Interview: Ludovic Tézier

[From OPERA, October 2014, pp. 1212-20]

Among the oft-repeated refrains of operatic doom-mongers, the lament regarding today’s dearth of baritones with the wherewithal—in terms of technique, stylistic sense and basic vocal apparatus—to tackle Verdi’s great roles is one of the most common. But if this is heard more regularly in Britain then elsewhere, it might well be due to the fact that Ludovic Tézier has sung here so rarely in recent years. In 1997 and ’98—‘when I was young, thin and charming’, the French baritone remembers with a laugh—he donned Raimbaud’s habit in Glyndebourne’s Le Comte Ory.

But his only appearances at Covent Garden have been in 2009’s concert performances of Linda di Chamounix (subsequently released on Opera Rara), as Massenet’s Albert in 2004, and as Belcore in the Laurent Pelly L’elisir d’amore when it was new in 2007. The reactions in these pages to those two staged performances neatly sum up Tézier’s primary virtues: Max Loppert, reviewing the Werther, hailed ‘the best lyric baritone to have emerged from France in many years and aristocratically handsome to boot’; in the Donizetti, ‘Tézier sang his music cleanly and strongly’, wrote Richard Fairman.

Britain’s loss has been the rest of the operatic world’s gain. But when we speak, it’s clear that Tézier is a remarkably relaxed customer, for whom the health of the voice is more important than any ambitions to conquer the great stages. Nevertheless, the big Verdian engagements are there: Posa, in both French and Italian, is a signature role, and has been in his repertoire for nearly a decade; his performances as Don Carlo to Jonas Kaufmann’s Don Alvaro in Munich’s La forza del destino last autumn and again this summer were universally praised; April saw him sing Verdi’s other baritone Don Carlo in Monte-Carlo’s new Ernani; he was Germont père in Paris’s new Traviata in June; Renato has long been in his repertoire.

This summer also saw him sing Alphonse XI opposite Juan Diego Flórez and Elīna Garanča in concert performances of Donizetti’s La Favorite in Salzburg. But his schedule is still punctuated with performances of roles one might have assumed he’d have left behind: next year he sings Albert (Werther) in Vienna, and he was still stepping out as Marcello in Paris last season, where he expands his Puccini repertoire this month, taking on Scarpia for the first time.

It’s no surprise that the music of French composers features heavily in Tézier’s repertoire: Massenet’s baritone version of Werther has proved something of a calling card for him (often jumping in for indisposed tenors), as has, more predictably, Escamillo, with which he made his Met debut a decade ago. French works by Italian composers (not only La Favorite and Don Carlos, but also, opposite Alagna and Dessay, Lucie de Lammermoor in Lyon and on disc) inevitably play to the virtues that have also made Tézier a valuable champion of rarer French repertoire.

His performance in the title role on Naïve’s release of Bizet’s Ivan IV, for example, led Rodney Milnes to describe him as ‘a classic French baritone with warmly focused tone and a real sense of musical line who sings off the words like his great predecessors’. Those predecessors were a formative influence, but only once he had been forced to abandon an early dream of tenor stardom and once his teacher, the former soprano Claudine Duprat, had given him discs of Michel Dens, Ernest Blanc and Robert Massard. ‘I was not trying to copy their vocalism: they were mature when they made those recordings, and I was not. I had no way to imitate the colour, but I did try to imitate the style, to find the way to breathe and sustain the phrase.’

Asked when he decided to become a singer, he turns the question on its head. ‘I never decided to be a singer. If once you take a heroin shot, that doesn’t necessarily mean you decide to be a junkie. No, you try it, and then it’s in your blood. For me it was opera!’ Of his time growing up in Marseille he says, ‘We lived very simply, and I had parents who saved nothing for themselves: everything they earned was for me and my sister.

‘I had the fortune at the time of getting into the paradis at the Opéra de Marseille for nearly nothing. I was 13 or 14 and I saw Parsifal. My father thought I was mad, but he said, “If you want to go, I’ll buy you the best place that I can”. If he had been able to come with me, he would have, but we couldn’t afford two seats. So I went to the theatre alone to attend this performance, and this first “shot” was just like a dream.’

His father—‘quite a guy, something very special’—was an autodidact who devoured second-hand books, started working in a Marseille bakery aged 13 and ended up running the ticket-machine systems in the city’s Métro. ‘I once did a chess competition when I was very young,’ Tézier recalls; ‘my father looked at it and said, “oh, that’s interesting”. Two months later he was beating me! With such a Commendatore at home, it was not easy for a young man, but fortunately he couldn’t sing very well, so that was my way to exist.’

And those first attempts at singing were made at home, alone, in a house where music was all around. ‘I never got “interested” in music, because I was born in it. No one at home played an instrument. We were just listeners. From Jacques Brel, passing through Beethoven and then the Beatles—at home, there was only good or bad music, no “classical”. I hardly dare say what I’m listening to now. My father-in-law is a fan of heavy metal so we have Black Sabbath in common—tremendous musicians and tremendous workers. And I’m a desperate fan of the violin.’

The ‘beautiful voices on scratchy records’ he heard at home are to this day like the ‘madeleine de Proust’ for Tézier. It just so happened, however, that many of those were tenors: ‘Corelli (not the worst), André D’Arkor (a wonderful Belgian tenor, so beautiful), and Georges Thill, of course. And naturally I was tempted to sing the same arias, because I was listening to them all day long, and trying to sing the same music. And it was not without any trouble—now we know why!—but I used to sing along to records, never in front of my parents. They had absolutely no idea.

‘The voice was really high then, and I could actually reach the tenor tessitura—in my way, which I thought was the right way. And then I met my first teacher—who to this day is the only person who I see regularly—and she said to me straight away, “You’re not a tenor. But you could probably be a good baritone.” I was really disappointed, to tell you the truth. Then I learned that once you’re born a baritone, you have to get along with it. This is something physical, you cannot change it.’

Then came a first competition, which Tézier won. ‘I said to my parents, “You know, I want to be a singer.” And that was when I was about 18.’ He was surprised by his father’s attitude to this decision: ‘I was expecting a kind of fury, that he’d tell me I had to go and find a “real” job. But absolutely not. He asked what this school of singing was, and I explained, and he said to me—I remember precisely—“But do you really want to do that?”. I said, “I’m young, I want to try it, I don’t know”. Because you don’t know.’

Tézier hedged his bets early on, studying economics while also taking singing classes in the Centre National d’Artistes Lyriques, in the same Marseille quartier as his university. But the singing soon took over, and he went to the Atelier Lyrique at the Opéra de Paris. ‘That should have involved doing roles, but at the time, the link to the Opéra was near to nothing. We were studying in the building but we had no opportunity to sing on stage. So I was studying every day in a small studio with professors.’

Among these professors was Michel Sénéchal, the veteran French tenor who was director of the Atelier at the time, and whom Tézier describes as ‘part of our history, more than clever, a very special man with a tremendous heart. He’s not part of the theatre; he is the theatre. He knows e-v-e-r-y trick, and this is very important for a young singer. And if he tells you how to do something, you have to pay attention. And we would spend hours speaking about the job and how to do it. Today I still use some of those small tricks, and, 25 years later, they still make me smile.’

