Basses are not just at the bottom of the musical scale, they are also at the bottom of the pay scale. That makes Eric Halfvarson’s standing as one of the opera world’s great lead basses all the more admirable. It takes true grit to persevere in a career that sees colleagues in higher voice ranges getting not just more attention but more remuneration. Halfvarson achieved his consecration as a divo a dozen years ago, when he was admitted into the exclusive club of the Ring as performed at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian Holy of Holies.
Halfvarson grew up—along with three sisters—in a musical family, but the interests and activities of his early youth offered few intimations of future greatness. His mother was a voice teacher and his father conducted local choirs, but young Eric channelled his musical inclinations into playing the French horn. He dreamt of becoming a scientist and entered the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, intending to major in physics.
Toward the end of his freshman year Halfvarson got an inkling of his future career when he saw an Illinois Opera Theater production of Das Rheingold. He was totally enchanted—and before long, he sold his French horn, changed his major to music, and took exclusively to singing. The music department offered him a role model: voice teacher Mark Elyn, a bass who sang in the Opera House of Cologne (Germany), where Halfvarson would eventually have his European debut.
Halfvarson made his American debut as a contracted artist while still a junior in college, appearing in the Lake George Opera Festival production of Barber of Seville to replace a departing Don Basilio. Many roles with the Illinois Opera Theater followed. After completing a master’s degree in music in 1976 he joined the Houston Opera Theater (which eventually became the Houston Opera Studio).
Halfvarson found his first and only agent, Martha Munro, in the Houston company, where she had been working. Upon leaving her job she took several singers from the first year of the Texas Opera Theater tour to be her first stable of artists. When Eric moved to Manhattan in 1979, she managed to set up 30 auditions for him in a few months, setting him on the long path to international success.
The road to such international recognition is much more tortuous for basses than for their baritone and tenor colleagues because their voices take much longer to mature. In addition, bass roles are often small and hence get less attention, and less pay. Halfvarson jokes that his favorite scene in Götterdämmerung is at the end, when he gets to kill the tenor as he thinks to himself: “This is for making so much more money than I did, for all those years!” He has worked his way to the top not only with good humor, but also with a measure of practical philosophy, which he shared freely in this Classical Singer exclusive.
In your early career, was it a matter of accepting whatever suitable roles were offered to you?
Absolutely. There is a certain matter of chance involved. I had the opportunity to go to the Santa Fe Festival early on and tried Baron Ochs in “Rosenkavalier,” of all things. I had [at] one time thought I would never do that because it’s too much of a buffo role—but as a matter of fact, it’s now my favorite. I was successful there and went back for a couple of other Strauss parts—I did Henry Morosus in Die schweigsame Frau and La Roche in Capriccio. I had a lot of good experiences there.
So people began to assume that I was some sort of misplaced German singer—but, and I emphasize this frequently, I’m an American. I was bred to be versatile. I have had great success as well in French, Italian, English, and Russian. We basses have to be versatile. Even in the strict Fach system of Germany, the bass repertoire includes quite a variety of different parts, more so than any of the other voices.
It takes much longer for a bass’s voice to mature. Tell us about the evolution of your voice.
It does actually take longer for the physical maturation process and the vocal mechanism to finish [developing]. We basses are probably up into our early 30s before that’s really done. It’s important not to sing too hard any time before that. Unless you have a very economical, soft-textured, light voice, you should wait a while. You can get away with doing some small, short parts, and even some dramatic ones. I sang very heavily as Lo Zio Bonze in Madama Butterfly in those early years, until I finally swore off the part. It’s 90 seconds of pure vocal hell—but it makes you grow.
You have to have a firm understanding of the patience that’s necessary to grow slowly. I didn’t do Mephistopheles in Faust, for example, until I was in my early to middle 30s; the same was true of Filippo in Don Carlo. I didn’t do Hagen until my late 30s or around 40. And now, in my 50s, my voice is functioning about the way it should in these parts.
Does this maturation process make it difficult to earn a living in the bass repertoire?
A young bass can work almost constantly, doing parts like Friar Laurence, Don Basilio, and Colline, and just barely break even. I don’t think I really made a profit in the business in the regional operas of the country for about a dozen years. Some people may not be quite aware that Friar Laurence is not likely to be paid the same as Romeo or Juliet. Don Basilio may not get the same as the Count or Rosina. That’s true even later on in the bigger parts. We do have to kind of find a way to philosophize and accept that about our lives, and get by. Part of a bass’s acceptance of his lot in life is also patiently waiting for his voice to mature.
There is a saying that all philosophers are friends. Can you say the same of basses, more specifically of singers of Wagner?
Well, most of the basses that I know are really friends. We’re like the “Fraternal Order of the Brotherhood of Basses” because there are actually few enough of us around that there’s enough work for everybody, as opposed to some other voice parts for example, who have a bit more rigorous competition. There is a wonderful sense of camaraderie amongst us.
Opera singers are a very select group of people who are sort of crazy enough to do this for a living for decades of time. The family of us who are Wagnerians is an even smaller group, and we keep running into each other all the time. It’s actually kind of a heart-warming consolation against the otherwise fairly rigorous solitude of this lifestyle. There are those who have succeeded in arranging their lives with ongoing relationships, but it’s very difficult to do. Traveling 98 percent of the time, it’s very, very difficult to start a relationship with someone while you’re on the road. It’s hard to get to the third date with someone before a year or two goes by when you go back to a given place. It can be very, very hard sometimes. And yes, we kind of become philosophical about it.
Have you been tempted to accept roles that you really can’t handle?
