OPERA NEWS, April 10, 1993
The tenor speaks his mind
by Carl Halperin
"How was the cat show?," Jon Vickers asks somewhat apologetically as he bounds into the room, nearly half an hour late for our appointed meeting. Earlier that day, I had arrived rived in Bermuda, where Vickers set up permanent residence twenty years ago -- "absolute Paradise," he calls it still -- and, with several hours to go before our interview, ventured out to get my first glimpse of the island, simultaneously taking in the feline parade in town.
Immediately he sets about reversing all that I had been told to expect. I find him not difficult but full of conviction, not headstrong but determined, a person not of temper but of thoughtful, individual temperament. His only demand is that we meet not in his home but on neutral ground. So here, in the lobby of my hotel, on the eve of his sixty-sixth birthday, we catch up on his life since retirement five years ago.
"I'm famous for putting into print what I think," he says, proceeding to give a history lesson of the period he calls the "second golden age of opera" -- those nights, not so long ago, when in a given week at the Met a Tebaldi was followed by a Sutherland or a Caballé, partnered by the greatest colleagues the world had to offer. Vickers feels that this time ended around 1970. "You've got a different audience today, demanding different things. Society has changed from the end of the Second World War, when my career began -- the real establishment of my career, in the late fifties and early sixties. If you had stopped for a moment then and examined the opera world, you would have had an instant printout of the state of the Western world. It was all involved in seeking truth, an abhorrence of personal ambition, speaking to the people of our time through comfort and solace and confirmation.
"What we were doing was needed. We stood in utter awe of the music. We stood in awe of the great opera houses, because we thought those houses were the consummation of all the lives that had been poured into writing, producing, singing, directing and conducting. When you stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House to sing Siegmund, you realized you were treading the boards where Melchior sang, where Slezak sang. It was a very humbling experience and laid on one a sense of responsibility. This opens up such an enormous subject, as far as I'm concerned. As T. S. Eliot said, 'It is the responsibility of the present to change the past, but it is the responsibility of the past to guide the future,' and I think what is happening in so many aspects of the musical world today is that they are not trying to root what they're doing in the past.
"One of the great tragedies of our time in music is that young people are trying to force success rather than concentrating on learning their trade. There are kids today who step onto the Met stage who know one or two operas and nothing of the art song, and certainly nothing of oratorio. I knew more oratorio than opera when I started my career, and I still think there is no substitute for repertoire. I mean, if I know Don Carlo and Aida and Forza del Destino, these add something to my Wagner, and the other way around too. I'm not saying we were totally right. I'm just saying the emphasis is different." Smiling, he adds, "I challenge any young singer to sing Pergolesi's 'O cessate di piagarmi.' If you really can sing that song, you know a hell of a lot about how to sing."
Vickers' own road to the top, a story he finds boring because it has been repeated so often, is one of vigilant determination, even in the face of an early period of severe self-examination, during which he considered another occupation after seven years of active concertizing. "My teacher told me, 'There's no place for you in a church choir. You've got to be somewhere where you're not the best, where you can discover how much you've got to learn, where you work with people who are so good that you're learning from them all the time.' That was my great opportunity at Covent Garden. Suddenly I was working with Kubelik, Gobbi, Hotter, Nilsson. I mean, holy mackerel!" His years in London served as a springboard to his first international success there in 1957, in Berlioz' Les Troyens, which led to offers from Wieland Wagner to appear in his 1958 Bayreuth Die Walküre and, following that, offers from managers of the world's other major theaters.
Looking back, Vickers remarks, "I think Énée was the most difficult part I ever sang, and one day I'll probably go down as one of the greatest in this role, because no one else has ever sung it untransposed and uncut." But what of his widely circulated feeling that no one has ever got Énée down correctly? "Oh, well," Vickers laughs, "I don't think anybody ever gets anything right!" Right or wrong, Philips' recording of Covent Garden's 1969 Troyens revival allows posterity the opportunity to judge for itself, and it remains one of this singing actor's greatest accomplishments. "Énée knocks the spots off Tannhäuser for tessitura, I promise you. Énée is murderous!"
