Interview: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet on Isolde in Dallas

The stuff of legends: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet and Clifton Forbis
as Wagner’s immortal lovers.

It’s always painful when Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet sings great music in some place where I can’t get to hear her. It happens too damned often. But the pain is especially acute this week, as she sings one of her touchstone roles, Wagner’s Isolde, with Dallas Opera; a run of four performances begins on Thursday night.

I heard her sing a transcendent Liebestod in Bordeaux a few years ago, and it’s killing me to think that, for once, Jeanne-Michèle is right here in America, singing the whole megillah, and I can’t go. But my regret doesn’t end there.

JMC and Forbis in the same staging, from Geneva.
This production, directed by Olivier Py, was recorded for DVD,
which you can (and should) purchase.

When I was a boy, Tristan und Isolde was the first Wagner opera that Dallas Opera (then known as Dallas Civic Opera) produced, a rite of passage for the company and for me, too, since Tristan was thus the first Wagner opera that I ever attended. (It was also the first time I asked a girl on a date. I was smooth, all right.) To return to Dallas, all these years later, and to hear the opera with fresh, better-educated ears, while a friend sings the heroine’s music, would be magical indeed. No such luck.

But Dallas Opera is also where I launched my journalistic career, interviewing Beverly Sills in her dressing-room before a performance, and so far as sopranos and interviews and Dallas Opera are concerned, at least, my luck is still good. Despite a phenomenally busy rehearsal schedule — in which what was originally planned as a concert performance has been fully staged — Jeanne-Michèle managed to find time to answer a few questions about a work that means a lot to her and about a company she’s clearly pleased to revisit.

Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, in person.
She grew up in New Orleans, which is sort of next-door to Dallas, if you think of it as a very, very wide door.

WVM: For a while now, the DVD of Tristan from Geneva was the most reliable way for audiences in the United States (your native country, by the way) to get a sense of who you are and what you do.

JMC: This appearance in Dallas feels like the completion of a beautiful circle, and maybe the beginning of another? Clifton Forbis and I did our first Siegmund and Sieglinde here together. Then we did the Geneva Tristan, his first and my second, together.

For me, that was such a magic production. It was the beginning of my close relationship with Olivier Py and a musical highlight in my life to sing this music with the magical Armin Jordan. The DVD that was made there captures so much of that for me. Clif and I are very similar musicians and artists, and our voices work very well together. It is such a joy to be back in T&I and Dallas with him. Old home week.

JMC and Forbis in another scene from the Geneva production

WVM: How has your interpretation of Isolde changed since the Geneva production?

JMC: Of course, every production brings new ideas into my interpretation, and with most roles, every time I sing it (and I mean every time: rehearsal, performance, run-through in my living room), I discover new things, new colorations, new nuances in text and musical phrasing.

I think the biggest change for me is the fleshing out of the character's backstory, both within my life and my imagination. In this production, for example, Isolde has Morold's coat and is in possession of Tristan's original sword. She uses the coat as a comfort, a reminder, a talisman. At first I felt confused by this idea, felt a little Elektra-like, but slowly I have worked the coat into my Isolde: the need to feel that things could have been different, that had Morold lived and she had spent her life with him, everything would be okay.

JMC with Thomas Moser as Tristan, in Naples, 2004.

In my personal opinion and experience of the character of Isolde, Tristan and Isolde were in love at first sight; the potion unleashes their inhibitions, but does not create the love. I find using the coat, using this almost-escapism to her past, makes her younger, more vulnerable in a way. It gives an expression to her weakness/humanity, so, despite the intensity of her rage in Act I, you see the woman who just wants it all to be okay.

WVM: I was around in 1976 for the company’s very first Wagner opera — which just happened to be Tristan. Coming to town decades later, how do you find the company’s command and the audience’s response?

JMC: We will have some public for the general rehearsal [final dress, tonight], so I cannot comment on the audience response. But I can say that this cast is a good as it gets, and the atmosphere is so congenial and positive. We all are reveling in each other's abilities and ideas. Such a fabulous working situation. The production, by Christian Räth (another old friend) is beautiful. Clif (who has sung 100 Tristans) has said that he feels it is one of the truest he has been in.