A further key event came when Tézier had a chance to sing for Christa Ludwig, who organized an audition for him with an agent in Zurich, which then led to the baritone, at the age of 22, joining the ensemble of Oper Luzern. She must have seen a special talent, I suggest. ‘Maybe. I was a very good singer when she was in the room. But when she left the room, I was not good any more! There are very few people like that. She improves you. Just her presence is kind of magnetic, and you’re happy to sing for her.

‘And then you try it again at home and it’s terrible! And I wouldn’t say that I was already an opera singer,’ says Tézier of himself at the time he joined the Swiss company, ‘but I had some weapons.’ His first major Lucerne role, Don Giovanni in 1992, earned a complimentary review in these pages: ‘The title role was sung by a polished young French baritone, Ludovic Tézier,’ wrote Andrew Clark, ‘who gave all the notes full value, impressively so in the Champagne Aria.’

Other roles in Lucerne included a rare excursion into English repertoire as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Marcello, Escamillo, Sharpless and Count Almaviva. But Tézier was increasingly expected to tackle larger and larger roles, for which he didn’t feel ready. He returned to France when Jean-Pierre Brossmann invited him to sing the Figaro Count at the Opéra de Lyon in 1995.

A stint with the Lyon ensemble followed, and then came the first invitations to Toulouse, an important house in Tézier’s career, whose audience he still counts as his ‘home crowd—in the way, I would say, that my father was: probably my greatest supporters, but also the ones who expect the most. And to tell you the truth, I also expect from myself to give something special here.’

Certainly the Théâtre du Capitole’s medium-sized, 1,300-seat auditorium has
provided a good testing ground. ‘This is where I’ve started with some of the most beautiful parts—and some of them perhaps not expected from a Frenchman.’ So, in 1998, the year in which Tézier and Garanča were awarded joint second place in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition (behind Erwin Schrott), he sang Schaunard in Toulouse and made the jump to Zurga in Les Pêcheurs de perles.

He tackled another major French part—the lead in Thomas’s Hamlet—in 2000 (alternating with Thomas Hampson), and also his first and, as yet, only Wagner role, Wolfram. In 2003 came Yevgeny Onegin, the role also of the Tézier’s La Scala debut, in 2005. ‘I opened the score and started by learning “Ya … ochen … shchastliv”,’ he says of his first encounter with Onegin. ‘I had to be patient. It took a year, but I love it. Now I can speak a bit of the language; to meet a culture, you have to.’ Yeletsky is now also in his repertoire, as well as Gryaznoy in The Tsar’s Bride.

Nicolas Joel, then Toulouse’s boss, came close to persuading Tézier to tackle Jokanaan (at one stage also slated for performance at La Monnaie) and Mandryka. What happened, I ask? The answer is characteristically straightforward. ‘I trusted Nicolas—I was singing Schaunard when he asked me to do Zurga, and there’s a huge gap between those roles. Then he really wanted me as Mandryka. I checked the score and it looked good, but it was just too early. Not only because I want to have a 40-year career, but also because I wanted to survive the part on stage. Especially with Mandryka or Jokanaan, you can begin like a fireball and vanish in ten minutes. I wasn’t ready technically, and if I could have done this properly at the time, I would probably have begun what we call “la grande carrière” earlier. And I knew that when I refused it. But I’ve no regrets, because I’m here today.’

This sort of patience and care is perhaps what one might expect from a singer, prone to a certain amount of self-deprecation, who describes himself as ‘kind of a diesel’. He explains: ‘It takes a while to warm up. It’s good not to push. If a door opens, you have to go for it, but you have to wait your turn.’ He also characterizes himself as an artisan: ‘To be an artist, you have to work hard as an artisan, although I know this isn’t very modern today, where you’re expected to be a born artist. Even Mozart had to learn a bit!’

Taking his lead from the gender of ‘la voix’ in French, Tézier personifies his voice as ‘she’ and adopts a gentlemanly attitude towards ‘her’. ‘We’re not getting younger,’ he explains, ‘so you have to follow your voice—to help her, to be very cautious and very nice with her, to seduce her.’ And the relationship with the voice trumps everything else: ‘If the voice is healthy and good, I’m healthy and good. If the voice is lazy or tired, I’m sad and totally depressed.’

That relationship is clearly going well, even if Tézier seems as reluctant to offer details of long-term plans as he is to talk about the nitty-gritty of his technique. He adopts a philosophical attitude: he will tackle new roles if he’s offered them at the right time. Scarpia is one significant addition, as will be Rigoletto, a role he has sung so far only in special performances in the small town of Besançon, east of Dijon. His Gilda on that occasion was his wife, the soprano Cassandre Berthon—‘a great singer, and I’d say that even if she wasn’t my wife!’.

The conductor was Jean-François Verdier. ‘For my taste, he is one of the best French conductors. He’s in charge of a small but good orchestra in a small structure there, and we wanted to do something with him. We decided to do Rigoletto together, to build our own project. So we did a new production in ten days, with only beginners on the stage. It was quite an event in Besançon. I was just back from the Met, but there was a very special energy, and this Rigoletto, still today, gives me goose bumps. To sing with the woman you love in your arms at the end, though, was tough. She was so good at that moment, so I had to think about rugby or whatever during “Gilda! Mia Gilda!”—I wouldn’t have been able to sing otherwise!’

Rigoletto is one of the three operas Tézier has said are his favourites, and he’s planning to tackle the title role in more conventional circumstances in Toulouse, although not until the 2015-16 season at the earliest. The other two are Otello and Parsifal. Are roles in those works in his sights too? The answer is characteristically non-committal, but, in the case of the Verdi, it sets Tézier off on some more personal history.

‘Shakespeare fascinated me as a child, because—believe it or not—on French TV in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there would be those beautiful Royal Shakespeare Company stagings—in English, with subtitles. At that time culture was open for everybody. Try to get that now, and you have to pay for it. Of course I was ten or 11 and I couldn’t understand a word. But I was already trying to follow with subtitles and already listening to the music, because this is pure music. People in France and Germany say the English never had a great musician, and I usually say, “They did: William Shakespeare”. Purcell is good. Shakespeare is better. Sorry about that!

‘Of course I have sung Thomas’s Hamlet on stage, a very nice piece and, until the Yorick scene, actually very close—or as close as possible in French—to the Shakespeare. And it’s a shame that he didn’t do the duel on stage: that would have been tremendous to sing. But I had the fortune to have the famous speech’—he begins to recite Hamlet’s best-known monologue in English—‘which is fascinating. And I could sing it!’ Next on the list, though, is Macbeth, with Iago to follow in good time after that. ‘This is how I will try to play Shakespeare. I will try to disappear on stage—in Donizetti, for example, you can’t, because it’s a bit show-off, it’s bel canto. But I remember watching the Hamlet with my four-year-old son, explaining to him that while you see this is Jacobi coming on stage, you forget it the next second. That’s the ideal. I’m not an actor, nor Derek Jacobi, but I try to think like that.’

