Behrens Interview 1985

Will Crutchfield is a music critic for The New York Times. uf7612

IN NEW YORK'S MUSIC WORLD,

there is an almost palpable sense of excitement about tomorrow night's opening at the Metropolitan Opera. The curtain will go up on a new production of

Puccini's ''Tosca,'' starring the West

German soprano Hildegard Behrens in

her first mainstream Italian role at the house. Floria Tosca is one of the most glamorous roles in the repertory, a favorite over the years of many of opera's grandest dames. The Met's new production, staged by the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, was made for Behrens along the most lavish lines. Don't plan to walk up to the box office and buy a ticket on your way in. Good seats for the run of nine performances starring Behrens have been sold out for weeks. But the performance of March 27 will be telecast live.

A Zeffirelli opening is, by definition, a big night at the Met, as big as they come. Everyone is there. Each production by the director has at least one coup de the^atre of the sort that Met audiences lap up: the brilliantly lit scene of public ceremony in ''Otello'' that appears before your eyes after what feels like only 10 seconds of blackout; the second-act street scene in ''La Boh eme'' that seems, if anything, slightly bigger and busier than a packed Paris boulevard in real life. In ''Tosca'' the tourist attraction will be a third- act Castel Sant'Angelo set that will sink and sink as Placido Domingo climbs and climbs to the rooftop place

of the hero Cavaradossi's execution.

The presence of Hildegard Behrens has given the usual excitement a spe

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Behrens first sang Tosca last December at the Paris Opera opposite

That number is significant, because the Tosca all Paris talked about 20 years ago was Maria Callas. She sang it there in Zeffirelli's celebrated London production - a production in which, as it turned out, Callas soon afterward made the last stage appearances of her career. Zeffirelli hasn't touched the opera since. But now that Hildegard Behrens is on the scene, he is ready to try again. ''Now the moment is right,'' he told her. ''I'm 20 years older. Let's see what happens.''

Strange to say, Tosca is not Behrens's first Puccini role at the Met. Few remember that one. She started small, in 1976, with Giorgetta in ''Il Tabarro,'' one of the three soprano leads in ''Il Trittico.'' But soon came an extraordinary series of ''Fidelio'' performances with Jon Vickers, then a fiery, bizarre Elettra in ''Idomeneo,'' a riveting (if uneven) Donna Anna in ''Don Giovanni,'' a radiantly human Isolde.

And then, in 1983 at the Wagner shrine of Bayreuth in Germany, the seal was set on her ascendancy among sopranos of the day. She sang the monumental role of Br"unnhilde in ''The Ring of the Nibelung,'' conducted by Sir Georg Solti. ''There does not seem to be another Br"unnhilde to match her for vocal authority, expressivity and dramatic presence,'' wrote Donal Henahan in The Times. John von Rhein, in The Chicago Tribune, wrote that she ''wielded a warm, gleaming soprano that was at all times reinforced by sensitivity, intelligence and a strong, sympathetic stage presence . . . She was thrilling to see and hear.''

In her chosen field, Behrens is clearly the diva of the moment. Still, a number of music critics have reservations about her voice. Some question whether she has the dramatic-soprano solidity they hear in Eva Marton and Ghena Dimitrova, both fairly recently catapulted toward the pinnacle of the big voice category. They wonder, too, if Behrens will be able to stay the course to remain, like Kirsten Flagstad or Birgit Nilsson, an unquestioned reigning soprano for many years. They fear she may be more like Martha M"odl and Astrid Varnay, sopranos who brought the Wagnerian heroines to vivid life in the theater, but on whose voices the composer's musical demands took a severe toll. Behrens herself has no such doubts. ''I have never thought about saving my voice, never,'' she says.