Roberta Knie and Jon Vickers in Tristan at Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1979, three years after they sang these roles in Dallas.
Only much, much later did I understand how good they were.

WVM: I’ve admired Graeme Jenkins’ conducting on several occasions and in varied repertory, but I’ve never heard him in Wagner. What is he bringing to this music?

JMC: He loves this score and has prepared it so well and with such attention. He is absolutely present with us, and we are making great music. The orchestra is thrilled to play it and has put in a lot of time on the score. I think the audience is in for an exceptional treat.

WVM: Any advice for audiences who’ve never heard this opera before?

JMC: Wagner takes a big commitment of time and energy from performers and audiences alike. The more preparation one does, the more one gets out of it. That said, do not come hungry, or too tired, if possible, and do be ready to be transported.

JMC with Petra Lang as Brangäne. Santiago, Chile, 2007.

Listen both to the voices and the individual voices of instruments and sections in the orchestra. Wagner gives information on many different levels: textually, melodically (both voices and instruments), harmonically, texturally, color-wise, etc. He constantly is guiding the listener in their experiences and the experiences of the characters on stage. Listen for the leitmotifs, and know how every act reverberates into the next, the ripple effect of a stone thrown into a pond, and how all is connected. Another ever-expanding circle.

Tristan und Isolde
Dallas Opera
Thursday, 16 February, 7 PM
Sunday, 19 February, 2 PM
Wednesday, 22 February, 7 PM
Saturday, 25 February, 7 PM
For information and tickets, click here.

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Interview: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet on Elektra

In Berlin

The story goes that, with his score for Elektra, Richard Strauss pushed the musical envelope so far that even he got scared; thereafter, he retreated to music that was more melodic and more comfortable. Which is to say that he might as well have written the title role of Elektra precisely with soprano Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet in mind. She thrives on a big sing and a juicy dramatic role; at the forefront of the most demanding repertoire, she’s an artist who constantly pushes the envelope.

I came thisclose to riding a bus to Berlin for 32 hours, just to hear her role debut, but I missed out. I have another chance this month, in Geneva, where Jeanne-Michèle performs Elektra again. By now, she’s lived with this music and explored the territory thoroughly, and I asked her to share a bit of her perspective, as a preview. Despite a busy rehearsal schedule, she found time to answer my questions.

In concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, January 2010.
According to The Guardian, her Elektra “rippled with intelligence and nuance” in this performance, which was recorded for release on CD (forthcoming).

WVM: When you first told me you were going to sing Elektra, I was thrilled: the part seems such a good fit for you vocally, dramatically, and even temperamentally, because you’re an artist who really likes to challenge herself. Now you’ve performed the role several times in a couple of productions: has Elektra turned out to be a good fit after all?

JMC: My first serious contact with Elektra was as the Fourth Maid in Spoleto. Deborah Polaski sang Elektra and Helga Dernesch was Klytemnestra (and I use “was” intentionally). I was blown away and terrified that people told me I was a baby Elektra, Elektra-in-training.

The great Helga Dernesch as Klytemnestra

Fast-forward to now. I am in my fourth production and have done two concert series and, I hope, finally have her really in my voice and skin. As you point out, this is a daunting process and will continue as long as I am singing Elektra, I am sure. (And maybe when I move to Klytemnestra, too!) As a singer, I am drawn to the most challenging repertoire and characters. I look to feel them and fill them, change and grow with and through them. Elektra is for me one of the most horrible and rewarding to inhabit. I have come to love her, to want to hold her and make it all better, something that cannot be done.

JMC as Elektra, in Warsaw

To be in her and stay connected to myself, hold onto sanity somehow, is the real challenge. Singing this music requires some emotional distance; the vocal demands encompass everything, save coloratura. Each time I sing her, I get better at feeling my own lines, knowing where to step back and just let the music make the point.

WVM: It’s such a demanding role. How did you prepare for it the first time? Or, to put it another way, where do you start when you take on a challenge like this one?

