September 1994

There is certainly no shortage of his type of voice, either in Britain or anywhere else. But this one is extraordinary. It belongs to Bryn Terfel (pronounced 'Tairvell'), a twenty-eight-year old Welshman who sings both Leporello and Mozart's Figaro in October. Six foot three and broadly built, with a mane of shaggy brown hair, he looks as if he ought to be powering his way toward the goal post as a front-row forward in Wales' favorite game, rugby, although he will remind you he comes from North Wales, on the west side of Great Britain, where they are more interested in soccer.

In 1992 and '93, Terfel sang Jochanaan at the Salzburg Festival in Luc Bondy's production of Strauss' Salome, with Catherine Malfitano in the title role. When his voice was first heard coming from the cistern, it was obvious even to Austrian critics (who don't much welcome foreigners in operas regarded as local property) that this was something remarkable -- not only the power of the voice but its nobility of tone and expressive delivery of the text.

When Jochanaan emerged from the cistern -- just a white arm reaching along the ground at first -- he was a terrifying sight. Salome gazed at him in wide-eyed wonder as he paced around like a caged beast, by no means impervious to the young woman's desirability. It was a monumental, gripping performance; Strauss believed that writing music for a prophet was not his forte, but Terfel allayed all such doubts.

"I'm at a stage now where people think I've been singing for twenty years, but it's about four and a half. I was married before my career took off. [He and his wife, Lesley, had their first child this summer.] When I realize that up to now I've worked with Solti, Muti, Giulini, Sinopoli, Levine, Dohnányi, Barenboim, Mackerras, I have to pinch myself. But that's the kind of business it is. If people think you've got the goods, and that you actually turn up and deliver, they want you."

Terfel had never heard a note of opera when he first went to London to study singing a few years ago. He was born Bryn Terfel Jones in Pantglas (Blue Gorge) -- Grove has it wrong -- a village he describes as "four houses, a church, a shop and three farms." Music played a part in his upbringing. He sang at Sunday school and had piano lessons. "Every Saturday I'd compete in local eisteddfodau [Welsh singing festivals], but I'd only do it to get 10 pounds to buy a pair of football boots or a football -- pure enjoyment, that's all." His father is a farmer, and his mother teaches handicapped children. He has an older brother who, according to Terfel, "says I pinched all his voice. He's a physical-education teacher, slim, fit and good-looking. I'm the big, ugly, unfit black sheep of the family."

After taking his final exams, young Bryn started to worry about what he was going to do. He didn't want to be a farmer. Today he recalls, "My music teacher said, 'Why don't you go up to London and audition for one of the schools of music?'" He applied to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Neither his parents nor he had ever been to London. "It was a culture shock. We went down into the Underground railway and couldn't work it out -- didn't know where to buy the ticket -- so we went back up and got a taxi. Luckily, Guildhall accepted me, and I got a scholarship as well, 800 pounds a year -- very nice to buy scores, which I didn't possess."

Someone at the Guildhall must have had an ear for talent, since all Terfel could offer at his audition was a group of Welsh songs. His mother tongue means a lot to him. "My roots are important to me, because that's the sort of thing that keeps me to the ground and stops me from turning into another person that people won't like. When I go home, my friends say, 'Well, you're still the same Bryn.' I wouldn't like it if they thought 'He's gone now.'" One of his recent recordings, made for a small Welsh label, is of songs by a Welsh composer, Meirion Williams.

When he entered the Guildhall School, he knew nothing about opera. "I didn't know who Pavarotti was. I didn't even know who Geraint Evans was, and that's a kind of sin, because he was the most famous of Welsh singers. I'd never heard of Gwyneth Jones or Margaret Price, both internationally known Welsh sopranos."

His first teacher was Arthur Reckless. "He was from the old school. I think Geraint Evans studied with him for a while. He was a wonderful person who would let you develop by yourself. He was never technically-minded, never language-oriented. He would always sing with me in lessons -- I could never hear my own voice, because his was bigger. He gave me a good solid technique without my ever knowing I was getting a technique, because it was such a natural progression." After three years he moved on to Rudolf Piernay, from Berlin.

Terfel goes to Piernay to sing through roles he has been offered, and Piernay attends most of his performances. "You can look at a score and say to yourself, 'The scope, the range, are O.K.,' but you have to sing it, because you don't know how large the orchestra's going to sound, and you must have a person who knows that and knows voices. Mr. Piernay will tell me the truth about how I'm singing. People tend to say flowery things to make you feel wonderful, but I need somebody to be critical and tell me straight."

Terfel never entered a competition at the Guildhall School until his last year, when he won the Gold Medal. "They put cotton-wool round me, and I'll always be grateful for that. I met people like the baritone Benjamin Luxon and the tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson. To talk to people like that is where you learn about opera and about singing, and that's when it got into my blood." His four-year class was a performers' course that did not include opera. He studied French, German and Italian, dancing and tap-dancing. "Toward the fourth year my voice began to change, and it was then I thought perhaps I'd do opera. The whole aspect of it appealed to me.

