Alan Titus Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Baritone Alan Titus

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Alan Titus (born October 28, 1945) studied under Aksel Schiøtz at the Colorado School of Music, and Hans Heinz at The Juilliard School. His official debut was as Marcello in La bohème in Washington, D.C., in 1969. He came to prominence, however, in Leonard Bernstein's theatre piece MASS, creating the role of the Celebrant. MASS was commissioned by former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy for the September 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Titus created the role of Archie Kramer in Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke (after Tennessee Williams) in St. Paul in 1971, and repeated the role in his New York City Opera debut that same year. He found a home at the New York City Opera, where he was a leading baritone for many seasons. He participated in nationally televised performances of Il barbiere di Siviglia (with Beverly Sills, 1976), Il turco in Italia (1978), La Cenerentola (opposite Susanne Marsee and Rockwell Blake, 1980), and Madama Butterfly (conducted by Christopher Keene, 1982). He made his only appearances with the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, as Harlekin in Ariadne auf Naxos, with Montserrat Caballé.

In 1974, the baritone appeared in the world premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Rachel, la cubana, for WNET Opera Theatre, opposite Lee Venora and Marsee, conducted by the composer.

In 1973, Titus made his European debut, in Amsterdam, as Pelléas in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. He has since been heard at Glyndebourne, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, Vienna, Paris, Rome, London (Covent Garden), Berlin, etc.

At the Teatro alla Scala, the baritone appeared in Arabella (1992), Elektra (directed by Luca Ronconi, 1994), La fanciulla del West (1995), Die Frau ohne Schatten (in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production, 1999), and Salome (2002).

He made his Bayreuth Festival debut in 1998, in the title role in Der fliegende Holländer and repeated the role in 1999. At Bayreuth in 2000, he portrayed Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre and The Wanderer in Siegfried; and repeated all three roles in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. He portrayed Wotan at the Teatro Real de Madrid in 2003. He returned to Bayreuth in 2009 to portray Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

In 1994, the singing-actor was awarded the title of Kammersänger, in Munich.

Titus retired in 2010, following a forty-year career.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

In December of 1986, Alan Titus was back with Lyric Opera of Chicago for Count Danilo in The Merry Widow with Maria Ewing, Jerry Hadley, Donald Adams, Susanne Mentzer, Donald Kaasch, and Gualtiero Negrini, with Baldo Podič conducting and Lotfi Mansouri directing. Previously Titus had portrayed Pantaloon in Love for Three Oranges, with Klara Barlow, Frank Little, Italo Tajo, Jacque Trussel, Richard T. Gill, Kathleen Kuhlmann, and William Powers, with Bruno Bartoletti conducting, and Giulio Chazelettes directing; and Lescaut in Manon with Renata Scotto and Alfredo Kraus, with Julius Rudel conducting. Titus would return the following season (1987-88) for Guglielmo in Così fan tutte with Kiri Te Kanawa/Kay Griffel, Anne Howells, Marie McLaughlin, Hadley, and Timothy Nolen, with Sir John Pritchard conducting the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production.

Between performances of The Merry Widow, Titus graciously took time to sit down for a lengthy interview. When I asked his birthdate, he gladly said it was the day Mozart finished Don Giovanni (167 years later!), hence his special interest in this opera.

Bruce Duffie:   The 200th birthday of Don Giovanni is coming up, and we’re going to play your recording and use parts of this interview.

Alan Titus:   Terrific. I was asked to do it in Prague in May, on the stage where it was originally done. But unfortunately, I’m engaged at that particular time with, of all things, Die Fledermaus.

BD:   So, you have to give up the rogue for an operetta?

Titus:   [Laughs] Well, as you know, in this business, you have to take the bitter with the sweet.

BD:   I assume your recording Don Giovanni with Rafael Kubelik is part of the sweet. [Vis-à-vis that recording which is shown at right, see my interviews with Rolando Panerai, Arleen Augér, Edith Mathis, Thomas Moser, and Jan-Hendrik Rootering.]

Titus:   Of course! In May of 1985, I had been resting at home, and was planning on the Thursday of that week to go to Dusseldorf to do a performance of Don Giovanni. But Monday morning I got a call from my Viennese agent, saying Bernd Weikl had canceled at the last minute, and asked if I would please fly over immediately to do the recording. I felt if there was any right time to jump in, this was perfect, because I had had four or five days rest, and I had worked on the role both silently and then with voice. I was just waiting to take off on Thursday, so instead, I took off on Monday! I was tickled pink! It really was like a dream, though it was actually grueling. I took the Concord on Monday, and got into Paris about 10:30, slept in the hotel in the airport, and then jumped on a plane at 7 o’clock. I was in Munich by 9:30, and was in the studio at 10:00. We ran through some stuff and recorded that whole day. Then on Friday I had to fly to Dusseldorf for a rehearsal, and I flew back. We recorded some more, then I flew back to Dusseldorf on Saturday. We did something in the morning and had a performance that evening. Then I flew back at 7 o’clock on Sunday, recorded the end of Act 1, and on Monday we did the Cemetery Scene, and then the Finale with Giovanni’s death on Tuesday. I was finished with the performances, but under all this strain of flying and everything, I was a little tired. So I must say I’m not too satisfied with the serenade, Deh, vieni alla finestra, but it was done at the very end of the recording because we didn’t have the original mandolinist to play. We had fired him in the first week because he couldn’t play too well! But that’s the only part I have any reservations about. I would only listen to little snatches of the CD here or there. I was so nervous, but the intent comes out. I can hear a lot more colors in the voice. It was interesting to work with Rolando Panerai because he has a very distinctive way of producing his voice. So when we get into the Disguise Scene, evidently Luigi Bassi, the very first Giovanni, was a very good imitator in acting and vocalizing. So I tried to get a few of Panerai’s vocal mannerisms, and I thought it came off quite well. Kubelík was absolutely astounding. I’ve rarely worked with a maestro of his quality. They call him Die Mensch, which means a total human being. He was this great Olympian Musical God, and nobody should be nervous. He said, “My dear, we’re going to make music!” Everything was fine, except when I got to the point where the Commendatore takes Giovanni’s hand, in my mind was all my acting training. I was waiting, and I was waiting, and this scream was building in the bottom of my bowels. We started off like balls of fire, and we got to this point and suddenly I let out this scream. Kubelík looked at me and asked, “What is that???” I realized that my Mozart-style failed me at that moment. It was really interesting, because there is a certain point of acting when you’re doing music, or opera like Mozart, that you don’t go beyond. Sometime I’d like to go into this very interesting discussion which my colleagues and I have about opera-acting as opposed to theatrical acting, and what people were trying to do after Callas to youngsters like myself, and everyone who was developing after that time, to try and bring more drama into opera. It’s a very interesting question.

