The tenor problem in Wagner has never been simple. Melchior, of course, was Melchior — a phenomenon so far outside the normal distribution of human vocal endowment that invoking his name in any comparative context is almost an act of bad faith. But after him, and after the generation of Windgassen and Hopf and Treptow, the supply of voices genuinely suited to Heldentenor repertoire has thinned to something approaching a crisis. Thomas, Kollo, Jerusalem — each admirable, each compromised in his own particular way. Against that backdrop, Jonas Kaufmann arrives on this all-Wagner recital not merely as a relief but as something close to a vindication: here, the voice seems to say, is what this music actually sounds like when everything works.
What separates Kaufmann from most tenors who attempt this repertoire is a quality easier to reveal than define — a kind of baritonal density in the middle voice that keeps the tone grounded even when the phrase rises. You hear it immediately in “Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater,” Siegmund’s great narration from Act I of Die Walküre, where the temptation for most tenors is to push upward and outward, to manufacture heroism through sheer volume. Kaufmann does the opposite. He pulls the sound inward first, lets the text accumulate weight — “Wälse! Wälse!” arrives not as a shout but as something that has been building since the beginning of the phrase, inevitable rather than effortful. His slight natural hoarseness, which might in a lesser artist suggest vocal wear, here reads as authenticity, the sound of a man for whom desperation is not a theatrical gesture but a condition.
Ramon Vinay had something of this quality. Jon Vickers had it absolutely.
The Siegfried excerpt — “Dass der mein Vater nicht ist” — presents different challenges, and here is where I have a genuine reservation about Donald Runnicles and the Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin. The Woodbird music surrounding Siegfried‘s forest reverie wants a particular kind of transparency and wonder, a sense that the orchestra is listening rather than accompanying. Runnicles is a player I respect, and the playing is clean enough, but there is a studied quality to the conducting here, a caution that keeps the music at arm’s length from its own magic. Carlos Kleiber could conjure the sense that Siegfried‘s moment of awakening consciousness was happening in real time, the instruments discovering themselves note by note. Runnicles settles for beauty, which is not nothing but is considerably less than everything.
The “Inbrunst im Herzen” — Tannhäuser‘s Rome narration — is another matter entirely. This is where Kaufmann’s particular gifts converge most perfectly with the demands of the text. The narration is essentially a study in progressive desperation, a man recounting his own spiritual humiliation in language that grows more anguished with each verse, and Kaufmann’s voice, with its inherent quality of suppressed urgency, is ideally constituted for it. He phrases with a poet’s ear — not the common compliment it sounds like, because most tenors phrase with an athlete’s ear, thinking about where the next big note is coming. Kaufmann thinks about what the sentence means, and the vocal line follows.
The Wesendonck-Lieder are a more complicated proposition. These songs — settings of poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, written while Wagner was composing Tristan und Isolde and conducting what was clearly a complicated emotional relationship with their author — were orchestrated by Felix Mottl, and they carry a kind of concentrated interior anguish that suits mezzo-sopranos and dramatic sopranos almost better than any voice type. Flagstad recorded them. Christa Ludwig left one of the great recorded performances. A tenor has to negotiate not only the transposition but the whole question of whether the songs’ particular erotic melancholy translates across the gender of the voice. Kaufmann largely makes the case. His “Träume” is genuinely affecting, the long-breathed phrases sustained with an ease that never sounds like effort. Whether it is quite as devastating as what the best female voices bring to this music — that is a question I am not sure I can answer neutrally.
One technical complaint must be registered: the microphone placement is too close. This is, regrettably, a chronic condition of the modern recording industry, which has apparently decided that the ideal listening experience involves the sensation of the singer standing approximately two feet from your ear. Kaufmann in a large house — the Bayerische Staatsoper, say, or the Vienna Staatsoper — produces a sound that fills the space without seeming to try. That quality, the relationship between a voice and the air around it, is exactly what close miking eliminates. What we hear on this disc is Kaufmann’s voice in clinical isolation, which is still remarkable but is not quite the same thing as Kaufmann singing Wagner.
Still. The “In fernem Land” from Lohengrin, given here in the extended version with its rarely heard second verse, is as luminous a piece of Wagnerian singing as you are likely to encounter anywhere in the current catalog. The grail narration is, in its way, the most exposing music Wagner wrote for tenor — no dramatic context to hide behind, no orchestral storm to ride, just the voice and the phrase and the silence after. Kaufmann floats the opening pianissimo with the kind of confidence that comes from not having to think about it, and he sustains the line through the long descent to the cadence without a single moment of uncertainty. It is, simply, singing.
The Rienzi aria is a curiosity — that early, pre-Flying Dutchman Wagner, still half in the world of Meyerbeer and grand opera spectacle — and Kaufmann makes more of it than the music perhaps deserves, which is its own kind of achievement. The “Am stillen Herd” from Die Meistersinger is warmly done, though I find myself wishing for slightly more wit in the phrasing; Walther von Stolzing’s song is, after all, partly about a young man who is too earnest for his own good, and a touch of self-aware irony would not go amiss.
But these are arguments around the edges of something genuinely important. The honest fact is that in the current landscape of Wagnerian singing, Kaufmann is not merely the best available option — he is the only tenor working today whose voice carries the specific weight and color that this music requires. His diction is exemplary, his musicianship real, his artistry deepening with each year. The reservations about miking and conducting are genuine, and a future album under a more dramatically engaged director would be a different and possibly better document. For now, this is what we have, and what we have is considerable. Kaufmann may not be Vickers. But then, Vickers was not Melchior either, and nobody held it against him.
