Tenor Jonas Kaufmann recounts his fight against his lung infection

A jubilee that did not go as planned. Having to celebrate thirty years of career this year, the German tenor Jonas Kauffmann was forced to increase the number of cancellations, in particular his participation in the Paris concert on July 14 as well as in Othello given at the Aix-en-Provence Festival . The cause is an infection with multi-resistant germs.

The 54-year-old singer gave reassuring news this weekend about his state of health and recovery in the Austrian daily Die Presse, as he returns to the stage at the Vienna Opera with Turandot. “I suffered for a long time without knowing what I really had. I had a bad cough and my lungs were clogged with mucus. If, as a singer, I had not had such excessive breathing capacity, I would have been out of breath with every step,” he confides. And added: “I went from one doctor to another and everyone had a different opinion: reflux, food intolerance, allergy, runny nose syndrome. No treatment worked. Neither rest nor a long stay by the sea.

“I was in full doubt. I asked myself: 'Am I doing something wrong? Is it due to a change in technique?'” Jonas Kaufmann recalls. Until finally, a strain of multi-resistant bacteria was identified that reacted to only two antibiotics. “I then had to take high doses for four weeks and the side effects were terrible. I still have a few today,” he admits, “I noticed an improvement from the third day. But I could only stop taking the medicine once all the bacteria was gone. It was very difficult. If such a setback had happened to me 15 years ago, I don't know if I would have remained as calm.

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And noted: “I’m lucky there aren’t many tenors like me. It was possible for me to take a long break and still find contracts. If I was at the very beginning of my career, this would have been impossible. We would have had to start from scratch.”

Interviewed by Le Figaro in September, Jonas Kaufman was confident: “I have often faced more or less serious problems and I maintain complete confidence in my ability to recover. Things would probably be different if I had had to undergo one or more vocal cord surgeries. It's complicated, psychologically, to know that the immensity of an opera, and of your career for which you have sacrificed so much, rests solely on these two tiny things that serve as your vocal cords. But after thirty years, I still have absolute confidence in my instrument.