On picking up his Strauss plans again, he is relaxed but enthusiastic: ‘I would still like to do them. If they refuse themselves to me—and I say that consciously—I will let them go.’ Amfortas, though, is closer to his heart. ‘I would definitely like to do that. I much prefer Wagner to Strauss—less creamy. In Wagner there is something a great deal more powerful, more grounded, nothing fake. And especially Parsifal. There’s no cream there, this is very real.’

And bigger Wagner, Wotan perhaps? ‘Like every singer and every human being, I’m looking to the moon,’ he answers enigmatically. ‘If you have the chance once and you have the voice—and an angel on your shoulder or the stars aligned in the sky—to be able to sing this music, then sing it! But I don’t want to compromise myself and do it for my own egotistical pleasure. I do it in the shower every day,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘and my soap likes it very much.’

In the meantime, at the other end of the vocal spectrum, he’s just as keen to keep singing Mozart. ‘I’m desperately trying to get my agent to find me some Count Almavivas, because I’m not getting any younger. Maybe also one or two Don Giovannis, which I’d definitely sing differently now from when I was slimmer!’ He goes on to explain his theory about Mozart’s great seducer: ‘You don’t have to be beautiful, you have to be fragile. This is no Casanova, and he’s much more than a seducer—he’s a charmer, in the old sense of the word. It’s about magic.’ His view might be wrong, he admits, but he hopes to be able to explore it on stage.

In the meantime, it looks like London and Covent Garden will have to wait for at least another season to see Tézier return, even though he says he loves both the city and the theatre, describing the Royal Opera as more like an ‘opera home’ than an ‘opera house’. This month, as well as unveiling his Scarpia, Tézier will reprise Marc-Antoine in Massenet’s Cléopâtre (in concert, as at the 2012 Salzburg Whitsun Festival), and then there’s more Verdi coming up, in the guise of Germont père, in New York in December and Baden-Baden in May.

And as our conversation comes to a close, Tézier reflects briefly on being a père himself, on his own family and home life. He concludes with a touching and, one can’t help feeling, very French metaphor. ‘To think of my wife and my three wonderful children makes me realize that they are my centre. I’m passionate about my job, but it is my mistress. My true love is my family. But my job is a nice mistress, and I love her very much.’

Freeing the Imagination: An Interview with Brigitte Fassbaender

[From OPERA, July 2014, pp. 829-835]

©Marc Gilsdorf

An interview with a retired singer might normally consist primarily of reminiscences, talk of foundations, teaching and the like. Things are a little different with Brigitte Fassbaender, who turns 75 this month. The former mezzo—whose singing career started with her engagement (aged 21) at the Munich Staatsoper at the beginning of the 1960s and lasted until her retirement in 1995—has now been directing opera for well over two decades, including a 13-year stint as Intendant at the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck, where she produced some three dozen shows. 

That appointment came to an end in 2012, but further directing engagements are proliferating, many of them with a distinctly Straussian flavour: next year she’s in charge of a new Rosenkavalier in Baden-Baden, a Capriccio is planned for 2017 at Oper Frankfurt (where she staged a new Ariadne in the autumn); plans for Arabella in Leipzig in 2016 had to be abandoned—postponed rather than cancelled, she hopes—because of a clash with another of her duties, as director of the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a post she has held since 2009 and which is contracted to run until at least 2017. To that we can add masterclasses and a week-long Lieder festival, the Eppaner Liedsommer, which she runs in the South Tyrol. She’s also recently served as presiding artistic spirit over a recording, using hand-picked singers, of all of Strauss’s songs and melodramas (for which Fassbaender herself is the reader). She describes it as a ‘personal gift from me to one of my life-long most beloved composers’; the box set (released on TwoPianists Records) was launched in Garmisch on the composer’s birthday, June 11. 

©Marc Gilsdorf

All in all, Fassbaender’s workload would keep someone half her age busy; and she speaks 

longingly about a time when she might be able to pursue her painting more, if something akin to retirement ever materializes. When she was profiled in these pages (August 1981, pp. 789-794), Susan Gould described her as a ‘cornucopia of paradoxes’, and it’s one of these paradoxes that seems to play some role in keeping her so youthful: an irreverence and an acute sense of the ridiculous bubble on the surface during our conversation, but do nothing to mask the fierce intellect and deep seriousness—and love of her art—that lie beneath. Added to this are an openness, and an absolute lack of snobbery, pretentiousness or any trace of the grand manner one might justifiably expect from someone who was, after all, one of the great singers of the second half of the 20th century. 

She loves being as busy as she is, but gives a characteristically self-deprecating answer when I ask what she liked best about her Innsbruck post. ‘I could sleep in my own bed for 13 years! Because, as a singer, you are two thirds of the year travelling and living in hotels, and this is horrible. My contract was for two productions a year, so I had a lot to do there.’ Besides opera, this included directing musicals (she also wrote the books for two, Shylock and Lulu), operetta and plays. ‘I had to take care of the ensemble, and I coached the singers technically—lots of them—and it was an enormous challenge to run such a theatre with 400 personnel.’ The discussion soon reveals a perhaps unexpected passion for a composer, Britten, whose operas she never sang in but which she clearly loves directing. ‘I did lots of Britten in Innsbruck—Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Albert Herring. It was unknown there, but they were amazed that it’s so wonderful: I think Britten is one of the greatest opera composers in the last century.’ 

In fact, there is not much that Fassbaender didn’t direct there. She singles out a production of Les Troyens as an example of the theatre’s level of ambition, but adds, ‘Strangely enough, I didn’t do very much Mozart: only Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni and Lucio Silla. I would love to do Così or something like that, because it’s so difficult. But what is more difficult? Everything is difficult in a way!’ She certainly speaks from experience regarding Lucio Silla: her 1998 touring staging of that work for the now-defunct Opera for Europe was, by her own admission, not a great success: ‘It didn’t go very well, because it was technically very difficult. In London [at the Shaftesbury Theatre] they didn’t get it together, so it was a disastrous performance.’ Her only other UK staging was Der ferne Klang for Opera North in 1992. ‘It went quite well,’ she says. ‘I love the opera and would love to do something like that again, but it’s very difficult in terms of audience: if you run a theatre you have to think of the “Auslastung” [the ticket sales]. It would be a dream to direct something else here. But I think it will stay a dream,’ she adds with a laugh: ‘one must have unfulfilled dreams in life!’ 

Either way, she’s happy to continue to be kept so busy after Innsbruck. ‘Especially at my age, it’s not so common that one gets asked. I just did this Albert Herring in Vienna, this Ariadne in Frankfurt. And there are interesting things coming, too.’ These include a new Rigoletto in Regensburg in the autumn, Yevgeny Onegin in Kiel early in the new year, La Bohème in Coburg next June and a Freischütz at Jennersdorf next summer, as well as a Paul Bunyan, already scheduled for Frankfurt in autumn 2016. But it’s next Easter’s Rosenkavalier at Baden-Baden, her third production of that work, that will perhaps be her highest-profile directorial engagement to date. It features a starry cast headed by Anja Harteros and Magdalena Kožená, and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle—‘a wonderful musician’.  

