As an opera conductor, RenΘ Jacobs knows his profession from both sides. The Belgian musician began his career as a counter-tenor and quickly established a position at the top of his field, working with the likes of Gustav Leonhardt (on the project to record the complete Bach cantatas) and Sigiswald Kuijken. Naturally, this gives him a very special perspective on singing, particularly in the area of baroque opera, in which he is now so widely experienced, both onstage and in the pit.
He was, he says, the first counter-tenor to record Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, and now a new recording with him as conductor, and with an all-female cast, has just been issued by Harmonia Mundi. "It might surprise listeners," he says, "that I chose a woman to sing the role of Orfeo, sung by the castrato, Guadagni, in 1762 in Vienna - it's the early Viennese version of the work we use in the recording.
"I have a very easy answer for that. For me, the choice of who is going to sing in a castrato role is not at all determined by whether it's a man or a woman. That's not the way it was in those days, either. They had, on the one hand, castrati singing female roles, and on the other hand they had women singing in male roles. I always quote a little opera by Hasse, Antonio e Cleopatra, where the role of Mark Anthony was sung by the contralto, Vittoria Tesi, and Cleopatra by the 17-year-old castrato, Farinelli." He laughs as he recalls Hasse's opera, possibly remembering the fact that castratos normally grew to a great size.
"So, independent of their sex, I want singers who can move me. Bernarda Fink, the Orfeo on the recording, is somebody who can move me to tears. And I think you can be moved to tears when you listen to the arias Che far≥ senza Euridice? or Che puro ciel?. Bernarda is Argentinian, and by coincidence the two others are also Argentinians, because they also move me.
"In this recording I am very happy with the Euridice, who often in recordings or in productions, disappears a little bit because she comes so late and is so inactive. But from the moment that Veronica Cangemi opens her mouth as Euridice, you are moved. And of course, I have tried to do it in a very lyric way. It can be that Che puro ciel? is slower than what we are used to with period instruments, though not modern performances."
There are other differences in Jacobs's Gluck, too: "I use ornamentation. On one hand we have documents about rehearsals of Gluck where he said, 'I don't want any ornamentation.' On the other hand we have a vocal treatise from the end of the 18th century, published in London by Domenico Corri, who was a singing teacher there. He says something like, 'As you will see now from my examples, Guadagni was extremely sober in his ornamentation. He didn't do anything, hardly, in his rendering of Che far≥.' And then he gives the line that Guadagni sang, and for my taste, it's too much."
Often, in period performances, the singers seem to inhabit a slightly different world from the instrumentalists. It's not a phenomenon that seems to worry many people. "Very often, they are already happy with hearing a beautiful voice, period. Of course, the other issue is the issue of ornamentation. For instance, I am shocked to hear many of my colleagues, conductors in baroque opera, who allow the recitatives to be done without any kind of appoggiatura" - appoggiaturas are poignantly dissonant, added notes, which create tension, typically at the ends of phrases. "Now, if we know something about how the appoggiature were added in recitative [the sung, conversational exchanges between characters], we know that it's described everywhere!"
Recitative is something Jacobs feels passionate about, both from the perspective of the singer and the keyboard players who accompany those parts of the opera where words and plot usually move quickest. I attended his performance of Haydn's Il mondo della luna at the Innsbruck Festival this summer, where the florid keyboard part entered into a dialogue with the antics of the modernised staging. That represented a degree of elaboration that Jacobs would tone down for a recording, where the visual clues to the musical purpose would be missing. But he is scornful of an attitude that amounts to thinking that the music somehow stops when the recitative starts.
"We have no examples of written out keyboard continuo of recitativi secchi in Italian opera of that time. We have only very theoretical things, which say that one should not play so much that the singer will be disturbed. Or many treatises say also, the singers sometimes forget the notes, then the harpsichord player has to help, and so on. Those very banal things we know.
"Mozart played for Cos∞ fan tutte, and Haydn played the ones of Il mondo della luna. He conducted from the clavier, whereas in symphonies he conducted from the violin. So I cannot imagine that people like Haydn and Mozart with their fantasy played very dry little chords. They went on composing, they went on improvising. I want the audience to hear that a harpsichord player has fantasy and he is finishing the job of the composer. Maybe that sounds pretentious, because nobody can say he is like Haydn. But it's much better to dare to do that than to do nothing."
Another bΩte-noir is what he calls the "new fashion" in recitative, which is "to make them very fast, and without pauses. I have heard my own singing teacher say, 'Sing over the pause'. And that's one of the things I discovered recently, that those pauses written in the recitative, even in Haydn's and Mozart's time, were there for something. Very often it has to do with the poetic form of the recitativi, which were written in verses of seven and 11 syllables.
"But I have had discussions with Italian singers who didn't know that, with an Italian singer who said, 'No, no. You are wrong. The arias were written in verse, but recitativi were written in prose'. So I hope that all those fine things can be brought back. Most conductors are not interested at all in this."
Although he's one of the leading practitioners in the field of early music, Jacobs doesn't see the growth of interest in his particular field as coming entirely from healthy causes. He traces an interest in early music back to 18th-century men such as Charles Burney in England and Baron van Swieten in Vienna, who commissioned arrangements of Handel from Mozart. Increasingly, says Jacobs, through the 19th and 20th centuries, there were people who "could not any more live with the music from the contemporary period. The contemporary music had become too difficult to follow, or too complex.
And so we see in the 19th century that Mozart's Marriage of Figaro was the first opera to be played every year; there was never a year when, somewhere in the world, Figaro was not played. If you look back to operas by, say, Cavalli or Handel, it was almost impossible for an opera to live 30 years or longer. Then another composer would be asked to write music on the same libretto. So people were much more living with the music from their epoch. Now, we see that very few people really live with contemporary music all the time. Which can be deplored, of course. I think that many people find their kind of new music in this so-called early music."
He agrees that one of the perils for early music performers is that academic concerns can become greater than musical ones. "The danger of a movement like this is that the element of reconstruction, wanting to reconstruct the sound of the earlier time, becomes more important than giving new life with fantasy to the music. To give an example, it has become very fashionable in recent years, because the period instrument orchestras play later and later music, to play Beethoven symphonies following the metronomic indications to the letter. One conductor is already getting to Wagner, and I saw him on television, speaking to the audience, about doing an overture, which a document of the time says was done in eight and a half minutes. So 'Look at your watches'. he said.
"All those things, of course, have to be done, because it opens perspectives about the musical sound in a totally different way. But it's only a beginning. Because, then, we have to make music again. It shouldn't be that because Wagner did something in eight and a half minutes that it cannot be done now in nine and a half minutes. The danger is that musicology becomes a kind of alibi for a lack of personality or fantasy.
"I am very often criticised because I go too far. There are situations where at night I cannot sleep as I should, thinking about whether I will do something or not. You have to take decisions, especially when it comes to opera. In a way you still have to translate it, like a good German poet who would translate, with love, the sonnets of Shakespeare. Out of love, there will be one element of treachery, because he wants to do so many things, translate the sense, what is behind the words, the form. He has to make decisions. And I like to compare that with the decisions I have to make."
RenΘ Jacobs's new recording of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice is on the Harmonia Mundi label