She is a tall, solidly built woman in her mid-40's, with a face of fascinating intensity and allure. There are deep

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Her first words contained a kernel of the independence that makes her atypical in today's operatic jet set. ''The director,'' she recalls of Jean- Claude Auvray, who staged the opera in Paris, ''saw Tosca as rather hysterical. I don't agree. She has a great capacity for jealousy, like many passionate people. And don't forget,'' she says of the first scene, where Tosca rushes onstage in a suspicious rage, ''that she did hear whispering, she did hear someone's clothes rustling.'' (Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, has just been talking to a fugitive political prisoner.) ''This is not hysterical. Actually it is appealing, flattering to her lover, that she's jealous. And Tosca's religion I find touching. She is so simply religious. It is half-way between superstition and religion, the way she feels about the Madonna.''

Behrens manages not to be too annoyed at a hovering waiter who constantly offers to remove dishes she has not fin

Behrens played the part her way in Paris - as a religious, impulsively jealous woman. ''I do not want a director to mold me into his concept of the role.'' WHEN SHE IS NOT traveling, Behrens makes her home in New York, in a Chelsea loft shared with Seth Scheidemann, an American cameraman and film producer. The household includes their young daughter and Behrens's son, whom she raised alone in West Germany in the first years of her career. She is resolute and unruffled in her unwillingness to discuss her family life: ''They have not asked for celebrity, and I would be violating them if I subjected them to it.''

But days after the opening of Alban Berg's opera ''Wozzeck'' at the Met in January, with bags under her eyes on a morning after tending Scheidemann's heavy cold and both children's flu all night, she dis somewhere. It is a matter of total concentration, like Zen. The only thing that works is the clear thought.''

Two weeks later, she had allowed it in. ''I was so miserable!'' Nevertheless, during her illness, concerts with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe were scheduled for New York and Boston. She didn't cancel. In February, she sang Beethoven and Mahler in Carnegie Hall. ''It was awful,'' she said. ''It was a bloody triumph of raw passion over style,'' said Bernard Holland in The Times, while praising ''emotional generosity'' and ''wonderfully ripe piano tones.''

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On Feb. 14, almost recovered, she reported for work on ''Tosca'' at the Met and had her first encounters with Zeffirelli and the conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli. ''We had great fun. Sinopoli is very subtle and knows a lot about the voice. He has a beautiful openness - we try things this way and that. He wouldn't want you to do something you didn't feel.''

Sinopoli did want some changes, however, and the soprano was game to try them. ''He doesn't like some of the traditional screaming and growling,'' she said. ''So we worked to get the same feeling into a shiny, sharp sound, with lots of head voice. It's true that you can easily let go and fall into something a little cheap'' - as when Tosca stabs Scarpia and cries ''Muori, muori dannato'' (''Die, die damned'').

''It means a lot of work, and it's like saying goodbye to some dear habits that worked very well for me. But I'm willing to undergo that because it's a challenge.'' Sinopoli, for his part, found her ''willing to be convinced.''

Offstage, her fierce artistic independence notwithstanding - and most colleagues said this of Callas too - she has the reputation of being a trooper, a pro. She stands up for her interpretation of a role, but she is far from being an arrogant diva who takes offense at being offered ideas. ''What she can't do,'' explains James Levine, who has conducted most of her performances at the Metropolitan, ''is get up and do something just because she's been told. She has to be abso

At a ''Wozzeck'' rehearsal, she is friendly, mixes easily with her colleagues; she waits her turn in conversations. She chews gum, doesn't wear makeup, doesn't mind being seen in a dress she has worn twice already to the same series of rehearsals. She will sing a morning rehearsal full voice, not saving. But one quickly learns that Behrens knows her own mind. She has her own criterion for evaluating an operatic production: ''I wasn't asked to do anything against my understanding of the role,'' she said of a recent production, ''so for me it was a success.'' Hardly the words of a malleable trooper. Nor can ''ensemble singers'' say of interpretive clashes with stage directors, ''So far I have always gotten my way.'' IT WOULD BE DOWN

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right disappointing to find

that Behrens's background was conventional, her preparation ordinary. They were not. Her parents were doctors in the small North German town of Varel, and, in no small measure, her unusual career and artistic authority were shaped by a tenacious unwillingness to give up the liberty of her childhood. ''I was the youngest of six,'' she recalls. ''It was great, because I was spoiled and left alone. I guess that all the educational precepts of my parents were kind of wrung out already and they were very lenient. They didn't have any theories about child- raising and they didn't have too much time, so I grew up free.''