There are few works with which Fassbaender is more closely associated than Strauss’s Komödie für Musik. Long before her Octavian became legendary, this was the piece with which she had what she describes as her first high-profile international engagement, a Covent Garden revival with Sena Jurinac, Lucia Popp and ‘this wonderful Ochs here, Michael Langdon’. (Of her performance on 11 November 1971, Harold Rosenthal wrote succinctly: ‘Brigitte Fassbaender, very young, gamin-like, handsome, sensual, and with a lovely rich, dark mezzo’.) How does she approach a piece that she has such a famous history of singing in herself? ‘I waited a long time before I felt I could direct it, because your imagination is so occupied with these old, traditional productions, which I had done all these years all around the world. But then something happened that freed my imagination. I saw Ruth Berghaus’s [1992] production in Frankfurt. This was a shock, but a very healthy one.’ She’s especially pleased that Berghaus’s designer for that production, Erich Wonder, has been lured out of retirement to work with her on the Baden-Baden production.

‘I could leave behind all these traditional obsessions and think totally freely about it, feel free from this traditional way of doing it, without betraying the piece. I come from that tradition, but I maintain that you must have new ideas and that it’s legitimate to have new ideas—without destroying the piece.’ But it’s clearly also about balance: ‘there was the tendency, especially in Germany, to make everything like trash. And that I don’t like: you don’t need to. But they’re turning back the wheel in a way. They want to see the piece again, and not just ugliness on a rubbish heap, or in a station. Der Rosenkavalier Act 2 in the Bahnhof? That’s not for me!’ 

At the beginning of her career, she was lucky enough to have worked with several people who were close friends and colleagues of Strauss himself: Karl Böhm, Rudolf Hartmann—‘all those old Nazis!’. But when asked which directors she particularly enjoyed working with, she begins with Günther Rennert, the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Intendant from 1967 to ’76, when Fassbaender’s career arguably reached its apogee—she was made Kammersänger there in 1970, at the time the youngest singer ever to receive the title in Germany. ‘He was wonderful, and I loved to work for him. And I knew and worked with all these famous directors in my time, real opera directors, like Ponnelle and Götz Friedrich. And the young Otto Schenk.’ 

She also speaks highly of Kurt Horres, and describes his Munich Werther as ‘still valid, still very acceptable’ (a recording of her incandescent performance in it, opposite Domingo, is available on Orfeo). ‘But I missed working with people like Neuenfels and Konwitschny—I would love to have worked with him. We know each other, and he asked me if I would come back on stage under his direction: just a small part which he wanted to do as a main part, in Jenůfa or something, and I said, “No, I can’t come back.” Also, Vienna asked me for the old Countess in Queen of Spades. But I never wanted to get old on stage. Sure, you can sing at 80 like Mödl did, but that’s not for me.’ 

When asked about conductors, she mentions three: ‘Giulini, Kleiber and Kubelík—he was a wonderful conductor. But they are only examples of this great league of conductors I was happy to work with. There are others, I worked with them all. Even with Stokowski. It was only once and it was funny, because he looked like a very old woman; he was deaf and blind but still very keen. And when I got introduced to him, he said, “Fassbaender, Fassbaender … didn’t we work together in 1911?” There had been a famous singer in Munich called Zdenka Mottl-Fassbender, and he’d worked with her as a young young Korrepetitor in Munich.’ 

On the whole, however, Fassbaender’s feelings towards conductors might best be described as ambivalent, and when I ask if her new role means a new attitude towards conductors, her answer is brief, and accompanied by a big laugh: ‘It hasn’t changed a lot, my impression of conductors, no.’ She continues: ‘There are some very nice ones. But, nein nein, it is still notable that conductors don’t understand a lot about voices, so their ideas of how a singer is cast or shall react or sing is far away from my ideas. So, there we have to fight together always.’ Does she feel that this contributes to the difficulties facing young singers? ‘There are so many young singers around today, for many it seems it’s not worth taking care of one, because ten others are waiting. So people use them and throw them away. Only very rarely does a singer have the responsibility for himself, and the concentration and the discipline to say “no” to totally false offers. It’s the singers’ mentality in a way, because they always think they’ll never get asked again if they ever say “no”. In a way it’s right to think like that. But if you have a rare talent and a wonderful gift, then you have to wait for your time.’ 

In her own career, when did she learn how to say ‘no’? ‘I had my father [the baritone Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender], who was a teacher, and he knew what it meant to make a solid career. He always told me that it takes ten years in a fixed position in an ensemble to build up a career step by step. Not singing the main parts immediately at 21 or 22. And I started at 21, so I sang every Page and every Magd, whatever there was, together with bigger parts coming up. But the main parts, like Octavian or Eboli or Carmen, I sang in my late 20s or early 30s, when the voice was totally matured.’

There were still plenty of offers that Fassbaender did turn down. ‘There was a time when I could have sung the Italian parts all around. Like Amneris, and Eboli. I sang Eboli a lot, but for Amneris and Azucena I said “no”.’ She recorded Azucena in the studio with Giulini, of course, and did tackle Amneris—‘only once in Munich, with the young Muti: a wonderful, very successful experience’ (also captured on Orfeo, also opposite Domingo). She discovered afterwards that Giulietta Simionato had been in the audience: ‘A horrible, horrible moment! If I’d known beforehand I wouldn’t have sung a note. But then I got asked to sing it all over. But I stopped it, because I felt it’s not my way of working, to jump in every other night somewhere else in this really challenging part; and I wanted to keep the voice fresh and young for the Lieder singing. They offered me Kundry and Ortrud and all this, and I always said “no”.’

Having grown up watching her father on the stage, did she ever envy other voice types their roles? ‘There are two soprano roles I’d love to have sung: Tosca and Fidelio. They are two poles of a woman’s life, in terms of character and emotions. But I’m not a soprano; I’m a mezzo-soprano and am very content with all the parts I sang. In a way I would love to have been a tenor, but I was content. A part is what you make it.’ And the fact that Fassbaender’s mother was the actress Sabine Peters also clearly influenced her artistic make-up: ‘I always felt more a singing actress on the opera stage than a singer. I didn’t want to be called an opera singer; I was always ashamed to be called an opera singer. I was not interested in singing a Marschallin; I was much more content with Octavian, because, acting-wise, it’s much more interesting. And I didn’t want to sit around in the dressing room for a whole act!’ 