BD:   Let us come back to that after we talk a little bit more about Don Giovanni.

Titus:   The interesting thing about that opera was that Beverly Sills had offered it to me several years earlier at the New York City Opera. I declined to do it because I felt I wasn’t ready. Then the new production in Dusseldorf happened, which meant I went to Germany to spend two months, eight hours a day, working on it. So, by the time I got my cold, which was the opening night, I knew that I could get through the piece, because I had been doing it for two months. I really had rehearsed it, and I felt I was nailed into that piece. The other fortunate thing that happened to me was that before I made my Paris opera debut in The Marriage of Figaro, I met a wonderful coach, whose name is Ubaldo Gardini [photo and biography are shown in the box below]. He is now in Japan helping the Japanese start their opera company.

Ubaldo Gardini (Poggio Renatico, 18 December 1924 – Ferrara, 24 November 2011 ) was an Italian singing teacher and musician who taught at the Royal Opera House in London, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and the Tokyo University of the Arts .

Born into a wealthy family, he inherited his interest in music from his father, Angelo, a self-taught accordionist. He began studying the violin as a child, and furthered his studies at the Frescobaldi Conservatory in Ferrara , where he continued studying viola, piano, composition, counterpoint, and harmony. At 17, he met Pietro Mascagni, who wanted him under his artistic tutelage. During the Second World War he obtained a diploma as a radio announcer and began to work in radio broadcasting, also writing for the magazine "Musica e registrazione".

gardini In 1946 he moved to Florence where he began to occasionally give opera singing lessons, but he maintained his commitment to study, obtaining his diploma from the Conservatory of Ferrara in 1949. Still in Florence, in 1952 he joined the orchestra of the Caffè Paszkowski as a violinist . Here he had the opportunity to meet Victor de Sabata, artistic director of the Teatro alla Scala , Lamberto Gardelli , Renata Tebaldi and Tito Gobbi. However, the meeting that would change his life was the one with the Australian Sylvia Fisher, principal dramatic soprano at Covent Garden in London. Impressed by Fisher, he wanted to go to Rome to see her first performance of Sieglinde in Wagner 's Die Walküre and, the following year, to London in Tristan und Isolde.

From there he decided to remain in the United Kingdom, marrying the soprano in early 1954. In the meantime, he worked as a singing teacher with various theaters, including, in these years, La Scala for L'elisir d'amore . It took him almost a decade to establish himself as an Italian instructor in London, during which he gave private lessons to the numerous singers who requested them.

It was only in 1963 that he established himself as a regular collaborator with Covent Garden as an Italian language coach. He took part in the 1967 Glyndebourne Festival and the following year collaborated with Sir Colin Davis on the recording of Mozart 's Idomeneo, published by Philips. Throughout his career, he has made a series of interventions on around fifty recordings, almost all of which were made for Philips and Decca, and 28 DVD editions of operas. Some academic articles are also known, including a Treatise on the Harmony of Music and an analysis of the different versions of Madama Butterfly. In addition to his vocal coaching, in the same years Gardini was also involved in the staging of some Mozart operas with Italian librettos, including The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte .

In 1981 he divorced Fisher and ended his tenure at Covent Garden. Around that time he had met the Hungarian Eva Kondra, a costume designer at Glyndebourne. Their relationship produced three children: Angelo, Susanna, and Michele. They remained living with her mother in Brighton when he decided to move to New York, where, in addition to working as an opera coach at the Metropolitan Opera, he signed a contract as second conductor and producer that kept him busy until 1984. He was subsequently appointed professor at the Juilliard School.

In September of the same year, he was invited to Tokyo as a visiting professor of Italian Opera at the University of Arts and Music. There, he supervised Idomeneo, and the following year, Don Giovanni . There, he met the woman who would become his second wife, Reiko Sakuma, who preserved his memory after his passing. Although he no longer worked with internationally renowned singers in Tokyo, Gardini contributed to the promotion of Italian Opera, overcoming cultural differences and organizing courses with famous names such as Plácido Domingo and Frederica von Stade, broadening the horizons of his students, many of whom went on to successful careers.

In 2004, at the age of eighty, Gardini resigned from his teaching position in Japan, but upon returning to Italy, he could not refuse the offer of teachers and singers to organize summer courses at his birthplace in Poggio Renatico. Having converted his home into an office, from 2005 onward he held courses until he was able to continue teaching. His last production was in 2007, when he organized and directed The Marriage of Figaro to celebrate the centenary of the University of Tokyo. The performance was given to a sold-out crowd at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, the city's most renowned opera house.

