Bass Michael Langdon came to Chicago in 1981 to appear with Lyric Opera of Chicago in The Merry Widow with Evelyn Lear in the title role, and Neil Rosenshien, André Jobin, Gualtiero Negrini and others, conducted by Lee Schaenen, directed by Lotfi Mansouri, with lighting by Duane Schuler.  [Names which are links refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website.] 

He graciously took time from his schedule for a conversation.  His remarks would eventually be heard on WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago, but I was also giving some of my interviews to Wagner News, published by the Wagner Society of America, so that is where we began . . . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:    Is this your first trip to Chicago?

Michael Langdon:    My very first, yes.

BD:    How do you like our city?

ML:    Very much from what I’m able to see of it.  With the very heavy rehearsal schedule, there’s not much time to get around.  People always seem to think that being an opera singer and seeing all these famous cities, you have a chance get a street map and go around and visit all the places of interest.  It’s often very difficult to do much other than commute between the theater and the hotel.  From what I have seen, it’s very awe-inspiring city, especially as I tend to look over the wrong shoulder when crossing the road!  I’ve always done that in the States.  Driving on the left in England, you always look the wrong way for the traffic.  But after you’ve had a couple of shaves with the Chicago bus, you quickly learn to look the right way!  [Both laugh]

BD:    Let us start with your roles in Wagner.  You are a principal singer at Covent Garden and your roles include Hagen, but do you sing in all four of the operas in the Ring?

ML:    Yes, on four occasions done Fafner in both operas.  I always did Fafner in Rheingold...

BD:    Rather than Fasolt?

ML:    It suited me better, yes. 

BD:    Why?  What is the real difference  between those bass parts?

ML:    Fafner is slightly deeper pitched.  The tessitura for Fafner is a little lower, and if you’re doing all four roles you tend to want to save yourself as much as you can.  Having a deeply-pitched voice, Fafner suited me better, so I used to do Fafner in Rheingold, Hunding in Walküre, Fafner-Stimme, of course, in Siegfried, and Hagen in Götterdämmerung.

BD:    Do you think it works better when the man who sings Fafner in Rheingold also sings the Fafner voice in Siegfried?

ML:    It is an advantage because, after all, the four operas are one.  It’s four episodes of the same opera, and it’s good to have that continuity.  If it happens to be a distinctive voice, that it can be recognized in the two roles, it adds a sort of dimension and linkage, rather than just some outside embodiment coming in to simulate the Dragon.

BD:    But what about then the same voice singing the Dragon and Hagen and Hunding?

ML:    Here again you get different characters, but in the audience’s mind they see Fafner because it is just the voice from behind the scene.  So there is a linkage.  If you see Hunding and you see Hagen, you see entirely different characters on stage.   Fafner-Stimme is a disembodied voice and should bear some relationship to the real Fafner.  If you follow the cycle through, you have got set in your mind from the first opera.  That’s my feeling.  But it’s like any operatic role.  Once you get the costume and make-up on, you should become or simulate very effectively that person.

BD:    Do you feel it’s easy to simulate the evil embodiment of Hagen?

ML:    I always find it difficult.  One of the reasons why I didn’t sing more performances of Hagen, perhaps to some of the other Wagner parts, was the fact that I’m essentially a very genial sort of chap, and while I can put on the harsh sound which is required, it is a chore when one has to work at it.   There are much better Hagens than me around; people who can naturally get that hard quality that is required. 

BD:    You do alter your vocal production then for Hagen?

ML:    One almost inevitably has to adjust to the character one is doing to some degree.  While one doesn’t alter the basic placing of the voice, the color that is required for a part like Hagen is more often dark than any other color.  So whereas with another part you bring in the dark shades when necessary and the lighter shades and the brown shades when necessary, with Hagen you’re faced with a pretty black canvas all the way through.  And as black singing probably comes harder to me than the more richer-type of singing, I probably have to work harder at that role.

BD:    A more genial part might be Pogner.  Have you sung him?

ML:    Several times I was asked to sing Pogner, and the reason I never sang Pogner

BD:    They would hear the F over the orchestra?

ML:    They’d hear the F simply because he’d hypnotized into hearing it.  [Both laugh]  Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but it gave me great hope that maybe a famous man like Kipnis might have had the same trouble.  So Pogner was not for me.  Wagner wrote two different types of bass parts.  He wrote the higher tessitura basso, like Heinrich in Lohengrin, and Pogner, and some basses can even take on Hans Sachs, although they often ruin their voices trying to do it.

BD:    But I must admit myself when I listen to it Meistersinger I like the added weight of the basses who sing Hans Sachs.  I’d rather hear the Hagen sing Sachs than the Wotan sing Sachs.