"I was perpetually in the college library, either listening to records of old singers or looking at scores. This German word Fach I don't really like, but that's the kind of thing you have to look at, and I always tended to buy records by José van Dam, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Sam Ramey, George London -- all those with a bass-baritone quality. If you read Van Dam's book, you find that at the start of his career he went from the Sprechers to the Masettos to the Figaros to the Boccanegras, to Hans Sachs and the Dutchman, which is gradual and a wonderful way of building a career." It's an example Terfel has followed. "Covent Garden offered me Mozart's Figaro for my debut, and I turned it down, so they offered me Masetto in Don Giovanni, and I said yes. I wanted gradually to build a reputation, so Masetto was perfect. If I'd done Figaro, it might have gone against me. My first Figaros were with Welsh National Opera and then my American debut at Santa Fe." He eventually sang Figaro at Covent Garden in April and since then has sung the role in Vienna and recorded it.

Terfel's local government authority supported him for four years, but after that he needed money while building his career. He entered the Kathleen Ferrier Competition, Britain's most prestigious singing contest, and won.

Terfel's next success was in Wales in 1989 when he entered the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, which, unlike the Ferrier contest, achieves national exposure, because the preliminary rounds and the finals are televised. He came in second to Dmitri Hvorostovsky and was awarded the lieder prize. There was a rumor that the international jury flinched from awarding him first prize in case it might appear that there had been bias toward a Welshman. Terfel dismisses the idea: "Hvorostovsky is a fantastic singer. He had four or five years on me -- he'd already done many operas in Russia -- and he was marvelous on the night, when it mattered."

Georg Solti and Giuseppe Sinopoli were watching the finals on television and invited Terfel to sing auditions for them. Then a lucky thing happened. Sinopoli had planned to record the Deutsche Oper production of Salome with Ekkehard Wlaschiha as Jochanaan, but Wlaschiha was ill and Terfel was asked to take over. "Like Cheryl Studer [Salome], I'd never sung my role onstage. Because I came into the recording late, I sang only half the role live and never met anybody else in the cast. I did it in two days."

Before that, he had sung two small parts in Deutsche Grammophon recordings: Angelotti in Tosca with Domingo and Mathias in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel. "The first recording I made was for Decca, Adriana Lecouvreur in 1989. I came back from touring Canada with a Welsh choir, and WNO said they wanted me to do Quinault in their recording, and I said, 'Who are the other singers?' They said, 'Joan Sutherland and Carlo Bergonzi.' I thought they were joking, but they took me to a hotel, and the next thing I knew Joan Sutherland was pouring me a cup of tea. Her recording technique is incredible. She just sings into that little mike, that black dot in front of her. She never sings to the acoustic of a hall or who's in front of her -- she just concentrates on that microphone."

A recording Terfel made of Schubert's Schwanengesang has become a collector's piece. "It was a test for myself," he says. "I asked my accompanist, Malcolm Martineau, if he fancied doing it, because we'd already done it in college, and I thought 'Let's see what we can do and work out how to record lieder.'" Terfel now has a contract to record for DG. His recording with Sinopoli of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder has already been acclaimed for its exceptional insight. "Malcolm and I are going to do another lieder disc and a John Ireland disc. With James Levine as pianist, I'm going to do some Schumann, and I'm to do the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel with orchestra. I don't think DG has got many artists who do British songs, so I'm trying to bring something new into their catalog.

"I was supposed to sing Barak [in Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten] in Paris with Sinopoli, a combination of performances and recording, but it's a bit too early. Why should I test myself when I could sing Papageno, perhaps, which would be much easier? I know Barak already. Acts I and II are very lyrical, but Act III gets a bit heavy. I sing Mandryka [in Arabella] -- a good stepping-stone toward Wagner, because Strauss can be loud. I felt the decibels coming out of the pit at Salzburg in Salome. It all added to the tension of the evening.

"If you read the books by Geraint Evans and Tito Gobbi, they write as if they brought everything into the operas themselves. They'd worked out the characters before even meeting the producer, and they did their own makeup and had a big say in their costumes. But these days a producer has set ideas, others do the makeup, and the costume's there for you. So really now it's a combination of what people think.

"Take the Luc Bondy Salome. For the first two weeks in 1992 I took what he said, but I disagreed with a lot of it. When I got to know him, I put my own ideas in and worked around it, so it was a collaboration. When the production went to Brussels, José van Dam sang Jochanaan, and colleagues told me it was totally different. Perhaps he wouldn't do what I do onstage, such as touch Salome. I touch her in a way that I think I have won her over. The tension she and I have between us must make the hairs on people's necks stand up.

What would Terfel say to an invitation to sing Wotan at Bayreuth? "No, thank you. You think your diary is full for the year, but the companies and concert societies can always fit you in somehow, and it's up to the young singer to say, 'No, I don't want to do that.' A performance on Monday and Wednesday is enough in a week, but they will try their utmost to get you, and I'm even now turning down work. I went from Salzburg last year to Edinburgh and Cardiff to sing Ford in Falstaff, then to Vienna for Les Contes d'Hoffmann -- I sang all the baddies.

"There are plans for the Dutchman around 1997. I'd do Das Rheingold's Wotan now. I'm not sure about Die Walküre -- it's a long sing. The Wanderer in Siegfried could be a bit low for me now -- it's low in the beginning and gradually higher. My voice is getting higher. Most probably it will end up as baritone someday. But they say the low notes come as you get older, and I'm only twenty-eight, so there's time.

- Michael Kennedy