Complete Surrender to the Moment
An eagerly awaited début will soon be taking place, when Magdalena Kožená sings the title role in Bizet’s opera Carmen at the 2012 Salzburg Easter Festival. It will be the first time that the mezzo-soprano has sung Carmen onstage. She spoke to the dramaturge Peter Blaha about her approach to this challenging role and about the particular relationship to life and death on the part of the Spanish in general.
“This role is a tremendous challenge. And yet I don’t think that any singer would turn down the chance to take it on. It is the dream of every mezzo-soprano,” days Magdalena Kožená, adding that “it’s not so much a technical challenge, for in this respect I’ve sung far more difficult roles. No, the challenge consists in bringing out what it is that makes Carmen so special ? namely, her unique charisma. The audience needs to understand why everyone falls in love with her even though there are lots of other pretty young women onstage,” the singer adds with a smile. Magdalena Kožená faces this challenge head-on. She is the Salzburg Easter Festival’s new Carmen. At the same time she is extending a repertory that already includes Octavian, Mélisande and Angelina in Rossini’s La Cenerentola but which is dominated by Baroque operas and by Mozart. She has in fact already recorded “Les tringles des sistres tintaient” from Act Two. “It was a long time ago. I did it with Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens du Louvre. I found his interpretation of Carmen utterly fascinating. If you perform it with period instruments, you really notice the difference ? it’s completely different from the Carmen we’re all used to.” Even so, Magdalena Kožená thinks it would be wrong to be influenced by this interpretative approach in Salzburg. “In Salzburg the Berlin Philharmonic will be playing. They play fantastically and are very flexible from a stylistic point of view, but the sounds that they make aren’t those of a period ensemble.”
Expressing subtle nuances
For Magdalena Kožená, Carmen has come at just the right time. She was born in Brno in the Czech Republic and studied singing with Eva Blahová at the Brno Conservatory. Her exceptional talent first came to the attention of a wider audience when she won the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg in 1995. After early engagements at the Brno Opera and the Vienna Volksoper, she made her international breakthrough in 2000 when she took over from an ailing Anne Sofie von Otter and sang Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at that year’s Vienna Festival. Since then she has been one of the most sought-after mezzo-sopranos of her generation, equally at home in the opera house, the concert hall and the recital room. Her “voice of milk and honey”, as it was described by the Cologne General-Anzeiger, is extremely colourful, expressive and flexible, with the result that she is practically predestined for the coloratura fireworks of Baroque music. It is not a dramatic voice, however, so that Verdi and Wagner are not on her agenda. But Bizet’s Carmen is in the tradition of an opéra comique and does not demand a dramatic mezzo but a flexible and adaptable voice that is capable of bringing out the subtlest of nuances in the interplay of text and music. And it is very much this that is Magdalena Kožená’s great strength, even when she is singing in French.
Asked whether she initially found this easy, Magdalena Kožená replies: “No, no! It was terrible! As a language, Czech is very different from French. It was already hard enough to have to learn to speak French, but it took a long time for me to get it into my voice so that it feels technically comfortable and people can actually understand what I’m saying. I remember the first time I went to Paris to sing a small role in the recording of Gluck’s Armide. I’d previously worked very hard with a language coach, but when I started to sing, Marc Minkowski interrupted me and said: ‘You’re singing wonderfully, but unfortunately I can’t understand a single word.’ I was devastated.” But that is all in the past, for Magdalena Kožená was married for a time to a Frenchman and lived in Paris. Since then she has made the language her own, even though ? as she explains ? the French themselves did not always make it easy for her. “As soon as you address someone in the street in French and they notice your accent, they reply in bad English. It wasn’t very encouraging.” Today Magdalena Kožená loves singing in French. “It’s a very special language. It’s like a fantastical painting on which many different details can be made out. In Italian it is the sound that matters most, whereas French sets out much more from the words. I like that a lot. And it’s also very important in Carmen.”
