God's Tenor

The death of Jon Vickers the other day  at the age of 88 prompted me to listen to him again in the DVD of one of his major roles - Don Jose in the Salzburg Festival performance of Bizet’s Carmen with Grace Bumbry in the title role and Herbert von Karajan as conductor.

The lavishly detailed   production by the conductor himself, was very much a spectacular Karajan show, with dozens of extras, a full Spanish corps de ballet, clacking heels,  sumptuous costumes, and a Seville townscape for Act One, complete with sunshine, busy cafe terrace and big stairways - the obverse, in every way,  of the sombre , characteristically “urinary” Beito production streamed on July 1 from the London Coliseum.

Yet the heart of the Karajan performance was where it belonged, not only down in the Salzburg orchestra pit with the Vienna Philharmonic but in the outsize personalities of Vickers (slightly bandy-legged in uniform) and the alluring Bumbry  themselves, along with the expressive, wide-eyed Mirella Freni as Micaela. 

Although, like Beito, Karajan shunned the spoken dialogue which is an essential feature of Bizet’s masterpiece, the strengths - including the melodic sweetness -  of the opera shone through, however grand the scale. God’s Tenor, as Vickers used to be nicknamed, was in eloquent form. Though his Christian zeal - his first wife was a missionary’s daughter and  he pulled out of two major productions of Tannhauser because he deemed Wagner’s opera to be blasphemous - affected much of his career, sometimes to its detriment, his granite-voiced singing was of fierce intensity.

My wife, watching part of Act Two   of Carmen over my shoulder, remarked that he looked just like Billy Graham - an unexpected but apt comment, given his religious background, bringing to mind a profile of him written by Andrew Porter which said that the trouble with Vickers was that there were  moments when he wondered whether he was watching and hearing Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes  or Peter Grimes as Jon Vickers.

It was this aspect of the great, craggy-faced tenor, son of a Canadian  lay preacher, which my wife seemed to have picked up, and which undoubtedly marred some of his performances, memorable though they were. I heard him seldom - as Verdi’s Otello and Handel’s Samson - and almost always in London. But it was a memorable, if sometimes exhausting and finally exhausted voice. Karajan was said to admire him enormously but Sir Georg Solti - a “bully” according to Vickers, though Vickers seemed to be a bit of a bully himself - fell out with him and refused to work with him. 

And his Don Jose? Undoubtedly impressive,not least in the Flower Song,  though his soft notes, as light as feathers in contrast with what has been called the blunderbuss effect of his loud ones, are what stick in the memory.  It is easy to imagine what his Messiah, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, must have been like - the sound of God’s Tenor at full throttle, but at times on the edge of inaudibility,  was something to savour.

17 July 2015 

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