Tenor  Jerry  Hadley

Two conversations with Bruce Duffie








 

Jerry Hadley US tenor whose great vocal facility equipped him for both operas and musicals By Patrick Stearns, The Guardian July 18, 2007  [Text only - photos from other sources] Jerry Hadley, the fresh-faced tenor from the Illinois heartland, has died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head at the age of 55, following treatment for depression. The incident occurred on July 10; he was taken off life support on July 16. For decades, he was a dependable lyric tenor presence in the world's great opera houses and music festivals with a particular facility for singing modern music with an Italianate lyricism, starting with his signature role, Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in a student production at the University of Illinois. With no change in technique, his clean vocal production also encompassed Broadway musical theatre. In Hadley's best years, he was the ebullient, un-neurotic concert partner of baritone Thomas Hampson in what were playfully named the "Tom and Jerry" concerts. Hadley was married with two sons in affluent Wilton, Connecticut, and had a thriving recording career, including numerous complete opera recordings as well as highly publicised crossover albums in the 1990s for RCA. Both Beverly Sills (obituary, July 4) and Joan Sutherland played significant roles in his early career, the former offering him his first big opera house contract with the New York City Opera in 1978, the latter casting him in his first full opera recording, Donizetti's Anna Bolena, in the mid-1980s. The news of his death was, to say the least, a shock. One anonymous blogger from Boston spoke for many: "I saw Jerry Hadley [in a] master class earlier this year that rejuvenated my love of singing and brought many singers in the class to greater depths of emotional connection to their performances. I count it as a turning point in my own studies, and I cannot square that delighted, energetic man with the same person who wanted to die." However, with last year's arrest for drink-driving (the charges were dropped because, while he had been drinking, he was not driving when apprehended), a different picture began to emerge. His voice had been less reliable and lustrous. Though a frequent presence at the Metropolitan Opera starting in 1987, he had not sung there since 2002, when he gave a performance of the John Harbison opera, The Great Gatsby. See my Interviews with Dawn Upshaw and Susan Graham. The RCA crossover discs had never made much of an impact, either with critics or on the sales charts. In recent years, Hadley was divorced from his wife and singing mostly pops concerts, though a Madam Butterfly earlier this year in Australia apparently gave him new confidence on his operatic prowess. Though he was reportedly discussing new roles such as Mime in Wagner's Ring cycle, he was also considering bankruptcy. Such circumstances among world-class singers are infrequent, but hardly unheard of in a world where vocal health - not financial acumen - is a paramount consideration. Hadley always seemed to be the exception to that. Born in Princeton, Illinois, and brought up on a farm, he discovered his talent for opera while attending Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, before he had even seen one staged professionally. Vocal rest, he once said, came second to family duties. Though he lost his voice for months in the late 1980s - and said he learned a greater appreciation for life beyond his career - he came back, singing as effortlessly as ever. Indeed, what floored critics about the young - and even middle-aged - Hadley was his ease. Passages in The Rake's Progress that caused struggle with most tenors did not for him. Why, he could not say. The music's odd intervals simply never gave him trouble. As Alfred in Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus, he playfully tossed off bits of the most troublesome tenor arias. During his New York City Opera years (1979-89), he learned new roles quickly - the title role of Massenet's Werther, among them - and in a special, all-star concert version of Richard Strauss's Capriccio at Carnegie Hall, sang the role of Flamand. Unlike many opera singers who lost credibility in singing Broadway scores, Hadley's prestige only increased - at first - with his celebrated recording of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat with Teresa Stratas. He was a favourite of Leonard Bernstein, who is said to have offered him the leading tenor role in his 1984 recording of West Side Story, which Hadley turned down. However, Hadley was featured in Bernstein recordings of the Mozart Requiem, Puccini's La Bohème and Bernstein's own Candide. At Bernstein's memorial at Carnegie Hall, Hadley moving sang It Must Be So from that score. As Hadley grew more confident on stage, however, critics identified a lack of artistic taste that grew more pronounced in later years. He was featured vocalist in the RCA recording Symphonic Music of the Rolling Stones, specifically singing Sympathy for the Devil in operatic voice. The disc was one of the label's biggest failures. Nor did his appearance in Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio, portraying a blue-collar worker shouting for his dinner, help his artistic standing. At Cecilia Bartoli's 1996 Metropolitan Opera debut in Mozart's Così Fan Tutte, Hadley sang Ferrando with extravagant ornamentation that left some critics baffled. None the less, he continued to be featured in prestige projects, such as the 1996 Peter Mussbach production of The Rake's Progress in Salzburg and the 2002 recording of Janáček's Jenůfa at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Even with a self-imposed conclusion to his career, Hadley had what many tenors long for - nearly 30 years of almost unbroken activity, spread over both the US and Europe, in a nearly unprecedented range of composers, from Mozart to McCartney. · Jerry Hadley, tenor, born June 16 1952; died July 18 2007 --  Names which are links refer to my Interviews elsewhere my this website.  BD

