Features
Singing Saved His Life
Johan Botha, who sings his first Met Otello in February, believes
that if you love music, music will love you back. RICHARD DYER
reports.
As Siegmund to Nina Stemme's Sieglinde
in Vienna, 2007
At
forty-two, tenor Johan Botha—who sings his first Met Otello this
month—is entering his prime years. He boasts a voice that
balances dramatic power with lyricism, and when he is singing at
his best, he is able to deliver strong feelings in sweeping lines
that are invested with rich musical detail.
Sitting in his cinderblock dressing room at Tanglewood in summer
2007, after a rehearsal for Verdi's Don Carlo, the South
African tenor says, "As a child I was dyslexic. I still am. Because
of this, people thought I was stupid. I could not read words, and I
couldn't spell. What I could do was read music. This proved
to everyone that I could accomplish something, and singing became
my life."
Botha looks far younger up close than he appears in costume and
makeup under stage lights. His personality mingles self-deprecating
humility with justifiable pride; he's intelligent, emotional and
candid—and unafraid to speak openly of his profound religious
convictions. "God has given me this talent to work with, and I
trust in Him," he says. "I believe He has a plan for me and my
life."
Botha's homespun earthiness and lack of glamour (at the Tanglewood
rehearsals, he was dressed in a Paul Bunyan-style plaid shirt) may
account for the fact that he is not a singer hotly debated in
operatic cliques and internet chatrooms, nor does his name often
enter into discussions about successors to the great tenors of the
past—although he is well informed about his predecessors and
considers a four-hour conversation about singing that he once had
with Nicolai Gedda one of the pivotal experiences of his life.
"Eighty percent of your career will be made by saying 'No,'" the
senior tenor advised, urging Botha to alternate lyric and dramatic
roles.
Soprano Patricia Racette, who appeared opposite Botha in Verdi's
Don Carlo last season at the Met and at Tanglewood, says,
"Johan's sound is both powerful and sweet, gigantic and gorgeous—you don't find that combination in one singer very often. Although
he's singing the hugest roles these days, his voice is as fresh as
ever - and he sings everything with great elegance and ease. When
you hear him, you never say, 'Wow, that is such a big sound.'
Instead, you hear the music."
Botha is forthcoming when questioned about looking more like Leo
Slezak or Lauritz Melchior than some of today's matinée-idol
tenors. "Sometimes I feel I am fighting a losing battle. Hotels and
restaurants do not cater to people with weight problems, and by the
time I have finished with a day of rehearsal or a long performance,
I am bloody hungry. But I also think we have all been conditioned
by television. Everyone on television looks like a model, and now
people expect opera singers to look the same. But believe me, no
anorexic could sing Otello."
"Weight has been an issue for female opera singers for a long
time," Racette wryly notes. "Now it's beginning to catch up with
the guys, too. But there are certain types of repertory—Madama
Butterfly or Wagner for women, or the big Verdi and Wagner parts
for men—that no waif of a person can do. It's just how bodies and
vocal instruments are built."
Soprano Christine Brewer, who has sung with Botha in concerts with
James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, says, "He's a great
singer with a powerful instrument he uses very beautifully. He tore
into the prison duet in that Boston concert performance of
Fidelio with the kind of gusto that I love—we inspired
each other to just let it rip. I have the feeling that if we had
been in school together, we would have been the ones the teacher
had to send to the principal's office for goofing off. When you are
getting ready to sing these big powerhouse pieces, you have to cut
up and say sophomoric and silly things, or you'd go nuts. But once
Johan comes onstage, it's all about the music."
As
a child of five, Botha heard his father's vinyl recording of La
Traviata with Anna Moffo and Richard Tucker and gravely
announced that he wanted to be an opera singer when he grew up. "I
had a very high, boy-soprano voice," Botha recalls. "I could sing
the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute."
When Botha was ten, he began the rigorous vocal study that
continues today. His first teacher, Jarmilla Tellenger, worked with
him for seven years, even during the period when his voice was
changing. "We would vocalize every day, but only for ten minutes,"
Botha says. His voice initially settled into a bass-baritone, and
after he had done two years of compulsory military service in the
South African Air Force, he sang Falstaff in a school
performance.
Botha's teacher in Pretoria, Eric Muller, experimented with
developing his falsetto, and Botha found his voice moving upwards.
He made his professional debut as a tenor as Max in Der
Freischütz in Roodepoort in 1989; he was twenty-four. The
next year he was engaged to sing in the chorus at the Bayreuth
festival. A concert agent who had heard him in South Africa secured
an engagement to sing Un Ballo in Maschera in
Kaiserslautern. He began working his way up with engagements in
Dortmund, Hagen, Hildesheim and finally Bonn.
