Can’t sing, or won’t sing? Why opera stars are so prone to pulling out
Rupert Christiansen looks at a trend that’s both time-honoured and also frustratingly on the rise
Backstage at Covent Garden, everyone is on tenterhooks. The great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann – perhaps opera’s biggest box office draw – is preparing to make his long–awaited debut tonight in the supremely testing title role of Verdi’s Otello.
An expensive new production will be framing him and all performances have long been sold out. The anxiety is that for the past few years, dogged by problems with his vocal cords and respiratory infections, Kaufmann has developed an alarming reputation for cancelling – often at short notice, as audiences for his Barbican concert last January know to their cost.
Kaufmann isn’t alone. Kaufmann’s Iago, Ludovic Tézier, has already disappeared: he cancelled his performances in Don Carlo last month on health grounds, and when his doctors wouldn’t sign him off in time for all of Otello’s rehearsals, the management decided to replace him. Covent Garden has endured a terrible run of cancellitis this season, with stars dropping like flies. Anna Netrebko withdrew from Norma, claiming that the title role was wrong for her voice, and for other reasons Roberto Alagna, Rolando Villazón, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Krassimira Stoyanova have also withdrawn, along with several lesser luminaries.
What is going on? Four years ago, the Royal Opera’s music director Antonio Pappano exploded with irritation at something he regards as a new trend. “There’s something about this generation of singers,” he said. “It’s something that is very, very frustrating for me personally.”
Is this justified? Nobody has done a statistical survey, but anecdotally it is often said that there are more respiratory infections, viruses and allergies around (singers react particularly badly to the dust endemic to theatres). And perhaps we have as a culture become more neurotically self-conscious about the state of our bodies and more prone to recourse to doctors and antibiotics.
But there have always been singers with good and bad track records. Joan Sutherland, Janet Baker and Birgit Nilsson in the past, Renée Fleming, Plácido Domingo, and Joyce Didonato in the present have cancelled only for very urgent reasons, relying on special techniques that help them sing well even if they aren’t feeling tiptop or have the snuffles that the rest of us deal with on a daily basis. Maria Callas – and several other stars still very much alive – would not be ranked in this category. Sebastian Schwarz, Glyndebourne’s general director, believes that the cause of cancellitis is not so much physical as mental. “Fear is the key,” he says. “Fear of making a mistake, fear of ruining a voice, all made worse by the pressure that comes nowadays from being so aware of causes and consequences.”
In his previous job in Vienna, he remembers Anna Caterina Antonacci cancelling a solo recital at 15 minutes’ notice. “She had sung the same programme a couple of nights previously and it was fine; she sang it a couple of nights later too. She had just lost her nerve and there was nothing I could do except go out in front of the audience and tell them what little I knew,” he says.
Schwarz, a former singer himself, believes in being sympathetic. “I would never make someone sing if they didn’t want to. But I do insist that they see a specialist who can provide very precise analysis and reassure them. If there’s time, that usually works.”
But singers don’t have the same on with the show philosophy as actors. It wouldn’t be fair to say that opera singers are lazy, but they are inhibited. Rosalind Plowright once said to me: “I wish I could take my voice out at night, like false teeth, and forget about it. But it’s always there, like a genie in a bottle, out of my control.”
Another problem for opera is its understudy system, known as ‘‘covering’’. ‘‘Covers’’ are singers who can stand in for stars at rehearsals or emergencies, but they are expensive and managers sometimes prefer to cross their fingers and fly in a substitute from abroad if the need arises. This isn’t failsafe, as demonstrated by last month’s bank holiday matinee of Don Carlo at Covent Garden when the soprano replacing Krassimira Stoyanova as Elisabetta fell dramatically ill minutes before curtain up and the only option was to perform the opera eliminating all the character’s scenes.
Audiences for Otello will be partly reassured to hear that sterling veteran Gregory Kunde will be on 24-hour call for Kaufmann, and is scheduled to perform on his own considerable merits at the end of the run.
‘Fear is the key. Fear of making a mistake, fear of ruining a voice’