At this point I bring up something Fassbaender said in an earlier interview: ‘We Octavians get some very peculiar fan mail.’ She elaborates in somewhat forceful terms. ‘Some of these fans … first of all, they are not fans: they are freaks. They get confused between the private person and the person on stage. They think what one does on stage in this travesti, this must be something interesting in your private life as well. So you get obscure offers,’ she says with a laugh, ‘and many, many invitations for lunch, love letters and even people threatening suicide when they don’t get a response. So I had a lot of this, and after performances, some would follow my car when I went home, and I’d have to do like they do in the films to shake them off. They came to my house in the night, surrounded my house, walked through the fence and looked into the windows. Even once, they pinched something from my garbage and sent it back in the mail. Or they broke into my car—one year when I sang in Bayreuth—and pinched my score. But really, it’s strange, these things—spooky, horrible. But it’s over. Although there are still one or two! But I bet it happens to every Octavian. And it happens a lot to singers.’ It’s not all bad, though: ‘some of them are really nice and intelligent and not burdensome,’ she takes care to add. 

When the conversation gets on to the state of opera today, Fassbaender doesn’t mince her words either, even if those words are leavened by a humour and warmth that is difficult to translate onto the page. ‘No, it’s not in a healthy state,’ she says unequivocally. The first problem regards casting. ‘Could you imagine a career like Margaret Price’s or Sutherland’s these days? And this is something unhealthy. You must not look like a model on stage. Singers are not made looking like models. They must have a certain physiognomy. The dramatic singers, for example, they must be like that. I don’t like the “perfection” and the superficiality: only the packaging is interesting now. And that’s how most young singers sound now. I can’t immediately recognize a singer any more. They lose their absolute vocal personality, their timbre, because they want only to be as beautiful as possible—or as loud as possible or as high as possible. And this is a pity, although it has always been the same in a way.’

Second: ‘Now I also feel when I work with young singers, as a director or in masterclasses, that they’re not disciplined, they don’t have the concentration. They play around with their Handy and they sit at night surfing the Internet. They don’t have any time to concentrate on the profession and learn. Young singers are not prepared enough when they arrive at a rehearsal, because they don’t have time for it, and they don’t get enough sleep because until four o’clock in the morning or whatever they’re on Facebook.’ 

The third problem on the list is perhaps less expected. ‘They all drink water—by the litre, only water—which can’t be healthy, because every second young singer I know has something called reflux. This is the modern singer’s disease. And I’m sure it comes from drinking water all the time.’ And what did she drink as a singer? ‘Not water,’ she answers with a laugh. ‘Water too, but not only! We didn’t drink such a lot. It wasn’t necessary. Now they do it on the concert platform and they put it on their chair. This looks awful; this was unthinkable in my time.

‘I’m also playing with my phone and looking on the Internet,’ she admits, ‘but I’m not obsessed with it: it’s not my whole life. And this I miss a bit: the real knowing about the seriousness of this profession. It’s not hard work to get an opera singer: to get an artist is hard work, to become an artist. And if it’s a fantastic talent, I really try to influence and take care of somebody like that. I don’t give private lessons. I have only a handful of young colleagues who I sometimes coach. Most of my work is done in the masterclasses.’ A formal teaching position is something she tried and didn’t like: ‘I was for eight years at the Musikhochschule in Munich, but it was not my way of teaching. I’m no civil servant.’ 

As the conversation comes to a close we come back to directing, and what her further ambitions in that regard are. A return to Salome is one, to revisit and develop the concept she explored when staging it in Innsbruck. But finally it’s back to Britten: her ultimate dream is to tackle one of his works at Glyndebourne, where she sang only once (Clairon in Capriccio in 1990)—‘but my father was there very involved at the beginning of Glyndebourne, and that was something life-long for him: he loved it’. If someone at the East Sussex festival is listening, maybe that particular dream won’t remain unfulfilled. 

Interview: Jonas Kaufmann

[Originally published on musicalcriticism.com, ahead of Kaufmann's first ROH Cavaradossi] 

Jonas Kaufmann is a rare breed of singer. Coming originally from Munich, he has avoided being type-cast and has a repertoire that ranges from Mozart to Wagner, encompassing many of the great French and Italian roles. This season at Covent Garden he's already impressed critics and audiences alike opposite Anna Netrebko in La traviata. His Don José in Francesca Zambello's production of Carmen(when it opened in 2006) received the kind of universal acclaim that's hard to come by in the opera world. He first made an impression at the Royal Opera House when he appeared opposite Angela Gheorghiu in Puccini's La Rondine and it's in the same composer's Tosca that he makes a role debut next week, as Mario Cavaradossi.

When we meet for our interview, I find Kaufmann laid-back and easy-going, and the conversation leads straight into Tosca. 'It's a beautiful production,' he enthuses, 'and one that, let's say, goes according to the original story, which makes it very easy to remember. It seems to be pretty easy in a positive way, not simple but not too interventionist.'

I ask specifically about the character of Cavaradossi and how he fits in with the other, flawed characters Kaufmann has played – Don Carlo, Don José and Alfredo in La Traviata. I put it to him that sometimes Scarpia, as the villain of the piece, can come across as the more interesting character, his attempted seduction of Tosca eliciting strange sympathy from the audience.

'I don't see it in this way. Of course Scarpia would love to have a relationship in this way with Tosca but I think he hasn't. It's an ongoing thing that he wants her, particularly in the sexual way. He's not an aristocrat, he's not well-educated, and therefore apart from my complaints that Tosca's jealous about everything and everybody, I think I really love her and I'm really confident that she's really with me. So it's not as though I have any doubts about the relationship or am jealous about her. Well, obviously, the whole trouble is caused by my doubts regarding her loyalty, but it's maybe just that I know her really well - that she can't keep secrets. The problems start just because I don't tell her what's going on and she's suspicious, and that's why it all ends tragically. I suppose the character's got more nobility than the others you mention: he's not as innocent, as foolish as Alfredo; not aggressively as passionate and driven as Don José. It's different, but only, I think, because he feels safe in the relationship with her and that's what allows him to keep calm.'

I mention an interview with Paolo Gavanelli, who will be playing Scarpia in this revival. In this interview, the baritone plays devil's advocate and talks about Scarpia as just doing his job, controlling Cavaradossi who is, after all a revolutionary. 'If Cavaradossi had been a really active revolutionary it would be different,' admits Kaufmann. 'He's obviously a sympathiser of the Napoleonic idea, of the revolutionary idea. As Scarpia says disrespectfully, he's reading Voltaire, but he's not active as such. It's not that he's in this group of people who want to overthrow the government. He feels sympathy for that idea, and it's through the coincidence that he meets Angelotti on his flight that he starts playing a more active role; that's why he suddenly needs to help.'