ML:    Yes, although I say a bass has to have a very, very good top to do Sachs, a very, very good top.  Other parts like the Landgraf [shown in photo at left] are so beautifully written for the bass voice.

BD:    It lies nice and low?

ML:    It lies beautifully.  Not that there are so many low notes in it, but the general tessitura.  One of my favorite Wagner parts is Daland.  I love Daland.  That, again, lies beautifully for the voice.

BD:    Let’s explore Daland a little bit.

ML:    I once had a review that said,

BD:    So the singer is the motivation?

ML:    I think so, except in rare occasions when suddenly there is a thunderclap or sacred surprises.  Then, obviously, the motivation is from the pit.  But generally speaking, the singer can be writing at a desk and a thought is going to occur to him, and he’s a good enough musician to know exactly where the orchestra is going to suggest that thought.  But his reaction comes just that split second before the orchestra picks it up.

BD:    Now let me ask about one specific instance here.  When Hagen is giving Siegfried the draught, there’s a trill going on in the orchestra and all of a sudden the trill changes.  We know that at that point Siegfried’s mind has been clouded.  So is Siegfried’s mind changed first and then the trill changes?

ML:    It depends on the singer.  Let’s face it, all singers are not brilliant intellectual like me.  [Both laugh]  It depends really on what the singer’s idea is at the time.  There has to be a bit of body language.  I would still say that the right way round is for the singer’s expression to suggest the change just before the change is echoed in the orchestra.  This is the greater impact because the audience sees more or less sees what’s happening.  They look at his face and then it’s underlined in the orchestra.  That would be the strong way of doing it.  Some people may disagree, but that’s the way I feel about it.  The rule I teach young kids is that first comes thought, movement, sound.  If a producer wants you to move from this chair to that chair while you sing these lines, the first thing I would ask is the reason for me to move.  Why don’t I just stay in this chair and sing them the lines?  He has to convince me that there is a motivation behind it, there’s some thought that causes me to change position.

BD:    I remember in my student days years ago, a stage director I was working with told me that when anyone was ever coming onto the stage he always asked,

, the first note of the opera.  They are obviously in the middle of a conversation.  If you get two singers who psyche themselves up into more or less having something of a conversation, then the curtain goes up and it’s such a natural thing.  You are fading in in the middle of a significant moment.  But if you get it too magnificent singers who come on, and the bass thinks this is a G natural and it’s a good place in my voice so I’m going to impress the audience with the power and quality, when the orchestra plays quietly it’s nothing. 

BD:    If you were directing this, would you maybe have the singers walk around backstage and time it so that they would just come on at the right moment?

ML:    Yes.  I think I would probably would!  I certainly wouldn’t have them standing still and talking about the latest results!  You really do have to work at this, you know.  And it’s even more so in comedy.  I don’t know who said it, but comedy is a very serious business, believe me!

BD:    Do comedies adapt more to updatings, like the Pasquale you mentioned?

ML:    Well they do.  I hate all the abstract stuff that’s come into Wagner.  Why the hell don’t they do it as Wagner wanted it?

BD:    What would happen if you had a production of the Ring updated like this Pasquale production?

ML:    I wouldn’t like it.  I wouldn’t like it at all.  There have been updated performances of the Ring.  A few years ago at Bayreuth, they did that Ring by Chéreau, and he had people in old army greatcoats and God knows what!

BD:    But what if they updated the whole thing and made it consistent?

ML:    Well, maybe.  That’s a possibility, but I’m a great traditionalist.  I’ve done many performances of Hunding [shown at left].  There is that fantastic moment where the door swings open of its own accord, and the

  We said we were and she told us to get in.  It was Flagstad and she gave us a lift!  She was a lovely, lovely lady.

BD:    Tell me about Karl Rankl.

ML:    He was a vastly under-rated musician; the man who started Covent Garden and ran it between 1946 and 1951.  I’m writing a book at the moment [shown at left] about my thirty-odd years as a principal at Covent Garden.  A lot of biography comes in as a matter of course, but it’s not a biography as such.  I find a lot of biographies very dull when they just chronicle dates and places and other details.  Mine will have my own impressions of the place, and Karl Rankl is a person I talk about most of all.  Not to put too fine a point on it, he was badly treated by Covent Garden at the end of his career.  When Rankl left the Garden in 1951, his next visit was to see Moses and Aaron.

BD:    In 1965 conducted by Solti?

ML:    In 1965, and as far as I know Rankl paid for his own ticket.  I may be wrong about that latter remark, but that was the next time he visited the theater.  He was not asked to come back and conduct as a guest.  I don’t know what went on...

