Jon Vickers, a leading Metropolitan tenor for more than
twenty-five seasons, died last summer, on July 10. Vickers is remembered for
such diverse roles as the comic, stuttering Vasek in The Bartered Bride, the towering Aeneas in Les Troyens, a Samson who toppled the temple as much with the force
of his voice as with the restored strength of his arms, Laca in Jenufa, quick to anger, transcendent in forgiveness.
Audiences and critics may have carped about Vickers’s tendency to hug the
underside of the pitch and to croon at pianissimo. They nonetheless agreed about
the power, clarity, and individuality of his timbre, the sensitivity of his
phrasing, the force of his personality, and most importantly, the depth of his understanding
of the musical and dramatic dimensions of his roles. His Siegmund expressed the
fullest measure of passion, his Otello and Canio vented unfathomable rage.
And then there are the two characters that he made singularly
his own, his incomparable Florestan and Peter Grimes, roles for which he holds
the house records. With Leonie
Rysanek, then with Hildegard Behrens, Vickers gave Fidelio a
currency in the repertoire that it had never before enjoyed in New York. At the
start of Act II, Florestan, imprisoned in a dark dungeon for his opposition to
despotic rule, laments his loss of freedom. Suddenly, a vision of his beloved
wife fills him with hope. The tenor easily surmounts the difficulties of the
aria and makes palpable the character’s despair, then his ecstasy.
In the
final scene of Peter Grimes the
eponymous hero, cast out by his community, suspected of having been responsible
for the death of his two apprentices, tormented by his own demons, delirious,
recalls the events that have brought him to the verge of suicide. Accompanied
only sporadically by a foghorn and an offstage chorus, it is Vickers, now
keening in legato phrases, now issuing brief interjections, who finds a
universal message in the confusion and anger of the poor fisherman.
It is Tristan
that should have been a third role in the Vickers pantheon. Alas, he sang it
only twice with the company. In 1973-74, he was announced for an eight-performance
run of Wagner’s opera. When the scheduled soprano bowed out, Vickers first
refused to sing with her replacement, changed his mind for the broadcast, and
finally appeared opposite the greatest Isolde of her generation, Birgit
Nilsson. That single smashing evening told Met audiences how otherwise
impoverished were the contemporary Wagnerian ranks. Regrettably, by reason of indisposition and of the peripatetic life of the opera singer in the 1970s, the
voices of Vickers and Nilsson twined only
once in the “Liebesnacht” in New York. Here they are in performance from Vienna.
A small number
of dramatic tenors have assumed some of the Vickers roles with great
distinction and success, notably Plácido Domingo and Jonas Kaufmann. But Florestan
and Peter Grimes still belong to him.