Spellbound

Jonas Kaufmann’s ascent to the position of the leading German lyric-dramatic tenor has been surprisingly gradual. I first saw him in Edinburgh in 2001, giving a Lieder recital in the Queen’s Hall, and was immediately astonished that I hadn’t heard of him before. For the next few years, I heard him there in more recitals, and in concert performances of Der Freischütz, Capriccio and culminating as Walther in Die Meistersinger in 2006.

Jonas Kaufmann’s ascent to the position of the leading German lyric-dramatic tenor has been surprisingly gradual. I first saw him in Edinburgh in 2001, giving a Lieder recital in the Queen’s Hall, and was immediately astonished that I hadn’t heard of him before. For the next few years, I heard him there in more recitals, and in concert performances of Der Freischütz, Capriccio and culminating as Walther in Die Meistersinger in 2006.

Meanwhile, he had made his Covent Garden debut in Puccini’s La rondine, and subsequently went on, in Traviata, Carmen, Tosca and Don Carlo, all at Covent Garden, to demonstrate his extraordinarily powerful and natural stage presence, combined with a flawless vocal technique and deep musical intelligence. But only recently have any CDs appeared of him in the great Lieder composers, where he is at least as much at home as on the stage. His Wigmore Hall performance of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin was, as one might expect by now, a very hot ticket indeed, and was given an appropriately fervent reception.

In an interesting new German book on Kaufmann, with interviews with him and some of his colleagues, there is a striking passage where he talks of his somewhat fraught relationship to Hans Hotter, whose master-class he attended in 1993. Hotter insisted that the great Schubert song cycles must be narrated, not enacted, while Kaufmann insisted on the reverse: and, as he quite rightly points out, if you listen to any of Hotter’s recordings of Winterreise, he is living the journey, not telling us about it.