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SEEN AND HEARD INTERVIEW
Paolo Gavanelli:
The
Italian baritone talks
to Anne Ozorio about singing Scarpia at The Royal Opera (AO)
Verdi and Puccini wrote roles that
demand tremendous presence, and few singers create them as
effectively as Paolo Gavanelli. His characterisations are so
powerful that it was a little worrying to encounter someone who
can create such Rigolettos, Nabuccos, Scarpias, Iagos, and Gianni
Schicchis, but Gavanelli himself is charming. It’s all in
his art: he says his roles come alive because he thinks about how
the music is written. But this is a modest understatement, for
much experience and intelligence goes into his work. This Tosca,
a production by Jonathan Kent, was premiered by Bryn Terfel just
two years ago, but Gavanelli’s Scarpia will make it special.
Gavanelli has created Rigoletto no
fewer less than 185 times and will soon achieve 200 productions.
Even by his standards, his 2001 Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House
was a milestone. He scuttled across the stage like a wounded
spider, but he sang the role with such dignity that he made the
role deeply moving. “If you think about what Rigoletto did, he is
like a monster for keeping his daughter hidden like a prisoner,
but if you look at the tessitura in the first act it’s very, very
high for a baritone. When a baritone sings that high, it’s
disturbing, like having a stick in your body, something’s not
right. Then in the second act, the tone is real baritone, in the
middle register. That’s when you discover the real nature of
Rigoletto. Then, at the end, the fermata are very low, for he is
coming close to finding out his daughter is dead.. It’s cupo,
very dark. It’s perfect. Verdi has designed the character”.
If Gavanelli
can make Rigoletto sympathetic, what does he make of Scarpia ? “It
depends on the point of view”, he says. “Nowadays the public has an
idea that Scarpia is bad. In Italy, we say that the history taught
in schools is written by the winners not the losers. So of course we
think Angelotti and Cavaradossi are good because they are
republicans. But when you think about 1800, Napoleon and the
battle of Marengo, it’s a time of great instability. For many people
then, Scarpia meant order and security. To him, the republicans are
like terrorists now, trying to destroy things. He is a policeman
doing his job. He’s practical and pragmatic, not evil.
Angoscia grande, pronta confessione eviterà!
If he can get a confession, it saves everyone trouble. He’s not
like Iago who is evil in purest state. Iago gets pleasure from
doing evil, from making others suffer. But Scarpia supports the
church and state because that’s what gives him his power. When he
makes the sign of the Cross in the second act he doesn’t do it
because he trusts in God but because he thinks, if I pray, God will
do something for me. Do ut des, that’s Latin, I give you
something, you give me something back. This is how Scarpia is.
A doppia mira tendo il voler, my will takes aim at a double
target, né il capo del ribelle è la più preziosa, and the
rebel’s head isn’t the only prize. He wants Tosca and he can get rid
of the rebel too. Of course Scarpia is brutal, but always he has
something to conquer, power, Tosca…..”
Although he has sung Scarpia many times, each time he finds
something new from the music. “I’m trying to get as little movement
as possible. Everything happens in this opera in only a few hours,
close to real time. I want to put in the idea that Scarpia is used
to doing these things every day, it’s his routine. Angelotti and
Cavaradossi get tortured, but the same would happen to any
republican rebel. It’s just the way they used to do things then. So
when he arrives at the church, he doesn’t have to shake his fingers
and shout. Spoleto and the other policemen know perfectly what they
have to do. They do things like this all the time. No ? When
Scarpia arrives he just looks around majestically and says, “Un
tal baccano in chiesa!, what a noise in a church !”.
Everyone else is running around. But I look at the window, it’s
very soft and quiet, almost no movement. But when Scarpia moves,
everyone notices, the public is shocked. In Italy, we have a saying
“the dog that barks does not bite”. Scarpia knows he has power, so
he doesn’t need to show it by screaming. When he questions
Cavaradossi he doesn’t shout, he just asks quietly. He’s pragmatic,
he doesn’t waste time”.
Gavanelli is intelligent – he was one of the top law students in his
years at Padua, one of the oldest universities in Europe – and
intelligence certainly shows in the way he approaches his work. His
roles have huge emotional impact, but they arise from firm
technique. “I have to give emotion when I sing, but I do not have to
have emotion while I’m singing. It’s different. When I sing it’s
well prepared and I know what I have to do”. Recently he heard
someone asked Maurizio Pollini what he felt when he played.
“Nothing” said Pollini, “if I get too emotional I make mistakes”. A
performer is like a channel allowing feeling to flow between composer and
audience. When he was training, his teacher told him that in a
career, “The voice is 5% important. The rest is stamina, strong
nerves, and good technique. Of course a perfect voice helps, but
some people start with a wonderful voice but after a few years it’s
finished. And other people have good careers because they can use
the voice they have well”.
Although Gavanelli at 48 is relatively young for someone so
prominent, he has seen many changes. From the age of 4 or 5 he was
listening to the great singers of the past – Benjamino Gigli,
Giovanni Martinelli, Giuseppe de Luca, Appolo Granforte. “Things
now are not like 60 or 70 years ago. When Gigli sang in America, he
went by ship and it took 2 weeks. And on board he had a pianist and
piano and he could vocalize with the fresh ocean air! Nowadays we
fly everywhere, we sing every 2 or 3 days. In San Francisco I’m
singing my 70th Gianni Schicchi”. When he started
singing, he had to practice a short passage from Eri tu che
macchiavi quell'anima for weeks until it was perfect, but
singers don’t have that luxury today. And audiences are used to
judging by recordings. “Every performance has to be like a
premiere. I love audiences but I wish they would understand that we
are human. We can sing 100 performances, and people only remember
the one that wasn’t so good because we were sick or had problems
like everyone else in the world has sometimes. And they forget the
99 that were wonderful !”
Gavanelli is a regular at the Royal Opera House because he’s much
respected. He’s also a regular in Munich, where he was appointed
Kammersänger in 2005. The honour means a lot because it was awarded
by the Bavarian State Ministry and he doesn’t sing German
repertoire. He’s met many great singers, but he remembers the time
early in his career when he sang with Julia Varady in La Traviata.
He’d sung the second strophe of Di Provenza il mar with pppp,
four pianissmi. Afterwards, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau came up
and took him by the arm. “Mr Gavanelli”, he said, “Don’t ever lose
your pianissimo! I can hear it in the last row of the theatre
!”
It taught him something about using the voice for dramatic effect.
“You can sing most of an opera piano but at some point you have to
be forte. If you are screaming all the time it’s boring, and after
a few minutes the audience gives up. But if you sing piano, lento,
calando, when you do the forte people will pay attention”. So Gavanelli’s Scarpia, this month at the Royal Opera House,
will seem all the
more menacing for being restrained and orderly.
Anne Ozorio
Picture courtesy of IMG Artists (UK)
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