James Morris
World Renown Bass-Baritone Performs the Flying Dutchman in Denver
On a sea voyage from Riga, Latvia to Paris via London in July of 1839, the small ship on which Richard Wagner and his wife Minna were traveling was caught in several storms that cause the vessel’s crew to steer toward shelter along the southern coast of Norway. That experience, along with conversations with sailors about the sightings of the ghostly sea captain who is cursed to sail the world until his day of redemption, gave Wagner the idea for the Flying Dutchman (der fliegende Hollander). Wagner’s dramatic work has offered rich-toned and powerfully expressive bass-baritones the opportunity to transfix an audience, transporting them to the stormy seas of redemption through love.
Considered the world’s leading interpreter of the title role in the Flying Dutchman, as well as the role of Wotan in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, James Morris’s repertoire includes all the greatest roles written for bass-baritone from Mozart's Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro to the great Verdi characters such as Philip II in Don Carlos, PrRFida in I vespri siciliani and Jacopo Fiesco in Simon BRFcanegra, Mussorsky's Boris Godunov, the Four Villains in Les contes D'Hoffmann and Mephistopheles in Faust. When the Metropolitan Opera brought Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd into the repertoire, Morris enjoyed another one of the greatest triumphs of his career as John Claggart, a role he has since repeated there on many RFcasions. Morris has also been strongly identified with the role of Scarpia in Tosca and has appeared often as Iago in Otello and Amonasro in Aïda.
Interview with James Morris, October 16, 2007.
RF: Over the years of singing the Flying Dutchman, have you come to sympathize with him?
James Morris: Oh, absolutely. It’s a very interesting myth, the Flying Dutchman. It’s been distorted many times in movies but you do empathize with him. He got into this because of his own pride and the fact that he defied the gods and thought he could sail around the Horn of Africa. He lost his ship and crew simply because of his pride, and for that reason he’s been punish for eternity. But he keeps trying to find love and redemption, which is a big theme of Wagner’s.
RF: The production in Denver will be a concert setting without the staging. How does that change your approach?
JM: You can concentrate on the music and so can the audience. Productions now days, most of them are off-the-wall. People are often confounded, sitting there in the audience wondering what this all means. But in a concert version you can just concentrate on the music and people can put their own images into their heads.
As a performer, too, it’s very nice because you don’t have to fight the staging, which quite often you have to do. I’m basically a traditionalist. I like realism on the stage but now days everybody goes for just the opposite: black is white and white is black.
RF: How many years have you been singing Wagnerian roles?
JM: I started in 1984. The Valkyrie was my first one, and it was shortly thereafter, in the same year that I did my first Dutchman, I think November. I’ve been singing for much longer than that but I’d stayed away from Wagner. First of all, a lot of people had warned me about Wagner, how difficult it was and the stamina and the size of the voice required to get out over a Wagner orchestra.
I’d started to look at Valkyrie a couple times but never made it past the first scene without falling asleep. (laughs) And then Terry McEwen, who was in charge of the San Francisco Opera in those days, said, “Let me give you a hint: Start with the end and work backwards.” I did and it got under my skin and I couldn’t put it down. San Francisco was the first opera to offer me the role. They were doing the complete cycle and they said I could do as many of the operas as I wanted, Rhinegold, Valkyrie, and Siegfried, or all three.
But Wagner, as I was saying, really does get under your skin and once you get into it it’s hard to get out of it, believe me. It’s fun now and then to go back to my roots, back to the Italian and French repertoire. I love Verdi and singing Iago on occasion, and I still enjoy the Hoffmanns and Fausts, Otellos and things like that. But I always come back to Wagner.
RF: Speaking of the stamina it takes, what do you have to do to prepare? I’m picturing a marathon runner.
JM: Yes, well, the operas are very long, except for Rhinegold, which is just a couple hours long. They usually end up being around five and a half hours. Meistersinger is six hours. You’re not on stage the whole time, but a lot of it does require a good sized voice. The Wagner orchestra is a large orchestra, much larger than any of the other composers, so it takes some getting used to. The first few year, for instance in the Valkyrie, I found myself sort of blowing out in the beginning of the third act. You learn to pace yourself.
RF: From what I’ve read and heard about Wagner, he sounds like an intense person…
JM: Putting it kindly. He was not a nice man. But people have to separate the music from the man and the politics. He was a very difficult person and anti-Semitic, the business of the master race. That’s something you try and put aside for the beauty of the music.
RF: Yes, but that aside, I would imagine the person who is the world’s leading interpreter of Wagner would be a pretty intense person himself.
JM: Oh, I have my light moments. (chuckles) I wouldn’t say I’m that intense. Working on my craft, yes, but I wouldn’t say I’m that intense.