In Berlin, with Marianne Uhl as Chrysothemis

JMC: Someone recently played a Flagstad interview in which she was talking about her repertoire. She said that just being older and experienced was necessary to sing the big roles. That said, all my life has prepared me for these parts. Years on the stage (it is my 20th career anniversary right now) and years of learning the languages of the late-19th- and 20th-century composers, and loving their music. Then there is just gathering info, the Greek plays, the modern plays derived from the Greek ones, psychology and history (this time Moby-Dick, looking at Ahab and Elektra’s parallels) … it never ends, as you know.

And, for me, soul-searching: finding how and where the psyche of Elektra and mine can meet, or not; how our stories can intertwine to bring her to life. This is not always simple. I spend a lot of time journaling and fiddling on the piano. Then there are the words and notes.

In Berlin, with Alfred Walker as Orest

WVM: Have any of your directors or conductors or colleagues really illuminated some aspect of the role or changed your initial perspective in a meaningful way?

JMC: In colleagues, I have been blessed. I have only done one production in which the director believed the story is only one of hatred and horror with no real interest in the history that brought these characters to their current state, and he was eventually willing to be won over to a more balanced psychological read. Certainly for me, it was interesting to give distance to Elektra’s pain, to just look at her hatred and not her desperation and terror and loneliness.

In Berlin, with Henschel as Klytemnestra

Klytemnestras are, naturally, Elektra’s teachers. From my first stage mom, Jane Henschel, to my current, Eva Marton, I have learned so much from these ladies. Elektra is, after all, Klytemnestra’s daughter, and their routes to “K” inform my “E.” Of course, sharing a stage with Eva is a lesson unto itself. She has been very generous with me and I relish this opportunity to share the stage with her.

In this production here in Geneva, we have a husband-and-wife directorial team, Christof Nel and Martina Jochem. Martina is a psychologist and they have worked with me to play the insecure, childish side of Elektra even more. It is a challenge to balance the big exultant musical moments with this, and it helps make sense of some of the “daring” moments of attack and retreat with Klytemnestra.

Is there a definitive take? I think not, which is one reason this story has been around for millennia. It asks us to address these questions over and over.

In Berlin

WVM: The Ancient Greeks would reenact this story to help audiences achieve catharsis, and I wonder how you as a performer feel afterward: exhausted, ground down, or enlightened, uplifted, or something altogether different?

JMC: In the end, I feel emotionally exhausted, depleted and hungry. Some productions end with exultation, a death with a smile on her face, but this is not one of them. I hope there is a bit of a glow in the final moments when Elektra is lost in the glory of righting her world, that somehow more death and blood will erase the past deaths, but she is her mother’s daughter, and the story just continues.

In Warsaw, with Ewa Podles as Klytemnestra

WVM: What’s next on your schedule?

JMC: I am very excited for this winter. I am finishing the Ring Cycle in Strasbourg, Opéra National du Rhin, with my first Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde, then I am singing and recording Erwartung with Ekka-Pekka Saraste and the WDR in Cologne, and finally I sing the beautiful Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Barcelona. Needless to say, I am madly studying and preparing all these new roles, reading reading reading and spending lots of time at the piano. I find lots of joy and exhilaration in the process!


Elektra
Music by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal
Christof Nel, director; Martina Jochem, scenic analyst
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; Stefan Soltesz, conductor
Grand Théâtre de Genève
November 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25 at 8PM

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Things That Go ‘Wesendonck’ in the Night

JMC in Wagner’s Siegfried, with tenor Lance Ryan.
One of these days, Wotan willing, I’ll hear her sing this, too.

If I have any complaint at all about the career of soprano Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, it’s the uncanny ability of her managers to schedule her choicest engagements at moments when I’m least able to hear her. With clockwork regularity, she sings wonderful roles precisely when I’ve got a deadline, in towns that are just beyond my reach. Not to be paranoid, but I’ve come to feel almost as if her managers were keeping me under surveillance.

That’s why I was so thrilled to learn, at the last minute, that Jeanne-Michèle was singing a program of Wagner with the Orchestre National de l’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux, this week. I was — believe it or not — in between deadlines of my own, and Bordeaux is quite easy to get to. Moreover, Jeanne-Michèle’s would perform the Wesendonck Lieder and the Death of Isolde, and after the retrograde weeks I’ve endured lately, I needed to hear that music. I was off like a rocket to the south.

