COMMUNICATION
This communication factor is an elusive thing at best. What moves them on Tuesday may not move them on Thursday. What didn’t move them on Wednesday may bring them to their knees on Saturday. That’s the whole brilliance and beauty of the live artistic experience. To me, it’s a dialogue.
ENTERTAINMENT
Entertainment is a tough word. I think we do get preoccupied in this country with celebrity, with the messenger rather than the message. You can’t deny the power of celebrity or stardom, or even the necessity of it. But when I am teaching a class or working with students, I want to free them from that preoccupation. I certainly try to free myself. It’s one of the great protections for nerves. When I stand in front of an audience, I promise you I am not concerned with getting my personal message to those people. That doesn’t interest me. What interests me is to enliven or re-create either the character or the world of which I’m singing – of which I’m really the medium. In fact, the movement of communication is from the audience to my world. I’m the doorway through which they participate in the artistic journey. I want people to be drawn to The Barber, or Busoni’s Faust, or Werther. Do I want to entertain them? Not particularly. But the artistic adventure is very entertaining. But I am a bit of a weird guy. I think museums and libraries are entertaining. I think knowing more tomorrow than I know today is extremely entertaining.
PERFORMANCE
I really don’t like the word performance, because it has a feeling of ‘I have something I’m going to regurgitate at you…’ The Barber of Seville is a comedy, in the Shakespearean sense of comedy. The comedy comes from the human truth in it. When you do The Barber of Seville, the last thing you really should be preoccupied with is getting laughs. You take those people very seriously, and then they become extremely funny. We should not take ourselves seriously, but take what we are about very seriously.
RECITALS
What is the perfect recital? Somebody singing and somebody listening. The recital forum, and forum is just the right word, will never be dead. I think the forum in which songs are conveyed and given and re-created is under some stress, because forums and paradigms shift all the time. But if we are honestly concerned about the song itself, the form will take care of itself. People will always, as they always have, come together in some community and participate in telling each other the story of why we’re here, what we have done, what was my day like, what were my ancestors like. Song is a diary of our collective journey. Sometimes It will grow, when someone comes along who has a particular charisma.
CHARISMA
I can’t define what charisma really is. But I’ll tell you that every person that I have ever found charismatic – and I’ve fallen for as many as everybody else on the popular level – has had a particular, deep connection with what it is that they are doing. It may not be intellectual, and it may not even be all that altruistic, but it’s a huge commitment to why they are standing out there. I can only define what my own commitment is. It is certainly not random, and it is certainly not only about standing out there.”
LANGUAGES
“I don’t speak Polish or Russian, but you learn it ‘as if.’ You become somewhat familiar, and you have to find a way, at least phonetically, to make the language your own. In the normal languages we work in English, Italian, French and German I think any singer should have an essentially rudimentary ability. I think the old Grand Tour of Europe that used to be fundamental to any young person’s – certainly a singer’s – rounded education needs to be re-installed.
“The idea of going over for a couple of years in a German repertory house is not viable any more because the financial demands of the houses are such that the positions are not as interesting. And the backup system that you would need to keep your voice intact is, perhaps, not what it used to be. But that is not to say that I don’t recommend going to Europe and getting jobs. I have lived over there for quite some time and German will always be my first second language. I am not anywhere near as conversant in French as I am in German, but I can make myself understood, or I can embarrass myself thoroughly in French. I can do that in English, too. Italian, of course, is the great opera language and I wish I spoke it better than I do. It was a mistake, in my twenties, not to nail down Italian and French.”
TRAINING
“Sometimes I wonder whether we are training singers or whether we are training voices. A singer’s development that is bereft of leider or ballads doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s about telling the story. It’s a tremendous challenge for a singer to stand there and tell you the story of Earlkoening. Young singers should work in the song repertoire both for their voices and to develop the entire communicative skill, the tool box that you have to open up to get rid of yourself and give the world. We must never lose sight of the fact that it’s about the song, not the singer’s ability to hit high G. Of course we are working on legato, on communication, on letting your psychology color the voice. I do not believe in objectively coloring the voice on this vowel, or that word. But you must be able to find, technically, where that vowel, or that expression or that psychology can live until it departs your body and becomes somebody else’s property. It’s not about Tom Hampson. It’s about Goethe, or Mozart, or Schubert or Heine. That’s the great challenge of teaching, showing the audience that it’s about the repertoire, it’s about the expression, it’s about their fantasy, it’s about the world, it’s about the re-telling of the story of life. It’s that basic. It is the diary of our being together and having been together. It is not about 200 years ago; that is a coincidence. We live in the same continuum of experience. We wear these clothes; they wore those. Does that mean something? Yes, in terms of the context. But what about the human emotion? Reasonability and compassion, and the balance of it: That to me is what the arts have to offer.”