Vickers is alluding to his near-experience with Wagner's antihero, one of a handful of scandals over the course of his controversial career. In 1977 Covent Garden and the Met planned new productions of the opera with Vickers, his first time in the role. "I studied Tannhäuser for thirteen months, and I was working in my home here in Bermuda at the piano. I'd come home from Dallas and had the whole role memorized except for the Rome narrative, so I decided to go to work on that. I came out in the kitchen and said, 'I just hate it!' My wife said, 'Well then, you're a fool. People are offering so many things you want to do. Why do you have to take this on -- just because it's another thing to add?' So I canceled, and then of course everybody said I lost my nerve and couldn't sing the role. The bottom line is that I wouldn't sing Tannhäuser, because it attacks the very basis of my Christian faith. The arrogance of Tannhäuser, the self-pitying arrogance of the guy, the superiority of his believing that everybody else walked with shoes and he walked in the ice and snow with his bare feet -- oh, my gosh, I just puked trying to learn it. I simply couldn't swallow that crap!
"I can't stand Wagnerian philosophy," he continues. "A lot of people ask, 'Why did you sing these roles?' And I say, 'Do you think I could stand here and criticize Wagner if I couldn't sing him? Do you think I could criticize the philosophy of Wagner if I couldn't sing his music?'" Asked just what he finds offensive in the Wagnerian psyche, Vickers readily responds. "Oh, it's his concept that if you demonstrated you are a superior person, then you're not tied to conventional morality, so you can establish your own morality. At the end was Hitler's death camps and the degradation to which man can sink. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and Freud all led to Hitler."
Vickers admits that in playing both Parsifal (which he has called "blasphemous") and Tristan he had to make do with a "certain amount of rationalization. I don't think Tristan is a nice person, and I don't think Isolde is, either. I ignored what he was doing to his own reputation, what Isolde was doing to herself and what the two of them as human beings were doing to themselves. Wagner's answer, of course, is that their love was so great that it was beyond all human morality, and this would be rewarded in the afterlife, although his picture of the afterlife as painted by Tristan is nothing but blackness. I have no time for suicide. What a coward! You can't face the shame, and so you not only kill yourself, you ask her to follow you. It's ludicrous!"
Vickers is eager to set the record straight on the other major cause célèbre of his career, the famous "Guthrie changes" in his portrayal of Britten's Peter Grimes. "As you know, I changed the interpretation of Grimes, because as I studied the work I found that the interpretation placed on it had left an enormous contradiction within the work. I love research -- you can get bogged down in it, but I love it. Having read the autobiography of George Crabbe [author of The Borough, on which Britten's opera is based], and having seen Ben Britten and Peter Pears do it many times, I just said, 'This work is out of kilter.' The reason is that Grimes in my opinion is timeless and universal, an in-depth study of the whole psychology of human rejection. When Peter and Ben performed it, it was not that -- it was the story of a homosexual caught, and wonderfully successful in that it won great compassion for homosexuals. But it is not limited to the homosexual world, because every human being knows the sting of rejection. I universalized it by playing it that way. Nevertheless, my changing in that opera was rooted in what I knew of Crabbe, his poetry and in particular of The Borough. The Grimes of The Borough is just a monster, a brute, and the Peter Grimes in that book bears not the slightest relationship to the Grimes of the opera. In the opera, if he's inarticulate, if he's a rough, tough brute, then why put in his mouth 'Now the great Bear and the Pleiades where earth moves/Are drawing up the clouds of human grief/Breathing solemnity in the deep night'? He's obviously an aesthetic, and that's what Ben Britten was, that's what Pears was, that's what Crabbe was."
Vickers continues, "You probably know I've been victimized by certain members of the press by saying I changed the text to suit my own interpretation. I never changed a single word of the text. It was the director, Tony [Tyrone] Guthrie, who went to see Ben Britten and said, 'Look, this won't fly in America.' I wasn't the only one to change texts at the Met -- Balstrode changed his text, and so did Ellen -- but I was castigated for being the one to change the text, and I didn't. Every text change had the approval of Ben Britten through Tony Guthrie, and we would not have dreamed of changing a word or a note without it."
