Saying goodbye to the stage was not difficult for you ?
No, not at all! First of all, I have a long career behind me, I have been singing for almost 50 years, forty-nine and a half to be exact. Since I never cared about numbers, I gave myself this half year that would have made a fiftieth anniversary. I also never kept books, which, by the way, wasa disadvantage when writing my memoirs. I also never kept a diary; I neither wanted nor needed to record anything. The past has never been important to me. Only the future is interesting! When I said goodbye, I was actually glad to have put this job behind me, this life with the constant fear of catching a cold, of overstraining my voice. Which meant giving up communication with friends, because that's what speaking is all about. As a singer, you have to constantly sacrifice for the sake of a beautiful sound. Besides, every farewell is also a new beginning. And nothing is worse than stagnation, isn't it?
You could say to yourself, during the last ten years of your singing career, now I'm going to stand still with what I can still do, and with what I can perhaps still inspire the audience, or at least attract it. But that is so terribly boring. No more new challenges, always thinking about my vocal chords and what my body can still do for my art. If you can talk about art at all. When you start to compromise and realize that you can't do this anymore, and that you have to help yourself like this, and that you have to cheat a little bit, it's incredibly frustrating. To have all the knowledge how to do it, but not to be able to do it physically anymore, that's the end!
Did it save you from recklessness, and your voice from damage, having sung so many small roles in your early years ? Today it is rather the case that young singers sing big roles and after a few years they have worn out their voices.
Today's singers don't start as young as we did back then. Sometimes would-be singers come to me who have never been engaged, but are already over thirty years old. Even in my master classes, only in rare cases is someone younger than twenty-seven. It is an exception when I have a twenty-four year old singer in front of me. When I think of my generation, at twenty-seven I was engaged at the Vienna State Opera, at the same time as Nikolai Ghiaurov, Waldemar Kmentt, Eberhard Wächter and Walter Berry. Gundula Janowitz started at that time, also at twenty-four, Callas sang her first Turandot in the Arena in Verona at twenty-four! Rysanek also started at twenty-one as Sieglinde in Bayreuth. We were all much younger as beginners.
Why is that? Why do today's singers start so late?
I think singing has become too bourgeois! Parents say: you have to graduate from high school first. But then they have to master at least one instrument for a long time and in a concentrated way, studying some music theory and being fit in singing, in order to be accepted at a music academy at all. Then they are already nineteen or twenty years old and it takes at least four years to study singing. So before mid-twenties you almost can't start today. I think this is completely wrong! Singing at the universities is also much too intellectualized. You learn so many superfluous things there. Do I have to be able to sight-read right from the start? No! And practice is always the best. Being engaged to an opera house as young as possible is irreplaceabl. It doesn't prevent anyone from learning on the side.
Not everyone is in such a good voice so early, and as highly gifted as you were.
I would like to say the following: If you are not really "highly gifted" today, by which I mean more than just having a beautiful voice, you should leave singing alone! Indeed, one needs a solid health, a well-trained stamina, a certain charisma, an aura, great musicality, the impudence to stand in front of an audience, to enter a door again and again, even if one is thrown out, one must be free of any fear, one must have an iron will for art, more than a need and real assertiveness! All this is necessary in addition to a beautiful voice, perhaps even more important than the voice, because one can have a wonderful career even without a beautiful voice, if I only think of my dear colleague Anja Silja. A wonderful person and stage appearance, although she by no means had a so-called "beautiful" voice. Callas didn't really have a "beautiful" voice either, but she had so much else! Exceptional talent simply has to be there, otherwise it is downright a crime against young people to teach them, because they are without an engagement afterwards and have no chance. I often experience that when I teach someone for a week, at the end I know: it's really for nothing. Now and then I also tell that person. It's very difficult to teach someone understanding that. I sometimes try to steer such a would-be singer into a different field. For example, if a young lady is two heads taller than me, you have to ask her what she wants to sing on stage! Maybe she should rather sing concerts. And if someone doesn't have, let's say, a romantic voice, then he should turn to baroque music for my sake. My mother once advised a tenor, who didn't have a beautiful voice at all, to become an ear, nose and throat specialist; he happened to have studied medicine. Well, ENT doctors who know something about singing and specialize in singers and voice problems are extremely rare and sought-after people at opera houses. By the way, he has also become one.
