Where’s Jonas Kaufmann?
mainIn Geneva, singing Die Schöne Müllerin at the Grand Théatre tonight.
Seen here with a journalist, Claire Bourgy.
He tells Laura Fontana: ‘This boy is so innocent that he doesn’t know how to seduce his müllerin. In my opinion he ends up committing suicide… but not everyone thinks like me…. and certainly not my piano partner Helmut Deutsch.’
It might also have been a good idea to mention that the lady in the photo with Jonas Kaufmann is NOT Laura Fontana. Now the text “he tells Laura Fontana…” gives the idea that it is Laura.
Thanks for the clarification. I also published a post specifying that I am not the person who spoke with Kaufmann.
The boy/hero of the cycle is maybe a bit like Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night – in love with being in love (‘if music be the food of love’ etc . If the object of his affections made a move – he’d probably run a mile.
I would like to specify that the dialogue under the picture is between Jonas Kaufmann and the journalist Claire Bourgy. I was not present at the event. Laura Fontana
It is a poetical cycle. Not a novel. Or a play. Realism is out of question and so is easily digestible “psychology”. It captures a specific mode of being in the world ( a rather symbolic world) that is based primarily on imagination, dreaming, deep feeling.
It is exactly this attitude and analytical approach that puts Maestro ahead of many other artists and allows him to become a unique interpreter of the musical quest he proposes each time. He becomes this innocent lad and the entire cycle becomes … his!
His millers, 10-15 years ago, never sounded very chaste. Or innocent. Fortunately. Maybe this is also due to his voice, quite gorgeous at the time. They communicated rather an intense, polymorphic eroticism hard to be contained by social laws and labels and more akin to nature .
Absolutely, I experienced Kaufmann singing this cycle live and by the middle of Wander’n he WAS that brash youth. He LIVES the text in real time and slightly different at each performance.
Backstage, 20 minutes after Wiegenlied, he was the mature artist, amiable and outspoken on the latest issues.
Anyone know how many will be attendance ? I see the website says sold out.
800 were there, I believe.
Thanks Helen. Were you one of the 800?