Vickers recalls that opening night (Jan. 20, 1967) as among his finest evenings in the theater. "You know, it was one of those magical nights, simply staggering. It was a Monday, and I didn't have a clue that I'd have the impact on the audience that I did. I walked up and saw the mob, and I was so taken aback, so moved. It was incredible."
Reflecting on this bittersweet moment, he adds, "You know, these amateur psychologists take over a performance you've done and say, 'Oh, well, he isn't really acting Peter Grimes, he just is that kind of crotchety, nasty, aggressive human being.' How that could result in a VasÆek like I sang VasÆek [in Smetana's The Bartered Bride at the Met in 1978], I don't know. Maybe they thought I was an idiot too!"
His Grimes and VasÆek, two of the most dissimilar roles in Vickers' repertory, were televised during the last decade and a half of his career. His Énée almost made it to the big screen thirty years ago -- another of those missed golden opportunities that dot every artist's scratchcard. Despite Vickers' feelings about the artificiality of documentation -- he is said to dislike much of his recorded work -- he recognizes the importance of both the aural and video media in keeping an artist permanently before the public.
"I've done films, but the only one I was ever really interested in doing never happened. Paul Czinner wanted to make a film of Les Troyens, and I was terribly excited, because he was going to do it for the panoramic screen on a big scale. They were going to build the city of Troy on the Lido, and it was going to be burned. They worked out all the outlying helicopter shots and everything, and Schweppes was going to back it. But Schweppes backed out." That disappointment aside, the tenor, who admits to never having taken his films very seriously, gave the screen his interpretations of Otello, Don José and Canio, under the watchful eye of Herbert von Karajan, whose estate still owns the broadcast rights to the latter two. "When I say I never took these very seriously, I don't mean I didn't do my best with them, but I never thought of them as amounting to a hill of beans, for the simple reason that the technology at that time was such that you had to get involved with this darn lip-sync stuff, and when you do, there's no intensity in the face, there's no intensity of action, because you're so concentrated. If you get involved in playing the role, suddenly they're shouting at you, 'Lip-sync, lip-sync, lip-sync!' Today I think the best way to do it for the most effective opera performances -- unless you go whole hog, as Czinner was planning -- is to film it live, as we did with Norma, Fidelio and Tristan und Isolde."
These performances, so central to Vickers' career, are preserved on film, but they have not guaranteed Vickers the celluloid immortality he had hoped for. Vickers relates a recent conversation with Martina Arroyo, who had just returned from lecturing at a black college, where she was shocked to find students who had not heard of Marian Anderson. Vickers sees this as indicative of a failure of the system to support and nurture its own. "But come on! What significance have I had, really? I sang for forty years, thirty-two years on the big scene, but there's no significance. That's the trouble. People can get so carried away with how significant they are, or how significant they've been. If you don't choose some sort of absolute, then you're going to come up a very disillusioned person." This attitude, so important in Vickers' makeup, was taught to him by the example of men such as Serafin, Knappertsbusch and of course Karajan.
"The single quality I've observed in the really great men that I've had the privilege of meeting -- I won't say 'knowing,' because that would be arrogance -- was humility. Do you know that Knappertsbusch wouldn't bow? People would beg him and beg him, but he wouldn't even bow. Karajan was asked, 'How do you get an orchestra to have this concentration, so that they become one in what you are trying to achieve?' And he said, 'Have you ever gone on a walk in the country? Have you ever startled a flock of birds? They go off pell-mell in every direction, and then suddenly some unseen force takes over, and they fall into a rhythmic pattern, into a direction of movement.' He said, 'All my job is, is to try and create this.' I remember Beecham being interviewed in England once, and they asked him a similar question, and he answered, 'I don't teach orchestras how to play, I let them play!'" Vickers recalls his one meeting with Dag Hammarksjöld, weeks before the U.N. secretary general met his death in the Congo, as one of the most important formative occasions of his life. "This shy, self-effacing man had an aura about him that was just electric. You know, he wrote a book called Markings, in which he said, 'Only in faith can man be created. Oh, to be both humble and proud, knowing that in God I'm nothing, but that God is in me!' All these men, you see, they all stood in reverence before something that was much bigger than them, be it music or whatever else."