Part of his library, consisting of more than 3000 volumes, including scores and books, often enriched by dense notations in his own hand, was donated to the library of the Vienna Conservatory. The copies annotated by the maestro were entrusted to Tokyo and made available to the students of the University of Music. His piano and another significant part of his collection of books, scores, opera librettos and records were donated to the Opera Academy of Verona.

In May 2014, the Municipality of Poggio Renatico, in the presence of his widow and numerous personalities, awarded honorary citizenship to Ubaldo Gardini "for having particularly distinguished himself in his artistic field at an international level" .

== This biography is slightly edited from the Google translation of the article in the Italian Wikipedia

Ubaldo is as exact in Italian as you can get. He’s very idiosyncratic, but he’s a marvelous teacher, a maestro, and I started working The Marriage of Figaro with him in about 1983. When I called him to do Giovanni, he was in New York, and we spent about three or four hours a day for three weeks. I have something like fifty-eight tapes of these sessions that we did. Since it was his favorite piece, what was fascinating about it was that we not only covered the piece, with its diction and rhythmical precision, what was more important was the concept that he had of the character of Don Giovanni. This was a combination of Greek hero, and an eighteenth-century drama, where the magnetism of the Giovanni character was like this dark Apollo, and all the people that were attracted to him and attracted to his incredible magnetism that he had.

BD: Did all of this agree with your preconceived ideas?
pasquale

Titus:   I had no pre-conceived ideas. I had read all the literature on it, and especially there are some very interesting books put out by Eulenburg. There’s a very interesting treatise on Giovanni, and I read all about the emotional qualities of the keys and everything, but nothing quite came close to Ubaldi’s explanation of the double entendre in it, which I can’t go into on the air! But believe me, it really brought the piece to life, and illuminated the sense of the Italian language. After I worked with him, I realized that the acting in opera is really through the language, and what we call acting, which is gesture, is completely different. We’ve tried to call it attitude, because that has a feeling of a longer duration, whereas if you’re acting naturally on stage, you move a little too quickly and the public doesn’t quite see what’s happening. There isn’t enough time to travel or register, and then go onto the next point.

BD:   Because of the distance?

Titus:   Because of the distance, and also because of the rhythm that usually is set up by the music. Sometimes it’s possible, and I’m not saying this is a hard and fast rule. But sometimes people will act very naturally on stage, as they would in the theater, or in your home. As I say, sometimes it’s possible. But most of the time it clouds the points that you’re trying to make. On the negative side, one can overdo something so that it becomes a point to be taken, and isn’t organic.

* * * * *

BD:   When you’re making a record, can all of this language business come through?

Titus:   This is the point. I had made Don Pasquale with Beverly Sills, Donald Gramm, and Alfredo Kraus... [LP cover is shown at right. The photo shows Kraus (Ernesto), Sills (Norina), Gramm (Pasquale), and Titus (Malatesta) l-r.]

BD:   [Interrupting] Was that your first record?

Titus:   No, I did the Bernstein Mass [shown below-left], and in my school days I had done music of Antoine Busnois, though Andrew Porter calls him Buzz-noise. [Both laugh] He’s a madrigalist of the fifteenth century. It was with Joshua Rifkin and the Nonesuch Consort [shown below-right]. Then I had made Haydn’s La Fedeltà Primiata with Frederica von Stade and Antal Dorati [shown farther down-left on this webpage], and The Merry Widow with Sills and Julius Rudel [shown at the bottom of this webpage]. When we came to this Don Pasquale with Sarah Caldwell, I remember standing in front of the microphone acting my head off and doing all these gestures. I thought I was really giving the performance of my life, but when I went into the studio I didn’t hear any of it. I thought I was missing something. It’s happening in my voice, but it’s not coming across! When I started to go back to the drawing board, I realized that a lot of times, people gesture, and that carries the meaning, but it’s not in their voice. So I went through this whole process of learning how to put the acting in the voice. People like Luciano Pavarotti do incredibly well by adding what they call messa di voce for certain expressive demands in a piece, or having a piano [soft in volume] where it’s supposed to be piano, but not because it’s supposed to be piano but because it has an emotional reason to be piano. So, when we got to Giovanni, that opera’s telling a story. On the whole, musical style has changed a lot in the past fifteen years, and when Luciano sings, you can hear that he’s describing those words. The words have an emotional meaning, and that comes out through the voice.

BD:   Even if you don’t understand the Italian, it comes across?

Titus:   Yes. There is some visceral thing that’s happening to you, and that’s what I felt Ubaldo gave me in these three weeks of intensive preparation for the Giovanni. When I went in to my first rehearsal, the director had a very odd conception, and my first question to him was to ask if he believed in God. He dropped his cigarette and nearly fell off his chair. The production was all done with mirrors. He had us all playing with our backs to the audience, because our faces were supposed to be reflected. I don’t think there is any way you can get a performer to turn his back on the audience, so we rehearsed in three-quarter. Finally, when we saw the mirrors coming in, they were all curved because they hadn’t made them quite flat. At that point we just abandoned that whole idea altogether, and played it facing out as normal.

BD:   Curved mirrors would make everyone look fat.

Titus:   Yes, exactly, and the poor director called it a catastrophe when he saw it. We were very pleased, because we didn’t want to play to the mirrors anyway. I had asked him if Don Giovanni didn’t go to hell at the end, where does he go, and he said he goes back into the mirrors. [Both laugh] I consider Don Giovanni as being an extremely religious piece, and that was the kind of thing I was confronted with.

BD:   Is it a morality play?