See my Interviews with John Mauceri, Gian Carlo Menotti, Sheri Greenawald, and Martin Feinstein.
Also in the cast (but not pictured) was Richard Stilwell as Marcello.

you can, with the digital, do just that one measure (with a few beats lead-in and lead-out) and it will be spliced right into the master.  In a sense, the recording becomes better than real-life.

BD:    At what point does it cross the line and become a fraud?

JH:    I don’t know.  If you start talking about the recording as a representation of a live performance, then almost every recording is a fraud.  But, we’re not striving for a kind of archival document.  We are trying to make something that is as blemish-free as possible.  As a record collector and audiophile myself, I appreciate being able to put on a piece of music done to perfection and listening to what a great work it is.  Sometimes it concerns me because we’ve all run into a situation where someone will come backstage expecting to hear the same kind of acoustical balance and detail in the theater that they have heard on the recording where everything can be done perfectly and balanced just right.  They’ll even say that there were things they liked better on the recording than in the performance.  That’s a danger we run into.

BD:    Do you ever feel you’re competing against the recordings

particularly in works that are heavily scored.  Also, the large American opera houses will have a different situation from the smaller European houses.  Even someone with a canon for a voice will have trouble matching the presence of a recording when the orchestra is going full-tilt.  Domingo said he knows that there is a limit to what a human can do to compete with that.  You have to just sing the same way you always sing, and the balance is the problem of the conductor. 

BD:    Do you sing differently at all from big theaters to small ones?

JH:    My intention is not to sing differently.  Remember that when I step on the stage here in Chicago, this house is almost as big as the Met which is 4,000 seats, and is almost twice as big as even the largest European house.  You don’t go out and push more, but you do have a sense that there is more space in which you have to operate, and we all tend to work a little harder than we do in a smaller situation.  I remember the first time I sang in Vienna, which holds about 2,200 people and is a rather severe horseshoe shape, so no seat is all that far from the stage, even the ones way up in the fourth ring.  You still have a sense, perhaps not of intimacy, but at least that you’re in the same geographical area.  I’ve noticed that those of us who are used to these huge theaters feel we don’t have to work as hard over there to make the same musical or vocal points.  I must say, though, that of all the houses, this one here in Chicago is quite a gem acoustically.  I had some relatives who sat way up in the back, and they were surprised at how splendid the acoustics were.  But coming back to the idea of recordings, back in the 1950’s, London records made an attempt with their opera recordings to try to recreate the ambiance of the theater.  If you hear some of those discs where the singers don’t have quite as much presence as they do on the more modern sets, the consumer probably has the same idea that I do, being that when we pay $35 or more for a set, we want to hear everything.  I don’t know what the answer is.  In the same way, opera videos can present opera in a different light from the theater.  Having real outdoor sets and so much freedom gives a richness that you can’t get when you’re confined to stage settings.  On the other hand, you must realize it was conceived as a theater piece to be done on a stage where you have four walls, with the audience looking in from one of those walls.  I’ve often wondered how the advent of the opera video will affect the expectations of the audience in twenty years. 

