Like many a mezzo before her, she first made her name in Rossini
roles — most notably in late 1997, when she stepped in for Vesselina
Kasarova as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Metropolitan Opera.
But a step backwards in musical history, into the great leading roles of Baroque
opera written for castrati, is taking Vivica Genaux forward in the
public's imagination.
A very promising 1998 performance in the title role of Handel's Ariodante at the Dallas Opera in Texas was followed shortly afterwards by her first performance with a period-instrument orchestra, as Selimo in Johann Adolf Hasse's Solimano at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden in February 1999.
It was an electrifying debut, rapturously received by a public conditioned by conductor René Jacobs to expect the highest standards in Baroque singing. Genaux's performance commanded attention as much for her effortless coloratura and huge, even range as it did for her androgynous sex appeal. It was a breakthrough in pants-role interpretations — a woman who could look and move like a man without losing any of her feminine grace. It was also a coup for Jacobs, who has for years been arguing that mezzo-sopranos are better interpreters of roles written for castrati than countertenors are.
Genaux made her Paris debut in 2001 with another Hasse score, Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra. The piece itself hammered home Jacobs' point about Baroque gender-bending: at the 1725 premiere, the famed 21-year-old castrato Farinelli sang the role of Cleopatra, while contralto Vittoria Tesi was Marc'Antonio.
In a new disc on the Harmonia Mundi label, Genaux (accompanied by Jacobs and
the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin) sings arias written for Farinelli, now as in
his own day the most famous of the castrati. With her clear trills, long lines,
full lower register and uncontestable virtuosity, she brings back to life
repertoire written for a type of voice that we will never hear.
At the 2002 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, Genaux sang the title role in Handel's Rinaldo. Nigel Lowery's brilliantly subversive modern production saw her in perhaps her most masculine role yet, muscling through the set like GI Joe with army fatigues and a five-o'clock-shadow. andante contributor Shirley Apthorp found her in her Innsbruck hotel lobby between performances.
Shirley Apthorp: You were born in Fairbanks, Alaska — but the
story's not quite that simple, is it?
Vivica Genaux: True — I'm a mess! My mother was born in Mexico City, of Swiss and German parents; they had helped a lot of Jewish people escape through Switzerland to Mexico during the War. My mother was sent to Switzerland then for the first time after the war ended — she was on a year of study abroad from the University of Maryland; my father was American, of Belgian and Welsh descent; they met going over on the Queen Mary and were going out the whole time they were in Basel. They got married, and he was offered a position at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks as a biochemistry professor, so they moved up there in 1950.
SA: How was musical life in Fairbanks when you were growing up?
VG: We were really fortunate at that time, because Russian airspace was closed, so when European artists toured the Orient, the planes would all land to re-fuel in Anchorage. Fairbanks is just a 50-minute flight away, and so they all came to Fairbanks. It was amazing — we saw the most incredible range of artists, right across the spectrum.
My Dad would always be correcting papers when I went to bed, and my parents' room was above mine in my cabin. He would be upstairs blasting Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos and Brahms and Bruckner and Mahler, and ballet music — that's what I really loved — when I was going to bed. I'd invent all these little stories that went along with the music.
SA: You started out with a science degree ...
VG: I did. [My family] had grown up with grad students and doctoral students; we were all university brats, so that was my world. My sister became an aeronautics engineer — for quite a while she was the only woman in her department at Boeing, and they used to give her the problems that nobody else could solve.
But at high school [in Fairbanks] I had sung in two classical choirs and two jazz choirs, I was doing modern dance and ballet and I played violin in the orchestra. I think everybody's like that up there, because the winter is so cold and dark — in December there are only three-and-a-half hours of direct sunlight and the sun barely comes above the horizon, so what else can you do?
I was at the University of Rochester in [upstate] New York, taking a degree in genetics. I did a year and a half, and I was truly miserable. In summer I would go and study singing in Texas with Dorothy Dow, a teacher I'd begun to take lessons with when I was 13. And the second summer I just fell apart, because all I wanted to do was to sing and I didn't want to go back to university. So Miss Dow picked up the phonebook and called the Indiana University School of Music. That was how I ended up there, studying with Virginia Zeani. I was scared to death, because it was a completely new world for me: I was 19 and knew nothing about the operatic world. I spent hours in the library trying to find out about arias she had told me to sing; I really worked very hard to come up just to sea level.
