"Opera," said the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers once in an interview, "is not entertainment." For entertainment, he explained, he would far rather watch My Fair Lady. Opera had to go deeper. It was deeper, or it was nothing. Even for those of us too young to have seen him on stage, that he lived this belief is evident from every moment of every recording (and happily there are plenty) that he ever made. Such is the indelible impression that he made on a gallery of roles, covering French, German, Italian and English repertoire, that it is hard to believe he has died--especially since a long illness kept him from public life from some years, giving his admirers time, as it were, to get used to feeling his presence through the recorded legacy.
There are times in impressionable young lives when artists assume a significance for one's own emergent beliefs. For some, it may have been the independence-claiming wilfulness of the Beatles, for others the ironic imagination of Andy Warhol. On my own school maths folder, I had a picture of Jon Vickers as Verdi's Don Carlo. For me, it was the hulking Canadian tenor that represented what art could be. Every bit as much as John, Paul, Ringo and George, Jon Vickers harnessed an energy that seemed elemental.
Watch his "Now the Great Bear" monologue in the Covent Garden film of Peter Grimes. Both feet planted firmly on the stage, body shaking with emotion and power that even Grimes does not understand, he seems to draw force from the Earth itself, and turn it into sound.
The singer's ambition was no less than this. "All art," he once said in a radio interview, "is an elaboration of life. It represents the ideal to which humanity can strive." That is why opera, why Vickers himself, had to push and struggle. Because in his eyes, the very definition of humanity was at stake. That utterance, when I first heard it, sent me scurrying for a notepad. I kept that note pinned to my wall for years.
Born in 1926, in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, it must always have been clear that he would do well. Voices that can comfortably encompass the beefy operatic roles are few and far between, and many quickly burn out. This was not to be the case with Vickers. As with so many Canadian singers -- a fact Vickers himself would later lament -- he got his big break abroad, with an invitation to sing Riccardo in Verdi's Un ballo in Maschera at London's Royal Opera House in 1957. Don Carlo followed in 1958, the famous Luchino Visconti production, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, that almost single-handedly brought that opera to the forefront of the repertoire.
Both of these productions have since been issued in unofficial recordings (Ballo from a slightly later revival under Edward Downes from 1962) by Opus Arte and are fascinating in showing what the young tenor made of these lyrical roles. Vickers's voice evolved greatly over the decades. Here, it is a honeyed, open sound, far from the much more idiosyncratic, bronzed tone of his later days. But even this early, he clearly throws himself dramatically into both interpretations. When it came to his studio recording of Carlo, Giulini opted for the more traditionally heroic Placido Domingo. But it is Vickers who charts the character's disintegration. This is a Carlo on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
One can say something similar for the dramatic urgency he later found in his recording of Verdi's Aida, under Georg Solti for Decca, far from the prosaic Radames we usually get.
As the years progressed, he took ever more risks, not least musically. Critics have even accused him of 'crooning' for effect and repetitive mannerisms. There was a camp who preferred Vickers' great contemporary rival James McCracken, a more straightforward singer in some ways, but whose voice recorded less comfortably. So, it was the Canadian who got the lion's share of the studio work.
He could also go too far for some colleagues, who didn't believe that opera needed to be a matter of life and death. Literally. The mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig once told me over lunch how, in a rehearsal for Bizet's Carmen, Vickers as Don Jose had mock-stabbed her with such untrammelled ferocity that he actually drew blood. In fact, she had to be taken to hospital for checks. Back at rehearsal the next day, she related the fire in his eyes was unabated: "And he didn't even apologize! That was all part of the work as far as he was concerned." But, though her annoyance had clearly also dimmed little, she conceded with some awe, that he was unlike any other tenor.
Arguably, both the best and the worst thing that happened to Vickers was his long association with Herbert von Karajan. In the German conductor's luxurious sounds, he found space to explore the deep expression in characters; Karajan took risks alongside his star. A comparison of Vickers' first and second studio recordings of Otello is striking. The first, under Tulio Serafin for RCA, finds a trumpet-toned general brilliantly sung, yet much in the mould of heroic predecessors like Martinelli. By the time he returned with the role to the studio (and in front of the cameras), this time for EMI under Karajan, his Otello had become a true anti-hero--a searing depiction of a descent into barbarism.
If, however, Karajan also indulged some of his vocal eccentricities (yes, an occasional tendency towards mannerisms) and also sometimes insisted on the odd annoying cut (the Act III ensemble in that EMI Otello is a prime example), they made some unforgettable recordings. For Karajan, Vickers was a Siegmund of indescribable tragedy, a wracked Don Jose and a frenzied Canio (these last two on film). Above all, a Tristan of such poetic imagination that it has arguably never been surpassed.
Mind you, one could say the same of quite a number of his roles.
Some of these were with other conductors. His Florestan in the famous Otto Klemperer set for EMI is a case in point. Has any tenor ever found such outraged desperation in that opening "Gott! welch' Dunkel hier?" As is his Aneas in Berlioz's Les Troyens, another of those operas that he was instrumental in bringing back to the light, culminating in the Colin Davis recording for Philips that has stood as a benchmark for that work ever since. His Peter Grimes, again for Davis, was more controversial--the composer is said to have hated it--but offered a riveting alternative view to Peter Pears' out-of-place poet. Vickers conceived the role instead as a man given to wild tempers, who doesn't know his own strength, a simpleton in the body of a giant.
He did plenty of concert work and many recordings of that repertoire. But with Vickers, it is always the opera that commands attention first and foremost. And it leads one to speculate with frustration on the ones that got away. His unhinged Hermann in Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades was a favorite role, but he never recorded it commercially. The only off-air recordings are very hard to find and in bad sound (better than nothing though and, a bit of trivia, one of them has the very young Gerald Finley in his first time on stage, as an uncredited chorus boy). Siegfried was going to happen and then didn't. Ditto, Tannhauser. Don Alvaro, Achenbach, Captain Vere, perhaps above all Captain Vere (which he never sung)...
But we must be grateful for what we have. Which is a body of portrayals in opera that are unequalled in their intensity and come-hell-and-all dramatic commitment by any tenor in recorded history.
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