Is he naïve to let himself get caught up in it all? 'No, I think it's a very clever plan. It would have worked. He has the house, the secret path that leads to the house, the hidden cave where Angelotti can stay and no-one will find him. It's a clever plan and a good idea, and if Tosca hadn't appeared and had the doubts after seeing Angelotti wearing women's clothes for his escape, the suspicion that there might be an affair with another girl, everything would have been pretty easy and smooth.' Is he undone by Tosca? 'More undone by himself and the fact that he doesn't tell her the truth from the start and say to her, "This is what's happening and please don't tell anyone". The moment he realises he should have told her, he doesn't have the chance: he just says in the second act, "quanto lo vedesti", so "whatever you have seen, don't say anything or you kill me" and she doesn't understand. She has an initial doubt and Scarpia feeds this as part of his attempt at making him more open to her. Maybe I disagree with that view of Scarpia but maybe you're right, we just see the opera from different angles. Let's put it this way, though: in this interpretation, Scarpia is definitely not well educated, he has no respect for art, for culture or anything apart from his own interests. After all, he's the tyrant, he's torturing the people.'

And how does Kaufmann assess the challenge of singing the role? 'Oh, it's just great, great music. You've been mentioning other parts – Don José, Don Carlo – which are beautiful to sing, but I've been longing for this Cavaradossi for a long time, and now finally, for the first time, I get to sing it. It's one of those dreams come true, because Tosca is such a beautiful opera. From the very first to the last note it is so rich, so...' Words fail him at this point. 'Aaaah! So great. And I'm very happy to be doing the first production in a relatively traditional, non-interventionist way; if you start in one of those turned-round productions where you can't follow the plot, it's very difficult to do it for the first time.'

Although Kaufmann has established an enviable reputation in French and Italian opera, he is also moving into the German repertory, having sung both Walter in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal, as well as Florestan in Fidelio (a role he reprises at the Paris Opera in the Autumn). He's already booked in to sing Lohengrin in Munich in September 2010. I ask him if he feels himself, as German tenor, being pulled inevitably towards the bigger Wagnerian roles, but he makes it clear that he never wants to be pigeon-holed in terms of his voice. 'Once you start singing this repertoire, once you step into the box called "Wagnerian tenor", especially if you're a German tenor and have a certain success in singing that, there's such a longing for those kind of voices that everybody wants to force you to accept almost only German repertory. I think this is a big mistake since you're losing a lot of your qualities if you concentrating only on this pretty heavy stuff. So I try to avoid that. I love Wagner, I have to say, I really like to sing Wagner, but I don't want to miss out on the others. I don't want to miss out Puccini or Verdi or the French composers.'

And Lohengrin and Walter are still roles in the Romantic tradition? 'Yes, I think even Wagner himself had the idea of an Italian-style singer performing his operas. He didn't agree at all with having Sprechgesang where it's more talking and speaking than singing, and where you're losing the lines and you're losing the warmth of the voice. Again I think it's a mistake and it can happen if you always force yourself to do the same things; the voice will not only get heavier but also less flexible and hard, and maybe less pretty, and I worry about losing those qualities. I should add that it's also not just a purely logical and practical thing to save the voice: I would simply miss the other things so much, like Cavaradossi. And there are so many other things to do, like Butterfly, which is coming soon. I can't name them all: everything up to Otello, so Trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, many, many beautiful operas, and later maybe also Aida.'

So he sees himself going towards the heavier Verdi too? 'I see myself going towards the heavier roles but in all the repertories: the French, the German and the Italian. And I'll try to keep as much of the lighter things as possible in between, just to keep the voice in good shape, to keep its flexibility and to be able to sing Lied, which I adore. I don't want to miss out by screwing up or fooling about with the voice. The problem in our business is that you plan so far in advance; there are so many decisions you have to take now for things that come in six or seven years and it's ridiculous because you're not a machine or some sort of medium who can see the future. You're dealing with more human material and it's a good thing that we grow with the things we do, that we change slightly, develop, increase, whatever you want to call it. 

'But it's change, and sometimes you change in directions you don't expect and then you're screwed because you made the wrong decisions years and years before. Therefore, I hope that I've made the right decisions and that as far as I see now in my schedule, I'll keep all those things: I'll keep the Mozart and I'll keep the lighter Verdi but I can feel also that my voice is going in this direction. With the breaks in my hand I let it go but not maybe as fast as it wants to, or maybe as fast as the opera world wants it to.' I mention how the opera world is always longing for the perfect Tristan or Siegfried and he interjects, 'Or Otello. There's always a discussion about Otello. I've already had many offers for the role and it's difficult to say no because it's such a beautiful opera and such a great role, but…' he laughs. But there's plenty of time, I suggest. 'Exactly'.

I bring up the rumours that about him being involved in Les Troyens at Covent Garden in 2012, suggesting that the role of Enée in the Berlioz opera would tie in with his vocal game-plan. He reacts to the rumour with well-rehearsed evasion. 'I heard so,' he laughs, but goes on: 'Exactly, and in 2011, I'm going my first Siegmund [in Die Walküre] at the Met in New York. So yes, step by step, one after the other. But again, I try to avoid having too many heavy things at the same time, so it's one or two productions per year of this type and the rest is French or Italian repertoire. So I'm going to be debuting at the beginning of next year as Roméo [at the Teatro la Fenice in Venice], because I've never done it and I want to do it now because it's more than time to, and Werther will come in 2010 for the first time. So there are many other things of the not-too-heavy repertory that have to be done too.'

Obviously Kaufmann's versatility has given him the opportunity to pick and choose, but judging from our conversation, there's one role that is testing his resolve to be sensible with his voice. 'One of the very finest houses offered me Otello and I really struggled to decide whether or not I should do it. I said I need to do Trovatore and Ballo before. At least those two, and we're only talking about the Verdi repertory. There's not time to do that in the next four years so it just has to wait.' But it will come? 'It will come; the problem is not that I'm dreaming of things that will never come, the problem is different. I always compare it to the child in a candy store, where you see that and you want this and that and you can't do it at the same time without ending up with a stomach ache. So you have to be patient and you have to feel the joy of waiting for something beautiful to come: that's what I'm doing now, which is great.'

With such a wide repertory and no obvious desire to specialise in any particular area, I ask Kaufmann if he sees himself as an old-fashioned singer. He agrees but adds: 'Usually "old-fashioned" has this dash of not being really attractive, let's put it that way. I see it in this case as being very positive. In the singing tradition, in the singing technique, we – humanity – did much better in the past than we do now. If you listen to old recordings, to the old Italian traditions of singing, you can hear how solid their technique was, how much care they took and how they covered their voice in cotton wool just to protect it. You can hear that in the singing, that they really were careful. They got to the stage where they were able to sing everything. And now you're supposed to concentrate on something. Sometimes it's not your fault, let's say, tastes also change, which means today you don't want a Lohengrin to sound like a light Mozart singer, but there was a time where that was absolutely acceptable. 

'Of course, if your voice is limited to a certain volume, you can't sing everything, you can only sing as much as you're actually allowed to without being covered by the orchestra. But if you have a voice that can get through the orchestra, even if it's the heavier one, for me it's a better choice to do everything - to do the lighter as well as the heavier things. That's better than just saying, "The heavy roles are my speciality, I can get through everything, just squeeze it out and let the turbo run every time," because that's not interesting. For me, it's not interesting. Sometimes now you hear voices, especially in the Wagnerian repertory, where there is no beauty in the voice, the voice is loud, the voice is digging through everything like a drill and you lose the musicality. You don't have the big phrases, you don't have the big bows, the intimacy. And it's really a pity.

