Jon Vickers (In Memoriam: 1926-2015)

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.

New York City Opera Reborn?

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access images and sound.
 

On March 9, 2015, we were at a benefit concert sponsored by NYCO Renaissance. The host organization attracted a large audience to celebrate the life and work of Julius Rudel and to raise funds for the rebirth of the New York City Opera. Founded in 1943, the City Opera folded in 2013 after an extended period of managerial and fiscal troubles.

The program dovetailed with City Opera’s original mission and with the repertoire that dominated when Rudel was general manager and principal conductor, the company’s “golden age,” 1957 to 1979. The second half of the program, in particular, featured young singers and American composers.

 

In acknowledgement of Rudel’s birthplace, Vienna, the program began with the overture to Die Fledermaus, conducted by Imre Palló, a rendition so detailed, so elegantly phrased that the familiar chestnut seemed reborn, a harbinger, we can only hope, for the company itself. And if the players, identified as the “New York City Opera Orchestra,” will indeed constitute its pit orchestra, we will have further cause to rejoice.

Outstanding among the younger artists was countertenor John Holiday who sang one of Caesar’s arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, recalling the unforgettable 1966 production that helped validate the company’s claim to a place in Lincoln Center. On that brilliant occasion, Beverly Sills, who you hear as Cleopatra in the clip that follows, was finally recognized as the star she had long been. She would go on to be the prima donna assoluta of the company until her retirement in 1979.

Soprano Joélle Harvey lofted floating pianissimos in an aria from La Clemenza di Tito, a Mozart work that Rudel led at City Opera several years before James Levine brought it to the Met. Here is Carol Vaness, who made her acclaimed company debut as Vitellia in that 1979 production. The recording dates from a 1989 performance in Chicago.

 

Other prospects for the new New York City Opera on the benefit program were tenor Joshua Guerrero who capped a zarzuela aria with ringing top notes, and baritone Michael Chioldi, a sonorous and idiomatic Scarpia in the “Te deum” from Tosca. Soprano Kristin Sampson offered the world premiere of a concert aria by Tobias Picker who was present at the benefit.

The first of the City Opera alumni to perform was the irrepressible Plácido Domingo, in the final baritone aria from Verdi’s Macbeth. He reminded the audience that it was he who opened the company’s first Lincoln Center season as the heroic tenor lead in Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo. Frederica von Stade was moving in excerpts from Ricky Ian Gordon’s A Coffin in Egypt and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. We hear her in the world premiere recording of Heggie’s opera.

The concert ended with the hopeful ensemble that concludes Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, “Make Our Garden Grow.”

The benefit sponsor, NYCO Renaissance, is one of two bidders for the rights to the “New York City Opera” name and to its scarce remaining assets. The other bidder is Gene Kaufman, an architect and opera aficionado whose organization, Opera New York, has put $1.5 million on the table, $250K beyond NYCO Renaissance’s offer. A hearing in Federal Bankruptcy Court about the two bids is scheduled for late April. 

Ironically, and alarmingly, just a week before the Rudel celebration, the Times reported  that the Metropolitan was obliged to pledge two of its bronze Maillol sculptures to renew a $30 million credit line for which it had already encumbered its Chagall murals. According to the report, the Met had suffered a loss of $21.9 million in the fiscal year ending July 2014 (see the featured article in the March 23, 2015 issue of the New Yorker for a detailed account of the Met’s current financial challenges). The juxtaposition of these two events, the NYCO fundraiser and the Met’s further borrowing difficulties, begs the question: Can New York, like London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, sustain more than one resident opera company, and if so, under what conditions? Necessary, if not sufficient, is a venue for the reborn City Opera much smaller and more acoustically friendly than the company’s former home at Lincoln Center, perhaps the Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Theater proposed by NYCO Renaissance, the site of the recent gala concert. And equally necessary is a return to one of New York City Opera’s original missions, affordable ticket prices for the “People’s Opera” it was intended to be.