Soprano delighted at last-minute opening

“They didn’t have to talk me into coming,” Carol Wilson says of her Canadian debut in VO’s Der Rosenkavalier

by David Gordon Duke

Interviewed less than 24 hours after her arrival in Vancouver from Europe — and at 2 a.m. on diva time— soprano Carol Wilson was nonetheless bright, enthusiastic and intelligently articulate about her imminent Canadian debut in Der Rosenkavalier.

She’s here in remarkable circumstances: last week she was singing the pivotal role of the aristocratic Marschallin in Germany, only to find herself parachuted here following the sudden withdrawal of Deborah Voigt from Vancouver Opera’s production.

Wilson admits that jumping in at the last moment is a challenging assignment “no matter how seasoned you are as performer,” but that she is delighted to be here. “Vancouver is a wonderful city, whose opera house has a first-rate reputation, and Jonathan Darlington, with whom I’ve worked before, is a wonderful conductor. They didn't have to talk me into coming.”

But with all the goodwill in the world, Wilson joins the production at a crucial time — the “final rehearsal week.” Back with her home company, the Deutsche-Oper-am-Rhein, this would come at the end of at least six weeks of rehearsal. In these more trying circumstances, she admits, “you are just running on adrenaline, with no time to think.”

Wilson knows her character well — she did 10 performances in Lubeck and another last week in Aachen—- but is still discovering things about the role. “When you first listen to it you think, oh, this won’t be difficult, and then you begin to learn it and realize that it is not so easy, and needs a great deal of time to prepare it well. The dialogue between characters has to sound effortless, but in fact it is difficult to do well. No singer should underestimate the difficulty of the role in that sense.”

A native of Iowa, Wilson studied at Iowa State University, then completed a masters at Nebraska and a DMA at Yale. In the first stage of her career she performed recitals, chamber music, even early music. Her move into opera was, she admits, almost a Hollywood cliché. Her agent-to-be Alan Green (of Columbia Artists Management International) wandered into a church and overheard Wilson rehearsing a Strauss song. He introduced himself, asked what other Strauss she knew, and was soon coaching her for an audition he arranged in Dusseldorf. “He prepared me physically, vocally, and above all emotionally to sing in a big house.”

Wilson and her husband share an apartment in New York, but her commitment to her resident company means that for now, “home” is Dusseldorf. She enjoys being in a resident company, where she has had the opportunity to perform 14 new roles over the past five years, including Wagner, Strauss, Mozart, and Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt (which she performed with the Royal Opera in Stockholm last year).

Composer Richard Strauss’s early series of orchestral tone poems made him the toast of Europe in the last years of the 19th century, but his first attempts at opera have been more or less thankfully forgotten. Then, in the early years of the 20th century, he created two real shockers that have become landmarks of the repertoire: Salome, a biblical story of sex and violence adapted from Oscar Wilde’s topical play, and the even more extreme Greek tragedy Elektra (heard in its first Vancouver performance two seasons ago). Both operas are completely of their pre-First World War moment — flirtations with avant-garde harmony and virtual Expressionism — and were to prove the extent of Strauss-as-modernist. With Der Rosenkavalier he turned his back on advanced (and, for many audiences, unpopular) idioms, harking back to the mid-18th century Vienna of Maria Theresa to create a tune-rich tonal idiom of very, very potent charm. Vancouver audiences have heard live symphony performances of the Rosenkavalier “waltzes” and an occasional sung excerpt, but this is our first staged performance.

Rosenkavalier marks the second collaboration in Strauss’s long and productive partnership with Austrian dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

It is so much more than nostalgic waltzes and farcical comedy in a glittering ancien regime setting. Rosenkavalier is an opera for grown-ups: von Hofmannsthal’s libretto is about real, three- dimensional people, developed with extreme subtlety. Strauss’s delicately nuanced music underlines their complex, contradictory natures. Though the major roles have their own spectacular highlights, Rosenkavalier demands balanced casting and a feeling for ensemble theatre.

With an unerring, and slightly salacious flair, Strauss cynically conceived the part of the work’s romantic male lead Octavian as a “pants role” for mezzo-soprano — a tradition going back to Mozart’s Cherubino and beyond.

It’s a convention which allows for unexcelled female voice combinations.

Growing out of the Wagnerian tradition, Der Rosenkavalier is a big work, with three full acts. Wilson generously insists that because the singers portraying the young lover Octavian and the jaded Baron Ochs are on stage almost throughout the opera, endurance is more of a concern for them than for the Marschallin.

“Strauss was kinder to his soprano. I have a long wait after the first act before reappearing at the end of the third act. I want to ‘stay in the show’' and not check-out dramatically, but it does give me time to catch something to eat and to rest.”

Central to the Rosenkavalier plot is the relationship between the Marschallin and the younger Octavian. “He’s just happens to be a boy she knows — she’s well aware she has no future with him. He’s not her first, and may not be her last.”

Fundamentally, “the Marschallin is concerned about growing old.” Wilson sees her as being in her early 30s:“"Heavens, 30-year-olds I know myself think they're getting old.” And she sees a Straussian wisdom behind the stereotyped gender and class roles.

Baron Ochs is, in today’s terms, an insensitive male chauvinist.

Wilson understands that “the Marschallin is supposed to be used to his kind of talk, and to find it funny. But she doesn’t. She knows that she herself used to be like Sophie, and that Octavian could very well turn into another Baron Ochs.”

Vancouver audiences will at long last get to meet them all in four performances, opening Saturday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Vancouver Sun
14 October 2004

archives