■■ヒルデガルト・ベーレンス先生、心よりお悼み申し上げます■■
09．8.20 中村洋子
★ヒルデガルト・ベーレンス HILDEGARD BEHRENS先生が、
日本で、急逝されてしまいました。
まだ、72歳でした。
本当に悲しく、茫然としています。
涙が止まりません。
★ベーレンス先生は、草津音楽祭出演のため、
16日の日曜日午後、日本に到着されました。
私は、同様に来日されたベッチャー先生と、
宿泊先の国際文化会館でお会いし、食事をご一緒しました。
ベーレンス先生は、“日本の地震が怖い”ことと、
“心臓の不調”を訴えられていることを、仄聞していました。
★その後、病院に行かれたようですが、ご体調を案じていました。
そして、18日夕に動脈瘤破裂で、お亡くなりになったという報道。
★私は東京新聞を購読していますが、19日夕刊、20日朝刊にも、
訃報記事は、残念ながら出ていませんでした。
ドビュッシーが亡くなったときのことを、思い出しました。
コンセルバトワール院長を務め、国葬となったフォーレとは、
対照的に、ドビュッシーの訃報は、極めて小さな報道しか、
なされなかった、そうです。
本当の芸術家を、同時代が理解することは、
なかなか難しいものがあり、ベーレンス先生の残された芸術は、
これから、私たちが、学んでいくべきものでしょう。
★2年前の夏、ベーレンス先生が演奏された、
シェーンベルク作曲「ピエロリュネール」を、聴きました。
この曲は、最高度の演奏「技巧」と「知性」が、要求される曲です。
「現代音楽」の専門家は、この曲のもつ複雑な音程やリズムを、
正確に、ソルフェージュのように、演奏することは、可能です。
しかし、シェーンベルクの豊穣な世界を表すには、甚だ不十分です。
この曲のもつ、もう一つの面、つまり、
本来の「クラシック音楽」の世界を、表現するには、
シューベルト、ブラームス、シューマンの歌曲を、
演奏できる芸術家でないと、不可能で、
シェーンベルクの豊かさには、近づけません。
★ベーレンス先生は、それができる極わずかな芸術家の一人でした。
その最高の演奏を直に、聴くことができ、私は、本当に幸せでした。
その後、ベーレンス先生に、そのことをお話しましたとき、
とても、喜ばれました。
私が持参しました「ピエロリュネール」の
スコア冒頭の、真っ白なページ一杯に、
「あなたの作品が世界で、聴かれることを、期待しています」
という内容のサインを、頂きました。
★昨年も、先生にお会いし、私の「ピアノトリオ」が、
ヴァイオリンのサシュコ・ガブリロフ先生、
チェロのヴォルフガング・ベッチャー先生、
ピアノのフェレンツ・ボーグナー先生によって、演奏された際にも、
楽屋にまで、わざわざ、祝福しに来て頂きました。
私を、暖かく抱擁され、「とても、感動しました。
あなたの曲が終わったあと、一瞬、沈黙があり、
それから拍手がありました。皆さん、心から感動していたのです」と、
おっしゃっていました。
★そのとき、バッハの「無伴奏チェロ組曲」の楽譜を、
持っていましたので、そこにサインをお願いしましたら、
「バッハの楽譜にサインするのは、恥ずかしいわ」と言いながらも、
にこやかに、サインをしてくださいました。
★一緒にお食事もしましたが、暖かく、知性に満ち、
思慮深く、好奇心も一杯、ユーモアにも溢れていた方でした。
澄んだ、小さな、細い話声は、一度聴いたら、
忘れることのできない声です。
その声が、いまでも聴こえるようです。
「あなたの夫は、ピアニストのマルカンドレ・アムランにそっくりね」と、
ウインクされていました。
（ベーレンス先生と私 Aug.08.）
■Hildegard Behrens, Soprano Acclaimed for Wagner, Is Dead at 72
August 19, 2009
The German soprano Hildegard Behrens, a mesmerizing interpreter of touchstone dramatic soprano roles like Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Strauss’s Salome during the 1980s and early ’90s, died on Tuesday in Tokyo. She was 72 and lived in Vienna.
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Her death was announced by Jonathan Friend, the artistic administrator of the Metropolitan Opera, in an e-mail message sent to associates and released to the media by Jack Mastroianni, director of the vocal division at IMG Artists and her former manager.
Ms. Behrens fell ill while traveling to a festival in Kusatsu, a Japanese resort town, to present master classes and a recital, and was taken to a hospital in Tokyo on Sunday night. She died there apparently of an aneurysm, Mr. Friend wrote.
Ms. Behrens’s ascent into the demanding Wagnerian soprano repertory was uncommonly fast after starting her career late. She did not begin vocal studies, at the Freiburg Academy of Music, until she was 26, the same year she graduated from the University of Freiburg in Germany as a junior barrister, having initially chosen law as a profession.
Her debut came in Freiburg in February 1971, the month she turned 34, in a lyric soprano role, the Countess in Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.” Her voice at the time was rich and flexible, and she might have continued on a lighter repertory path. But the shimmering allure and power of her sound and the intensity of her singing led her inexorably to Wagner.
In her prime she was a complete vocal artist, a singer whose warm, textured voice could send phrases soaring. Her top notes could slice through any Wagner orchestra.
