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COPYRIGHT 2005 Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
"All I want is to give pleasure to the audience." Rene Pape--who has emerged as the world's most charismatic bass in the first decade of the twenty--first century--repeated this statement several times during our two-hour interview (generously lubricated with beers and grappas) at a Florentine card last December. And surely no statement could be more unquestionable in its logic for a performing artist. It came as a surprise all the same--perhaps because few opera singers have such a lucidly unpretentious vision of their mission in life, or perhaps because we tend to associate the German opera aesthetic (Pape is both Dresden-born and a leading Wagnerian) with angst rather than with unfettered delight. Of course, even pain can be pleasurable (as some German directors clearly postulate in their self-flagellating "readings"), but on the simplest level at least, Pape's artistry is largely about the heartwarming immediacy of communication.
The previous afternoon, he had sung his greatest Verdi role--Filippo II in Don Carlo--in a revival of Luchino Visconti's historic production (first staged in Rome in 1965) at the Teatro Comunale in Florence. The tension generated during the big Act IV aria ("Ella giammai m'amo"), much of it sustained in the most introspective of half-voices, conveyed both the desperate loneliness of the powerful monarch--portrayed as still being in the prime of life, like the forty-year-old Pape himself--and the sense of physical well-being that derives from hearing beautiful sounds produced without the slightest waste of breath or unsteadiness of line, with every word poised on the lips (and only the vaguest hint of a foreign accent).
This combination of tragic expression and sensuous beauty is of course typical of Italian opera, yet it is no less appropriate in pre-Expressionist German works. Wagner, too, wanted his operas to be sung with the vocal finish of the finest bel canto tradition. "I notice many similarities between Verdi and Wagner," says Pape, "and feel that of the two it is Wagner who writes better for the voice. Marke's monologue in Act II of Tristan und Isolde is pure...
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