As Isolde, in some other production I wasn’t able to see.
(That’s tenor John Treleaven as Tristan.)

This was the first time Jeanne-Michèle had sung the Wesendonck Lieder with full orchestra, she told me, though of course she’s sung Isolde all over the place: it’s one of her calling cards. I’d never heard her in any live performance of Wagner, so this was a rare opportunity on many levels.

The sheer power of her instrument is remarkable, like some tawny panther that leaps out at a listener, surging over the orchestra, prowling around the auditorium. In this case, the auditorium was the Palais des Sports — yes, an arena — where the Orchestre frequently offers symphonic concerts. (Whether this is a good idea on other evenings, I can’t say, but this time it worked. Jeanne-Michèle is a rock star, baby.) Give her the right material, such as the Wesendonck Lied “Im Treibhaus,” in which the instrumental component is a storm of moods and passions, and what you get is a double-whammy force of nature.

Yet she knows when to scale back, to caress a phrase with sublime tenderness, and these selections gave her plenty of opportunity to do just that. The wings of her “Der Engel” are like those of a butterfly. Just as I knew they would be.

Her connection to this music was demonstrated in visible ways, too, most tellingly during the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, when she was seated onstage, next to conductor Kwame Ryan. As I say, she’s sung Isolde many times, and the music conjures very specific associations for her: as she listened, she saw people she cares about, so clearly that I could almost have drawn their outlines in the empty air before her.

Best of all, her appreciation didn’t spoil ours. I had my own visions, too, standing right beside hers.

Afterward, I had the great fun of introducing her to my sister-in-law, and of accompanying her to a souper hosted and attended by other really cool people. Is her life always like this? I hope so, for her sake. And as for my sake — she may make a Wagnerite of me yet.

Force of Nature: Really, she’s a Discovery Channel unto herself.

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Dining with Divas

Bisou sans bijoux: Joyce DiDonato and Bill
Photo by Gilles Jaroslaw, Paris 2007

One of the nicest things about not being a critic anymore is this: so many singers are now so much more comfortable around me. Lately I’ve had occasion to reflect on this, and to enjoy the benefits of my new status. I’ve attended performances by three wonderful artists, visited the ladies backstage, and gone for supper with them afterward. This is a rare privilege, one that makes me both grateful and boastful. But knowing the singers is also — I am understanding more clearly — valuable to me as an artist.

Long ago I recognized that opera appealed to me as a kind of storytelling by other means — in fact, by all the means at once — and the ladies who sing opera are therefore storytellers of a high order. If I pay attention, I can learn things about their creative process that will inform my own.

Let’s begin with Joyce Castle, the Texas-born mezzo-soprano whom I’ve known since an afternoon in the mid-1980s, when she visited the Weill Foundation. In those days, I was immensely excited by the existence of any Texan in opera, which I took as a sign that I was not alone in the world. Never mind that Joyce left the state shortly after her birth. Only a Texan would insist that she’s a Texan.

I began to seek out her performances at New York City Opera. Sometimes the presence of Joyce’s name on the bill was sufficient to induce me to purchase a ticket. That was the case with Einem’s The Visit, in which Joyce played the leading role, and my reward was one of the most complete portrayals I’ve seen on any stage or screen. She’s populated the stage of the State Theater with a whole town’s worth of memorable characters, comic and tragic and just plain weird, applying keen musicianship and theatrical insights that are consistently thrilling. In time, it wasn’t enough to see only what she did at City Opera, and now, whenever I can, I travel to hear her: to Minneapolis, for The Handmaid’s Tale; to Fort Worth, for The Turn of the Screw; to Boston, for Mahagonny; to Wilmington, for The Medium.

Joyce Castle, center, sublime as always in NYCO’s Cendrillon.
Sadly, she did not wear this outfit when we went out after the show.
Original photo by Carol Rosegg©

Last month I traveled to New York to hear her, as Madame de la Haltière, the stepmother in Massenet’s Cinderella opera, Cendrillon, at City Opera. In a rollicking production, with strong contributions from almost everybody, Joyce carried the show. As a hilariously hypocritical snob, she gleefully combined so many odious traits that you couldn’t help loving the character. She kicked up her heels in a couple of dances, and she soared over the (often very loud) orchestra with ease.

