Behind the scenes at opera’s event of the year
Louis Wise meets super-tenor Jonas Kaufmann, star of the Royal Opera’s new ‘Fidelio’ and father of a similarly strong-lunged infant
At Covent Garden, rehearsals for Beethoven’s Fidelio are in full swing. This muchanticipated new version stars super-tenor Jonas Kaufmann and rising soprano Lise Davidsen, and is directed by opera’s current favourite bad boy Tobias Kratzer; all three are onstage as they run through the finale of Act Two. Beethoven’s only opera famously climaxes in an ecstatic paean to liberty, but all the same it’s a shock when a baby starts yelling in the auditorium. The mind boggles: is this the latest provocation by Kratzer, whose Tannhäuser at last year’s Bayreuth caused quite a stir? Actually, no. It’s just Kaufmann’s infant son Valentin, who has clearly inherited a little of his father’s lung power.
“He didn’t recognise me today,” says Kaufmann a little later on in his dressing room, his child now much happier in his arms; the baby’s mother, the director Christiane Lutz, hovers nearby. “I had the beard and the hair.” This much is true – playing the unfortunate Florestan, who has been sequestered in a dungeon for years and is about to be saved by his wife Leonore (or, as she has crossdressed herself, “Fidelio”), the 51-year-old’s period breeches and shirt are offset by a distressing amount of long, greasy hair. He looks like Ozzy Osbourne after a heavy session at the Bullingdon Club. “Ja!,” says Kaufmann delightedly when this is put to him. “A combination of Ozzy Osbourne and Jesus, probably.”
This Fidelio is set to be the operatic highlight of the year. The star wattage of the participants, plus the staging of the piece in the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, couldn’t have it any other way. Though the piece is often called “flawed”, thanks to its uneven plot and clunky bits of dialogue, its story of redemption and freedom, and, of course, its rapturous music (conducted here by Antonio Pappano), make it an undeniable part of the canon. Still, it comes with questions.
What can Kaufmann, a veteran of several versions, bring new to the role? What will his fellow German Kratzer do with one of their country’s most revered emblems? Can Davidsen keep up her momentum as the buzziest soprano on the block? And finally, will anyone actually get to see it? Anyone not very rich, that is. There was a big kerfuffle when tickets went on sale and were immediately snapped up by the “Friends” of Covent Garden – it seemed that civilians barely got scraps.
On this latter note, Kaufmann is grimly sanguine. The German superstar points out that the last show he did at Covent Garden, 2019’s
La forza del destino, also sold out immediately. A lot of his fans have become “Friends” so they can get to his shows first. He laughs almost hysterically at the notion of putting on more shows (there are six in the run). And he then points out the blazingly obvious.
“It’s a great art form, but unfortunately a very expensive one. And someone has to finance it, so… if it’s not the state, you need donors.” [No time to dwell on the fact that the RO gets an awful lot of money from the state too.] “And then what else can you do, but give the donors first choice for the tickets?”
Kaufmann has sung Florestan for years: “It was actually my first major German repertoire role before I started on Wagner,” he points out. In the past he has stated that the role is one of the most demanding in his repertoire owing to the big scene in the second act in which the singer has to convey both ecstasy and desperation as he hallucinates about his wife.
“I needed to be convinced a lot [to do it again]. I wasn’t sure whether this is a good idea, because everyone told me how dangerous it is, and how careful you have to be, and you can ruin your instrument.” But instead, he says, it’s been the opposite. “It opened a whole new world for me… the throat, and everything, is just open and wide and it felt good. It gave me extra confidence to continue.”
Kratzer’s very meta Tannhäuser included the title character as a clown, onstage copulation and a trip to Burger King. Granted, the stage here is dominated by a massive slab of black rock on which the stars totter precariously; around them sits the chorus. It’s a concept, sure, but it hardly feels outrageous.
“I don’t think that the show is scandalous in any way,” says the 40-year-old Kratzer, who is much chattier and cheerier than his reputation might suggest. He admits he is bored of being called provocative, “because I’m not going for provocation”.
“I look at what a piece needs, and then I do what is best for the piece at that moment.” It’s his first production in Great Britain, but he isn’t overthinking how a British audience might receive his work.
“I try to be a little aware,” he tempers. “It’s a little bit like speaking with a person. I’m not trying to please everyone I speak with, and I’m not trying to provoke everyone I speak with. But I want to at least speak the same language.”
There is, he says, maybe a light irony to a German director staging the German composer of the Anthem of Europe in Britain’s premier opera house, just weeks after Brexit has been confirmed, “but I don’t want it to be read in terms of nationality,” he insists, “because I think it’s really a universal message. There’s a message of empathy that goes far beyond countries or borders.”
Davidsen is arguably as much of an attraction on the bill as Kaufmann, especially after shining as Elisabeth in Kratzer’s Tannhäuser last year, and then in her Met debut, last autumn, in The Queen of Spades. This isn’t her Covent Garden debut, having taken various smaller parts in the RO’S 2018
‘Everyone told me how “Fidelio” can ruin your voice, but it opened up a whole new world for me’
‘Opera is a great art form. But unfortunately a very expensive one, and someone has to sponsor it’
Ring cycle. “In a way that was more fun,” chuckles the 33-year-old Norwegian in her laconic way. “Because the pressure wasn’t on me.”
In rehearsals, Davidsen looks preoccupied, but that’s because she’s a perfectionist, she admits. Either way, she has total confidence in her director’s vision. For one thing, she says it’s common sense to keep the action roughly in the 1790s, as it makes Leonore’s cross-dressing – and everyone’s easy acceptance of it – more believable. “It’s very difficult to take a woman dressing up as a man seriously in 2020,” she reasons. “You wouldn’t really care!” For another, she likes his reading of the piece, which argues that all it needs is one individual like Leonore to strike out and spark real change. Greta Thunberg was an inspiration, something Kaufmann readily endorses. These days, says the tenor, a revolution doesn’t need to be as bloody as in Beethoven’s day.
“Greta Thunberg has started something incredible,” he enthuses. “You can be with her, or not, but you have to admire how much this one little girl has changed the world. This is enormous. This is something probably Beethoven’s Fidelio will never achieve,” he says with a high laugh. “But,” he smiles, “we can try!”