She went to the University of Freiburg in southern Germany to study law. ''I don't know why. My next brother was studying law, and the one before that was studying music in Freiburg, so I was just trotting after them. I thought law was very chic, walking around with our briefcases. But I found I spent all my time at the music shool anyway, without ever considering it for myself professionally. I had had piano and violin lessons like all my brothers and sisters, and I went to master classes - not to play, just to listen. I had a boyfriend then who was a violinist, who's now in the Berlin Philharmonic. So I had a great time without doing too much work on my studies.''

At loose ends in Freiburg, Behrens took up singing at the age of 26, far too late for any one with career intentions to begin serious study. She had no particular knowledge of opera, but had a love for choral singing and an intense desire for self- expression that was, at the time, deeply

After auditions and fitful beginnings with various teachers, she eventually made her way to Ines Leuwen, a teacher at the Freiburg conservatory of music, with whom she studied for four years. ''She said, 'You're singing like a young dog, but you have a voice.'

''The difficulties were not really

''So I went home for vacations and in our big house, from 11 at night till 3 in the morning, I was just screaming and howling, and so I knew could sing, I knew I could sing everything. Without that I couldn't have lived. It was there I found my big sound. But I could never show it in my lessons - I wasn't sure of myself. She would say I seemed to have practiced very nicely, very neatly, and then after two years she told me I should stop singing, that I was absolutely untalented. So one day I thought, 'I have to convince her, I have to come out of my shell.' Then finally she said, 'That's the first time my judgment was totally wrong. Now let's go on and study together.' ''

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After leaving the conservatory and Leuwen, Behrens never worked with teachers again, nor even with a regular coach. ''That has to do,'' she says, ''with growing up freely, and being an Aquarius. I like to do it on my own responsibility. Under the eye of a teacher I had the feeling of standing beside myself, not in the center of myself. And this is impossible, you know.''

In 1971, Hildegard Behrens was accepted into the opera studio at D"usseldorf, and, while still technically an apprentice there, made her debut as a guest in Osnabr"uck, a small town in northwest Germany, as the Countess in ''The Marriage of Figaro.'' Soon she was taken on as a regular member of the D"usseldorf company, where an early role was Marie, the promiscuous common-law wife of the soldier Wozzeck in Berg's searing, dissonant opera.

One of the conductor Herbert von Karajan's favorite artistic ploys is to discover unknown singers and mount major, risky productions around them. He likes to take them into his ''stable'' and groom them for roles that they are taking on for the first time. The soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow, the mezzo Agnes Baltsa, the tenor Francisco Araiza - each of whom has gone on to strong international success - each got a big initial boost from being such a creature of Karajan.

Karajan heard a ''Wozzeck'' rehearsal in D"usseldorf and was struck by Behrens. Did the intense new Marie (''new,'' though by now in her early 30's) have her sights set on any particular role? Behrens did: Richard Strauss's Salome. Then and there, ''Salome'' was scheduled for the Salzburg Festival of 1977, years in the future. Partly on the strength of that engagement, some international invitations began coming her way. In 1976, she sang Leonore in ''Fidelio'' at Covent Garden and ''Il Tabarro'' at the Met. For ''Salome,'' meanwhile, Karajan had a few conditions - she was not to perform the role anywhere else beforehand, and a dancer was to substitute for her in the famous ''Dance of the Seven Veils.''

Behrens today would not have accepted the restrictions. ''It was terrible. When Salome speaks to Herod after the dance, it is all short and breathless.'' She demonstrates. ''But I was not out of breath, and everybody in the theater knew I had not danced. The emotional continuity for me was ruptured. I had to fake it; I was miserable.''