Her technique made heavy use of chest voice, an approach that would eventually take a toll on her singing. Many purists argued that Ms. Behrens was no born Wagnerian. Her voice lacked the penetrating solidity of a Kirsten Flagstad or the clarion brilliance of a Birgit Nilsson.
Yet with her deep intelligence, dramatic fervor and acute emotional insights, she made her voice do what the music and the moment demanded. A beautiful woman with dark hair and a slender athletic frame, she was a poignant actress capable of fits and temperamental flashes onstage.
She was riveting as Wagner’s Isolde, a role she recorded with Leonard Bernstein conducting; Senta from “Der Fliegende Holländer”; and, especially, Brünnhilde.
She learned the three Brünnhilde roles of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle (in “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung”) simultaneously, because she thought of the cycle’s four operas as an entity, an organic operatic drama. Her first Brünnhilde came with a complete “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1983, the production conducted by Georg Solti. It was a triumph for Ms. Behrens, which she repeated for the next three summer seasons there.
She sang the role when the Met opened its 1986-87 season with “Die Walküre,” the first installment of Otto Schenk’s production. In the spring of 1989 she sang in the Met’s first presentation of the complete Schenk “Ring,” which was designed with her in mind. The production was retired this May.
Between her Met debut as Giorgetta in Puccini’s “Tabarro” in 1976 and her appearances as Marie in Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1999, she sang 171 performances with the company, including Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Elettra in Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and the title roles in Strauss’s “Salome” and “Elektra.” She sang the title role in Puccini’s “Tosca” opposite Plácido Domingo in the premiere of the popular Franco Zeffirelli staging introduced in 1985, a production later broadcast on public television.
Still, Brünnhilde became her Met calling card. She appears in the company’s DVDs of the Schenk “Ring” — recorded mostly in 1990, when she was at her dramatic and vocal peak — with James Levine conducting. The release affectingly captures her uncommonly feminine and thoughtful portrayal of this rambunctious character.
Yet Ms. Behrens’s move into Wagner was an act of will that took a vocal toll. By the mid-1990s, when she was approaching 60, her singing became ragged, with dicey pitch and strident top notes. Ms. Behrens drew criticism from many opera buffs and reviewers during this period. But she was determined to sing her chosen roles with uncompromising intensity, whatever the cost.
Hildegard Behrens was born on Feb. 9, 1937, in Varel, Germany, west of Hamburg, the youngest of six children. Both her parents were doctors, and her father was an avid amateur musician. As a child Ms. Behrens studied piano and violin and had a natural singing voice. Commenting on her musical upbringing in a 1983 interview with The New York Times, she said, “Nobody cared for me, and I had no expectations.” Hence her drift into law school.
Her true talent did not emerge until well into her vocal studies in Freiburg. In 1972 she joined the Deutsche Oper in Düsseldorf. She was discovered there by the powerful conductor Herbert von Karajan, who recruited her to sing Salome at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 1977. The experience was exasperating for the determined Ms. Behrens: Karajan insisted that a nonsinger perform Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils. Still, her performance was acclaimed and led to a landmark recording.
In the 1983 interview Ms. Behrens explained that she knew from the beginning that she would become a dramatic soprano, and that her slow start was an advantage.
“I consider my career to have had a fantastic logic,” she said, adding, “Now I realize that all that time I spent at the conservatory allowed me to evolve as a musician.”
“It was like playing a role out in my mind, before I actually did it. Even today I can think through a part, and my throat will subconsciously assume all the correct positions without my actually having to sing.”
By the early 1980s Ms. Behrens was such a major Met artist that she considered her loft in Chelsea home; she lived there at the time with her two children. Ms Behrens’s children, Philip Behrens of Munich and Sara Behrens Schneidman of Vienna, survive her, along with two grandchildren. She was married for a time to the German director Seth Schneidman, who directed her in several productions.
Ms. Behrens saw no divide between acting and singing. “Music for me comes out of the dramatic context,” she said in a 1997 interview with Opera News. “I have never had the temptation to view the voice as a fetish. For me it’s just a vehicle. I cannot consider it as some kind of golden calf.”
In 1990, while performing in the “Ring” at the Met, Ms. Behrens sustained a severe injury when a piece of scenery fell on her during the final scene of “Götterdämmerung,” the dramatic climax in which the Hall of the Gibichungs collapses. A beam of plastic foam and canvas stretched over wood fell prematurely and knocked Ms. Behrens to the floor, bruising her forehead and blackening her eyes. She had to miss subsequent performances. In a statement at the time, she said that if the beam had not struck her she might have taken a fatal fall into an open shaft created by a premature lowering of part of the stage floor.
Ms. Behrens was not an artist who looked back at decisions with regret, including her early choice of law school. She found helpful connections between law and opera.
“You go step by step in law,” she said in the Opera News interview, “and that’s what you do in opera too — finding motivations, reasons, cause and effect, emotions, guilt, responsibility. The intellectual training and discipline that it takes to solve a juridical case are very good for the approaches to a role.”
Correction: Aug. 19, 2009
A previous version of this obituary misspelled the surname of Hildegard Behrens's daughter. She is Sara Behrens Schneidman, not Scheidman.
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