Titus:   Yes, but people misconceive the character of Giovanni. It’s been said that some women love men that are mean, that treat them badly and so forth. There’s something attractive to them about that. The line that I found in his character was this extreme cruelty, and that, to me, is the center of the role. It’s covered with a great deal of savoir-faire and charm, and that’s a camouflage. Look at the way he treats Elvira, or what he’s done to Donna Anna, and what he does to Zerlina and Masetto. He has no compassion for anybody. He’s a totally self-centered cruel person. When he says to Donna Anna and Ottavio about Elvira that she’s pazza [mad], so I don’t listen to a word she’s saying, it is frightening. Then he takes out the sword with which he has killed Donna Anna’s father, and he asks, “Who has made you cry? With my blood, with my honor, and with my sword I will defend your honor.” This is unbelievable bald-faced hypocrisy, and shows the quality of Giovanni. The conflict that I find so interesting is that he presents everything as truth, but they’re all lies, and there’s all this corruption underneath the character.
titus

BD:   Does he believe his own lies?

Titus:   He believes them, but he does it because of his social standing, and it shows the curious turning points of the piece. There are two schools of thought in this opera. This is his last day, and it’s his denouement [grand finale], but he doesn’t make it with anybody. Ubaldo Gardini said that’s not true. The rage of Donna Anna is because she has experienced a sensuality she will never experience again. She doesn’t recognize him by his touch. When he kisses her hand, and he looks at her, suddenly she realizes that he was the one who was in her room that night. She describes this act of love-rape when she tells Ottavio this fantastic description of the act of love in the beginning of the recitative. To me, that made Giovanni in control, which he is throughout the piece. Even when he gives his hand to the Commendatore, he is in control. That’s why he is condemned, because he spits in the face of God. He says that he is the Supreme Being, and has pride like Satan. It’s fascinating.

BD:   He is not Satan, is he???

Titus:   No, he is not Satan, but he lives the principle (as you read in Dante) that in the Catholic Church, in Christianity, man chooses Hell. This idea of free will plays a very important part, and so Giovanni chooses the inferno Hell. He is not condemned to the inferno, he chooses it, and that was the most revolutionary thing about Don Giovanni in its time, because it did present this being who said, “No” to God and to eternal glory. He chose eternal damnation.

BD:   Do you expect the audience to react to all of this? Do you want them to applaud you for this performance, or do you want them to hiss you for being that character? [I have been at performances where the despicable character has been so well-played that the audience hisses and boos at him during the curtain-calls.]

Titus:   That’s what’s interesting. It’s color and light. You can’t paint a white line on a canvas without having a black line, or a darker line behind it to bring it out. So, you’re playing this repulsive person, but it has to be done with the greatest charm and sexuality, so that people see only this one thing. Under the greatest con man, how often has this personality been used in which he can absolutely sway and persuade the world? As in Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the devils speaks in this fantastically persuasive way, and all his arguments seem perfectly rational and real.

BD:   Is Giovanni a sexual con-man?

Titus:   Sex is power, and sex has power. Another one of my friends offered a very interesting sideline about the quandary, noting that here was a man whose conquests were other human beings, rather than territory. But when you come to play the role, all these things go into your intellectual foundation, and the horror of Giovanni. Ubaldo noted that when the spirits lacerate Giovanni’s skin, and they’re tearing him apart, this descent into Hell is his greatest orgasm. His death is his sexual death, and there’s nothing after that. I was just watching an Ingmar Bergman film called The Devil’s Eye, which is based upon a little Irish proverb, that a female’s chastity is a stye in the Devil’s eye. Of course, the scene opens with the Devil having a stye in his eye, and he sends Giovanni to seduce this young virgin a week before her marriage. Giovanni falls in love with her, and can’t seduce her. When he returns to Hell, the Devil sends him back to his routine, which is that a woman rushes into his room and he’s about to seduce her, and right at the end, Leporello walks in and says, “Okay, that’s all!”

BD:   It’s extreme frustration for Giovanni?

Titus:   Yes, always. It’s a little bit like Tantalus trying to reach the food. There is only this constant repetitive pattern of his particular sin.

BD:   All of this has to be superimposed upon the music of Mozart?

Titus:   Oh, absolutely! That’s why I had an interesting time with this director. When I walked in and explained to him my concept of the part, he took three days off to try and find out how we were going to make it happen. I think that’s one of the reasons why a lot of people are scared to play Giovanni. I’ve heard that there are a lot of baritones that are very wary of playing this role, because they don’t understand this basic foundation. Actually, I find it a more spiritual foundation than one which is overtly sexual.

BD:   Somewhat like Jerome Hines, who is a very spiritual man, getting a thrill out of playing the Devil.

Titus:   Exactly! I just did Faust, and Robert Lloyd a wonderful English bass, and we had marvelous discussions. He would say that Méfistofélès is the greatest king-role there is, because he is the Prince of Darkness. He liked being able to play the greatest royalty, and to make the role come out from the Seven Deadly Sins. It is the pride of Satan, just making the water in the fountain turn into wine. There is the interesting double-entendre with Christianity, when he says to Faust that he is his slave. This is a put-down of anyone who is a Christian, that they’re a slave to God, and that’s their relationship with the Almighty. One of the things that bothers me a lot in opera is that many directors have over-psychoanalyzed opera, and have lost its spiritual content. If you go to Europe, they still have Pentecost as a free day in Germany and in France. Christian holidays are observed in Europe. You can’t tell me that in the nineteenth century, Judeo-Christian philosophy and religion were not part of the make-up of all these people. You see it in Verdi. You see the morality of Christianity in all these Italian operas and German operas, and this is one of the real big problems now that I’ve seen in a lot of directors, because we are such an agnostic society on the surface. This spiritual essence of a lot of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piece are completely ignored, and it’s to the detriment of the piece, and to the detriment of the audience being able to understand it all on a certain level.

