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The New York Times (European Edition)
September 1999 Prince of Wales If he hadn't become a world-class opera and concert singer, the young Welsh bass-baritone could probably have been an international rugby player. As one of the world's best-known Welshmen, he has rugger, as well as singing, in his blood, so it seems entirely appropriate that he should have been selected to sing at the opening ceremony of the Rugby Union World Cup at Cardiff Arms Park on October 1 alongside Wale's vocal living legend, Shirley Bassey. Decca has recorded an album -- unsurprisingly entitiled Land of My Fathers -- in which Bryn and Shirley will be joined by the Black Mountain Male Voice Choir in a rendition of the Rugby World Cup's offical anthem, World in Union. Although the disc is international -- it features South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo and haka chants from New Zealand -- the Welsh bias is marked: Terfel sings the moving Welsh folksong Ar Lan y Mor (Beside the Seashore), Bassey will be keeping a welcome in the valleys, while West End and Broadway star Michael Ball chips in with Wales for Ever (Bread of Heaven, for those who know the hymn in its English version). Terfel's Welshness is important to him. Welsh is his first language and, despite his fame as one of the world's leading opera singers of the post-Three-Tenors generation, he still lives in a village near Caernarfon, north Wales, with his wife and two children -- though we meet in a hotel suite overlooking the dazzling new Cardiff Arms Park Stadium. He's the son of a beef and sheep farmer and he looks that part, too. His burly frame and gritty, gnarled featues proclaim him a true child of the countryside. "Coming from north Wales," he says, "the environment is so different to southern Wales. Here is is coal-mining, industrialised. North Wales is much more agriculture. My father has a beautiful farm in the Snowdonia National Park." Despite his international success -- and only at 33 it has come to him early for an opera singer -- he retains a strong sense of identity with the community in which he grew up: the land, singing, and rugby are all part of that. "Music was always there in the background but I was more interested in sports as a youngster. My brother was a sportsman and you look up to your older brother. He didn't like singing much, but I used to take up contrary positions: he supported Leeds United, I went for Manchester United. He liked Ribena, I liked orange juice. He went into PE, I went into music. Family and community are certainly the foundation stones of a meteoric career that could easily have plummeted in a man of lesser character. He shot to fame 10 years ago at the tender age of 23, when he was runner-up -- actually winner of the art-song prize -- to the handsome Russian Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the 1989 Cardiff Singer of the World. Both have gone on to conquer the world's great opera houses, but Terfel arguably has made the bigger impact -- a star with the pulling power of the tenor trio and Cecilia Bartoli, but few else. Yet despite the acclaim, the publicity, the money, he seems to have his feet firmly in the ground. "I'm grateful to my parents because I would never be where I am now if they hadn't encouraged me to do the circuit of singing competitions in north Wales when I was a child. I had a good basic instrument to sing with: from four years old on, I would sing with the harp -- they start you very early in Wales." Unlike many gifted boy sopranos, however -- Terfe's compatriot Aled Jones springs to mind -- his voice broke into a resonant bass-baritone that eventually won him a place at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He studied there from 1984 to 1989. The natureal resonace of his voice -- which he can use with great lightness and delicacy for show tunes and folk songs -- must have impressed all who heard it, but Terfel admits building it involved a lot of graft. "My first day at the Guildhall was terrifying, really terrifying. I was in tears in my lodgings at night and I wanted to go home. I had a basic instrument, but no technique. But someone on the selection panel obviously thought that with training, perhaps, I would become a singer. They gave me an old gentleman to teach me for the first three years, Arthur Reckless, who though I should be singing nothing but English songs." English songs might have been boring for the young would-be Figaro and Don Giovanni, but Reckless's persistence has left a distinctive mark on Terfel's artistic persona. He is surely one of the finest singeres of the English language since Dame Janet Baker. Articulation and communication of words, more, even, tha quality of voice, is the key to the Terfel magic. "Diction was very important to my teacher. And even from an early age, diction was important to me: in Wales one of the biggest art forms is singing songs with a harp, and you are adjudicated on how well you bring over the poetry. So those rules and ingrained in me." Although he spoke no foreign languages -- other than English, of course -- when he went to the Guildhall, he has become perhaps the most versatile linguist among the singers of his generation, especially at home in Germany, where critics have praised his command of the language to the skies, and in Italian, which he sings with a relish and colour rare for a non-native speaker. It is entirely typical of this highly intelligent and literate singer that the text is often as important to him as the music. "For instance, working on Verdi's Falstaff for Australian Opera, the play of words in Boito's libretto is amazing. The coating of Verdi's music, of course, puts the text into a different league, but Verdi has such ammunition to work with for his only comic masterpiece." This is Terfel's Falstaff year. He knows the opera well because he sang the second baritone part, Master Ford, in Peter Stein's production of the Welsh National Opera early in his career. But the title role is one of the pinnacles of operatic comedy and usually reserved for old Verdian retainers rather than a vigorous young man of 33. He sang old Sir John, the fat knight, for the first time with Australian Opera in Sydney earlier this year. At the end of the month he opens in a new production at Chicago Lyric Opera conducted by Covent Garden's music-director elect, Antonio Pappano, and, to crown the year before the new millennium, he stars in the new production of Falstaff conducted by the Royal Opera's present music director, Bernard Haitink, which reopens the Royal Opera House on December 6. Did he experience any trepidation in tackling the role so soon? "No, I was glad, because you need to be fresh to tackle this piece. There are certain things in your calendar that you really look forward to, and the opening of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is something I'm itching for. I've already had a costume fitting. They're doing this wonderful belly for me." It is an indication of the seriousness with which Terfel takes his career that he has prepared for this Covent Garden debut so metisculously, tackling Falstaff initially in Sydney and taking it on to Chicago before presenting it in the full glare of publicity surrounding the re-opening of Covent Garden. But Terfel is a softly-softly operator. He has cancelled projects at the last minute when he felt ill or not ready. For years he has been billed as the next great Wagnerian heroic bass-baritone, but he is still not signing any contracts. The opera world is currently mesmerised by rumours that he plans to retire from singing at 40 and return to his north Wales farm. "Well I'm certainly going to slow down when I'm 42 or 43 and not do so much travelling. I'd like to work more with Welsh National Opera [he has promised to open the Cardiff Opera House -- oops, sorry, the Millennium Centre -- with Wagner's The Flying Dutchman when it is ready], to do something at Opera North or Scottish Opera."
If he wanted to, Terfel could sing at only the most prestigious opera houses -- Salzburg, the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden --- yet he has chosen to sing in Sydney and Amsterdam when the offers intrigued and excited him. The glossy and glamorous world of international opera may be dreading the day when Bryn Terfel decides to stay at home, but there will be a welcome in the valleys and a lot of
happy fans in Wales.
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