always refused to hire a publicity agent, which I know must have hurt my American career. Now any one of the Three Tenors probably spends more on publicity in a year than I made. I do think that I was probably too easy about my fees, however, especially given the rarity of my voice type.
CS: And what about Wagner?
JK: Houses are always anxious to exploit my kind of voice in Wagner, but I was careful. I began with Lohengrin, in a performance where I replaced Kónya yet again. I had heard him in the part, and I remember how worried I was when I thought about the way he did “mein lieber Schwann.” I went to Martial Singher and said that I could never duplicate that Gigli-esque mezza voce. He told me that I didn’t have to, that I would sing my own Lohengrin. That’s an important thing for young singers to recognize: you should be aware of what colleagues are doing, but never be intimidated by them. Meistersinger was congenial and so was Parsifal, though in our recording Pierre Boulez claims that I am always a little ahead of the beat, and maybe I am. But Siegmund was my part, and I recorded it twice, once for London when Fischer-Dieskau decided that he was better off not venturing into tenor territory, and a live performance at Bayreuth in 1967 that Philips taped. That was the wonderful Wieland Wagner production. It might interest young people starting out to know that I was really nervous about having it correctly learned before the opening in 1965, so nervous in fact that at one point I thought it might not happen. But Wieland just told me flatly, “You will do it,” and I can still see Karl Böhm running backstage after the first act clapping his hands and calling out “King, King, King!” I guess it went pretty well. But I am always a little sad too when I remember that George London was to have been the Wotan. When he arrived for rehearsals it became clear that something was badly wrong; Nora London describes it all in her book about George.
Herbert von Karajan offered me both Siegfrieds at Salzburg, with the recordings, but the young hero was not for me and I told him I would only do Götterdämmerung. I thought we had it all arranged, but he must have been irritated, and he found himself another tenor. You have to be prepared for things like that to happen in a career if you are true to what you know you should and should not do.
CS: There must have been requests for Tristan.
JK: I actually agreed to sing it for Bayreuth in 1972 and had it all learned. But Karl Böhm warned me off the part. “King, on stage you are too much of a go-getter both vocally and dramatically,” he told me. “You could do it, but I think it would shorten your career.” He knew my voice in performance better than anybody, so I listened to him. He advised Leonie Rysanek not to do Isolde as well. I think he didn’t want any problems developing with his Strauss singers. In any event, Wolfgang Wagner was mad as could be when I withdrew, and that was the end of my singing at Bayreuth. But he did send a touching message for my birthday that suggests my work with him and his brother is remembered with gratitude.
Although I never sang Tristan on stage, I did excerpts in concert, once with Bernstein at Tanglewood. Lennie was a wonderful, inspiring musician, and we always liked and worked well with each other. But the orchestra didn’t know Tristan, and he wanted them to hear the vocal line, so he asked me to sing out at all the rehearsals. Sure enough, I was shot by the performance — there is a lesson for young singers there, too. People are always counting the number of performances an artist does, but nobody thinks about the toll rehearsals can take on you.
Listening to Ben Heppner in the part now I feel I was right not to have attempted it myself. Do you know that for the tenor, the second act is as long as the whole of Otello? Some 850 bars. And I am amazed that he is willing to sing the opera complete. When I was working on it I consulted Max Lorenz, who was both one of my teachers and an astute advisor. He told me that if I did it I should insist on the traditional cuts, especially the “Tag und Nacht” cut in Act II. Heppner sings it very beautifully — what a technique that man has! — but I would advise him not to do it often, and to keep lyrical Italian works in his repertoire as long as he can. Ludwig Stuthaus told me that when I began singing Wagner, and I’m sure it helped me to keep the voice fresh. Unfortunately, what everybody says is true: Over time the big Wagner parts do thicken the cords and make other things more difficult. For me it was right around 50 that my Italian roles began to pose some problems. And I am reminded of Jess Thomas, who was a great guy and a good friend. Things started not to go so well for him after Tristan. It is just a very dangerous part.
One more thing about Tristan. Bernstein had a project to record it with me and Jessye Norman, which I could have done, since in the studio the singing would have been spread out over a couple of weeks. But at the last minute for some reason Jessye decided against it and the idea was dropped. It’s too bad that recording never happened — I would have made quite a good effect in the third act delirium, I think. So that is a regret in my career along with not being able to accept a dinner invitation once from Max Lorenz when the other guest was Lauritz Melchoir.
CS: What differences do you see between today’s operatic world and the one you knew?
JK: Well, everybody comments on the commercialization and marketing of art and artists. I may be old-fashioned, but I think that what we do nourishes our own souls and the public’s too. It’s something Martin Luther wrote, that music is a great and glorious gift from God. When business interests begin to be the most important thing, we lose the whole point of the profession. And there seems to be less room for people at the top today as well. I think of the tenors who sang in my Fach: Vickers, McCracken, Thomas, Windgassen, Hopf, Kónya, Cox, and on the Italian side Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano, whose notorious cancellations made some good opportunities for me in Vienna. We all knew and respected each other. But today it seems that management wants to support a tiny group of people and push out all the rest. Look at what the recording industry has become. It is difficult for young artists today to find their own way; I don’t envy them.
CS: Any advice for those young artists?
JK: My friend Fischer-Dieskau is a good example. He not only defined modern Lieder singing, but he also conducts, writes extensively about music and poetry, and he paints too. And Leonie whom everybody — colleagues and fans alike — loved so much. She was completely dedicated to art. In the dozens of times we worked together I can’t remember once seeing her at a post-performance party. That aspect of our career was just too frivolous and distracting for her. So I would encourage singers to cultivate an asethetic and spiritual life as broadly as they can; I’m always reading something new myself, hoping to deepen my understanding and interpretation of music. My college teacher Dallas Draper always emphasized the importance of a wide cultural knowledge to me, so I would say become as fluent as you can in the European languages and literatures, too. Vocally if you want to last I advise avoiding the wobble at all costs. I never had that problem in my career and I don’t have it now. It is very hard to fix once it starts, maybe impossible. But more generally I think that we should never consider our vocal training as finished. I sing every day, and even now I am learning things about the healthy functioning of the voice I didn’t know twenty years ago. I like to say that I am the oldest student in the IU Music School.
What we do is not just a profession, it’s a vocation, devoted to a holde Kunst. And a true vocation involves hard work and difficult sacrifices. Certainly not everything in my life turned out exactly as I might have wanted, but when I look back I take great satisfaction in what I was able to achieve, and in the knowledge that many people appreciated it. My hope for young singers is that when they reach my age they will be able to feel the same way about their careers.