BD:   Are these directors getting too much power, and going in the wrong direction?

Titus:   I don’t know if it’s too much power, because once they set the piece on stage, the conductor takes over. The conductor basically is the nucleus of any production. It’s like a cell dividing. You have two cells, and suddenly it becomes four. The director turns into the people on stage, and he leaves. He spends three weeks working and he’s gone! Then the opera starts to take on its own shape, as you perform it with the same people over and over again. I’m a firm believer that it’s art-as-process, not as art-as-goal, which speaks of a kind of rigidity that is antithetical to art. In a drawing, you realize that one more brushstroke would ruin the piece by Van Gogh, and he stopped. But the series of brushstrokes was a concentric circle that was ever widening, and it’s even more so with music. You become aware of more and more things, and it never stops.

BD:   Do you feel that a painting has a static end and has to stop, but music is a living art which has to keep going?

Titus:   I think so. One of my French colleagues always said to me that the beauty of music is that it’s always doomed to fail. You’re striving every time to reach this perfection, and you never can get there.

BD:   Has there ever been a performance where you have done everything right?
titus

Titus:   [Laughs] There’s always something that happens. The minute that special feeling creeps into your mind, you trip or something! [Both laugh] I remember once that happened to me. I was doing Giovanni, and I got to the Serenade, and I realized I hadn’t taken my gloves off. So I had to play the mandolin with my gloves on! I thought Giovanni can do anything, but that was a little improvisation.

BD:   Let me ask the Capriccio question. In opera for you, which is more important, the music or the drama?

Titus:   I think there are three answers to that. Sometimes the words are more important, sometimes the music is more important, but most of the time they are important together. The music sets up the rhythm of the words, and the words give meaning to the music. If we’re talking about program music, what did Beethoven mean when he wrote the Eroica, or the Fifth Symphony? Was that fate knocking at the door? Everybody is always looking for concrete verbal intellectualization of this musical language, which basically hits our intuitive mind. That’s what’s so beautiful about opera. Most of the time you cannot concretize the music into an emotion.

BD:   Let me ask another balance question then. Where is the balance between art and entertainment in serious music?

Titus:   Before we started this conversation, Jim McMahon [quarterback for the Chicago Bears] was on the TV. I was saying that football is entertainment, and a lot of my colleagues would say opera is just entertainment! I think it’s more than entertainment. It’s like a time-tunnel in which we can share our human sameness with the past, just like you can read Herodotus and weep at Medea. There is something that keeps us linked with the past.

BD:   Should the opera companies try to entice the football audience to come to the opera?

Titus:   I’m not the person to ask, though it is a very interesting idea. There are two or three views to everything. The opera company has to sell tickets. They have to work on the business end, and that’s not my end. Mine is the artistic end, and I sometimes feel that the business mentality impinges a little too much on the artistic mentality, and it is felt that everything has to be a success. I would assume I wouldn’t make the same generalization about institutions, that occasional failures hurt, but as horrible as failures are, you learn a lot and grow from those failures, and I don’t see why an institution should be exempt from that kind of similarity. Yes, it’s bad sometimes for the proceeds, but I’m sure that the people learn what not to do the next time, and how to present a piece so it’s attractive. I like football, too, and Americans are exposed to so much. Why not watch a football game, and also get a great deal of pleasure by seeing an opera, and being sensitive on that level?

BD:   One way to open the door to opera might be TV. Do you think opera works well on television?

Titus:   It’s in its infancy. [Remember, this interview was held at the end of 1986.] It works well on television up to a certain point. There’s a market for it and people are putting it out like or just shoving it out there. It is like the early records, where they have to make the next one more interesting. What they do is set up their camera angles, and get a set designer to make a certain set. Maybe they’ll extrapolate it and do it in a studio, or part of it will be live. They’ll use certain cinematic techniques. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle has done that already with interior soliloquies. I would assume a character could be sitting there with his mouth closed, thinking these thoughts with a certain expression on his face, but you would hear his lines on a pre-recorded track. These things will happen eventually on video opera. It really hits the nail on the head as to what the composer was trying to do at that point. The only thing that bothers me about TV opera is that it’s not live theater, and it’s not live opera. There’s a big discussion going on in the opera community where everybody is trying to define for themselves what opera is.

BD:   [Pouncing on the obvious follow-up question] Well, for Alan Titus in the fall of 1986, what is opera?

Titus:   Right now for me, it’s a transition. This is the last of my performances of The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus here in Chicago. I’m retiring these roles from my repertoire.

BD:   Consciously?

Titus:   Yes, absolutely. With my successes that I’ve had in San Francisco doing Falstaff and Don Carlos¸ I’m moving into the Verdi baritone Fach [vocal category], and intend to pursue that along with Eugene Onegin and Tannhäuser, and all those things. In the next ten years, I hope to batten down the Verdi baritone repertoire.

BD:   Will there be any more Wagner?

Titus:   Farther down the road, Amfortas might be something that would suit me, but right now I’d like to do Wolfram [Tannhäuser]. I think that would be right for me. I’d like to do it before I get to be fifty! [As noted in the biography at the top of this webpage, Titus would sing the Dutchman, Hans Sachs, and the three Wotans at Bayreuth from 1998-2009.] I plan to do Rigoletto and Falstaff in my fifties.

* * * * *

BD:   What about opera in English? Do you like doing opera in translation?

Titus:   I have very big ambivalence to surtitles. As a performer I don’t like them, but as audience I like them. I especially don’t like them in comedy because I really think that they get in the way of the line that the performer on stage is trying to achieve. So, I say alright, let’s do opera in English when it’s The Marriage of Figaro. Let’s do a little more work and learn it in English so that we can communicate directly with the audience. Then it’s a straight line between the performers and the audience.