Perhaps Vickers' greatest legacy is that he used his gifts in a wide breadth of character studies, covering Monteverdi through Shostakovich, with plenty of Wagner and Verdi along the way. To future Otellos he advises, "You'd better know your Bible, or you can't read Shakespeare. And if you read Shakespeare, then you've got to wrestle with the great essences of the meaning of manhood and womanhood, of truth and wrong, and of the brutality of man. Art is a reflection of ultimate reality, and man has to be measured against an ultimate standard. In opera you deal with ultimate realities, so you can't cater to the masses -- you have to hold up examples. This is what art does -- it defines. As for Otello, we've all got tragic flaws, and that's why I say art is a distillation.
"The distillation of Shakespeare, for example, gives us crystal-clear concepts of what is right and wrong in human behavior and society. You're not dealing with an individual here, really, you're dealing with situations that all of us can understand. Take the simplest example of all -- what a disaster can result if a man and woman marry for the wrong reasons. I believe Othello so idealized Desdemona that he didn't really love her. She gave him a better image of himself just because of the perfection she represented in his mind. Well, that's no basis for a marriage, is it?"
On Florestan, the tenor is equally realistic. "Fidelio is the greatest outcry against tyranny ever written. Leonore is the distillation of marital love, but beyond that she is the distillation of the human being. She and Florestan represent the individual who has the courage and the faith to act, the only thing that will stop tyranny in its tracks. If we had in our society today fifty men who would stand up and be counted as to what is happening in the degradation of our young people, the drug scene, the advocacy of wide-open sexuality -- if we had these fifty, it would stop."
The tenor will be off in the morning to pack up his farm in Canada for the winter, so time is short. Rather than being intimidated by change, the recently widowed Vickers faces the future with characteristic resolve. "My wife, before she died, had saved all the criticisms we ever got, and she organized them all with programs and cities according to year, and there's a great big file for thirty-two years. I've got a lovely membership in two golf courses here in Bermuda, and I'm toying with the idea of putting together a summer music school program here. I have this wonderful library, and I'm going to write my memoirs, whether they're ever published or not. I've also got all my files from my management for the last thirty years, sent over from England. If I put together my files and read the critics, my memory will just explode."
Reflecting on his years before the public, Vickers sums up: "The whole emphasis in my approach was to delve as deeply as possible into the text, and into the feeling of that text as the music translates it, to absorb it and to digest it and then pour it out as a gift to the audience -- to say 'Examine this, listen to it, feel it, become involved in it, go away and think about it.' I always had this feeling, every time I walked onto a stage, that I was there to give something. I had this desire to do something for somebody else, to end up being in a giving position, and I think singing is just that. So if you ask how I think of myself as a singer, well, I had a big voice and sang the dramatic repertoire, and I was a singer who first of all loved the art form and did my best. I just did my best."
MR. HALPERIN hosts a daily classical music program on WUNC public radio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
a selective discography
BEETHOVEN:
Fidelio (Angel 69290, 69324)
Symphony No. 9 (CBS MK-38868,
RCA RCD1-5020)
BERLIOZ: Les Troyens (Philips 416432)
BIZET: Carmen (Angel 63643,
Frequenz CBJ-3, Hunt CDKAR-221)
BRITTEN: Peter Grimes (Philips 432578)
CHERUBINI: Medea (Melodram 26005, Hunt OPI-10, Hunt 34028)
ELGAR: The Dream of Gerontius
(Arkadia 584)
MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde
(Philips 411474)
SAINT-SAËNS: Samson et Dalila
(Angel 47895)
SCHUBERT: Winterreise (VAI Audio 1007)
VERDI:
Aida (London 417416, Hunt OPI-13)
Otello (RCA 1969, Angel 69038,
Foyer 2034)
Messa da Requiem (Angel 62892)
WAGNER:
Tristan und Isolde (Angel 69319)
Die Walküre (DG 415145)
Parsifal (Arkadia 34051)