BD:    Do you feel opera works well on television now?

JH:    I have seen lots of opera productions which are simply staged performances that are filmed and broadcast to audiences throughout the country.  Some things work and some things don’t work.  For instance, in order for histrionics on the stage to “read” clearly to the back row of the theater, there needs to be a kind of larger-than-life quality.  You have to exaggerate the gestures

BD:    Let’s talk a bit about Massenet.  You seem to be moving into the French repertoire now.  Tell me about the character of Werther.

JH:    Werther is the prototype for all of the tragic romantic heroes of the 19th century.  When Goethe wrote the novel

them whether they want it or not.  It’s much more gratifying and much more desirable if the audience gets involved in what’s going on onstage.  As performers, we know when the audience is involved and when it’s not.  When they’re involved, there’s a kind of electricity and energy that passes from the stage to audience and back again.  This creates an atmosphere in which great discoveries can be made on the part of both performer and listener.  It’s happened to me many times.  Often in Europe, because it’s so much a part of their heritage, there is an adversarial situation set up.  This is not because they want you to fail, but they come to the theater knowing more than the average person... or at least they think they know more, and that can be intimidating at times.  In America, people go to the theater with fewer biases, and they will respond or not respond depending on the degree of honesty with which you perform.  American audiences will not sit still for something that is dishonest or insincere, and I like that.  Europeans will come to the theater much more easily, but once inside, Americans are much more willing to listen.  This is not a criticism, but just the way it is.

BD:    Is there a competition amongst tenors?

JH:    I am sure there is, but I get along great with my tenor-colleagues.  After a certain point, you realize that everybody is so very different.  There is competition between people of like voice-types, but the kind of competition that the press would lead you to believe exists doesn’t, at least in my estimation.  There may be a little bad blood between Luciano and Placido, but that may be the result of all the press machinations they’ve undergone.  I get along with all the tenors.  You never know when you’ll need someone to bail you out of a situation when you’re sick or something.  It’s much easier to deal with life when you’re on friendly terms with everybody.

BD:    I wish you lots of continued success.

JH:    I’ll try not to let my head get too big!  All that extraneous stuff robs you of the energy you need to perform.  The antics may be right for Luciano, but those of us coming up behind him can’t get away with that stuff.  We’re expected to be more versatile, and audiences aren’t going to put up with it any more.  Working with Joan Sutherland was a wonderful experience.  She’s a product of that old school and she hasn’t indulged in any of that foolishness.  She’s now 60 and still sounds great.  The same for Alfredo Kraus.  He’s unbelievable.  He still blows everybody else away.  People half his age don’t sound nearly as good.

BD:    Are you striving to be fresh-voiced when you’re that age?

JH:    Sure, but that has to do with picking the right repertoire.  You have to look at those tenors who are still going strong and figure out why.  The idea that every tenor starts out doing Rossini and moves through Puccini and ends up singing Otello is just not right in many instances.

BD:    So you will let your voice dictate what you will sing?

JH:    It makes life a lot easier.

BD:    How difficult is it to say no?

JH:    Sometimes it’s hard.  It’s not difficult to say no, but you must know why you are saying no.  If it’s for a trivial and silly reason, then you’ve got a problem.  But if it’s for sound artistic judgment about your career and abilities, then even the top managements and directors will respect that decision.

and by that I mean the recorded legacy we have.  For instance of those singers of the turn of the century, people that were singing opera back then knew Puccini and Verdi and Mascagni and Leoncavallo and Wagner, and they probably studied with people who knew Rossini and Donizetti and all the composers that preceded them.  We’re in a very strange place in this part of the twentieth century because in the last thirty years there is a growing reluctance on the part of the singers to avail themselves of that recorded legacy to gain a frame of reference.  The problem is also that there aren’t many new works being written, and because opera is essentially the recreation of works that represent a different time and different place than we’re in right now.  It’s arrogant and foolish for us not to constantly assess our frame of reference if we are going to go forward.