SA: And you ended up as a mezzo-soprano.
VG: Yes — that was quite a surprise! But once I'd made the change from soprano, everything fit into place. I did a lot of auditions then, and my showpieces were Rossini — I always had the agility, it was a natural thing for me.
My first job was L'italiana in Algieri [at the Florentine Opera] in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conductor, Joe Rescigno, had me come and sing for the General Director, and they hired me on the spot without looking at my curriculum, not knowing that I had no experience at all. They didn't find out until just before the premiere that I'd never sung onstage before, and by then it was too late! In the audience that night was the general manager of San Diego Opera, and at intermission he offered me three contracts! So that was my break — it was just luck.
SA: So you've always been one to jump in at the deep end?
VG: Yeah, always. I'm stubborn, I'm pig-headed. It's just [that] I have to try things.
SA: Do you get a lot of lectures about the danger of burnout?
VG: I give myself those lectures; I'm really concerned about how much I accept to do. I am working pretty much constantly, but I take time between jobs to work with my teacher, Claudia Pinza — I've been with her for ten years.
SA: Was the Berlin Solimano your first contact with René Jacobs?
VG: Yes. That was my favorite role of all the parts I've ever done — it fit like a glove, and I loved it. The world opened up for me with that production. René wrote all the cadenzas and all the ornaments for me; it was incredible!
SA: Did the move from Rossini to Baroque repertoire require a big change in vocal technique?
VG: That was the thing — it didn't. There was no technical change at all.
I knew of René, of course, from his reputation as a singer, and I'd heard that he was very particular when he worked with singers, so I was terrified. We went straight into a three-hour coaching session when I arrived, and it was most fun that I've ever had in my life working with somebody. He was so enthusiastic, and when he gets working, he has such a good time —it's like a kid discovering Lego.
SA: When you watch Jacobs' conducting technique, it's hard to understand how the performers know what he wants.
VG: Right ... I think the trick is that he's worked with these orchestras very often: they know him very well and he knows them very well, and the rehearsal periods are so meticulous that by the time you get into the performances, everybody knows what everybody's doing. When these pieces were written, there was nobody up there conducting at all. The orchestra would listen to the singer and follow; they all spoke the same musical language. Jacobs writes out all of the ornamentation, [for the singers and] also for the orchestra, and he knows all the parts by heart. By the time you get to the performance, he's kind of there just to direct traffic.
SA: Will you ever start writing your own ornaments?
VG: I don't think so. I've tried a little bit, but once I've learned one, I find it hard to forget — it's just one of my blocks.
SA: Handel's singers would presumably have improvised their ornaments.
VG: Yes, that's true, but it's almost impossible today, I think. Back then it was the only kind of musical style they knew; today we've heard a myriad other things.
SA: Do you agree with Jacobs that it's best to cast a mezzo, rather than a
countertenor, in castrato roles?
VG: It's historical fact. In secular music, the mezzo voice was the one that took over that [heroic castrato] tradition. Even in the 1800s, when Rossini was writing, he composed the kinds of roles that would have been sung by a castrato in the 1700s for a mezzo-soprano —like Malcolm in La donna del lago — the same kind of young hero caught between love and valor.
SA: How do you think the castrato voice would have sounded?
VG: I have no idea. If you look at the music written for Farinelli, you can see that the parts are divided into sections marked "soprano register," "alto register," "baritone register" and so on. It's almost as if there were mental gear shifts they had to make. So perhaps their range was not as seamless as we tend to suppose.
SA: Have you ever wondered what they were like as people?
VG: I think kind of like Michael Jackson, probably. I mean, look at the poor guy — he's amazing, but I think he was completely deprived of any kind of childhood or any kind of normal growth. I don't think he knows what a normal life would be. When you have such an extreme talent, there must be a compromise that you make, I think, in your lifestyle.
SA: Where did you learn to play a man onstage so convincingly?
VG: When I was working in Seville, I would go to the Plaza España and watch the men — younger and older men, how they reacted, how they touched people, how they picked up objects, how they walked down stairs and how they stood. In Spain they still have a kind of stylized masculine movement. A lot of it's about how you hold your shoulders.
Of course, everybody obviously knows that I'm a woman — I'm not
fooling anybody. But I try and find the real human character. What they told me
in Seville is that it's not a question of being a man or being a woman; it's a
question of being human.
