Interview, Michael Spyres on In The Shadows

Michael Spyres's fascinating album exploring early Wagner and some of the composers who influenced his style is in the running for two major prizes next week, having been shortlisted for both the Gramophone Awards and the International Opera Awards. Released on Erato back in March, In The Shadows saw the American baritenor teaming up with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques for scenes from operas by composers including Méhul, Beethoven, Meyerbeer and Spontini as well as excerpts from Die Feen and Lohengrin (in which Spyres made his major Wagner debut at the Opéra national du Rhin just a few days after the album was released).

We spoke earlier this year about Michael's rather unorthodox first encounter with Wagner's world, the difficulties involved in forming a clear picture of Wagner's debts to other composers, and why he's waited until his early forties to tackle this repertoire on stage...

When and how did Wagner's music first come into your life?

The funny thing is that I absorbed so many of Wagner’s leitmotifs and melodies before I even knew his name. In the US we have a strong tradition of vaudeville, and when I was a kid my mum and dad would put on music-hall shows in our area: they’d stage these old-timey stories with a hero, a heroine and a bad guy, and more often than not they’d use motifs from Lohengrin and The Ring! It says a lot that these themes are so famous that you could use them as a kind of musical joke in a vaudeville show in Missouri and everyone in the audience would recognise them, even if they knew nothing about the operas themselves.

Wagner was generally resistant to any suggestion that he was influenced by his older contemporaries, and even actively denigrated some of the composers who inspired him - how did you set about finding the missing pieces of the puzzle?

Because so much traditional scholarship on Wagner falls in with the idea that he was a one-of-a-kind genius, I spent a lot of time searching for unpublished academic papers that come at things from a different perspective, and that’s where things really get interesting. I remembered reading something about Wagner conducting Méhul and also being a fan of Auber’s La Muette de Portici and possibly Halévy, and going through and finding more about those connections was so much fun.

The frustrating part was that so many historians have been heavily influenced by Wagner’s own writings claiming that he was an absolute original, but if you talk to anyone who’s really knowledgeable about pre-Wagner repertoire you can see that there was more to it than that. I’ve collaborated with conductors like Michael Schønwandt and Marko Letonja who have worked within bel canto and Wagner, and they were the ones that told me that Wagner often uses motifs that only occur in bel canto operas. Once you’re aware of that, you start to find the same patterns - not just in the music, but in the philosophy, the ideas and the stories behind it…

And a lot of the research I did was guided by my own gut-feeling about the operas: I’d always felt that there was a strong connection between the stories and psychology of Norma and Lohengrin, for instance, and once you start delving into online academic sources you discover that someone has spent their whole PhD exploring exactly that! It would be impossible to cite all the resources I found unless I sat down and wrote an entire monograph about Wagner and his influences, but I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can in the booklet-notes.

At the end of the day, I’m not taking issue with the idea that Wagner was a genius. He was a genius - at putting everything together and creating something new out of everything that came before. But it’s not like he just conjured all these things out of thin air, which is what he likes to claim!

From a psychological point of view, what do you think lay behind that fierce desire to present himself as an iconoclast?

I think a lot of it stems from the fact that in his earlier years he was never given the recognition that he probably deserved: both the French and the Germans were very set in their ways about what opera ‘should’ be, and any non-French composer trying to write grand opera would be met with a curt ‘Non!’.

The feud between Offenbach and Wagner was massive, and being publicly ridiculed by Offenbach in Paris was something Wagner never forgave. In 1860 Offenbach wrote this amazing parody called Le Carnaval des Revues, which includes some spoken text making fun of ‘music of the future’: it’s all atonal and weird, and there are certain little themes which are obviously jabbed straight at Wagner. Wagner took that insult to the grave. When hundreds of people were killed after a fire broke out during an early performance of The Tales of Hoffmann at Vienna's Ringtheater in 1881, his response was essentially ‘I couldn’t care less if a bunch of people die watching an opera by Offenbach, and maybe they deserved it’.

Obviously that’s a horrendous thing to say, but to me it’s also very sad to see this genius lashing out like a child who never got enough love. That need for recognition and appreciation was part of what drove him to create the Music of the Future, but when you unpick the psychology behind it all you can’t help but feel sorry for him.

It sounds like you amassed a huge amount of repertoire in the course of your research - how did you go about whittling it down for a single album?

That was the most difficult part of the project. Initially when I’m conceiving an album I start with 50 to 60 arias, then I whittle it down by asking myself which pieces make the strongest argument for the point I’m trying to get across. Then I look for arias which show off my vocal qualities and the qualities of the singers they were written for, and hopefully by that stage we’ve got something that might just about fit on an album...

Almost all of the music here comes from operas which I’ve sung in full, so I was aware of how they influenced Wagner in terms of the overall structure and ideas rather than just the vocal writing. That’s why I think we have a strong case to tell this story: I’m by no means an authoritative Wagner scholar, but I do think that we’ve woven a convincing through-line. I like to create these albums in chronological order, so that people can see how the music changes and then morphs into this extraordinary Wagnerous thing!