'For instance, when I did Parsifal for the first time, I'd never expected there to be so much piano in this piece because you always hear them,' here Kaufmann makes a straining, groaning sound, 'All the time. There are so many passages where a Lied voice is not only enough but is really needed, because it's written in a way – so soft, so intimate – that this sort of sound, this light sound is ideal. But of course, there are some points where you can't avoid singing really loud, so in Parsifal in the Second Act if you sing 'Amfortas! - Die wunde!' softly, you might as well sing it at home because no-one will hear you. But the ability, the flexibility to have both, is so important and so interesting to hear. By specialising you lose quality and you lose certain abilities. I've been doing this job for quite a while now and whenever I'm doing a new part I discover something new; I always find some new colour, phrasing, something technical, whatever it is, and I add that to the collection of possible varieties and I can use it in other interpretations. Even with things I've already done many times I think, "Oh well, why don't you do that like this, why don't you try this sound in there?" And that also helps you to keep it interesting for yourself, because if just you keep doing the same things it's such a stupidity, it's easy to fall into routine, which then can't transmit as many emotions.'

And that's the whole point of live performance - that you have these option to call upon each time? 'Exactly. But sometimes you hear singers who, when they repeat three recitals in a row, sing every phrase in the same way: every tempo is the same, even the gestures are the same. I like to be able to choose spontaneously, and that's the main reason I do recitals: I'm the boss and I can decide and choose spontaneously to do this piano or to do an accelerando here. I don't want to miss out on that. It's a way of interpretation that you need in the singing world because you usually always have an orchestra with you, and with an orchestra you can't be that flexible. You have to agree that you're not alone and even the best conductor, like Tony Pappano here, who's so great and follows you so much, it all has to be done within limits. Even he isn't able suddenly to go into double tempo or to introduce a sudden piano where the orchestra's always played forte. He can go "sh! sh!", but fifty percent won't look at him because they don't expect him to do that. So, more or less, you have to do the same. Of course you can do some rubato and there are sometimes little details you can do differently but it's limited. Whereas in a recital you can do everything you want.'

Kaufmann first came to the attention of a wider audience away from opera with his Gramophone Award-winning disc of Lieder by Richard Strauss. Is song always going to be an essential part of his work? 'Definitely. First of all, I really would miss it and it would also be a mistake because you're using part of your voice that you would probably never use in an opera performance: because of the orchestra you wouldn't be heard, but with a piano you can do different things. I'm not saying that you're using a different voice for Lied singing. I remember when I did Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. He wrote it first of all with piano accompaniment. And it's really difficult to play, which is why it's not done very often, but I've been doing it with Violeta Urmana – who has a really large voice – and people were upset that we were singing it so loud. But I'd say, "I'm sorry, but if Mahler, a quite intelligent composer, writes ffff, he wants it loud!"' And he wasn't writing for small voices at the time, I point out. 'Exactly, they'd go from Pamina to Brünnhilde, everything was possible. And I've a lot of respect for a lot of Lied singers, but I think it's a mistake to use a completely different voice. You can use part of your voice, you can do a piano if you can do it, that's almost impossible on the opera stage.'

And the same is true when specialising on the big operatic roles? 'Exactly, then you can't go back down. But there are parts of Parsifal, as I've said, like the "Karfreitagszauber" in the Third Act, "Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön". Or "Parigi, o cara" from La traviata, where there's nothing in the orchestra, it's all so soft, you can whisper and everybody can hear. And you should. You should do it as softly as possible. Because it's a very intimate moment when he creates this dream for her to forget that she's about to die; he's not singing that to the audience, he's just singing it to her, and that's why I always love to sing it very softly. But if you don't do the Lieder you're not experienced enough, maybe, to use this part of your voice at the opera. So, all those different styles, all those musical parts, they all come together to bring out the full range of the voice, and I think it's healthy to do that. If you only always stick to the same thing it's not good. Like a motor, if you're only driving in town it's not good, nor is it if you only drive on the motorway, it's the variety that keeps the engine alive.' Of course with the Strauss, I point out, there are plenty of chances to sing out, too. 'Exactly, they're like operatic arias but they also have intimate moments.'

This brings us on to Kaufmann's most recent disc, Romantic Aria, the first product of an exclusive contract with Decca. The disc was extremely well received and features Kaufmann in several of the roles he's performed on stage. I ask about his plans with the label and whether or not they include, at this stage, complete operas. 'Yes and no' he answers. 'We haven't agreed 100% to complete operas but I'm sure we will. We're concentrating now to find recording possibilities for more solo albums. Now after the mixed album we're looking at ones specialising on the subjects like Italian, French, German, maybe verismo, maybe Mozart - stuff which is becoming more and more difficult to find time for, unfortunately, the more and more people are involved. I'm doing a Butterfly with Angela Gheorghiu and Tony Pappano this summer, but it's not with Decca but with EMI. The agreement is older than my exclusive contract. Yes, there are plans, though, and I'm hoping to record several things because as much as I like this life performing, at the end you realise that this form of art is a very instant thing. It only lives on in people's memories. You perform, and the performance is over and it's gone, so recording is the only chance to keep it alive.'

So he sees it as important to be recorded for posterity? 'Yes, it may be selfish, but you wish that something might stay. For a painter or a sculptor, whatever they create is there for ever. With us singers, though, everything goes except the recordings. Of course I know people now who say, "I've seen these famous singers live" and they can say, "This phrase he did like this or that," but still it's not the same as if they'd done a recording and I have it there to listen to myself. It's the only part of a career that stays and it would be great to do more, and I think we will.' These are difficult times for the record companies, though. 'Yes, but they're also difficult times for me because I started this more or less now in a phase of my career where I'm already so busy performing all over the world that it's really hard to squeeze out some more time. It's already at a limit, and I have a family - and I like to see them occasionally!' he laughs. 'So it's really difficult, and frustrating sometimes too when you realise that you'd love to record much more and both sides – me and the record company - agree that it would be a good thing to do.' He lets out a sigh at this, a dilemma that most singers can only dream of. 'But I just can't find the time. I've got plenty more years, though!'

I return to his references to older singers and mention his well-documented admiration of Fritz Wunderlich. Does he himself listen to recordings of other singers? 'I have to confess, now, for instance, that I've been listening to a recording that was released here at the Royal Opera House [on the ROH Heritage label] with Zinka Milanov and the debut of Franco Corelli at Covent Garden, with Guelfi as Scarpia, which is incredibly good. You can talk about the tastefulness of holding some notes forever but it's really, really impressive. There are some great moments but you can hear it's live, because sometimes they screw up, which is good because you can really feel that it's live. You can listen to it and it's almost like a movie. I had a friend who told me she loved a recording with Domingo, Sherill Milnes and Leontyne Price, which is a great recording. But if you listen to the live recording it's like' - he acts scared - 'ah, ah, God! She's going to kill him! It's so, so…' 

It's the difference between a well-polished product of a recording studio and a warts-and-all record of a thrilling live event, I suggest. 'Exactly. I remember that Claudio Abbado said he hates recording in the studio now - he always wants to make a live recording and then maybe go to the studio to edit parts if something really terrible happened. I can totally understand that, because you can feel so much more atmosphere in a live recording. And I bought that Tosca on purpose also because Corelli was, I think, thirty-four or thirty-six when he sang that here. I'm thirty-eight now, and I was interested to hear how he did it. Again, some things are "no-goes" these days, but other things are still great, even to our modern ears.