You’d have every right to expect her to be exhausted after that performance, but Joyce received my friends and me in her dressing room, then went out with us for supper. She regaled us with stories and tantalized us with her upcoming schedule (notably a return to Herodias in Strauss’ Salome, in Milwaukee); she made a point of engaging each of us, asking about our lives and our plans, too. That’s typical of her generosity. We had pretty much closed down the joint (O’Neal’s), when like Cinderella herself Joyce announced it was time to turn into a pumpkin and go home from the ball. But when I met her for lunch a few days later, Joyce was concerned that she’d been a party-pooper. On the contrary, she made the party, and if we went to another bar afterward, it was because she’d fired us up. Now some of us are talking about flying to hear her in Salome. In Wisconsin. In February.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds: if we go, we will be rewarded. At times Joyce becomes so consumed with the character she’s playing that she really becomes another woman. In Handmaid’s Tale (pictured at left, with Elizabeth Bishop), there’s a mammoth set piece in which one of the Handmaids gives birth, attended by all the women of the community in an elaborate ritual. As Joyce’s character, the barren Serena Joy, looked on, she began to strike her fist nervously against her stomach — below the belt. Her empty womb.

It was a stunning theatrical gesture, summing up so many of the character’s conflicting emo- tions, yet she did it discreetly, not trying to upstage anybody, just living the scene. Where did she come up with the gesture, I asked her later. She didn’t even know she’d done it. And I learned that sometimes the best art is that which we simply allow to happen.

Thanks to Joyce, I know Darren Woods, who introduced me to Joyce DiDonato, who introduced me to Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet. Though she’s as unlike a prima donna as a dramatic soprano can be, Jeanne-Michèle conforms to type in this: she avoids socializing with critics. When she heard I wrote for Opera News, she nearly stopped speaking to me on the spot, she later confessed. Mercifully, she gave me a chance to redeem myself, and we are becoming good friends, abetted by our love of New Orleans (her hometown) and of good music.

She came to Paris on 29 November to sing the world premiere of Philippe Fénelon’s Judith, which he wrote for her. The piece requires her to portray not the stealthy political assassin I remember from the Bible story but a psychosexual terrorist: difficult to imagine that this Judith could sneak up on the sleeping Holofernes. She sang at top volume, over the full orchestra of the Opéra de Paris, who played not in a pit but alongside her onstage. Yet Jeanne-Michèle seized on the less bombastic passages, too, caressing where she could, teasing out nuances where she found them. And though it’s a concert piece, she acted the role, as well, all the while singing the bejeezus out of a challenging, densely orchestrated score. As she took her bows, I said (but not too loudly), “Bis, bis!”

I was kidding. I didn’t seriously believe anybody could sing the piece twice. But when I found her backstage, she declared without prompting that she’d love to sing the whole thing over again, right away. With Jeanne-Michèle as with Joyce Castle, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find her completely exhausted, bundled up and whispering. Au contraire. Beverly Sills used to say that only toward the end of a performance did she begin to feel really warmed up; likewise, perhaps, Jeanne-Michèle was raring to go.

It must feel good, to let it all hang out this way, to engage for a couple of hours in a more disciplined variation on the primal scream.

Plenty to smile about: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet

Moreover, there was consensus backstage that in contemporary works a single hearing isn’t enough to appreciate the composer’s achievement. That’s often my reaction to contemporary music, too, but I’m an amateur, and I was surprised to hear professionals say this — wholeheartedly. I regretted that I hadn’t called more loudly for that encore.

We went to a Lebanese restaurant, where at two long tables we must’ve resembled an updated, better-behaved version of one of the rowdy soupers that one finds in nineteenth-century French novels: Marguerite Gautier or Nana Coupeau & Cie. Jeanne-Michèle has some extraordinary friends in Paris, including Denise Wendel-Poray, Gina Elardo, and two ladies whose acquaintance I hadn’t made: the dancer-choreographer Richild Springer and the costumer Mine Barral-Vergez. Richild and Mine have worked with everybody — including Josephine Baker, whom Mine dressed and with whom Richild danced. Hearing this was like hearing that I was sitting next to two of Christ’s own Apostles, and they obliged me with some thrilling reminiscences.

