“Siegfried wants to have a good time, kill the dragon, meet the girl”: Andreas Schager on Wagner’s young bully | Opera

AAndreas Schagr rushed through the door, crossed the room in one step and seized my hand in a tight clasp. “Sorry I’m sweaty,” he smiled. “You forged Nothong!” It’s midweek lunchtime in the busy back office of London’s Royal Opera House, but crafting a magic sword is a morning’s work for the world’s most sought-after Wagnerian leading man. Currently in rehearsals for Siegfried – the third painting of the Ring Cycle’s new show at Covent Garden – Schager plans to spend the afternoon slaying a dragon and rescuing his lover from an enchanted fire (after lunch, that is). But for now, the tenor has a moment to catch his breath.

At 54, Schagher is an anomaly in the world of opera. Most careers — especially those singing Wagner, whose scores are longer and whose roles are larger and more demanding than any other — are built over decades. As veteran agent Boris Orlaub says: “If you see Wagner singers coming from miles away, it’s a gradual process. You take the stairs, not the elevator.”

But Schager didn’t just take the elevator, he headed straight to the penthouse in 2013, when he traded a set of Wagner roles in Little Houses for the Berlin Opera House. Booked to sing the mature Siegfried in the final opera of the Ring cycle, Götterdämmerung – a debut experience for conductor Daniel Barenboim – he was rehearsing in the building when it became clear that the tenor scheduled to sing the same role in the cycle’s most demanding third opera, Siegfried, had gone unanswered.

In just a few minutes, Shager found himself ready, dispatching the enormous demands of the first act – 90 minutes of pure, powerful singing, perhaps the most intense single act in the entire operatic repertoire – with remarkable confidence. When Barenboim brought him in for a private curtain call, the extremely demanding crowd roared in approval.

After the first act, the original tenor dominated, but Barenboim’s new star had already been erased. Later that year, Schager traveled to Milan’s La Scala and the BBC Concerts with the conductor for further reputation-enhancing performances at Götterdämmerung. “There aren’t a lot of Siegfrieds and Tristans, so my schedule quickly became very busy, very fast-paced.”

Accidental stardom is a vacant topic. He grew up with four siblings on a farm in rural Austria. Music was part of family life – “in the summer, when work was done, we would all make music together” – but with no formal vocal training and did not consider making it a career, he instead headed to university in Vienna to study history and theology.

“Then I joined the choir, and singing started to take up more and more space in my life. I heard someone there with a really great voice, so of course I went up to him and asked him: ‘How do you do it?’ That’s how it started.”

“It” initially had a career in operetta – opera’s lighter cousin. Here was the dashing young hero – Orpheus in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Ottokar in Johann Strauss’s The Gypsy Baron, Caramello in Strauss’s A Night in Venice – learning to act and taking the stage in performances where singing was just the beginning. A decade of that, often two shows a day, could easily have turned into a lifetime. Was Vacant going to be satisfied?

“Absolutely. I never had sharp elbows, and I never thought: ‘I have to get to the top and be the best singer in the world.'” But then different doors began to open – “I just walked in without thinking too much” – and in 2012, he was invited to audition for his first film, Siegfried: a five-hour Wagner epic in which the hero is rarely offstage, singing almost the whole time.

“I had no idea what it meant, what to prepare for. I think my agent was more surprised than I was. I remember keeping score, turning page after page – it just kept coming… and then I saw how high everything was going. But I realized it was very similar to Barinkay’s role in The Gypsy Baron; the whole thing was the equivalent of two performances of that show, which I was doing regularly, so I said yes. I knew I could do it.”

On paper, it seems like an impossible leap – going straight from parkrun to marathon. But Shager sees it differently. “I went into it like I was doing a new operetta, and that was exactly the right approach.

“Siegfried is the hero of the operetta in the ring cycle. He wants to have a good time, kill the dragon, and meet the girl. He doesn’t know yet what a woman is, but he still wants one! Everything is exciting for him, and you can’t convey that just by standing still on the stage. You have to be cheerful and active. The operetta taught me to be funny, to run and talk and dance and sing – all at the same time.”

Siegfried is also one of the opera’s most difficult requests. Initially, he only reached the middle of Wagner’s four-part cycle. We already get the “story” of Das Rheingold – how the dwarf Alberich stole the enchanted gold and created a powerful but cursed ring, as well as the incestuous love story of Siegfried’s parents, the long-lost twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, in Die Walküre.

Now their son Siegfried, who was raised in ignorance of his origins by Alberich’s brother Mayhem, enters into the plot. It is his quest to slay the dragon Fafner and rescue the warrior girl Brunhild that sets off the final cataclysmic events in Götterdämmerung.

Siegfried has been roundly dismissed by Wagner scholar Michael Tanner as a “bullying teenager” and by the psychiatrist and author Jeremy Holmes as “rude, rebellious, demanding, lacking in all tenderness and consideration”, far from the obvious romantic hero. How does Shagar make this brave hero sympathetic?

“You don’t have to; he’s a very normal character: a young man full of emotions. He finds out that Mime has been lying to him all his life, and that the person closest to him actually hates him. This is a very difficult psychological situation.

“But his nature is pure, and I think – sympathetic. We hear that in the second act. For the first time in his life, he is alone. Suddenly the music changes; suddenly he becomes a lyricist singing about his mother and father. Only later in Götterdämmerung do we see him affected by corrupt society. His character changes and his soul becomes filthy.”

This transformation from angry innocent to sarcastic warrior is something every singer must find a way to express. For Shagar, counterintuitively, it’s a matter of not trying too hard. “It’s not important to shape the tone, but to let the emotions produce it,” he says. “I always compare it to babies. Every mother, when she hears her baby crying, knows if he is hungry or in pain, even though the baby cannot speak. We as singers have to learn to do that again on stage.”

With a decade of Wagner and more than 10 Ring Cycles under his belt, Schager has to work harder these days to find the “blank pages” he hopes to bring to any new theatrical production. “You have a lot of feelings and versions of this character embedded within you,” he says. “Sometimes it’s more difficult when you know a lot.” But matters were helped in London by the “dream team” of conductor Antonio Pappano and director Barry Koski.

Koski’s staging is rich in symbolism, full of beautiful and charged theatrical images: a tree oozing gold-like sap; A naked old woman, fragile and unashamed; A horde of ash-stained Valkyries hot from battle. Schager describes it as “old-fashioned in a very good way”: it sticks to Wagner’s text, and allows the music, the story and the singers to speak unobstructed.

This is just the beginning of a busy year for Shagar. A quick glance at his schedule reveals five different grueling roles for Wagner in the next six months (“Is that? I didn’t count it”) including the title role in the first Rienzi play ever staged at the Bayreuth Festival Theater – Wagner’s own opera house. He says it is a “huge honour”, before touching on the charged political history of Hitler’s favorite opera. “Wagner is not responsible for what others did with his music.”

Time was up, Chagr returned to training, and his sandwich had not been eaten. He may be an accidental hero, but these dragons won’t kill themselves.