BD:    It sounds like politics backstage.

ML:    Oh, there obviously was.  There must have been.  Rankl’s last performance as conductor of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden was on the night Flagstad had made the announcement that it was to be her last Wagnerian performance on stage, and it was Isolde.  I was out front as I wasn’t in the chorus of that one, and I listened to her singing.  It was magnificent, and the Brangäne was Constance Shatlock.  I remember Sir David Webster, he was Mr. Webster then, going on stage and making this speech saying that this indeed was Madam Flagstad’s last stage performance in Wagner.  There were  groans from the packed house and cries that she mustn’t.  On the other hand, Constance Shatlock was making her fiftieth appearance as Brangäne, and just coming into a great Wagner career, but not one word about Rankl!  He stood there, this diffident little grey-haired man stood there and not one word was said of Rankl.  When I was writing this passage, I typed it out and started to read it to my wife, and I couldn’t finish.  A lump came into my throat and I started to cry in the middle of it.  I felt terrible after all those years.  Of course I wanted to stand up in that house and shout,

BD:    Let me ask you how you feel about opera in translation.

ML:    By and large I’m not for it.  Here, the Opera School of Chicago do what I do in my own National Opera Studio in London.  They teach the young singers the roles in the original language first, and that is important because in translation invariably get changes in notation to accommodate the different language.  When you are a young singer, or if when you’re doing a role for the first time, you’ll learn those changes in notation as a matter of course, and when you come to put it back in the original, you find yourself with a problem.  The same problem does not occur when you coming into your own language because you can say an opera in English and forget a line, and dub another one at the drop of a hat because it’s your language, even if it means altering notation on the spot.  So I firmly believe that whenever possible, opera should be in the original.  Now I’m going to make a proviso here.  When it comes to introducing non-operatic audiences to opera, that is the time when opera can profitably be put into English so that people can hear the story and follow it and get it going.  But for big houses, to always sing in the vernacular is a mistake.  If you want the greatest protagonists you’ve got to do it in the original.  You’re not going to get Domingo learning Carmen in English for four performances.

BD:    But what if you could get him to learn Carmen in English for forty performances?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Sir John Tomlinson, Felicity Palmer, David Atherton, and Norma Burrowes.]  

ML:    Maybe...  I don’t know what he’d charge!  [Both laugh]  I think some operas translate better than others.  There are some operas that are almost untranslatable.  I don’t like hearing the Ring in English. 

BD:    Even in Andrew Porter’s translation?

ML:    The one at the English National Opera?  Do you know what I found when I was listening to it?  I started getting worried, and I said to my wife,

  The voices, as you know, were Rita Hunter, Remedios, Norman Bailey, real Wagnerian voices.  Then I realized I was trying too hard to hear the translation.  I knew the German and I didn’t know the English, and I was trying too hard to get the translation.  You never get every word in opera.  Anybody who tells me they go to an opera and can hear every word, I just do not believe them!  They may have read the libretto and think they heard every word, but give me somebody who does not know the libretto of an opera, and can go to it and take down every word in shorthand, and bring it back to me, there’s a miracle man!  I was worried so much about hearing the English, because that was the whole object of the exercise, that I was missing so much.

BD:    [Gently protesting]  Was that the whole object of the exercise???  I thought it was to put on a good Ring that happened to be in English!

ML:    The idea is that Lord Harewood feels that opera done in London in his house should be in English, and to introduce a wider public so that they could follow the story of the Ring more easily.  Let’s face it, it’s hard enough to follow no matter what language it’s in.  But once I stopped worrying about hearing the words, I started to enjoy the music, and to me it could have been in German because I just listened to the story that Wagner tells.

BD:    But you were schooled in the German, so then you were used to it.

ML:    I was schooled in German.  I was used to it.  I think I did sing Wagner in English very, very early on at Covent Garden.  I’ve got a feeling that very first year that I did something...  it might have been Fafner-Stimme, but it very quickly went into German, and I’ve never sung in any other language.  Just like Rosenkavalier.  I’ve sung one act of Rosenkavalier in English in my whole life.

BD:    But you wouldn’t contract to sing a whole performance in English?

ML:    Oh no, no.  Quite apart from the fact that I am lazy, it’d take too much time!  I think the music loses too much.  It’s conversational, and Erich Kleiber, the old man, said that when you’re learning a part like Ochs or any of these parts where there’s a lot of conversation, before you learn the notes you must learn the rhythm of the words and speak it in rhythm.  He said you get so much into your body and your mind and your bloodstream, that it becomes a natural thing.  Then you add the notation.  Now you take an opera like Rosenkavalier and put it into English, which once again your notation is altered, you suddenly find that a beautiful umlaut sound that comes good on a top B natural is now an open AH, and you wonder what the hell you’re doing with it.  Too much trouble!