Her success was spectacular, though. Now her career was launched in earnest. Salome, Agathe in ''Der Freisch"utz'', a group of Mozart heroines and Janacek's Katya Kabanova took her around the world.

But she was not destined to be a creature of Karajan. The Salzburg ''Salome'' was followed by ''Fidelio'' there, but ''our relationship got messed up,'' she says, preferring not to give details. The conductor had asked her for Strauss's ''Elektra,'' she had resisted, and then he had read an erroneous news story to the effect that she had accepted it elsewhere, she says. A rapprochement has now been effected. They plan to film and record the Strauss opera together, this time on the singer's terms, which include the stipulation that she will do the part in the theater first, elsewhere.

She is determined to keep her repertory broad and to keep Mozart in it, but the great Wagnerian roles have loomed ever larger. Early on came Elisabeth in Tannhauser,' Elsa in Lohengrin, Senta in The Flying Dutchman. In 1980 she added Isolde, which has been heard in Munich, Zurich and at the Met. Then came the 1983 Bayreuth triumph in 'The Ring. She made headlines for the feat of hanging face down in Siegfried for 90 minutes, strapped to the underside of a rock that eventually rolled over to reveal her in Brunnhilde's enchanted sleep. More important, she won the confidence of the operatic world in this most demanding of roles.

But it was by her own private yardstick that she finally measured the experience: she had been free to interpret Br"unnhilde as she wished; therefore, success. The Met is to hear her sing the role in a ''Ring'' cycle beginning in 1986 to be conducted by James Levine. Wagnerian singing has always been a problem area. Wagner's radical expansion of the orchestra's role and his prolongation of harmonic movement demand from a singer unprecedented reserves of stamina and power. It has rarely proved possible to combine them with the highest standards of beauty and ease in singing. Only a few phenomenal voices over the years have managed it fully in the great roles Behrens is now taking on. In this century there have been perhaps eight or 10 notable Br"unnhildes, but two names stand above the rest in almost all accounts: Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962) and Birgit Nilsson, born in 1918, who still makes occasional appearances.

Those few phenomenal voices - is one of them in Hildegard Behrens's throat? Hardly anyone thinks so, and this is the question mark that hovers over her brilliant career. ''The one element she doesn't have,'' says an admiring conductor who has worked with her in Wagner, ''is a clearly, comfortably controlled, positive vocalism.''

Some critics have put it more severely. John Steane of England's Gramophone magazine, as sympathetic and generous an observer of singing as may be found among serious standard-holders, thought the pleasure of Georg Solti's recorded ''Fidelio'' was marred by ''three black blots in the form of the three main arias,'' one of these being Behrens's ''Komm, Hoffnung.''

In The New York Times, John Rockwell went so far as to call her ''a second-rate singer with a first-rate theatrical personality.''

Many experts have shaken their heads at her fearless use of the chest voice, the mannish tones achievable at the bottom of the female range, which Behrens carries to higher pitches than some deem safe (quite regularly up to F-sharp in ''Wozzeck,'' sometimes higher).

In this connection, it is surely significant that her records have been uniformly less well received than her live performances. Nor have there been many recordings. Only four complete operas have appeared to date (the ''Fidelio,'' ''Salome'' with Karajan, ''Der Freisch"utz'' and ''Tristan und Isolde,'' done in live televised performances one act at a time under Leonard Bernstein.) A disc pairing Ravel's ''Sheherezade'' and Berlioz's song cycle ''Les nuits d'ete'' has just been issued, and, of course, more plans are underway. But up to now Behrens in sound alone does not seem to thrill as Behrens in the flesh never fails to do.

The singer, of course, is aware of this critical dissent, and sensitive about it. ''Tell me,'' she asks of a review that declares her Marie a success ''even though'' the role makes Wagnerian demands, ''does this 'though' imply that he doesn't think I can sing Wagner? Because he liked me so much in Bayreuth!'' She hates to be called a singing actress. ''What does it mean? I am a musician. I could have gone into the theater if I wanted to be an actress. I am coming from the music.''

