The ultimate Falstaff
Bryn Terfel, the great Welsh bass-baritone, has enjoyed some thrilling moments in his remarkable career, but none more memorable than stepping out on to the stage at La Scala, Milan, in January to sing Falstaff at the start of Verdi’s bicentenary year. “When you walk into that opera house, the nerves are tingling,” he says. “I hadn’t sung in La Scala for a decade, and Falstaff was the one I wanted to notch up.”
Terfel, who seems to have been around forever but is still only 47, has been singing Falstaff for more than a decade and has become synonymous with the role, which suits him vocally and dramatically like an outsized glove. “Falstaff has always filled me with a sense of pride,” he says, “because I was taking over the baton of Sir Geraint Evans, but I still don’t feel I’ve captured the essence of this very troubled, fat knight who eats, drinks, steals, trash-talks and celebrates his way through life.”
He made his debut in the role at the Sydney Opera House in 1999, when he was very young for the part. “Sir Geraint would probably have cringed that I was doing it so early,” he says, “but vocally I wanted to get it ship-shape, because it’s difficult, especially with all the make-up and heavy costumes.” Terfel chastises me – as much as this large, genial man is capable of chastisement – for suggesting Australia is a good place to try out repertoire. “Don’t fall into that trap,” he says. “Australia was somewhere I really wanted to sing.”
Falstaff, Verdi’s late masterpiece, is very different his preceding operas. In the place of set-piece arias, there is quick-fire ensemble singing that looks forward to Puccini in the degree of through composition. “It’s an endless melody, like Wagner,” says Terfel. I liken it to patchwork quilt, made up of musical fragments which the audience have to concentrate hard on to see the pattern. Terfel prefers the image of a Flemish painting with Falstaff at the centre and the rest of the large cast circling round him. “Right up to the end where you have that glorious fugue, everyone has to be on the balls of their feet,” he says. “If one goes astray, it’s gone.” Terfel is doing Falstaff again in October in San Francisco, and has been re-examining the facsimile of the original score which he bought 15 years ago in Vienna. “A tremendous amount can be gained over and above what you already know,” he says. The fat knight will eventually be captured.
Terfel says he was nervous ahead of his Falstaff in Milan, where he was sharing the role with the Italian Ambrogio Maestri, who had sung the part in the Covent Garden premiere of the production, directed by Robert Carsen, in 2012. “When you walk into La Scala you walk past all the posters showing Maria Callas in her most famous roles,” he says. “Some of those roles have never been reprised because they think no one could do them like her. Thank heavens she didn’t sing Falstaff.” Terfel had to make his first appearance three days earlier than anticipated when Maestri fell ill, but says an hour’s customary giggling in the make-up chair ahead of the performance helped settle his nerves. At La Scala, he segued straight from Falstaff into The Flying Dutchman. “I covered the Verdi-Wagner year in one week,” he jokes.
Having conquered La Scala, what about Bayreuth? To my surprise, he tells me he has never been invited to sing in a production there. He explains that he had a long relationship with the Salzburg Festival and the dates clashed, and now he enjoys spending the summers with his three sons too much. He was at the Festspielhaus in his early 20s on a bursary and auditioned there, but was too young to be offered a contract. Now, though, with the Dutchman, Wotan in the Ring and Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger firmly in his repertoire, he is ready. “I’ve still got time,” he says.
I’ve talked to Terfel on several occasions previously, but today’s meeting in a hotel close to the Royal Albert Hall is the most relaxed and engaged I have seen him. He is unusually expansive – one always has to remember that English is his second language and that he occasionally has to search for the word he is seeking – and focused on the goals he has set himself in this twin bicentenary year. “It’s amazing to talk about all these wonderful roles,” he says. “I’m enjoying everything that’s being put on my plate, even more than I have in the past.”
Terfel is noted for the beauty and lyricism of his singing, but insists those qualities are not what really matter to him. “Even in my younger days, I never went for the vocal quality,” he says. “I was focused on the words, the diction, the colours. My singing teachers knew they had a rough diamond on their hands – a farmer’s son from north Wales whose eyes were wide open with everything that was put in front of him.”
As he gets older, he says he can’t be as reckless as he once was with his voice. “When you are young, you can sing any dynamic you want. But now I have to think a little bit more about how I sing a certain phrase.” He is careful about the parts he takes on. He has in the past been offered Simon Boccanegra and Di Luna in Il Trovatore, but turned them down as not being right for his voice. “I am clearly a bass-baritone,” he explains. “I can sometimes go to the high register on a good day, but it’s not prolific, whereas a Verdi baritone can stay there forever, writing letters and riding a bike at the same time. They don’t have to think about it. To sing Di Luna and Boccanegra you need to be able to keep in that high tessitura. It’s a very specific register, and you have to be born with it. Your father will have cradled you, and sung you those songs. When you hear somebody like Leo Nucci and [Piero] Cappuccilli and Renato Bruson, you think ‘Wow’. It’s a thrilling sound. If I was offered Papageno or Di Luna, 99.9 per cent of the time I would go for Papageno, but I would have that niggling little per cent that would love to have done Rigoletto and Boccanegra.”
