ngelika Kirchschlager is sitting in a rehearsal studio at London's Royal Opera House, listening to a story about a popular and much-recorded soprano who, several years ago, was singing Gilda in Rigoletto at a major American regional company. The soprano in question was rehearsing the quartet, and the conductor wanted her to try something a little different, just to see how it worked. "I don't do it that way," she responded. "I know," said the conductor, "but I'd like you to try it." The soprano's voice rose slightly. "I DON'T DO IT THAT WAY." End of discussion.
Kirchschlager shakes her head reproachfully. "Hmmmm.... I think her license should be taken away. I think every singer should have a brain check-up every year, and if you are too fond of yourself, you should not be onstage anymore. I hate vanity. And sometimes I am so surprised that even the audience cannot tell the difference. They can't tell if they're really touched. They also love music sung or played by people who are only thinking about themselves."
This provides a conspicuous clue to the kind of artist Kirchschlager is -- one who is able to get out of her own way and approach the music with true emotional directness. It's a quality that has earned her an increasingly enthusiastic following, on both the opera and recital stage. She is the least flashy of singers, but her performances glow with a steady inner warmth. Her art is a quiet one, with uncommon alertness to text and nuance, as can be heard on her recent Sony recording of arias from Bach cantatas. And she has perhaps the rarest of gifts in both singers and actors: she knows how to listen. This quality was revealed in a joint recital of German lieder she performed with baritone Si
mon Keenlyside at the Salzburg Festival in August 2002. In songs such as Wolf's "Bei einer Trauung," she showed a rare degree of responsiveness to her stage partner. "That's the most exciting thing about music," she says. "You just stand next to each other and feel it, you know? It's like when you jump out of a plane, and you are connected, and you only have one parachute. Whatever you do, when you start from the first note, you connect, and no matter what one does, the other will follow."
Keenlyside is a favorite colleague of Kirchschlager's. Their friendship dates back to a B-minor Mass in Rome under Riccardo Muti, which was followed by Le Nozze di Figaro at the Vienna Staatsoper. "Whilst we were doing that," recalls Keenlyside, "I went to hear her sing a liederabend, and I was knocked silly by it. Everything I admired -- lots of colors, a nice wide palette and simple delivery. No nonsense. I thought, 'If I'm going to sing recitals with her, I'm going to have to be on the ball. We've been friends for years, but just being friends isn't going to to help me!' So I went to her and said, 'I'm nervous about our friendship.' She was so upset by that, the next day she summoned me to a restaurant and said, 'What did you mean when you said you think our friendship is not going to work?' So I told her I wanted to do something with her. And that was it."
or most singers, an invitation to perform at the Salzburg Festival is more than an important engagement. It's something of an extended holiday: along with the grueling rehearsals, there are plenty of opportunities to go biking along the Salzach River, take one of the ubiquitous Sound of Music tours and gorge yourself on Sachertorte and eiskaffee three times a day. It's different for Angelika Kirchschlager: she grew up in Salzburg and studied piano at the Mozarteum. In this small city of 130,000, nearly everyone she came in contact with was involved in music in some way. This may have robbed her of a sense of discovery as an adult, but she considers growing up in Salzburg a priceless privilege. "When you go to America, when I go to a place like Texas, you realize there is nothing of classical music," she says. "You really have to look for it. If you're lucky, you'll stumble on an afternoon concert. But it isn't really there, it isn't part of your life. But in Salzburg, it is part of your life, just like buying your milk. You go to the concerts and meet your neighbors and friends listening to the Brahms symphonies in the Festspielhaus, and you have hundreds of church concerts. On the other side, Mozart in Salzburg is the most commercial thing you can imagine. But it does not affect my connection with my music, you know? It's just a part of it."