I was sorry not to include anything by Halévy, and even more so to exclude Berlioz. There’s so much scholarship about his influence on Wagner, but the only piece that really fitted was something I’ve already recorded: ‘Nature immense’ from La damnation de Faust: When you hear that, you think ‘Wow, that was early Wagner!’.

Did your extensive experience in French heroic roles prepare the ground for transitioning into Wagner, or do they require a radically different approach?

Singing the earlier Wagner is a little bit like singing Berlioz, because it’s on the cusp of two techniques. Up until the 1830s and 40s, the old Baroque technique of keeping everything down was still in place: tenors didn’t really sing above the passaggio much, and if they did it was voix mixte. But then Berlioz (and Donizetti too in his later life) came along and wanted a different kind of heroic tenor; they kept the tessitura so high that singers had to create a new technique.

And in early Wagner it jumps back and forth: in operas like Tannhäuser and Rienzi you need mastery of the voix mixte, but also the vocal formants and strength to cut across the brass section. In the operas after Lohengrin, he really came into his own: he stopped basing his vocal writing on what other people had done before him, and started composing for that lower baritenor sound which fits more naturally into the palette of the orchestra and his whole concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. (Die Meistersinger is an exception from his later years, because he started thinking about it in the 1840s when he still had the whole mixture of Tannhäuser singers in his brain, and that plays out in the writing for the tenor in particular).

You've included an excerpt from Wagner's rarely-performed first opera, Die Feen on the album - how much do you hear (and feel) the seeds of his mature vocal writing in that score?

I do love the early Wagner, because you can see him experimenting and trying to find his own identity. Die Feen is a beautiful opera, and if anybody else had written it people would think it was a masterpiece: the only reason it gets dismissed is because it’s so different from the mature Wagner. I have such affection for these weird and wonderful things: it’s so much more satisfying to work on gems that just need a bit of a polish than it is to be presented with a perfect opera.

The Opera de Bordeaux approached me to sing Die Feen seven years ago, and my first impression was that it felt like it was written by Weber but with a super-heavy orchestra. I ended up saying no to the role: at that time my arytenoids hadn’t hardened enough so I didn’t have the stamina, but in the last three years there’s been a big change in my voice. The early 40s are usually when things shift around for guys, and that’s when most of the great singers of the past started with Wagner.

The original Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr, was only 28 when he created the role - maybe Wagner wanted a young sound, but for the most part I do think you have to be a little bit older. If you have a big instrument it can be thrilling and exciting to dive into this music, but there’s only so much that the muscles around the larynx can take when you're young: when I see people moving into this repertoire in their early thirties I think ‘I sure hope you’re singing in your forties’!

You made your debut in a major Wagner role earlier this year, as Lohengrin in Strasbourg - why did you choose that particular house to take the plunge?

Strasbourg is really on the crossroads of two cultures, and that’s why I find the place so fascinating. I’ve been working with that orchestra for a long time, and they combine that distinctively French personality with the feeling of correctness and unity that’s typical of a German orchestra. I was so happy to make my major Wagner debut at the Opera nationale du Rhin, because it’s the perfect place to hear Wagner: you actually feel the music rather than experiencing it at a distance, as you do in a larger house like the Coliseum or the Bastille or the Met.

People think it’s a small house, but it’s actually not: it has fewer seats than Bayreuth (which itself isn’t that big a place) because it’s set out differently, but in terms of the distance between the singers and audiences the two theatres they’re very similar.

On stage and on the album, your Lohengrin came across as somehow very human as well as ethereal…

I’m so glad that registered, because it was something we discussed a lot in rehearsals: if you really lean into the idea of Lohengrin as ethereal demigod (which most people do), you lose out on the possibility that he’s actually human. Of course the story centres on his mission to help humanity (and especially Elsa), but it’s also about him discovering what it is to be human for himself.

Our director talked about a film from the 1980s called Wings of Desire, where two angels come down from heaven and experience human emotions for the first time, and I think that’s the dichotomy Wagner was trying to portray. Towards the end you see Lohengrin switch between these two modes: the Grail Narrative is a very oracular declaration of who he is and what has happened, then in 'Mein lieber Schwan' he returns to the human part of himself, and for me that’s the most difficult transition in the whole thing.

I’ve found this journey quite refreshing, because if you follow what Wagner writes it’s all in there - he had very fixed ideas about what he wanted and if you’re faithful to the score you’re going to come up with something pretty similar to what I did. I’m just following all the dynamic markings and being guided by the text, and it’s odd to see how many people don’t do that because they’re trying to express themselves! I think it’s our job as artists to be a vessel for this amazing art, not to attempt to impose our own personality upon it.

In terms of tempo, it’s all relative: there are no metronome-markings in any scores I’ve come across, just things like ‘Langsamer’ and ‘Schnell in Zeitmass’. What we do on the album might be a little slow for some people, but I wanted to stretch the limits of what was possible breath-wise so you can also hear all those extraordinary harmonic changes that often get lost. And there is precedent for that: if you go back and listen to Wolfgang Windgassen in the 50s, it’s slower than molasses! But there’s something to be said for that, because it takes you out of our normal world. If you do it at a tempo that a person can easily get through then it’s not extraordinary, and opera is supposed to be extraordinary!