Terfel, though, doesn’t take on roles just for the sake of ticking them off. Nor does he take on too many operatic engagements. I wondered once whether this meant he would eventually reject the slog of opera and concentrate on lucrative concert tours, but today he sets my mind at rest on that score. He is committed to the roles he is currently singing, will add Boris Godunov to his repertoire in the next couple of years, and is looking for more leftfield projects – a newly commissioned piece or a work such as Hindemith’s gory opera Cardillac, which he says has always intrigued him.
He doesn’t count the number of engagements he takes on in a year. If something interests him, he will say yes, but he also believes in having enough free time to keep himself fresh and to spend time with his children. “From very early on, my calendar has been colour-coordinated. Green means I’m free, and if the green is evident I’m happy.” He also wants to make more time for his new foundation, which will support young singers.
Terfel has never apologised for singing popular music – Welsh songs, traditional ballads, Broadway standards. To him opera, lieder, hymns, popular song are equally valid forms of expression. “You have to remember that I was brought up in the Eisteddfod, singing in miscellaneous concerts with male voice choirs, so I was singing music theatre long before I ever sang an opera aria. If people wanted to hear Some Enchanted Evening, Oh What a Beautiful Morning, My Boy Bill, I’d sing it. One of the first recordings I did for Deutsche Grammophon was the Rodgers and Hammerstein album, then a Lerner and Loewe album, then came the Schubert.”
His latest studio album, his first for three years, is a disc of spirituals and traditional songs recorded with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City, Utah, in May. He says they made him very welcome, and it helped that so many the choir had Welsh roots. “At the end of the recording, the conductor asked those members of the choir who had Welsh heritage to raise their hands and 95 per cent of the hands went up.”
I ask him what other discs he is planning, and he casually mentions that Winterreise is on the horizon. Astonishingly, he hadn’t sung a single song from Schubert’s great cycle until he went to visit Jonas Kaufmann and his wife Margarete Joswig in Munich recently. “I played football with their kids for a bit, then Margy sat me down by the piano and played the first song. We sang it together, and that opened the floodgates. I thought ‘I have to do it now.’ Previously, he had felt it was too soon to take on the mighty work, and was also aware of the shadow of German bass-baritone Hans Hotter, whose recording he new well. “There’s a wonderful quality to his bass voice,” he says.
Terfel’s ease and expansiveness surprise me because we are meeting just as his divorce from his wife Lesley is being finalised. I had wondered how to introduce the subject, but he brings it up. “My life has changed in the last year,” he says. “I’m divorced now, and that will give me a different perspective in the remaining years of my career.” In a way it makes the logistics even more complicated, as he will need to have his own place in Wales and make time to see his sons there. But the fact it is now settled, after two years when they were effectively separated, means he can make a fresh start, though without trying to erase what went before.
“My wife and I had an amazing relationship that lasted more than 30 years,” he says, “and I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for her, her parents, my parents. They were so important in my career. It’s a life that takes over, and you need the network behind you. I still have that network. When I need a score, I ring my wife, or rather my ex-wife, and ask her to send it to me, because they’re still in the house.” An incendiary article in the Daily Mail in February had made their marital problems public knowledge. “We were trying to sort things out quietly until that article,” says Terfel, “and that hurt our boys. We had to pick them up after that.”
His wife had always found Terfel’s long absences difficult, and at times he, too, has found it hard to balance the demands of being an international singing star and a committed family man whose heart has always been in his beloved north Wales. “You give everything to your career,” he says, “and because of that you miss so much in your personal life – weddings, funerals, birthdays, your son scoring his first try, your son kicking his first conversion. These little things constantly prick that piece of flesh. That time I cancelled the Ring Cycle in Covent Garden [in 2007] caused such an incredible reaction, but I went back not to look after the son who was having the operation but to look after the other two sons. That was the dilemma.”
Now, perhaps, the dilemma is close to being resolved. His eldest son, Tomos, is studying business at Liverpool University, and Terfel hopes he will at some stage help him run his career and his foundation. His other two sons are teenagers. He says he will still need to be there for them, for instance when they were doing their GCSEs, but the trickiest times may be over. “It’s a new chapter in my life,” he says. A chapter that promises to be a Falstaffian feast.
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