She's right about that. For those addicted to shopping for crummy souvenirs, Salzburg is the promised land. For those who aren't, the plethora of expensive gift shops can be like consuming too much topfenstrudel. (One night in the middle of my weeklong stay, I dreamed I was being chased by a band of Hummel figurines come to life.) Somehow, being inundated with kitsch has not colored Kirchschlager's feelings about the city's most celebrated citizen. "Sometimes I have to remind myself that Mozart spoke the same Austrian dialect that I do," she says. "I think that he was a very normal person -- as crazy as he was. I have the strong feeling that he was so much fun. When I read about him, I don't have the feeling that I have to work a lot to understand this man. It's natural to me. I sing his music in a natural way and don't think about it very much. Maybe I trust too much that we come from the same surroundings, the same corner of the world, and saw the same buildings, the same hills, crossed the same bridges."
As a child, Kirchschlager embarked on ten years of piano studies at the Mozarteum. She did well enough in lessons, but public performances were another story, mostly because of her difficulty in memorizing pieces. "There was terrible trauma. I just could not do it," she remembers. "The first time it happened was when I was six, and I stopped and put my hands down. And I started again. My parents were dying. Every concert, every year. Twice. After you have done ten concerts, and it has happened ten times, then you know it is going to happen the eleventh time."
At eighteen, she left Salzburg for Vienna, where her boyfriend at the time had gone to study. Along the way, she dropped piano lessons, and with good reason: she had discovered singing, which felt altogether more natural. Studying seriously with Gerhard Kahry at the Vienna Academy of Music, she was surprised that her nervous tension receded and memory lapses became a thing of the past. For three years, she studied voice and percussion -- mostly timpani and snare drum -- concurrently, reaching the apex as a percussionist in a concert conducted by Claudio Abbado. In Vienna, she became immersed in the city's cultural history. "It is so intense," she reflects, "this energy of the past. At the same time, it is becoming a new, modern city -- in architecture and art and music. I love the Vienna from the early twentieth century. All the stories, the Jewish culture, the coffee houses, the literature. It was all in Vienna. Compacted. All before the war. And then, everybody ... the best spirits are suddenly gone. It is getting younger. It is not that old, old way. The average age of the population was sixty-two or something like that a few years ago. This is changing now."
After eight years of intensive study, Kirchschlager was ready for her debut. She was engaged by Graz's Vereinigte Bühnen to sing Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier. It was a daunting prospect for a debut, and she tried her best to talk herself out of it. "I didn't want to sing this role," she recalls, "and they would say, 'We can only give out the contract if you sing the role, because we need a mezzo-soprano who sings it.' So I had the choice of singing it or losing everything." At the time, she was studying with the distinguished bass-baritone Walter Berry (noted for, among other things, his fine Baron Ochs). Berry persuaded her that learning Octavian was not beyond her capabilities, and the debut went off remarkably well. Vocally, the role contains passages that vex her to this day: "What I still cannot sing very well is the second duet with Sophie in Act II. It is quite dramatic. And I am always psychologically scared of the very end, because it
's nearly the last phrase of the entire piece. I always make a little prayer before I start with the phrase, because if one note cracks, it's almost the last thing you hear in the opera!
"My heaviest part is the Composer [in Ariadne auf Naxos]. I with my voice am not really comfortable with it, because I always push too much." She comes to a full stop, looks at me across the table and laughs. "This is really wonderful. I am being a great interview, aren't I? The entire world should read about my terrible problems! But you know, I don't care. I am not embarrassed to say it. Why should I not admit that this is a terribly difficult part to sing? I don't know one mezzo-soprano who would not say, if she's honest, that it's very high and taxing. Some colleagues have a good technique and can overcome it more easily, and I am not such a technical singer, you know. My main interest in singing is not in technical adventure. I want to use my voice expressively. I love to improvise. I like spontaneity. I personally like risks."
If so, it's a good thing that she performs so often at the Vienna Staatsoper. Her roles there have ranged from Octavian to Idamante to Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia -- all in a theater notorious for allotting inadequate rehearsal time for revivals, and occasionally no rehearsal time at all. "It's a repertory system, as everybody knows," she shrugs, without apparent concern. "Sometimes a singer will come one week before the opening, and another one comes five days before. In the meantime, you rehearse with the stage assistant. Sometimes you don't manage to get all the singers together for the rehearsals, so you have one day of rehearsal. Say if you do The Marriage of Figaro, you have one rehearsal with the Count and Susanna, but not the Contessa, because she has a concert in Berlin. The next day she is back, but the Susanna has another recital somewhere. It's not just the fault of the house. The singers themselves don't show up as they could or should. It's not that they say, 'We want to rehearse, we want to rehearse.' Everybody takes advantage of the system. You get used to it."
