Aix-en-Provence Festival: Christian Gerhaher, a Wozzeck from the whisper to the cry

This Wozzeck is one of the survivors of the sinister year 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence to give up playing the planned productions. In addition to the staging by Simon McBurney and the direction of Simon Rattle, the blinding beacon will be Christian Gerhaher, familiar with the title role. For a German baritone, interpreting the poor soldier Wozzeck, in Alban Berg's masterpiece, is as much a challenge as an accomplishment.

In this work, which in 1925 offered a gateway into modernity to the opera genre, reputedly dusty, everything rests on the protagonist, a tragic figure driven to madness and murder by a society that quickly oppresses one who lives and thinks differently. The text is as important as the song, the vocal writing ranging from spoken to bel canto through a spoken-sung intermediate between the two.

This is where Gerhaher draws the benefit of his gigantic experience as a singer of lieder, those precious German miniatures brought to the top by Schubert, and where you only have a few minutes and a piano to give life to a poetic world. With Gerhaher, it is not just a matter of diction or timbre: all the resources of intelligence are used to draw the quintessence from each sentence, from each word.

A chiseled art, extremely worked, but which never lets interpretation, in the romantic sense, take over. Vocal seduction, sound volume, expressive effects, are not his cup of tea: his white voice evolves from whisper to cry by determining the vocal weight according to the word. He must have a secret to hypnotize us as soon as he opens his mouth, without seeming to interpret.

However, nothing seemed to predestine him to it. Born in 1969 in a small medieval town in Bavaria, he tried his hand at the violin and the viola with the father of a classmate. This comrade, Gerold Huber, would also become his accompanying pianist in life and death. He's not really good at it. As a teenager, his friend suggested he join a choir. He loves choral singing, and continues it in Munich, as a hobby, during his studies… of medicine!

It was there that he bought a ticket for a lieder recital by baritone Hermann Prey. He knows nothing of the lied, he is captivated. His childhood friend Gerold Huber having seriously pursued his piano studies, he suggests that he try some lieder, for fun. The duo has teamed up for thirty years from Salzburg to Carnegie Hall and teaches at the Superior Conservatory of Munich.

He is still finishing his medical studies, but, if he has his doctorate in his pocket, singing has taken on too much importance. He listens to all the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the patron, the god of this fragile and exclusive art, and takes fifteen days of lessons with his idol. Another goddess, another obligatory passage: a master class with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The previous student having just left the class in tears as often, the goddess tries to destabilize Gerhaher by interrupting him after four bars, he does not allow himself to be intimidated and sings until the end. She predicts a great career for him.

This has never been interrupted, from Munich to Berlin, from London to New York, a few operatic roles in Wagner, Mozart or Verdi being so many interludes in a journey whose intimacy of the lied and the spirituality of the oratorio are the backbone. He defends excellence with uncompromising standards. Because, as a good German intellectual, he considers that art is not entertainment, but existential necessity.

Wozzeck, Grand Théâtre de Provence on July 7, 10, 13, 18 and 21, at 8 p.m. Christian Gerhaher, Darius Milhaud Conservatory. July 16 at 8 p.m.