No, because if I know I can’t handle it, I won’t do it. I lust after some of the music of Wotan, for example. I’ve toyed with the idea off and on because I have a good top. People have said, “Oh, you’re really a baritone, you should do that.” But I don’t think it’s really true, because over the last several years I have added a third to the bottom of my voice. I actually vocalize regularly from low A below the bass clef up to high G. But that doesn’t mean that I can maintain the scene of Wotan and Erda in Siegfried. I think that I would not survive it.
Jimmy Levine once told me: “You know, I think you should leave Wotan alone. I think it would be a mistake to do it. We like your low notes the way they are.” He really completely, directly dissuaded me from even thinking more about the Wotan roles—and it’s fine with me. I have enough to do with other things. There are other guys who are better suited to it. It’s a long hard job to do that part.
What does singing Wagner roles represent in the evolution of a professional career?
I think it represents a long, careful growth to reach a point of strength and endurance that you’re able to do the Olympics of singing—and Götterdämmerung is really the Olympics of singing, and particularly for me as Hagen. It’s a role that was written very heavily and requires a kind of heavyweight-lifter-of-the-Olympics approach in certain places in the piece, where the orchestra plays as loudly as any orchestra ever in the classical music world. If you can get to this point, get through a show, survive, and do a whole run of shows and not hurt yourself, that’s an accomplishment. I’ve been on stage now for more than 30 years. It has been really in these past 15 years that I felt I could do it.
How do you go about preparing for a new role?
Well, I’ve passed the time when I would have tried to get away with a short part in a Russian opera without actually speaking any of the language. As I begin to actually study the language, I realize the fallacy of that. You must learn to speak at least some of the language. My process is to go from the text first and learn something about the character and the expression that he’s trying to make, and then go into the music.
As an artist who has turned into a singer-actor, it’s become vitally important to me that I would never dare play a complex, fully fleshed out human character like Filippo in Don Carlo or like Pimen in Boris Gudonov without a more intimate knowledge of the text and of the language.
Are you saying that singing a piece of opera begins with the language and understanding its meaning before you really get into the music?
Well, it kind of happens simultaneously. As a musician by family upbringing, the music comes to me so easily it’s kind of by nature. I’ve tried not to let myself so simply go to the music, but study the text, which needs more concentration and work and should rise to an equal level in my mind as the fluidity of the music.
More and more in the last decade, I have been studying as if I were a conductor. I actually study the score and I conduct myself through it, conduct recordings of it—and watch different conductors do it so I have a sense of what’s going on in the total ensemble as a conductor might perceive it, what sort of problems he has to deal with, and what I might expect or not expect from him given certain situations. Dare I say I would like to try my hand at conducting professionally some time?
Do you listen to other versions for clues on how you want to interpret a new role?
I use every [bit of] help I can find! I see no value in abstaining from any material that’s available. But I say that with the caution that one should not imitate particularly the tone concept of some other singer or how they’ve done anything. I have had some bad experiences with that, so I know what I’m talking about. When I was in school, and later in the Houston Studio Opera days, I loved George London. I wanted desperately to be George London. It nearly ruined me! I discovered, of course, that no one else can be George London, or Nicolai Ghiaurov, or Cesare Siepi, to name a few of my favorites—and later on, Gottlob Frick! I’m a huge fan of recordings of Gottlob Frick.
I tell young singers when I give masterclasses that this is a very dangerous thing, to become too enamored of one particular singer. You must make yourself listen to a number of different people. If there’s one you love a lot, listen to him or her only about once a week, and in that week listen to five other people sing the same repertoire. You must keep your mind open and listen to a number of different singers. Since the recording industry provides us with quite a wonderful, rich record of so much of performance history, there’s no reason why you can’t listen to a lot of different singers. You hear different tempi, you hear different textures, and you hear all kinds of things. Then you can use your own mind to create what you want to do.
How have you approached the acting part of a role?
Well, my acting, I would have to say, has been a long, slow, and sort of natural development. I haven’t studied the craft like a typical graduate of a seven-year actors’ school might describe that process. I’m sure that there’s a lot of validity and importance in what they study and learn, but I was sort of thrown on to the stage. I had to find a way to survive there. I’ve done more than 120 different characters over the course of 30 years, many of them very different from each other. I’ve been under the direction of some of the best directors and conductors in the world. I’ve picked up a lot of tips along the way.
Mostly, it’s terribly simple, in the most basic concept. There’s a sense of a presence of mind. You have to walk past the proscenium and enter the stage and be there, 100 percent. That means being in the present instant of time, observing the environment and reacting to it. It sounds like a simplistic statement, but if you can do that, you’ve practically made it all the way there. You simply have a thought of what the character wants, in general, for the whole piece to the end, and what he wants in this instant to get towards that end. If you can be there now, it’s kind of like a meditation.
There’s a wonderful book I ran into a couple of years ago by Ekhart Tolle. It’s called The Power of Now. He described very simply a kind of a model of how our brains work with two minds: one is our ego mind that thinks thoughts all the time—usually about the future, the past, and very rarely, the present—instant of time. The other part of your mind is kind of sitting in the back, quietly observing. You forget that that’s you! From the perspective of that other mind, you can observe the fact that: “Oh, I’m thinking thoughts.” You will recognize that you possess a center of consciousness that’s different from the mind that thinks thoughts. That’s the real you. And from that point of will, you have the power to say, “Stop!” And your brain, which is just a computer used for thinking thoughts, will obey and stop for at least an instant.
That instant of silence is golden. Gradually, with practice, that instant of silence can be expanded into longer and longer periods of time. That presence of mind, or presence of you—when you are purely there, thinking no thoughts but simply being, as yourself or as a character on stage—is the secret to stage presence. You’re really most alive because the present instant of time is really all there is. The entire universe is collected in the present instant of time. The past is gone and the future doesn’t exist yet. That’s kind of what the actor has to be able to do on the stage. You walk onto the stage and you must be there now. If you can do that, that’s all there is to it.