Kirchschlager has been heard frequently at La Scala, where Riccardo Muti has become one of the most important musical influences in her life. Their first collaboration in Milan was Così Fan Tutte at La Scala, and they established an immediate rapport that has seen them through many subsequent productions. "I was quite young and inexperienced when I did my first Così," she says. "I realize now how much has happened to me. He was always there, but our relationship grew very slowly. I hardly see him and hardly talk to him. He hardly lets anybody near ... but when you are together, you are very close. It is like a marriage -- you can't force it, you have to see what happens." Like many other singers, she has experienced the nerve-shredding terrors of Muti's famous yellow rehearsal room. "It's completely paved with pillows and tapestry," says Kirchschlager. "And a small room, with a conference table. Everybody sits at the table, and he sits at the head with the pianist. The other colleagues are there, sometimes the cover. You sing your aria, and then the cover sings your aria -- sometimes more beautifully than you! The acoustic is a catastrophe, but you have to do it in front of everybody, and get your critics in front of everybody. It's really tough work."
Kirchschlager's most high-profile assignment to date has been the lead role in Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice, which provided her with both her first world premiere and her Covent Garden debut last December. Based on William Styron's highly praised novel, and no doubt spurred onto the opera stage by the success of the 1982 Alan J. Pakula film starring Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice earned mostly glowing notices in London. The opera's emotional climax comes in the scene with the choice of the title, the moment when Sophie is forced to surrender one of her children to the Nazis and, in a wild, frenzied moment, chooses to hand over her daughter, Eva. Baritone Rodney Gilfry, who sang the role of her lover/tormentor Nathan, recalls, "Sophie had to scream when they took her child away, and Angelika didn't do it until three days before opening night. She has a seven-year-old son [Felix, by her husband, baritone Hans Peter Kammerer, from whom she is separated], and I think she just couldn't get her mind around it. She had to have a special session with Trevor Nunn to figure out the scream. Sophie's Choice was one of the best experiences of my career, and largely due to Angelika -- so loving and gracious as a colleague, and so willing to experiment. Her part was really strenuous, with things like twelve-second costume changes. But except for the scream, she would always say, 'Okay -- I'll try it.' She wasn't fazed by anything."
Kirchschlager found the experience gratifying but exhausting. "It's an extreme part," she says, "because half of the time I am screaming and sobbing and breathing in a heavy way. In the extermination scene, when I sing it in my dressing room, the voice sits perfectly, with all the notes there. I have to sing that one phrase, 'I haaaaaaaaaate my father,' and it goes really low. It's more of a scream than a note. If I'm really being emotional, I can't force myself to think of my diaphragm while I sing this phrase. Onstage, with the emotion, it's suddenly impossible to sing it, and that's a very new experience." She is pleased that William Styron was on hand for the first few performances in the run. "He was so happy with the show," she says. "He had tears in his eyes. You get the feeling that this is his story, and this is the best compliment he has been given about it. More important to have him here than the Queen!"
photos: © Johannes Ifkovits 2003 (at Baden); © Chris Lee 2003 (Carnegie Hall recital); © Marty Sohl 2003 (Cherubino)
OPERA NEWS, May 2003 Copyright © 2003 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.Angelika's Art
Meet the anti-diva:
Angelika Kirchschlager's singing glows with radiant intensity and scrupulous honesty The mezzo photographed by Johannes Ifkovits at the
Strandbad at Baden, near ViennaStyled by Evelyn Rillé
Dressing gown by Paloma Picasso
with Keenlyside in March 2003 Carnegie Hall recital, belowAs San Francisco's Cherubino, 1997
BY BRIAN KELLOW