BD:    Let me ask you an impossible question.  Where is opera going today?

ML:    I don’t know where opera’s going.  I’m not actively singing too much now.  I do know that opera could become more popular now than it’s ever been in its whole history judging by the interest that is presently being taken by young people in England.  I don’t know what it’s like here in the States, but there are more young people going to opera now than ever.

BD:    This is encouraging?

ML:    I find it very encouraging.  In fact, after seeing a performance of La Bohème one told me that it’s just like a musical!  Now there’s a great thought, it’s just like a musical!  Which came first, La Bohème or South Pacific?  [Both laugh]  People who say they can’t stand opera because people in real life don’t sing to each other, suddenly realize something.  These are the same people who go to see Alfred Hitchcock and never wonder where the orchestra is on the sound track.  They never feel that the orchestra is building up the tension as that guy waits with a razor behind the bedroom door!  If suddenly they stopped the soundtrack, they’d want to know what happened.  They are listening to opera!  They’re listening to music enhance the action, and that’s what opera’s all about.

BD:    What the role of gramophone recordings?

ML:    I think a dangerous role.  I’m very much against the ultra perfect recording.  I hate it because it encourages people to expect more than is humanly possible.  The best Rosenkavalier to my mind is still the old Erich Kleiber one, which he did act by act with all the warts, all the mistakes there.  Never mind, let it go.  He said he wanted a performance.

BD:    So he did it once through each act and that was it?

ML:    Once through the first act, once through the second act, and once with the third, and they did it all in one session, as an opera.  All they did was set up the mikes and then play the opera.  None of this building him up a bit on a B flat, take him down on the D, and give him a cup of coffee before the top C, and let him have a nice rest before the bottom C!   I don’t like it. 

BD:    Another role with a nice long low note is Osmin.

ML:    His bottom D goes on for eight bars, and you’ve been dancing around and whipping people.  I could always get a bottom D.  Somebody once said to me afterwards,

BD:    They probably shoved the mike down the guy’s throat for that one!

ML:    The story was that he just took a tuning fork home, and when he woke up in the morning, he sang [makes a fog-horn of a sound!] ‘Auch’, and they took it to the studio and spliced it in.  Well, Christ, I’ll do the damn thing a third down if you want it that way!  [Huge laughter]  This is the attitude of mind that’s encouraged by recordings.  They hear the perfect, and it’s so perfect it isn’t real.  It’s like artificial flowers.  I like flowers where the petals fall off.  I don’t want to come home every day and see the same exact thing.  Another thing I do object to strongly is where a singer will make a recording of a role that he has not a cat in hell’s chance of singing on stage.  It’s dishonest.

BD:    The Kleiber Rosenkavalier had a cast that knew the work and had done it on stage.

ML:    That’s right.   They were performing it at the Staatsoper and they did the recording.  This is one of the truest, most beautiful recordings of all.

BD:    What about a recording that’s actually made in the theater?

ML:    Sometimes it does work.  Some of your pirate recordings are a damn sight more realistic and exciting than your commercial recordings because you hear all the frogs in the throat, you hear audience reaction, everything.  Really and truly, opera is the nearest thing to a real fight you’ll ever get.  People want blood.  They want  to hear whether the voice will last out.  They want to hear people get tired and still make it.  They want people to look exhausted.

BD:    Are they hoping for the high C to break?

ML:    I don’t think they’re hoping for it to break, but they’ve got that glorious uncertainty in their loins that it may, and then when he doesn’t, ahhh!  But on a record?  You’re never going to hear a high C that breaks.

BD:    If it breaks, they just do it again!

ML:    Just do it fifteen times before they get a good one.

BD:    I wonder what would have happened if there had been a really serious mistake in that Kleiber recording of Rosenkavalier. 

ML:    I think the old man said before they started that short of a disaster they’d go on.  Obviously he’s sensible enough that if something really disastrous had happened, he would have stopped.  [Facetiously]  Knowing the old man, he’d have probably said,

See my Interview with Peter Glossop

See my Interview with Helga Dernesch See my Interview with Anne Howells See my Interview with Elisabeth Söderström See my Interview with Teresa Berganza See my Interview with Margaret Price (who, like Te Kanawa, would later sing the Countess!)

© 1981 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded backstage at the Opera House in Chicago on June 2, 1981.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1985, 1995, and 2000.  This transcription was made in 2014, 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.

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.