Aren't agencies and conductors also partly responsible for the lack of well-trained, well-developed voices? After all, they throw young singers into the cold water of big roles that completely overstrain them and ruin their voices.
But today's conductors don't even know that! Even in the past, only very few conductors understood anything about voices and singing. But today there are almost no conductors who care about the voice, who know what they can or cannot expect from a singer. Most conductors are occupied with at least three orchestras at the same time anyway, and no longer have any interest at all in leading a person or cultivating and nurturing an ensemble. That there is no time for this today, as is often claimed, I think is nonsense. Time is always the same. And a strange thing, yes, yes ...! One must take the time! But the reservoir of voices is so big today, and the world - thanks to airplane connections - so small, that it doesn't matter at all if a singer can't sing anymore in three or four years. Then there will be a new, another young voice. What people forget is that the maturity of expression, the know-how, only really exists after a certain age, around the age of forty. Until then, one sings the way one's beak has grown. You sing beautifully, enjoy your own tones, and cultivate and stabilize your beautiful voice. But it is only later that maturity and differentiated play with nuances of expression set in. But if you have spoiled your voice before, you will never make it to the stage of maturity. Well, and then you're already finished. And these people then become singing teachers, that's the worst! How are these ladies and gentlemen supposed to teach the youngsters the art of mature interpretation? And there the vicious circle closes. The only thing left for the young is to listen to historical recordings. But who of today's vocal students still knows who Zinka Milanov or Irmgard Seefried were? You can say what you want against James Levine, but he knows something about singing. For example, he guided and developed Kathleen Battle from the beginning until she was a great singer. And when she played prima donna, he threw her out!
You wrote that Callas was a model for you in terms of expression, and Zinka Milanov and Irmgard Seefried in terms of beauty of sound.
Especially Milanov produced such beautiful tones. I search in vain today for someone who has that beauty in voice and timbre. Callas will never go out of style because she had that great expression. Her whole tragic destiny was already in her voice. One sound from her and I start to cry. The sound of her voice arouses emotions, as it happens very rarely in this quality and this intensity.
You started out in poor, deprived post-war times. Weren't those times of artistic awakening that made it easier for your generation in some respects than for today's?
Perhaps in art everything has to be destroyed every now and then so that one can build up and start anew. Of course, we had it much easier than today's singers, because the world was bigger. In Germany there were German singers, in France French and in England English. In the age of globalization, everything is a mess and the opera scene is like a marshalling yard. The same people sing in Paris today, in New York tomorrow, and in Vienna or Berlin the day after. But I also believe that the experience of war has shaped us. Not that I wish that on anyone! But it is important for the development of a human being that one does not always live in cream and abundance. We had to do without, even if we didn't realize it as young people. If it wasn't bombing nights or piles of corpses or rubble. But these experiences nourished a tremendous enthusiasm in us; it was, as it were, an escape movement from reality into the illusory world of opera. If you like, I have always lived in the illusory world of old texts and old music. I almost never sang modern music.
I liked to take up the keyword Wagner. It was certainly not one of the least important episodes in your life to work with Wieland Wagner in Bayreuth.
Our collaboration already began in Berlin in Wieland's "Aida". At that time, I came directly from Salzburg, where I had worked with directors such as Rennert and Schuh, where value was placed on small movements. Every finger movement was meticulously designed and had meaning. Wieland, on the other hand, emphasized large, striking movements. I'm sorry, but at that time I simply found that old-fashioned. I only realized the significance of his direction much later, when he had already died. Of course he was an innovator, a revolutionary, but he never did anything against the music, he always just made the music the guideline of his actor direction. He recognized the essential and brought it to the point with light, with great gesture and a striking symbol, which he placed on the stage. Usually it was a phallic symbol. Because life is mostly about that, isn't it! But how closely he listened to the music! That's why he cleared the stage. Today the stage is more likely to be cluttered again.
