‘Siegfried wants to have fun, kill the dragon, meet the girl’: Andreas Schager on Wagner’s younger bully | Opera

Andreas Schager bursts via the door, crosses the room in a single stride and engulfs my hand in a agency clasp. “Sorry I’m sweaty,” he grins. “I’ve been forging Nothung!” It’s a midweek lunchtime in a cluttered again workplace at London’s Royal Opera House, however hammering out a magical sword is all in a morning’s work for the world’s most in-demand Wagnerian main man. Currently in rehearsals for Siegfried – the third panel of Covent Garden’s new staging of the Ring Cycle – Schager plans to spend the afternoon slaying a dragon and rescuing his beloved from an enchanted fireplace (after a spot of lunch, that’s). But for now the tenor has a second to catch his breath.

At 54, Schager is an anomaly within the opera world. Most careers – notably ones singing Wagner, whose scores are longer and whose roles are larger and extra demanding than every other – are constructed over many years. As veteran agent Boris Orlob places it: “You see Wagner singers coming from miles away, it’s a gradual process. You take the stairs, not the elevator.”

But Schager didn’t simply take the elevator, he shot straight to the penthouse in 2013, when he swapped a handful of Wagner roles in small homes for the Berlin State Opera. Booked to sing the mature Siegfried within the Ring Cycle’s remaining opera, Götterdämmerung – a first-time try-out for conductor Daniel Barenboim – he was rehearsing within the constructing when it grew to become obvious that the tenor scheduled to sing the identical function within the far more demanding third opera of the cycle, Siegfried, had gone awol.

With solely minutes’ discover, Schager discovered himself drafted in, dispatching the monumental calls for of Act I – 90 minutes of pure power-singing, maybe probably the most intense single act in the whole operatic repertoire – with outstanding assurance. When Barenboim introduced him out for a particular curtain-call the notoriously demanding viewers roared their approval.

After Act I the unique tenor took over, however Barenboim’s new star had already been anointed. Later that yr Schager travelled to Milan’s La Scala and the BBC Proms with the conductor for additional reputation-cementing performances in Götterdämmerung. “There are not many Siegfrieds and Tristans around, so my schedule quickly became very busy, very fast-paced.”

Accidental stardom is a theme for Schager. He grew up with 4 siblings on a farm in rural Austria. Music was a part of household life – “In summer, when work was done, we’d all make music together” – however with no formal vocal coaching and no considered making it a profession, as an alternative he headed to college in Vienna to check historical past and theology.

“Then I joined a chorus, and singing started taking up more and more space in my life. I heard someone there with a really fantastic voice, so of course I went up to him and asked: ‘How do you do that?’ That was how it started.”

“It” was initially a profession in operetta – opera’s lighter, frothier cousin. Here he was the dashing younger hero – Orpheus in Offenbach’s Orpheus within the Underworld, Ottokár in Johann Strauss’s The Gypsy Baron and Caramello in Strauss’s A Night in Venice – studying to behave and maintain the stage in exhibits the place the singing is simply the beginning. A decade of that, typically performing two exhibits a day, might simply have became a lifetime. Would Schager have been content material?

“Absolutely. I never had sharp elbows, never thought: ‘I’ve got to get to the top and be the best singer in the world.’” But then totally different doorways began opening – “I just stepped through without thinking too much” – and in 2012 he was invited to audition for his first Siegfried: Wagner’s five-hour epic through which the hero is never offstage, singing virtually all through.

“I had no idea what that meant, what to prepare. I think my agent was even more surprised than me. I remember holding the score, turning over page after page – it just kept coming … Then I saw how high it all was. But I realised it was very similar to the role of Barinkay in The Gypsy Baron; the whole thing was equivalent to two performances of that show, which I had done regularly, so I said yes. I knew I could do it.”

On paper it appears like an not possible leap – going straight from parkrun to a marathon. But Schager sees it in a different way. “I went into it like I was just doing a new operetta role, and it was exactly the right approach.

“Siegfried is the operetta hero of the Ring Cycle. He wants to have fun, kill the dragon, meet the girl. He doesn’t even know what a woman is yet, but he still wants one! Everything is exciting for him, and you can’t convey that just by standing still on stage. You have to be joyful, active. Operetta taught me to be funny, to run and talk and dance and sing – all at the same time.”

Siegfried can be one of many hardest asks of opera. For a begin he solely arrives midway via Wagner’s four-part cycle. We’ve already had the “story so far” of Das Rheingold – how the dwarf Alberich stole the enchanted gold and cast an omnipotent however cursed ring, in addition to the incestuous love story of Siegfried’s dad and mom, long-lost twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, in Die Walküre.

Now their son Siegfried, raised in ignorance of his origins by Alberich’s brother Mime, enters the plot. It’s his quest to kill the dragon Fafner and rescue the warrior maiden Brunnhilde that units in movement the ultimate cataclysmic occasions of Götterdämmerung.

Roundly dismissed by Wagner scholar Michael Tanner as a “bullying adolescent” and by psychiatrist and writer Jeremy Holmes as “boorish, rebellious and demanding, lacking all tenderness and consideration”, Siegfried is way from an apparent romantic hero. How does Schager go about making this fearless lout sympathetic?

“I don’t have to; he’s a very natural figure: a young man full of emotions. He discovers that Mime has been lying to him his whole life, that the closest person to him actually hates him. That’s a very difficult psychological situation.

“But his nature is pure and – I think – sympathetic. We hear that in Act II. For the first time in his life he’s alone. Suddenly the music changes; suddenly he’s a lyric tenor singing about his mother and father. Only later in Götterdämmerung do we see him influenced by corrupt society. His character changes and his soul becomes dirty.”

That shift from indignant harmless to cynical warrior is one every singer should discover a option to convey. For Schager, counterintuitively, it’s about not attempting too arduous. “It’s important,” he says, “not to shape the tone, but to let the emotions produce it. I always compare it to babies. Every mother, hearing her baby cry, knows whether it’s hungry or in pain, even though the baby cannot speak. As singers we have to learn to do that all over again on stage.”

With a decade of Wagner and greater than 10 Ring Cycles below his belt, Schager has to work tougher as of late to search out the “blank pages” he hopes to deliver to any new staging. “You have so many emotions and versions of this character embedded in you,” he says. “Sometimes it gets harder when you know too much.” But issues have been helped in London by the “dream team” of conductor Antonio Pappano and director Barrie Kosky.

Kosky’s staging is wealthy in symbolism, full of lovely, freighted stage-pictures: a tree oozing gold-like sap; a unadorned previous girl, fragile and unashamed; a horde of ash-smeared Valkyrie scorching from battle. Schager describes it as “old-fashioned in a very good way”: cleaving near Wagner’s textual content, permitting music, story and singers to talk unencumbered.

This is simply the beginning of a busy yr for Schager. A look at his schedule reveals a gruelling 5 totally different Wagner roles within the subsequent six months (“Does it? I hadn’t counted”) together with the title function within the first ever Rienzi to be staged at Bayreuth pageant theatre – Wagner’s personal opera home. It’s a “big honour”, he says, earlier than concerning the charged political historical past of Hitler’s favorite opera. “Wagner is not responsible for what other people have done with his music.”

Time’s up, and Schager dashes again to rehearsal, his sandwich uneaten. He is likely to be an unintentional hero, however these dragons aren’t going to slay themselves.