BD:    Should the singers today not make friends with Dominick Argento and Robert Ward and Menotti?

JH:    Of course they should, but we’re living in a different climate today.  Composers are not necessarily involved in the mainstream of professional opera theater.

BD:    That’s why I ask about those three, since they, as much as anybody, really are melodists.

JH:    As much as anybody, but they’re in the minority.  To make a living as a composer you have to be in the university.  You have to teach, and there’s a lot of energy that goes into that, but it actually draws away from the art of composition.  They’re not having any intercourse with people that are performers; they’re having intercourse with people who are students, who don’t yet know how to be performers.

BD:    So they’re getting a misguided view of it?

JH:    I think it’s a misguided view, and a lot of what’s written today doesn’t work because it’s not based on a practical working knowledge of day-to-day experience in the opera house.  It’s the same with conductors and it’s the same with singers.  We all are in danger of living in a vacuum, and you can’t do that.  You cannot do that and do what we do.   It’s very important to have that frame of reference.  Opera conductors today are largely not opera conductors

  It’s not that you’re necessarily going to get the key or the gimmick or the answer by any one of those conversations, but what you’re going to get is another piece of the puzzle.

BD:    Is the puzzle ever complete?

JH:    I don’t think so, but it’s necessary to keep doing that.  One of my best friends in the business is Thomas Hampson, and Tom and I are both fanatics about old recordings of singers.  We do joint interviews when we’ve gone out and done duo concerts, and one of the things people say to us is,

talking through music.  At least that’s what I think it is.  One of the reasons I love a lot of the singers of a generation or two ago is not that I don’t like singers today, but there seems to be a willingness in the first few decades of this century for singers to have a personal point of view about the music they were singing within the parameters of what the composer wrote.  From everything I have ever studied and read, every great composer wants his music to have a life beyond him or her.  One of the things that’s so magical about music is the composer’s inspiration towards a poem or libretto.  But it has to come out of some kind of collective consciousness because we all relate to it in various forms.  In the hands of different singers who are willing to stand on stage and throw their defenses down enough so that we can see how they are personally responding to those words as they sing to us, the same song sung by different people can give you totally different experiences.  But that only happens when people are sincere.  One problem is that when you try to communicate, you don’t communicate anything.

BD:    You’re working too hard at it?

JH:    Yes, working too hard at it.  You somehow have to trust the fact that you are a human being who communicates every day in real life.  It is enough if you simply stand on stage, having done all the work that you need to do before you get there, and just sing

to get to the point where you can do something on stage that looks so natural and so easy that people say it’s great art.  That is why I think that if we are self-consciously trying to create art, we don’t understand the process.

BD:    So then why do you sing?

JH:    Because I’ve always wanted to sing; because I can’t imagine doing anything else; because I just can’t not sing.  I know that’s what I’m here to do.  I love everything about singing.

BD:    Fortunately you do it very well, but if you had different equipment in the throat, would you have been driven to do something else, or would you have been driven to sing, and then been a very mediocre or non-career singer?