BD:   Do you then work harder at your diction when you know that the audience is going to be responding to every word?

Titus:   There are people in the audience who understand German, French, and Italian, and if you speak the language, it’s as if you were speaking and you know what you’re saying. You have the resonances of the words that are in your body while you’re speaking them. When I was doing Don Carlos in San Francisco, I could feel the audience responding to the surtitles, and they kept up with us. You really can’t understand certain words, because in a tenor or a soprano’s range they sometimes become indistinguishable because of the vocal demands.

BD:   You’re a baritone, so are your words going to come across much better? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Lucia Valentini (Terrani), Ileana Cotrubas, and Kari Lövaas.]

Titus:   [Hesitates[ Well, no. Diction is very important, and it also helps your energy level. If you feel that your diction is at a certain level, there’s a certain energy which the piece requires to project it to your public. So diction is not only just pronouncing your words clearly, it’s also part and parcel of your performance.

BD:   Are you glad you’re a baritone?

Titus:   Oh, yes.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge] No latent desires to be a tenor?

Titus:   Oh, no. Gosh, they can have it. There’s tons of material for baritones. They say tenors always have all the wonderful melodies, but are you kidding??? There are some baritone melodies that are fantastic. Look at those lines in Verdi. It’s unbelievable, and even Donizetti and Bellini are not so bad. I’ve seen tension in most of my tenor colleagues just to be a tenor, and I can’t live that way. When I was doing the role of Pelléas, it used to make me crazy because you can’t relax. There has to be this certain amount of tension, so your vocal cords approximate a certain way if you’re singing a role that is a little bit beyond your power. For a baritone to sing Pelléas is very, very difficult because you really have to sing like a tenor.

BD:   Have you retired that role also?

Titus:   Oh, you bet! The last time I did it was with Maria Ewing in Ottawa, and when I got to the fourth act, I thought it was stupid to have a baritone sing this part. You can sing the first three acts, but when you have to get into this light head voice in the fourth act, you’re already tired, and your voice is not as flexible... or at least it wasn’t for me. I know Richard Stilwell sang it with great success, but when I got to that point, I was always doing something that didn’t seem natural to me. I was trying to do something in falsetto, and then bring it down into my own voice, which didn’t work. People should hire a tenor to do that role. People say you should never do roles that are too heavy, or you will ruin your voice. Now that I’m forty, I’m ready to do this other stuff, so I’m attacking it with a vengeance.

BD:   You’ve been pacing your career very deliberately?

Titus:   No, it’s sort of happened actually by fate. My wife had Hodgkin’s, and in between her recurrences we had two children. The emotional impact of this kind of illness prevented me from doing anything other than dealing with the immediacy of everyday life. The fact was that my wife was practically terminally ill at one point. People talk about Victoria de los Angeles when her mother died, and the same with Renata Tebaldi. You can’t have a lot of freedom when you’re confronted with this kind of personal stress. I also went through my own vocal crisis in my early thirties, and finally worked that out. So, now I feel like I’ve made all my mistakes, and that part of my life is behind me.

BD:   Your wife is better, I hope?

Titus:   Yes, she’s in remission now for two years, knock on wood, but it took a lot to just maintain the career that I had. People don’t know your personal problems when you’re out in the market place. They expect you to take care of your life.

* * * * *

BD:   When you’re on stage, do you ever get too involved in the part that you’re playing?

Titus:   One of the great things that I’ve discovered in my performing life is a discipline called the Alexander Technique, which, succinctly put, means ‘balanced tension’. It comes from a discipline which is basically thought. It’s nothing that you do. It’s a concept that you have of your body, and the way it works changes the way your body works. It’s designed to increase maximum efficiency in your body, to let the muscles that are supposed to do the work, do the work. So, in a sense, you get out of your own way. It’s not very well known, but a lot of people in the performing arts know about it, and a great many conductors and artists practice this particular discipline. This was something that helped me get out of a lot of my vocal problems, and has allowed me to move on to the heavier repertoire with not as much effort. It’s interesting to see the great singers who have discovered these secrets that Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955) discovered. He was an actor who used to lose his voice, and he discovered why that was happening. It has helped me realize my dreams in more ways than one.

BD:   Do you do a lot of vocalizing before a performance?

Titus:   Not really, no. I usually can tell how my voice is when I get up in the morning, and I may sing a few scales. The kind of vocalizing in the theater is interesting. Everybody walks into the theater, and it’s like you’re a bunch of coyotes! [Laughs] Everybody lets everybody else know they’re there by doing little bits of their parts, or singing a high C in the dressing room. Your colleagues listen to you and know you’re in good voice! We all let each other know behind closed doors how we’re feeling. It’s a fascinating and conscious thing that I’ve noticed in a lot of theaters.

BD:   You feed off of the others’ vocalization rather than your own? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with Sharon Sweet, Marilyn Horne, and Piero De Palma.]

Titus:   Oh, absolutely! It’s not only vocalization, but also temperament. We feed off each other tremendously, and if there’s tension in a production, if people don’t get along and the chemistry is not right, there’s a good chance that a production will go down the tubes, or will not be as good as it can be. There are a lot of people who think we just know our parts and go on and do them, but there’s a lot more that must take place.

BD:   It’s much better to be an ensemble?