But we didn’t need to look to the past for evidence of great careers: Jeanne-Michèle sat right before us. It’s an exciting time for her, as she explores a new role, Strauss’ Elektra, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It’s a wonderful fit for her dramatic skills, and she’s able to bring her healthy vocal beauty to a part that’s too often shrieked.

Elektra seems to have opened up new artistic possibilities for her, as well. Not that she was adrift beforehand, I hasten to add: the woman sings the most demanding Wagnerian roles all over the world, and you can’t do that without a keen sense of direction, and a keener sense of self. Yet when Jeanne-Michèle speaks, you can feel that a kind of harmonic convergence has been achieved, and you want to be in on it. I don’t know how, but I’m going to find a way to be in Berlin in February, when she sings the part again.

We’ll always have Paris.

The next evening, Joyce DiDonato returned to Paris, like Violetta in Act II of La Traviata. She was coming from an idyll in the countryside with her lover, and she was bereft of all her jewels. The resemblance isn’t exact: Violetta is a soprano who has pawned her jewels, and Joyce is a mezzo who was robbed.

She’d agreed to appear as a last-minute replacement for Marie-Nicole Lemieux, the Canadian singer, in a concert with the Ensemble Matheus, under the baton of Jean-Christophe Spinosi. The event organizers had removed Lemieux’s name but not her Fach from the advertising and the program, with the result that Joyce was billed as a contralto. When I told her this, she stared at me a second and then said, “You wanna go for a scotch? Or a cigar?”

Other singers might have freaked out under the pressure. Not Joyce. I spotted her as I stood outside the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She was crossing the street, on foot and unescorted, carrying her gown in a garment bag, and she seemed perfectly happy to greet me and to chat for a moment. (I on the other hand was a nervous wreck. “Don’t you have to go to work now?” I said.) She was even trying to be upbeat about the robbery.

Joyce sang a number of arias by Handel, whose work she’s been performing a lot of (most recently Alcina in Milano and Poissy, and Ariodante in Geneva). But she hasn’t been performing this music with Spinosi, and without optimal rehearsal time together, they cast what was for me a really fascinating light on the process of music-making. On most occasions, Joyce makes it all look so easy. She stands there, the notes pour out, and you’re transfixed and transformed. A walk in the park. A mere bagatelle.

But of course it ain’t easy, any more than Astaire’s dancing or Pollock’s painting was easy. Joyce is such a hard-to-satisfy professional that she used her encores as do-overs for a couple of numbers. But it was hardly as though she and Spinosi hadn’t offered us extraordinary work the first time around, and I’d never have guessed that any improvement was possible in her “Ombra mai fu,” any more than I’d have guessed that she’d never sung it in public before that night.

Wendel-Poray: De-lightful, De-lovely, Denise
(But not to be mistaken for Di-Donato)

Tragically, she had another engagement and couldn’t go out for our traditional post-show beer. Denise Wendel-Poray and Gilles Jaroslaw and I went instead to a reception for the Ensemble. Denise, who happens to be a North American mezzo-soprano and blonde, too, was mistaken for Joyce at first: when we walked in, she was greeted with awe and reverence. Which she deserves after her own performances, but not necessarily after other people’s.

We heard some interesting views on orchestral playing, putting into context Spinosi’s animated behavior: though his baton work is tightly controlled and precise, the rest of his body is dancing. This turns out to be the Matheus philosophy. As one fellow put it, you’re moving your body in time when you play music. You are dancing. Why try to conceal the fact? Since my career as a violinist lasted precisely six cat-strangling weeks, I’d never considered the question.

My playing was not dance. It was abuse. I loved music too much to continue.

And so it is a very great thing that I know people who make music well, and who are willing to share their time, their experience, and their insights with me. In every meeting, I come away a little wiser. As artists, they are worth going out of my way to hear them; as people, they go out of their way for me. I’m a lucky guy, and I know it.

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