{"id":729,"date":"2010-10-05T18:16:14","date_gmt":"2010-10-05T18:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/renepape.wpengine.com\/?p=729"},"modified":"2017-03-20T18:21:14","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T18:21:14","slug":"a-tsar-is-born-rene-pape-is-about-to-have-his-moment-in-borus-godunov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/2010\/10\/05\/a-tsar-is-born-rene-pape-is-about-to-have-his-moment-in-borus-godunov\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tsar is Born: Rene Pape is about to have his moment in Borus Godunov"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rene Pape dropped his orb. He was onstage at the Metropolitan Opera last week, richly costumed and rehearsing Mussorgsky\u2019s opera\u00a0Boris Godunov<\/em>, an early scene in which the title character, anxious and ill at ease, prepares to become tsar.<\/p>\n

Mr. Pape, holding the scepter and orb, delivered his short monologue to the crowd with a haunted look on his face. Then, as he turned to enter the cathedral, he faltered and the orb tumbled out of his hand. A terrifying split-second followed, and it was only when one of Boris\u2019 handlers dove to catch it that it was clear that the accident was intentional. Mr. Pape, through the emotional honesty of the preceding monologue and the clarity of his gestures, had made a potentially silly moment startlingly vivid. It would have been a difficult effect to achieve in a performance; to do it in a busy rehearsal was extraordinary.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have a good director, you have this feeling that you can work really, really intensely,\u201d Mr. Pape, 46, imposingly built and with a deep, elegantly accented voice, told\u00a0The Observer<\/em>\u00a0recently over dinner (he had risotto) near Lincoln Center. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing. Every single rehearsal day is a performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 1995, Mr. Pape has appeared at the Met every season, clocking in more than 160 performances. He has had the kind of career with the company\u2013working his way up from smaller comprimario roles\u2013that\u2019s all too rare these days, and he\u2019s been a favorite of audiences and critics. But this Boris is a special moment: the pinnacle of the bass repertoire; his first new Met production as a star; and a role that the company gives to its most beloved basses (James Morris and Samuel Ramey in its last two runs). He\u2019s finally the one in the full-color newspaper ads, and if all goes well,\u00a0Boris<\/em>\u00a0will cement Mr. Pape\u2019s reputation as one of the great singers of his generation.<\/p>\n

The production, which opens on Monday, has taken some unexpected turns. The German director Peter Stein apparently bristled at difficulties securing his U.S. work visa and withdrew only two months ago. He was replaced by Stephen Wadsworth, known for his intricately detailed character work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a new situation now with this new director,\u201d Mr. Pape said. \u201cToday we spent longer time on the rehearsal than the union allows us. I was late tonight because we had to talk a bit more, and it\u2019s fantastic. \u2026 I had a discussion today with Stephen Wadsworth, and I was saying, \u2018How can I play that,\u2019 and I saw him, and I corrected it: \u2018How can I think that.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Pape doesn\u2019t immediately come to mind as an \u201cintellectual\u201d artist, perhaps because his voice is so overwhelmingly sensuous, an instrument of steady richness. The sheer beauty of the voice can make you forget how thoughtful the portrayals really are, how carefully each word is considered. He does the thing that great operatic voices do so well, particularly in his repertoire of conflicted gods and wounded kings: combining authority with vulnerability and tenderness. There are no broad effects, no yelling or sobbing, just a truthfulness that makes his characters\u2019 emotions seem, in the way opera makes possible, simultaneously individualized and archetypal\u2013his King Marke, in performances of Wagner\u2019s\u00a0Tristan und Isolde<\/em>\u00a0at the Met, was an icon of sadness and resignation. On a new Mariinsky Theater recording of Wagner\u2019s\u00a0Parsifal<\/em>, conducted by Valery Gergiev, Mr. Pape\u2019s Good Friday Spell begins with an offhand, almost conversational intimacy, and rises effortlessly to great waves of sound.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think about everything and at the same time nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt sounds stupid, no? You could think about, \u2018I\u2019m a 46-year-old East German guy dealing with working on 1600s Russian history, singing in New York, having this career,\u2019 but I just want to make the audience who comes to the performance happy, and to tell the story as much as I can. I\u2019m not studying Dostoyevsky and Pushkin every night. It\u2019s not possible. You just make the music happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

MR. PAPE WAS born in Dresden in 1964. His mother is a hairdresser and his father is a chef; his parents divorced when he was very young, and he grew up largely with his grandmother. He sang in the city\u2019s famed boys\u2019 choir (\u201cI had a very good soprano,\u201d he said) and even appeared as one of the Three Boys in\u00a0The Magic Flute<\/em>(surely one of the few Boys who has gone on to sing Sarastro).<\/p>\n

He was cast in the East German premiere of\u00a0Cabaret<\/em>\u00a0in 1976, in which he played the young Nazi who sings \u201cTomorrow Belongs to Me,\u201d and was only really introduced to opera when he began his studies at the Dresden Conservatory in the early \u201980s, joining the Berlin State Opera in 1988.<\/p>\n

Over dinner, he at first denied that living in East Germany had influenced his work in\u00a0Boris<\/em>, an opera about political upheaval. (He admitted that it might have benefited him to work harder when he was forced to study Russian in school.) But when talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall, his voice nearly cracked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Dresden,\u201d he said, \u201cand we called each other\u2013\u2018Did you hear that? What happened in Berlin? Let\u2019s go!\u2019 And we jumped in our Trabant and drove to Berlin. \u2026 If you had asked me the question \u2018What was your greatest moment in life?\u2019 I would say that. To have this opportunity, to have this feeling. We were crying, all of us, because of love and happiness, not of sadness. And if you can cry an hour or longer because of luck, it\u2019s the greatest thing you can have. \u2026 Growing up in East Germany, you don\u2019t expect anything. So everything that came after 1989, every single moment, every day, every travel is a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been almost 35 years since that \u201cTomorrow Belongs to Me\u201d debut, but basses develop late, and Mr. Pape may be now hitting his stride, just in time to capture the New York audience for good.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to wait until you\u2019re about 40,\u201d he said, \u201cthen a bass voice is really settled. \u2026 You get some life experiences, technical experiences, working experiences, then you come to a certain point [at which] you just are able to give the music, you don\u2019t have to think about the issues. You just think how you make people cry, laugh, go out of the opera house having their five hours\u2013coming and listening and watching\u2013and you want them to go home and be happy. I\u2019m delivering\u2013I\u2019m the deliveryman.\u201d<\/p>\n

VIEW ARTICLE<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rene Pape dropped his orb. He was onstage at the Metropolitan Opera last week, richly costumed and rehearsing Mussorgsky\u2019s opera\u00a0Boris Godunov, an early scene in which the title character, anxious and ill at ease, prepares to become tsar. Mr. Pape, holding the scepter and orb, delivered his short monologue to the crowd with a haunted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renepape.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}