Botha's repertory was eclectic, including Pedro in d'Albert's
Tiefland, Pinkerton, Don José, Rodolfo, and both
Turiddu and Canio; like another future Otello, Plácido
Domingo, he started off in that opera as Cassio. The turning point
came when he sang Pinkerton in Robert Wilson's highly-publicized
production of Madama Butterfly at the Opera Bastille in
Paris in 1993. "People from all the major opera houses came and
heard me, and the offers started coming in."
This led to unpleasantness in Bonn, where he was
still under contract, in a situation that did not make him happy.
"I felt I was being pushed to sing too much," he says. "In one week
I sang seven shows. And the Intendant did not want to release me to
sing anywhere else." Once those issues were cleared up, Botha was
free to go anywhere he was asked to, and soon he was singing in
Berlin, Paris, Milan and London, building a repertory of more than
thirty roles and appearing in concerts led by such top conductors
as Georg Solti, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von
Dohnányi and James Levine. In Vienna, he started at the
Volksoper before moving on to the Staatsoper, which has become his
artistic home; he lives in Vienna with his wife and two sons. Botha
arrived at the Met in 1997 as Canio in Pagliacci, and over
the past decade, he has sung forty-nine performances in seven roles
there.
From the beginning, people were eager to push the young tenor into
the big Wagner roles, but he was in no hurry. He began with
Lohengrin, then moved on to Walther in
Die Meistersinger and
the title role in
Parsifal. Earlier this season he sang his
first Siegmund in Vienna, and Tannhäuser is coming up in the
future. But as Gedda advised, he continues to sing Italian operas
and lighter roles.
The result, Botha says, "is that my voice keeps growing, and it
will probably keep growing for another few years. The minute I
think I've learned something, my voice has changed again, and I
have to figure out how to cope with it. It's not just a question of
vocal size. With experience my timbre has changed, the quality is
more mature. What is really important in the heroic roles is to go
for the line, and not to settle for barking. We know from his
letters that Wagner wanted bel canto singers for his operas—people who knew how to keep the legato line."
Since going to Europe in 1990, Botha has worked with the vocal
pedagogue Irmgard Hartmann. When he made his debut in Berlin,
singing
Pagliacci, in 1994, Botha remembers, she said,
"'Johan, why are you screaming at me? Why are you killing
yourself?' She has perfect ears, and she immediately knows when I
am not doing something correctly. She brought the pianissimo
culture into my technique. I was not born with this ability, but
with her, I have learned to sing softly."
On Botha's recording of "Celeste Aida" on his
Italian Arias
disc, he sings the
dolcissimo ending on the high B-flat that
Verdi asked for and has rarely received; the tenor repeated the
feat on his Met broadcast of the opera, and the audience's
astonishment is audible—it has been a long time since Franco
Corelli and Carlo Bergonzi attempted it. There is a stunned silence
following the end of the aria, and then an explosion of
applause.
"Well," says Botha, "Verdi put four
ps on the note, and I
was crazy enough to want to try to do it." This ability to sing
with dynamic variety, and the eagerness to study and respond to the
markings in the score, are what have made
Die Meistersinger
and the title role in
Otello possible for Botha. "Before my
first performance in
Meistersinger I was so scared I felt as
if I were walking in my sleep, but then I started to sing and have
fun with it. Eighty percent of Otello's part is marked
pianissimo."
Botha sang his first Otello in Vienna last season. On the broadcast
from Vienna State Opera, he sang with his usual scrupulous
attention to detail. The characterization was embryonic, but it had
nobility, and there was never any doubt of what basic emotion the
tenor wanted to communicate in every episode.
"Part of our operatic training in South Africa was in acting and in
movement," Botha says. "We learned costume and makeup, we practiced
fencing. And all of us had to take ballet lessons. You can imagine
how I looked in ballet clothes, but it taught me how to move
onstage. And we had to learn how to recite and declaim Shakespeare.
For me, in preparing Otello many years later, it was important to
study the Venice scenes in Shakespeare's play that are not in the
opera. These scenes tell you things about the character. Otello was
an intelligent person—that's how he came to be in the position he
was in. But he was uncertain of himself, and there was one person,
Iago, who saw his weak point. In addition to reading and studying,
you also have to bring your experience of life to a role like this.
Otello did not know who his real friends were."
Botha has also listened carefully to the recordings of the great
Otellos of the past and developed a special admiration for the
interpretation of Jon Vickers. "I don't feel worthy to walk in the
footsteps of some of the people who have sung Otello before me, and
there were points when I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
But once I had sung the first performance in Vienna, I could relax
a little. I knew I could sing it, so I could concentrate on nuances
and colors, and I know the more I sing this role, the more I will
find in it. If you love and respect the music, the music will love
you back."

RICHARD DYER
is recently retired from The Boston Globe
after thirty-three years of writing about music.Send feedback to OPERA
NEWS.