'Talking about Fritz Wunderlich, there are so many things I adore about him and he recorded lots of things, it's just the repertory I'm doing now he didn't sing or record most of it so I can't say I'm studying that. What I admire, though, is a basic thing, especially with Wunderlich, about how you express emotions. It's about how there can be a direct link between your diaphragm and the gut of the audience, so that people can have a real connection with your emotions. Wunderlich was perfect with that - whether it was joy or sadness or frustration – and that's really unique.'

Talkng of Wunderlich brings us back to an area in which his recorded legacy is probably richest: Lieder. I ask if Kaufmann too has plans for recording Lieder with Decca. 'Yes, we definitely want Lieder, that's something we agree on and we already have cycles and things in mind. I thought it would be much easier because it's just with my pianist, but I still need to have the time. It will take a while, but we have three or four albums in mind and we plan over the next three or four years to record several Lied albums. So it's not over with the recording of Liedernow that I've signed with Decca. Actually, that was not only my idea, it's not as if I forced them or convinced them to agree to it - they had the same feeling too.'

I ask there are any cycles in particular, but Kaufmann's answer studiously avoids any definite statements. 'There are some that can wait even if I've sung them often. An example is Winterreise, which is something I've been performing, not excessively like some. I mean, I always have the comparison with Herman Prey, whom my pianist Helmut Deutsch worked with for several years. He would do one recital tour in just Germany with 36 recitals, one day after another performing only Winterreise, so you can imagine how many of those he sang! I've done maybe ten or twelve now, but it's something that still can grow and the older you get, the more experienced, not only vocally but in terms of life-experience. For instance, with Die Schöne Müllerin you have to be young because the guy's really innocent: vocally younger and more flexible, more light, less sadness. In Winterreise the story's over and you start suffering from the first song, whereas in Müllerin the first half is positive before it starts going down. I think this must be a young man because he's much more naïve, and falls into this trap as a result. We tried to divide them into what's really essential to do now and what can be done in five or six years, and this is a cycle that needs to be recorded earlier rather than later.'

Kaufmann's own song recitals are relatively rare events so I ask if this is a conscious decision or simply dictated by a full operatic schedule. 'Lieder tours are impossible to do now, there just aren't the opportunities any more. They don't sell as well as opera and therefore many producers struggle to put very many recitals together. Of course here in the Wigmore Hall there's a pretty solid Lied cycle, but even in Vienna they've had to cut down and Munich just doesn't have it any more. There's one in Carnegie Hall in New York, but there there's just a few. Then there are the festivals, but they're only over a short period so it's impossible to do a Lied tour like they used to. I mean, they [Prey and Deutsch] did a tour of North America going to many, many cities and Japan, they were crazy about it there. That's pretty much over now, I think.'

Does he think more people have shifted towards opera, or has the audience just dwindled? 'No, I have the impression that it's just disappeared. Opera is powerful because it has more glamorous stars who are better-known, whereas Lied singers are now specialised. Herman Prey, also, wasn't only famous for his Lieder but for being Figaro in Barbiere, Wolfram in Tannhäuser and so many other parts as well. He performed so much opera at the same time and was one of those all-round artists. Like Brigitte Fassbaender or Christa Ludwig, all those famous singers that were also very famous Lied singers. Maybe Fischer-Dieskau is an exception because he was much more famous for his song recitals than he was for opera. But almost all the others you have in mind for thirty or forty years ago were opera singers who were great Lied singers, but they did both.'

Does he see the fact that there are now so many Lied specialists as having resulted in their audiences being more specialised but smaller? 'Exactly, that's it. I think it's a mistake, because they're so specialised and they're so concentrated on that that they lose the wider context.

Media attention is always particularly fierce when it comes to tenors, with fickle commentators always keen to find the natural heir to the famous 'Three'. I ask Kaufmann whether he feels any of this media pressure, but his answer is typically relaxed and straightforward and he comes across, again, as neither egotistical nor falsely modest. 

'I don't think there's a special gap. There aren't that many tenors of a certain level nowadays. Well, there are maybe more tenors who are well known than there were when it was only those three, but even then there were also many others. Now it's more spread out, there are not only one or two or three. The categorisation, the new successor, of whomever, I'm not really interested in. If I did have to choose anybody I'd say probably Plácido. Because of the three, Domingo was the one with the widest, still has, the widest repertory. He's sung Wagner, he's sung French and Italian repertory and if there's no classical German or French song, the Zarzuela is also a very soft and intimate way of singing. So that's maybe the closest but I think it's a big mistake to think of yourself as the next 'X' or 'Y'; you are you, and I'm the first Kaufmann and not the second Pavarotti or Wunderlich or whoever. 

'And for us who are doing the job now on this level there's enough work, so there's no competition. It's not like I wish Rolando [Villazon] bad luck for whatever, or he for me. We joke around and he said to me once "Ja, ja, you should do more Wagnerian stuff" and I said, "It's ok, I'll stick with it all". But that's only joking and especially for tenors, luckily for us, there aren't that many so we're not competitors but friendly colleagues. It's not like with some other repertories and voice types where there are so many that they really have to fight against one another.'

I point out the fact that Villazon will be Don Carlo in the Royal Opera's new production of the work this summer and that Kaufmann is rumoured to be singing in the production's first revival. 'Someone even sent me an article in a British opera magazine with the rumour that I was even going to do this run because Rolando was cancelling because he had to cancel a production in New York! I don't see that as a competition or challenge, though, whoever did the production before, in this case it's Rolando. It's no secret that I'm doing the revival. Which is fine. I've done Carlo before and I love this part. It's like Marcelo Alvarez did the revival of Carmen here which I did the first run of, so what? He's Marcelo, he does his own thing, you've always got to bring your own character to it and not imitate anyone else who was in the production. And that's what I'm doing in Tosca, I'm trying to create my own Cavaradossi - within the limits, of course, of this production.'

Finally I ask how Kaufmann will want to look back on his career. His main concern seems to be that he will know when to stop. 'Everybody has to stop singing at some point. Several other young singers I studied with and I, we have an agreement that we'd tell one another when it's time to go. Because we had several occasions when we saw the older generation of singers - who we adored - make fools out of themselves by singing in very bad condition just because they couldn't give up, they needed it. And I can totally understand that. Therefore we said we'd be honest with one another and say, "OK, that's really enough now". Although I hope I will be able to decide myself.'