As for her vocal technique, Behrens insists she knows what she is doing. ''The chest voice! Yes, I always hear this,'' she exclaims. ''In Germany, too, they have this fear of it, and I was trained never to use it - but when I was singing in D"usseldorf there came this American tenor, Jerome Lo Monaco, who prodded me and teased me to sing in chest, 'like the Italians,' until finally I said, 'All right, let's go find a piano and you show me.' I will always be grateful to him. Now I practice in my chest voice all the way up to what would be a high C for a tenor. I come out of a rehearsal room and people ask me who the tenor was in there with me. I think if this were dangerous, I would find out when I try to sing my high notes, or my pianissimo. If my intention is clear, centered, then I can do it without strain. Clear thought - that is everything.'' THAT SHE HAS SUStained so brilliant an ascent without singing in a way that quells reservations is ultimately a testament to her theatrical power. How does she create her effects? Everyone who has seen or worked with Behrens has a particular memory to cherish.

One soprano colleague speaks of a moment in ''Fidelio'': ''When she searched the faces of the prisoners, your heart was in your throat. You watched with her, every single one. When Shirley Verrett did that scene, she just disappeared, vanished before your eyes.''

''Hildegard,'' James Levine explains, ''has this extraordinary face. A lot of people can feel feelings, but not many can let them show like this.''

John McGlinn, the Jerome Kern scholar who is also an ardent Wagnerite, says: ''Nobody who saw it is going to forget her curse in 'Tristan.' Just before the high A on 'Tod uns beide' she absolutely dropped to her knees, like a quarterback.''

Ask Behrens how she does it, and she begins by saying the things any singer would. ''I try to understand a character through the music,'' she says, and adds that she reads up on the historical background, does her homework. Then come stronger, stranger words: ''I have the feeling that my body kind of takes the shape of the spiritual idea of the person. This is the crazy thing: I believe in the power of the mind to make that transformation. When I sang 'Ariadne auf Naxos' in Salzburg, I wore a plain black gown - like a statue, severe, stark. So I wanted my bare feet to look like in a sculpture. And after the performance Seth said, 'Jesus, I didn't know you had such long slim feet.' I mean, I have good broad piano hands like my brother, and the feet are the same! But I had wanted them to look slender. And when I did Isolde in Munich, I looked like this medieval madonna in a woodcut, and I had this idea of how I wanted my hands to look as I cradled Tristan's head - just like the woodcut. Even now, looking at the photo, I think they look like that. So I believe you can transform your appearance to a point.''

She plans also to transform her repertory with further forays into the Italian mainstream. ''Turandot'' has been mentioned as a possibility in some circles, and the singer expresses enthusiasm for Butterfly and Minnie in ''The Girl of the Golden West.'' ''Also,'' she says, '' 'Aida' and 'Forza del Destino,' I think, and maybe even 'Traviata.' Just to play that character would be wonderful - the fevered atmosphere at the party in the first act, sick from the beginning.''

Her artistic credo of ''clear thought'' is linked in her mind to the necessity to act as she feels impelled to act. ''I am drawn to things that are spontaneous and voluntary,'' she says. Tosca is spontaneous: the betrayal of Cavaradossi's secret bursts out of her; the murder of Scarpia comes to her on an impulse. Br"unnhilde, too, she says, is a character who follows her own nature above all.

''Brunnhilde begins as a warrior child, as though at the age before the sexes are differentiated, loving the father above all. But she realizes she must go against him and follow her own inner guides, her "innere Triebe," like Leonore in Fidelio, like all of us.

This is the tragedy, because it brings about the death of the father, which is what we fear when we break free of our parents, and in this case it brings the collapse of the world, the world she knew. But she does what she must. Always. I think of the line of Kant: 'Der bestirnte Himmel "uber mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir' - 'the starry heavens above me, and the moral imperative within me." That is what draws me to these characters, because I am following these 'innere Triebe' myself.''