When Brunnhilde makes her entrance to the exultant cry of “Ho-jo-to-ho!” in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” local audiences almost instantly should recognize the singer beneath the Valkyrie’s breastplate.
That big, gleaming, resilient soprano voice could belong to none other than Eva Marton.
Since her Lyric debut in 1979, in Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier,” the Hungarian-born prima donna has given the Chicago opera public some of her most celebrated heroines. Last year she scalded the stage as the vengeful Elektra in Strauss’ opera. The season before, she enacted the imperious ice-princess in the David Hockney production of Puccini’s “Turandot.” Tosca, Fidelio, Maddalena-name the heavyweight role and chances are Marton has sung it here.
But as the Lyric prepares to unveil the second installment of its new August Everding-Zubin Mehta “Ring” cycle, Tuesday night at the Civic Opera House, it is the warrior-maiden Brunnhilde that quite naturally claims Marton’s immediate thoughts and emotions.
She is submitting to the vocal and dramatic rigors of the part hard on the heels of singing a run of “Turandots”-again in the Hockney production-for the San Francisco Opera. It is not an easy transition, even for so practiced a dramatic soprano.
“Puccini is a totally different world, more show. Wagner has greater musical and dramatic depth,” Marton declares, in Magyar-accented tones that sometimes slip from English to German, which she feels more comfortable speaking.
The singer counts the German stage director Everding and conductor Mehta-Lyric’s Ringmeister-among her favorite collaborators. “Zubin has the very devil in him. And August is a very warm person. But I know that when rehearsals are over, he is very tired of me, because I always ask so many questions. You see, I want to know everything he knows about Brunnhilde.”
Although Marton has portrayed the “Walkure” Brunnhilde in London, San Francisco, Geneva, Bonn and other cities, she says she still approaches every production as if she were singing the part for the first time.
“I never do this role the same way twice. Before I go out on stage, I always decide on the dramatic line I want to follow that evening. I can’t show every facet of Brunnhilde in a single performance. Vocally, I find the role very lyric, with dramatic accents. Brunnhilde almost never screams. Even her entrance cry is a cry of joy; you never find these noises again in the opera.
“Dramatically I see Brunnhilde as a very innocent person, a mirror-image of her father Wotan, of his will,” the soprano adds. “The opera is about gods, but it’s really about very basic human emotions, about the strong relationship between Wotan (sung by baritone James Morris in the Lyric production) and his favorite daughter. When Wotan says farewell to her and kisses away her godhood at the end of `Walkure,’ I want the public to feel very sad about what has happened between them, as if they were members of their own family.”
Marton makes no secret of the fact that she is a very emotional person herself. Once, while singing Brunnhilde opposite Robert Hale’s Wotan at the Geneva Opera, she was so moved by the beauty of his singing and the power of his gaze that she burst into tears. And because she takes the dramatic aspects of opera very seriously, she expects everyone else to do so, too. Not so long ago she stormed off stage during a performance of “Tosca” in Houston when the audience found unintended humor in one of the supertitles.
Marton has earned the right to throw a diva fit once in a while. She is, after all, that rara avis, a dramatic soprano. True dramatic sopranos-voices that can encompass some of the most taxing roles in the repertory-have never been plentiful at any period of operatic history. But, through hard work and good, old-fashioned staying power, Marton has inherited the mantle of her inspiration, Birgit Nilsson, arguably the greatest dramatic soprano of the 1960s and ’70s.
Like Nilsson, she has made her mark in both the German and Italian rep and, like Nilsson, she commands a voluminous sound and a powerful top that can ring forth tirelessly even at the end of a long performance. Her chest tones have been dubbed the meanest in the business, capable of generating the kind of excitement that has all but vanished since Nilsson retired from the stage during the 1980s.
It was Nilsson who-when both singers were in position on stage, waiting for the curtain to go up during a 1981 performance of Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten” at the Met-urged her to take on the killer part of Turandot. “`I made my career with that one,’ said Nilsson. `Thank you very much, Birgit, but do you really think I can do it? `Sure,’ she answered. And the curtain went up.”
Marton nevertheless brushes aside any comparisons between her and Nilsson.
“Birgit was unique. Yes, I sing a lot of her repertory, but, excuse me, that is not the same as filling her shoes. Anyway, I think it was easier for singers during her day than it is now. They were, in a way, more innocent then. TV, record companies, the jet plane-everything has changed the opera world. The public is innocent of the politics that goes on behind the scenes. All this has made it much tougher to make a career.”
Marton is no innocent. She is well aware of the tradition she inherited from the Flagstads, Milanovs, Callases and Tebaldis. She also knows that, although these singers had more style to bring to their roles than the current generation, today’s audiences expect more dramatic believability on stage than the Flagstads and Milanovs had to bother about. And it seems that, paradoxically, the more grueling the role, the easier it must sound.
