My performance (Oct. 17) marked the return to the Met of Jonas Kaufmann after a prolonged absence marked by cancellations. He has been the only tenor who’s held any real interest for me over the past decade, in part owing to his illumination of several roles (in particular, Cavaradossi and Werther), and in part due to my fascination with his voice’s unusual  technical structure and its passage through time and repertoire. I have perhaps discoursed enough on those matters, both in previous posts and in Opera as Opera, to settle here for a simple report on effect. Dick Johnson is at the very limit of this dark lyric instrument’s capacities. True, as with Minnie, his music doesn’t absolutely demand a huge sound. Again leaving aside the early Met precedents of Caruso and Martinelli, and the postwar ones of Del Monaco, Corelli, and Tucker,  (though of course they can’t be left aside in any honest accounting), I found myself recalling Sándor Kónya, a closer natural match to Kaufmann. Kónya remains the best Lohengrin, Walther, and Erik of my live experience, and until the top (B-flat and up) started to tighten and dry out on him, he was highly successful in many of the same Italian roles Kaufmann has assumed. It also happens that he was the first Dick Johnson I saw, following Tucker in the 1961-62 season.

Kónya had a large, warm lyrical voice that could be hauntingly present at midrange spots like “Strana cosa ritrovarvi qui,” and in Italian roles he sang with a vibrant emotionality that was at times overindulgent, but seemed just satisfyingly on the brink in this music. To refresh memory, I pulled down from the shelf his early Puccini recital on DG, which contains both the “Or son sei mesi” and the “Ch’ella mi creda.” Positive as my recollections were, I was nonetheless startled by the immediacy, beauty, and drive of this singing, and with all due allowance for studio conditions and some judicious reverb, realized again (trigger warning: more Good Old Days lamentation) what a different standard we were applying to think of this artist as Dick Johnson No. 4 in the span of a few years’ passage.

In terms of temperament, Kaufmann is nothing like Kónya. He’s a modern singing actor in search of naturalness who, when allowed by directorial circumstance, makes considered choices in character action, from which his best singing impulses and expressions of emotion proceed. But his naturalness is of the cool modern variety, not the same as the sort Belasco sought to elicit, or the sort Puccini wrote into his music, which creates a world in which a high level of emotionality and rhetorical energy is “natural.” Kaufmann’s Dick Johnson was oddly withheld, in voice and action. For some reason, on his entrance into the Polka he was costumed in a long black garment that gave him a clerical look—had someone asked for last rites?—and dampened whatever postural presence he might have had. At the beginning of the Act 1 scene with Minnie, he sat at a table down left and proceeded in conversational, matter-of-fact tone, so that the implication of a line like the one of Kónya’s cited above did not emerge.  He remained seated and conversational during the slow build of the opening pages, so that when the declaration “Amai la vita, e l’amo, e ancor bella m’appar!“, with the sustained high B that suddenly flashes out, arrived, it seemed completely unprepared, and in fact got folded into the conversation as just another, and very strangely set, note. ^(I) In the Act 2 scene in the cabin, he again sat at a table to begin “Or son sei mesi,”  the highly charged, agitated, despairing confession of his destiny and unworthiness. These are choices that take down the bodily electricity of the scenes, that turn the overt, outward gestures of the music inward, as if the singer were a bit ashamed of them.