JH:    That’s an interesting question.  I’ve never been asked that question before!  I don’t know.  If you get down to the question of equipment, basically everybody’s born with the same equipment.  Physiologically-speaking we’re not very different, all of us, but there are other factors that go into it that nobody yet has been able to define.  As far as the acts of making the sounds, if you have the right person showing you what not to do to get in your own way, it is relatively simple.  It’s then you decide if you can take that and use it as a means for expressing something.  There are lots and lots of people that I can think of from when I was in school that sang, that produced the sounds far better than I did, far better than I ever could still, who lacked the desire to do it.  Honestly, I would have been willing to do anything to do what I do today when I started out.  I can remember when I didn’t have any singing jobs and I was teaching part-time at the University of Connecticut.  I came to a point where they wanted to offer me a full-time position, and it was very tempting because it was very good money, but it was not what I wanted to do.  I would rather have continued to work part-time jobs and sling hash or whatever I had to do to continue to try to be a singer.  I’m not faulting them for this, but for whatever reason, I don’t know anybody who really wants to do this, who really wants to do it the exclusion of everything else, who doesn’t do it.  People who tell you they didn’t make it because of this, this, this, this, this, and have a whole list of excuses...

BD:    ...didn’t really want to do it?

JH:    I’m not convinced that they really wanted to do it.  That’s certainly not to say that is true in every case.

BD:    So the real desire to do it puts you in the race, and the equipment and the ability makes you win the race?

JH:    Yes, if you keep your head on straight.  There are a lot of pitfalls on the way.

BD:    [With a gentle nudge]  Oh, you mean it’s not a snap?

JH:    [With a sly grin]  No, it takes weeks to achieve sometimes.  [Both laugh]  But coming back to what I said earlier about a frame of reference, I still spend an enormous amount of time listening to recordings of singers.

BD:    And always discovering things?

JH:    Always discovering things.  We’re so far removed from the source.  I’ll give you something analogous.  There isn’t anybody on the Broadway stage today who, if they were going to do Oklahoma for the first time, wouldn’t go back and listen to the original cast recording.  So who are we as opera singers not to listen to the original casts?  [Both laugh]  You can go as far back to hear the last castrati, for goodness sakes!  [There is a CD reissue of recordings made by Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) in 1902 and 1904.]  He was still making those incredible sounds and still astounding listeners.  So anybody who wants to do this, and anybody who doesn’t avail themselves of these recordings or deesn’t inundate themselves in that history denies themselves of a tremendous amount of possibilities.

BD:    But you shouldn’t pattern yourself after that.  You should use that as the beginning, not an end?

JH:    It depends on what you mean by patterning yourself, because I know for a fact that a lot of the things that I have developed as my own means of expression will have started out as pure imitation at some point.  It had to, because that is the way it is with all singing.  It’s like composition.  How can a composer be expected to come up with something brand new when he’s not fully capable of doing what’s been done before?  You have to have that as a basis before you have a point of departure.  All great singing has to start as emulation, as imitation.  You hear somebody sing and you think to yourself that you want to do that!  Do you want to sound like Elvis or Caruso?  Everybody does it!  I see Placido or Luciano or any of those guys and I think back to the first time that I heard them sing on recording.  I tried to imitate what they were doing, and I made a mess of it!  [Both laugh]  But the very fact that you have those role models is really important.

BD:    Are you aware of the fact that you are perhaps a role model now for some twenty-three year old?

JH:    [Laughs]  I get people that come up to me backstage all the time, young tenors and others.  Part of my perception of myself is quite honestly that I am still back there when I was a student.  So it’s very strange when somebody comes up and says,

See my Interviews with Richard Stoltzman, and Angel Romero. See my Interviews with Susan Dunn, Paul Plishka, Robert Shaw, Arleen Augér, and Tom Krause. See my Interviews with Carol Vaness, and Kurt Masur. See my Interviews with Alexandru Agache, Brigitte Fassbaender, Anja Silja, and Bernard Haitink. See my Interviews with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbara Bonney, and Florence Quivar. See my Interviews with Dame Felicity Lott, Sir Thomas Allen, and Sir Charles Mackerras.

© 1987 & 1994 Bruce Duffie

These conversations were recorded in Chicago on January 1, 1987 and October 13, 1994.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1991 and 1997.  The transcription of the first interview was made in 1988 and published in the Massenet Newsletter in July of that year.  The transcript of the second interview was made in 2016, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

*     *     *     *     *

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.