René Jacobs was probably the
foremost countertenor of his generation; now he is one of the very, very few
singers to make it as a conductor. Diffidently starting off leading "his"
Baroque repertoire (with a sensational Orontea, a long-forgotten 1649 opera by Pietro Antonio Cesti, at the 1982 Innsbruck Festival), he has now successfully moved along to Mozart — his 1998 recording of Così fan tutte is one of the best sellers in Harmonia Mundi's catalogue. His Nozze di Figaro (produced by
Jean-Louis Martinoty) had its premiere in Paris' Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 15 October; next season he will be doing Rossini's La Cenerentola there. Recently Jacobs has performed Haydn and Schubert in
concert with the Salzburg Camerata Academica, playing "modern" instruments; the
production of Haydn's Il mondo della luna
he led (with period instruments) at the 2001 Innsbruck Festival travels to Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden in February 2002. So will this gifted Belgian musician be tackling Bruckner — in which his blood brothers Philippe Herreweghe and Nikolaus Harnoncourt now indulge themselves?
"No Bruckner. No!" René Jacobs smiles. "Not for the moment, at least. There is far too much totally neglected Baroque repertoire still to be explored." In his Paris home, he takes a frugal sip from his coffee. And his smile turns rather awry. "I still have difficulties with institutionalized orchestras," he admits. "The Salzburg Camerata is a pick-up band, a truly great one. The generally young musicians are willing to learn from me, and I am just as happy to be able to learn from then. Just the same with Concerto Köln, the 'period instrument' gang I usually work with. During rehearsals, I regularly sing. Only that way all the musicians will clearly hear what I mean — questions of sound, intonation, accentuation. Many years ago, I tried the same thing with the orchestra of the Hamburg State Opera. With Concerto Köln we had just done Gluck's Eco e Narciso at the Schwetzingen Festival. The Hamburg Opera was a co-producer, but insisted on having its own orchestra in the pit. So during rehearsals, after a while I started singing to the musicians."
And now Jacobs looks really sad — yet angry. "Then rose the leader [concertmaster]. He told me: 'Sie sind doch nicht hier zum singen, Herr Jacobs, aber zum schlagen' (But you are not here to sing, Mr. Jacobs, just to beat the measure). Well, even tongue-tied, I really did the utmost with that orchestra — I dare say it worked rather well. But then, in the final performance, I got three cellists in front of me I had never seen before. Never! So, I'm sorry — but never again."
For his Paris Nozze di Figaro (as for Così fan tutte) he worked with Concerto Köln (a band founded in 1985), which must have made his life easier. And shortly before singers, orchestra and conductor reassembled for the stage rehearsals for this production, they did the opera in concert at the Montreux Festival and in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.
But not too many things have changed along the way, assures René Jacobs. "Only the recitatives. In concert it's sometimes hard to stop your singers — [you want] to get rid of these as soon as possible, as they want to get back to the 'real music' as soon as possible. On stage it is easier to let them understand what these words could — and do! — really mean. We have the great advantage of working with mainly Italian singers [Pietro Spagnoli, Patrizia Ciofi, Lorenzo Regazzo, Monica Bacelli], but even for them it took quite a while to understand what the system behind the Mozart-Da Ponte recitatives is. Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote verses, 7 to 11 syllables long — and after each of these, there should be a pause, however fractional. Chronometrically, this means that the recitatives take longer than in a traditional performance, but as these only now get their real dramatic sense, they're at least far less boring. And also, I have insisted that the singers even there take great care of their vocal line — appoggiaturas and embellishments should be reinstated. And that can also make a generally ever-so-dull recitative quite exciting."
Very important in these recitatives is the continuo contribution of the Portuguese fortepiano player Nicolau de Figueiredo, asserts Jacobs. "He is truly a brilliant musician. You may never forget that Mozart himself conducted and sat at the piano during the first performances of his operas. We can never imagine what he did exactly at his favorite instrument, but we may well be assured that he did not follow the notes he had written himself. That is why it is also most important that the fortepiano plays along with the orchestra — just to confront the audience with the infinite possibilities of Mozartean invention. No two performances ever sound the same. Even for me, and definitely the orchestra, it's always a surprise what our friend at the fortepiano may come up with next. And that keeps all of us — and also the singers — awake, alert. [Smiles.] Alive!"
Historically, it is now totally clear that Mozart never intended his singers to follow the score note-for-note. During Gustav Mahler's reign at the Vienna State Opera, the practice of embellishments and embroidery of the vocal line, even of appoggiaturas, was totally abolished. Today's musical world is still trying to recover from this measure, which was reasonable at the time — the stylistic consciousness of early 20th-century opera singers was not self-evident. But now, even helmsmen of the "historically informed performance" movement rarely give their singers any leeway. "And that is total nonsense, of course," sighs Jacobs. "I am afraid that some of my colleagues are still afraid to be considered 'too Baroque' in the later music they are now tackling. That is why they are timorously sticking to the score. But look, I am a singer — so I have an entire library on performance practice from olden days: books, treatises, pamphlets, even loose notes and reworked scores stemming from singers, teachers, composers from that period. Did you know, by the way, that when the first singer of Winterreise received the score from Franz Schubert he promptly got out his pencil and started 'improving' the vocal line? And his reworking of the vocal part will now be included in the complete critical Schubert edition.
"So we are getting somewhere now, at last! For our Figaro I gave the singers in first instance total liberty. Before rehearsals I did snow them under with my 'authentic' material, but that is exactly what intelligent singers like, I think. A conductor who is willing to guide, to share his wisdom, but finally leaves the ultimate choices up to them."
René Jacobs rarely sings these days ("I don't find the time anymore!" he laments), but is now conducting operas he had previosly sung himself. For Harmonia Mundi he recently recorded Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice; his own Orfeo, which he did in 1980 for Accent under Sigiswald Kuijken, is still a classic. But second time around, the Orfeo is no longer a countertenor, but a mezzo-soprano (the truly exquisite Bernarda Fink). Today Jacobs does not use many countertenors in his concerts or recordings.
"In recent times, our voice has been misunderstood," he explains. "No, we are not a contemporary replacement for the castrato — even in those days there were countertenors around — sounding, I assume, like we do nowadays, attaining a decent contralto range. After all, we are still men. But there were two kinds of castratos: the contraltos and the sopranos. In Handel's days, when a castrato fell ill, he was never replaced by a countertenor, but by a woman. And back then there were many female contraltos specializing in trouser roles. [Laughs.] So this made things a bit complicated.
"Last year, also in Paris, I did Hasse's Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra . Puccini would have written that for tenor and soprano of course, but Hasse wrote Marc Anthony for a female contralto, and Cleopatra for the then-17-year-old Farinelli, the greatest castrato of his time. So to make things easy, we just had two women on stage."
But does his reluctance to use countertenors not in fact mean that his former trade has gone downhill? René Jacobs is not very happy with this question and finally just gives a sad nod. "Yes, there are not very many good countertenors around today. Then again, there never were. And a brilliant man like Andreas Scholl is now being gradually swallowed by the marketing machine of what is left of the traditional recording industry. We still work together occasionally, but now he is basically concentrating on singing — and recording — a load of crap."