AUDIENCE
“I am as preoccupied as anyone else is about losing audience. Not for me, but in general. I am completely convinced that we are not losing audience. We are gaining audience. The audience is shifting. I am not talking about how many bodies are in the chairs, I am talking about people’s innate connection to a body of repertoire, a body of music that I truly am passionate about. I believe that it is much more a part of their lives than even they, themselves, understand. I don’t see any reason you can’t have in your subconscious Schubert, Schumann, Verdi, Mahler, Locatelli, and also the Beatles, Sarah Vaughan, and Randy Travis and Garth Brooks.”
VERSATILITY
“I think that young singers should not limit themselves at all. If they are going into the Verdi or Wagner Fach, those are exactly the people that I want to hear sing Handel or Schubert when they are in their twenties. I would say to a singer, if you are preoccupied with re-convincing people, or if you are slightly concerned that if you are singing Cole Porter people won’t think you can sing Don Giovanni, then don’t even try. I was as serious about recording Gershwin and Cole Porter as I was about recording Schubert. Are they comparable? No. The danger of singing such a wide range of material is superficiality. You must sing what you are going to sing, and give it everything you have. There is a profundity, sometimes, in the so-called lighter music that is overwhelming. Being slightly mischievous, I love to find the profundity in the banal and the superficial in the serious.”
TEMPI
The profound things are very often slow. But slowness, in and of itself, is very seldom profound. That is one of the best tempo indications that I can give anybody about anything. If you are preoccupied with ‘slow,’ you have missed the boat. You have been searching so hard for the trees, you have missed the forest.”
CONCERT DRESS
“Clara Schumann started the idea of concert dress: the tuxedo, the proper dress. I find it irrelevant; it comes and goes. The problem with changing the dress code is that it draws attention to the dress and the person and that statement. It is good to exhaust the curiosity as to what he or she will wear early on so we can just get on with it. I think it should be something dark and discrete that is flattering and vocally friendly, elegant, but not ostentatious, something that gives a different atmosphere than the everyday dress but does not make a huge statement. I think somebody coming out to sing songs in a beautiful, elegant silk Cossack shirt would be nice. But the bells and whistles should not take us away from the point of why we are there.”
OPERA PRODUCTIONS
“A director’s interpretation of a piece is interesting only when it is an enlightenment to the story. It’s especially distracting when you can’t understand what the director is thinking unless you already know the story. If that’s the road we are going down, then I want to say, ‘could you please write your own opera, a 21st century Don Giovanni, but leave Mozart and da Ponte at peace!’”
A SINGER’S NEEDS
“The financial needs of young people the starving actor or singer waiting on tables that’s always going to be there. We all have to go through that gauntlet. But you have to keep your eye on the ball, and you must make sure that you are trying to train yourself for economic purposes that your economic purposes will be fulfilled if you follow your artistic dream. It’s easier said than done and there isn’t much negotiation in that. If you are frustrated with your career and your development, I can promise you that you are not going to find the answer in another book about singing. You are going to find it in a balanced appreciation of what it is that you call life.”
RENAISSANCE MINDS
“I get pretty concerned sometimes about the lack of renaissance mind training that young artists are getting today. Where are the poetry classes? The history classes? Where are the sociology classes? There is a set of books, A History of Private Life, an encyclopedia of the history of manners, of gestures. Hand those books to anybody who wants to sing. Or George Jellenick’s brilliant book, History Through the Opera Glass, one of the most useful books ever written to enlighten one on what the operatic experience is. I enjoy all of this, the ideas , the metaphors behind the stories. Can you listen to The House of Life song cycle by Vaughan Williams and not know a thing about astrology? Absolutely! But why would you want to?