Titus:   Yes, but it’s the same in business, and it’s the same in any human relationship. We’re all dealing with people who are away from their families. We’re modern-day gypsies. We’re on the road all the time, and we have a sense of community. There’s this huge international community of singers, and you run into them in Chicago, and San Francisco, and New York, and Paris. We all know each other, and we all see how we’re doing. We all watch how our careers are growing, and how each other sings. I did La Bohème with Luciano Pavarotti at the Paris Opera in May, and it was fantastic! During the whole third act, Luciano was two feet away from me singing into my resonators in my face. It was a great vocal lesson. [In my interview with Jon Vickers, he praised Giulietta Simionato, saying he took vocal lessons from her as she sang with him.] Here I was performing, and I was getting all this Pavarotti sound in my head. It was great. It’s better than sticking your head in a speaker! [Both laugh]

BD:   Are the records too artificial?

Titus:   [Thinks a moment] Too artificial? It’s interesting... Martin Bernheimer [Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic] was on TV last Sunday night, talking about how he would rather be moved by a flawed performance than be not moved by a completely perfect performance. Basically, that’s the way Rafael Kubelík felt. The Don Giovanni has some flaws in it, but the overall thrust is there. It’s a studio performance which carries a live-performance feeling, which is a very rare thing nowadays, especially when you have overdubbing. The orchestra will lay down the track, and then one of the great stars will come in, put his headphones on, and sing over it. It’s like modern day music minus one! When I learned about that, I realized to what extent recordings had and have since disintegrated, because I don’t feel that’s right.

BD:   Are you going to keep Mozart in your repertoire?

Titus:   Oh absolutely, yes.

BD:   Is there a special secret to singing Mozart?

Titus:   [Thinks a moment] I don’t think so.

BD:   Let me ask it this way. How is Mozart different from singing Verdi?

Titus:   It isn’t! There are just certain stylistic things, like portamentos. It all has to do with line, and the big problem that can occur is if you sing forte [loud] too much. It’s very hard to get your voice to balance with the light messa di voce sound, and you need that quality in Mozart.

See my interviews with Helen Donath, Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Siegmund Nimsgern

BD:   Do you sing differently in different houses?

Titus:   Yes, different houses make different demands on you. There’s definitely the physical problem of moving air with your voice. It’s strange to sing The Merry Widow in a house [such as Lyric Opera] with 3,600 seats because you feel like you have to sing it like Verdi, which doesn’t create the kind of atmosphere and attitude that the piece needs. If it’s a smaller house [such as those with around 1,000 seats], your own natural force of your voice, no matter how loud or how soft, will carry. So, a lot of these pieces are not right for the big opera houses in America, but people want to see them, so they’ll do them.

BD:   Is it wrong for the public to put an artificial dividing line between opera and operetta?

Titus:   That seems to be built in, and I’ve been fighting it all my life. That’s why I’m taking them out of my repertoire, because even the papers don’t send the music critics to them. They send the entertainment critics. One of the newspaper critics here said that I was sedate in my pursuit of the Widow. [Laughs] I wasn’t even pursuing the Widow, so he didn’t even know the story! We can find that all the time, but it leans more towards musical comedy because there’s dialogue, and because the subject matter perhaps is a little more frivolous... although The Barber of Seville could be considered frivolous! But the beautiful thing about The Merry Widow is that it’s really romantic. It’s that particular period of style, and the costumes in this production make the women look great. I don’t know whether we’ve gone forward or backward in our styles. I still think women look great in the fashions of today, but that whole particular period was just wonderful. There are certain portions in The Merry Widow which are so romantic, and that’s why that piece comes back again and again. The public loves it’s precious feeling, that feeling of budding love and romantic love, and flirtation and seduction.
titus

* * * * *

BD:   Do you sing any contemporary music?

Titus:   I’m going to do Shostakovich’s The Nose in Santa Fe this summer, which is an interesting piece. I play Kovalyov. He likes to be called Major, but he’s not a Major. He likes to be called that because it enhances his standing. He’s really a Collegiate Assessor. What I’m suggesting is his pretentiousness, trying to make himself more than he is. It’s a fabulous piece, and I hope that we can achieve some of the things that are intended. One indescribable image in Nikolai Gogol’s novel is that he has a servant, and when Kovalyov comes home one day, the servant is lying in the hallway spitting at the ceiling. [Both laugh] It’s amazing how the human animal can hit the same mark twice. It gives you a fantastic idea of the milieux in which this piece takes place. [On the subject of newer works, Titus had previously recorded The Nude Paper Sermon, an electronic work by Eric Salzman with the same Nonesuch Consort as shown in the Busnois above, again led by Rifkin. A later review of the Salzman disc said, “The Nude Paper Sermon” blurs the lines of time and genre by mixing the sounds of a Renaissance consort and The New York Motet Singers, with a modern inclusion of electronic sounds and an actor/narrator. The collage of sounds personifies the second half of the 20th Century as an intricate and often overwhelming experience of overstimulation and complication.” Titus would later record the opera Yolimba by Killmayer. Both of these recordings are shown at the bottom of this webpage.]

BD:   What about contemporary American operas?

Titus:   The last thing I did was Dominick Argento’s Miss Haversham’s Fire. He is an extraordinary composer. I just missed doing Casanova’s Homecoming. He wrote the piece for me, but we had negotiation problems with the Minnesota Cultural Center, and I didn’t do it.

BD:   It would be interesting to do Don Giovanni and Casanova’s Homecoming in the same season.

Titus:   It would, exactly. Ubaldo Gardini said a lot of people misinterpret Casanova and Don Giovanni. They try and do Don Giovanni as Casanova, and that’s a mistake.

BD:   Are they two sides of the same coin, or two different coins? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Eva Marton, and Francisco Araiza.]

Titus:   They’re two completely different coins. If you stay with this dark Apollo, and play him as a Greek negative hero, you’re closer to the truth than if you take it as a pure eighteenth century play with this character who is really human. Don Giovanni is more than human.

BD:   Will you get to do Casanova’s Homecoming?