“Verdi is never easy to sing,” Marton declares. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think he knew much about the voice. I think I can say that, having sung Aida, Leonora in `Ernani,’ `Trovatore’ and `Forza del Destino,’ Amelia in `Ballo in Maschera’ and Desdemona in `Otello.’ But, then, everything is difficult. Somebody recently told me Turandot is easy, just 25 minutes of singing. Well, I watched Birgit sing that part and she really did a job. You’re on the spot the entire time. And the other singers usually have friends out in the audience; they can kill you even if the music doesn’t.”
Someone in the Met administration once asked Marton, early in her tenure there, what roles she would like to sing. She replied, “Everything-but slowly.” Those words could serve as a description of her general career progress.
Marton was born in Budapest and, showing talent as a child, was given piano and voice lessons. She soon found she didn’t have the patience, nerves or talent to make the piano her career. But her teacher told her she had a marvelous voice; and so, at 14, she switched her studies to singing. She entered the Franz Liszt Academy, where she received a diploma in opera and vocal teaching.
Her destiny was determined when she sang her first Wagner role-Freia in “Das Rheingold”-during her three years with the Budapest Opera, sung in Hungarian.
Conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi heard her, was impressed and invited her to sing in Frankfurt, later Hamburg, where he served as Intendant.
She sang both Venus and Elisabeth in “Tannhauser” at Bayreuth during the 1977 and ’78 seasons, and made her La Scala debut in 1978 in “Trovatore,” with Mehta conducting. Marton’s star clearly was on the ascendant.
Among the Wagner heroines, Kundry and Isolde are the onlyroles Marton has yet to sing. And Isolde, she eagerly reports, is on the books for Barcelona next year, Washington in 1995. She is, of course, slated to perform the “Siegfried” and “Gotterdammerung” Brunnhildes for Lyric Opera, during the 1994-95 and 1995-96 seasons.
Her only Wagner-related regret, she says, is that she turned
down the role of Sieglinde in Georg Solti’s “Ring” cycle at Bayreuth in 1983. Why? “Because I felt I was Brunnhilde by then, that I couldn’t go back to singing Sieglinde. I was maybe stupid.”
Eva Marton once told an interviewer she sang every performance as if it were her last. That was a decade ago. Does she still make that her practice?
“Oh, definitely more so these days! I know my time on stage is short; I have more years behind me than in front of me. I want now to do worthwhile things on stage, to enjoy myselfmore and more.
“And do you know what I want to do when I finish my singing career?” The singer smiles, savoring the dramatic pause. “I am going to be an actress in the straight theater! My friends say I have this gift to be used on stage, perhaps for comedy or character parts.
“Such is the life of an artist-a short life, and one cannot do too much during its span, which is why I want to do everything.”
EVA MARTON’S FINEST ROLES, ON DISC
Eva Marton has committed most of her core operatic repertory to disc. Here are highlights of her discography on compact and laser disc:
Wagner: Die Walkure (with James Morris, Cheryl Studer, Reiner Goldberg, Matti Salminen and Waltraud Meier). Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Bernard Haitink conducting. EMI Classics, 4 CDs.
Wagner: Siegfried (with James Morris, Siegfried Jerusalem, Theo Adam and Peter Haage). Bavarian Radio Symphony, Bernard Haitink conducting. EMI Classics, 4 CDs.
Wagner: Gotterdammerung (with Siegfried Jerusalem, Thomas Hampson, Marjana Lipovsek, John Tomlinson, Theo Adam and Eva-Maria Bundschuh). Orchestra and Chorus of the Bavarian Radio, Bernard Haitink conducting. EMI Classics, 4 CDs.
Puccini: Turandot (with Ben Heppner, Margaret Price and Jan-Hendrik Rootering). Bavarian Radio Chorus and Munich Radio Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin conducting. RCA Victor, 2 CDs.
Strauss: Elektra (with Cheryl Studer, Marjana Lipovsek, Bernd Weikl and Hermann Winkler). Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting. EMI Classics, 2 CDs.
Strauss: Salome (with Brigitte Fassbaender, Bernd Weikl and Heinz Zednik). Berlin Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta conducting. Sony Classical, 2 CDs.
Korngold: Violanta (with Siegfried Jerusalem, Walter Berry and Ruth Hesse). Bavarian Radio Chorus and Munich Radio Orchestra, Marek Janowski conducting. CBS Masterworks.
Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten (with Cheryl Studer, Thomas Moser, Robert Hale and Marjana Lipovsek). Vienna State Opera Chorus and Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti conducting. London, 2 laser discs.