Aren't you perhaps a cultural pessimist?
Oh no, not at all! There must be ups and downs, there is always something new developing, and that is good.
Do you think that today's conditions in the music business, the interchangeability of singers, the short-livedness of productions, the restlessness of conductors, can be conducive to an innovative push?
I hope so very much. But of course it is a vicious circle in which opera moves today. The audience, which is lazy and uninterested in new things, is also partly responsible. People always want to hear the same repertoire. They listen to singers on records and then want to hear them in the opera. So the opera directors hire these singers. And the record companies are happy to have their singers as advertising media in the opera houses and department stores.
And the media often play along!
Of course! It's terrible how careers are launched by the press and by advertising. If you drive through the city in New York, there are posters everywhere with the so-called new "fourth tenor" ... No one is interested in whether he can sing and has a beautiful voice. But people read that and believe it at first. But also the salary policy today is downright grotesque. A young, highly praised mezzo-soprano recently received sixty thousand dollars for her first performance in America. What is to become of this?
What always fascinates me so much about your interpretations is the greatest possible intelligibility of words and the differentiated tonal nuances down to the finest vocal colors.
I have always striven for this. Of course, one cannot always be word-comprehensible. But one can want to be. Solti had once put it in a nutshell when he said to me during Venus in Tannhäuser: "Here you have to speak very clearly and understandably, and then when you go up in pitch, you can smear." I will never forget the word "smear." But I don't like to smear, I'd rather smash. You know, when you're young, and you have a real fitting big voice, and you stand on the ramp and really belt it out, it's so beautiful, it's like sexual satisfaction. By the way, the conductors feel the same way. When I once heard the "Otello" in Vienna, I sat in the front row, directly behind Karajan. He rowed mightily and lashed out at the Philharmonic so that they turned the storm of the first scene into a hurricane. And then Karajan suddenly turned to me and whispered to me with a wink, "Oh, that feels good!"
Some of your colleagues have criticized Karajan for never giving cues.
Oh, I find that petty. What are stakes for? I never looked down into the orchestra pit, because the conductors always rather confused me and got me out of step. Especially Böhm with his small movements. I always said to him, dear Mr. Böhm, I can't look at you, you're confusing me! You don't really need cues if you are musical. There are occasional passages where you are unsure and want a cue, but then you tell the conductor before the performance, then you get it. Or from the prompter. In Italy and in Vienna, you always get every cue from the prompter if you want it.
And if the conductor conducts by heart?
Then you just have to rely on your own talent. But speaking of Karajan: he always waged war with the great voices, the trombone of Nilsson, for example, and the giant organ of Varnay. But of course he could not avoid using these magnificent voices in Wagner. Karajan loved more the smaller, more modulation capable, warm voices.
Did he actually take the concerns of the singers seriously and consider them ?
Oh yes! When I did "Fidelio" with him, which was always difficult for me because it was actually a soprano part, I needed a certain tempo to get by. Karajan knew that and always conducted a little faster for me to make the part easier. And then the newspapers wrote that Karajan was conducting too fast! He did it for my sake. Of course, he didn't do it for everyone's sake. Whether it was Karajan or Solti, Bernstein or Klemperer, I went to every conductor before a performance and said where I had difficulties and problems and asked to be helped, with speeding up the tempo, with a little pause to breathe, or with taking the orchestra back to almost zero. Of course, this has to be organic and coherent in musicality. But a good conductor always helps. James Levine is the most beloved conductor by singers in this regard. He does everything for a singer to create the best possible conditions for him to develop his voice to the full.