Titus:   I have certain ideas as to how I’m trying to get it produced. You can wish all you want, but you have to have ideas, and you have to talk to people, and say how they can be implemented. You just have to find the right place to do it... and who does modern operas?

BD:   Why don’t they do more modern operas?

Titus:   Because they don’t sell!

BD:   Why don’t they sell?

Titus:   I don’t think we have an inquisitive public. There are opera houses in every city in Germany, and the people like to go out! They like to go to opera, and they like to go to theater and to the ballet. We’re just content having our home-entertainment centers, and watching TV, or listening to our stereos. It’s hard to get us out after we’ve been at work all day. It’s also a problem with America because we don’t have that tradition. We have such a wide historical timespan of different styles of opera, that people become accustomed to want Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Wagner, and they take their preconceptions as how to listen to this music. For example, Janáček is a completely different aesthetic, and this is why education is so important. It’s a play done to music. There’s not going to be any arias, because that’s not the way he wanted his emotional impact to be conveyed. I was talking to a friend of mine who revealed to me, after we had been friends for many years, and whose wife’s father was my first voice teacher, that he thought Mozart was boring! [Laughs] His wife advised him not to make that generally known! That’s not something you broadcast to everybody, but as I talked to him about it, I realized that he was listening to Mozart with Wagnerian and Straussian ears, which he loved. This is the big problem with the public today. My advice is to come and see what’s new!

BD:   Are there any inheritors of the Verdi and Wagner tradition writing today?

Titus:   No, not really, because the emotions that people want to describe now are completely different. There was a musical vocabulary which developed to express certain emotions, and it really was on the mark with Verdi and Wagner. The librettos were set up to express these emotions, and now, with composers like Philip Glass, there’s a whole different aesthetic coming into opera.

BD:   Would you ever sing a Philip Glass opera if they offered it to you?

Titus:   It all depends. [Thinks a moment] A lot of Penderecki packs a wallop.

BD:   How do you decide which roles you will accept and which roles you will decline?

Titus:   As I told you earlier, I have always wanted to sing Verdi, and there is some challenging repertoire that comes to you peripherally, like The Nose. When I looked at it, I realized it was something very good to do in a summertime festival situation. But as far as standard repertoire, we, as workers, have to make our living. You have to do standard repertoire pieces, so you can’t devote all your time doing modern opera. If you do, then you become lost in the image of people who do standard opera, because they think only people who don’t have any voices do new things, and that’s the only place they can get a job. So it’s dangerous.
titus

BD:   Should the modern composers maybe take a few voice lessons and learn more about vocal technique?

Titus:   That might be recommended, although most of the people that I’ve worked with, from Dallapiccola to Argento, are constantly asking people who do know the voice, how they can modify what they write. Dominick has a marvelous understanding. His wife is a singer, so he understands the human voice very, very well. There are some people who treat it very instrumentally, and can do brutal things with it. But a lot of composers just hear the sounds. Look at the relationship with Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. Here you had this extraordinary woman who had this tremendous ability to do these things, and he just wrote his music for her. There are not very many people around who can do that anymore.

BD:   What advice do you have for the young singer coming along? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with Felicity Palmer, and Giuseppe Sinopoli. Titus also sings on a recording of the Beethoven 9th led by Michael Gielen.]

Titus:   Perform as much as possible! Whether it’s opera, operetta, or musical comedy, just work. Get on stage, and work, and sing, and study. It’s the old Stanislavsky advice. Everyone talks about the Stanislavsky method, but his aesthetic is more important than his directions for acting, which is absorb your environment. Educate yourself, look at paintings, read novels, listen to other music. Don’t just have tunnel-vision and do what you do. Being an artist is a very privileged position. You mirror society, you mirror man, and in order for your performances to mean something to the people that you’re performing for, you have to give them something that they can go away with. Don’t just think that because you sing opera, therefore you’re head over heels above the common man. It’s the common man that feeds opera, because if you’re playing La Bohème, you’re playing the common man. Look at paintings to get the idea of what lighting is, Learn how to change your face, and what character projects what. Experience how you can change your nose, your make-up, and your physical attitude. Find out what’s the best way to sing. This involves not only the sound that you’re producing, but all these other things. Just be aware as much as possible about everything.

BD:   When you’re singing, are you conscious of the audience?

Titus:   Oh absolutely, sure!

BD:   Are the audiences different from city to city and country to country all over the world?

Titus:   Yes. The problem is in an international context. When you’re in America, certain subtle body gestures can convey a meaning. As I was talking earlier about the Don Pasquale recording, you can get your point across a lot easier to your own people than you can if you’re singing, for example, in Germany, where they move a little differently for a certain effect, or to mean something on a word. But that’s the beautiful thing about being an international opera singer. You visit other countries and absorb other cultures, and it makes you so much more sensitive to mankind, and what you’re trying to do. It’s a great responsibility, but it’s also a great privilege. I will never forget the day I spent at the Palais Garnier in Paris, singing Mozart all morning in the opera house, and then walking out onto the Avenue de l’Opéra, and seeing all these people driving cars and honking at each other, and bakers hitting each other over their heads with their baguettes. I thought what a privilege it is to spend my life doing this great music in these great buildings, and meeting these incredible people, and traveling as much as I do. It’s a great honor to be an opera singer.

BD:   I wish you lots of luck, and hope that you continue for many more years.

Titus:   Thank you. I hope to so, too.

Notice that the recording on the left is the lesser-known version by Leoncavallo (composer of Pagliacci).
See my interviews with Richard Leech, Nancy Gustafson, and Roberto Scandiuzzi.

See my interviews with Gösta Winbergh, and Kurt Moll

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on December 16, 1986. Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following year, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2000. This transcription was made in 2025, 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 continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.