INTERVIEW Tenor Christopher Ventris shares his passion for Wagner operas, 'Wagner Gala' concerts in Seoul

By Anna J. Park

• Published Jun 6, 2019 9:09 AM KST
• Updated Jul 10, 2019 9:52 PM KST

By Anna J. Park

The Korea National Opera will present a “Wagner Gala” at the Opera Theater, Seoul Arts Center, this weekend and showcase two acts, one each from two of the German composer's most celebrated operas.

Act 1 of “The Valkyrie” (Die Walkure), the second installment of Wagner's “Ring Cycle,” or “The Ring of the Nibelung,” and Act 3 of “Parsifal,” Wagner's last opera, will be performed.

Aiming to bring out the grand and imposing Wagner sound to the fullest for Korean audiences, an orchestra featuring over a hundred musicians will accompany the two acts that will be performed as concert pieces.

Some of the world's most acclaimed and finest Wagner specialists have gathered in Seoul to prepare the two concerts. Under the baton of maestro Lothar Zagrosek, tenor Christopher Ventris, bass Youn Kwang-chul and soprano Emily Magee will sing at the Wagner gala concert. The three have often been invited to perform at the Bayreuth Festival, the annual festival that's regarded as a shrine to Wagner in Germany.

During an interview with The Korea Times earlier this week, British tenor Christopher Ventris shared his passion and love for Wagner's works, and his anticipation for the gala concert in Seoul over the weekend. It is his second time performing Wagner in Korea, following his first performance in the Korea premier of “Parsifal” in 2013.

“It's going to be a wonderful evening, with two fantastic acts of Wagner operas. In this performance, you will see the highlights of the two great operas. Just one hour of The Valkyrie, and one hour and ten-minutes of Parsifal. A lot of stories are told, and it's very approachable. Act 1 of The Valkyrie is orchestral and a vocal rush of energy, excitement and drama; Act 3 of Parsifal is nice, calming and more relaxing, winding down a sort of end to the evening. The balance of the evening is well composed,” Ventris explained.

“Act 1 of The Valkyrie is famous for the duet. There's a lot of storytelling, but there's wonderful emotional outbursts of two characters who discover each other brother and sister having been separated as children. So there's this real passionate love story that occurs, and music explains very well this great theatrical drama,” he added.

“Parsifal is another journey story. We join at Act 3 when Parsifal has come back to the scene after maybe twenty years. And again, there's a lot of explanation, but also there's very ethereal, beautiful music of understanding. It's a complete contrast to The Valkyrie, and that's a great thing of this program. We have very much emotional outburst of love and drama in Act 1 in The Valkyrie. And then Act 3 of Parsifal; it is a little more relaxed and dramatically, it explains the understanding of human nature, and it sort of brings the evening to a circle. It is very well chosen program that we have this big, high drama and then very much the growth and development of human nature that takes us to the end of Parsifal.”

For opera novices, it is not always easy to approach Wagner operas, as they are usually very long, detailed, and complex. Ventris admitted that Wagner operas could be quite demanding for audiences to absorb all the information at first, but there are so many great musical qualities that make Wagner unique and special in music history.

“I just think, the complexity and the detail, and depth of the storytelling and the quality of musicality, the way it's written, it's unlike any other music, really. It's the culmination of all the history of music that Wagner had listened to. He pushed the boundaries himself, and he created his own sound, very much the Wagner sound. It's just different to almost all other composers ever,” he said.

What's also distinctive about Wagner operas is that the German composer wrote the lyrics of the operas himself.

“See, Puccini and Mozart had wonderful poets to write their text, but Wagner wrote every word for all his operas and the music. It's absolutely incredible. As a human being, whatever he was, but as a musician, it's absolutely, astounding. It's really a life's work to write what he did,” Ventris explained.

Wagner's operas are based on myths and medieval stories, with many layers of interpretations. Ventris, who has been singing them for some decades now, said the librettos of the operas use some unique German vowel and consonant sounds, to create more meaning in the works.

“Wagner text is so expressive and clever, he really writes from human emotion and from a lot of theories and thought behind his German. And a lot of it is Wagner German. There are some German words that Germans don't use. It's just Wagner German he likes. In some of the construction of vowels, he likes us to have a little difficulty in making the word; we have to work hard in making the sound. It gives the words a lot of interest and a lot of drama,”

The seasoned tenor pointed out that Wagner's operas are constructed very differently to famous Italian repertoires, requiring a different set of vocal strengths and qualities from singers.

“If you listen to Italian opera, everyone is waiting for the big high notes; all the end of arias have wonderful big high notes. In Wagner, there's occasional high notes, but a lot of it lies in the high chest register, which is a different emotion. It's not so explosive. Wagner is centered around a high-chest voice, which physically and vocally gives a different intensity. I think Wagner tries to enhance talk and dialogue through his music, rather than just explosive high notes of emotion,” Ventris said.

Ventris also suggested the Korean audiences enjoy interpreting Wagner operas' universal mythical themes, such as journey, growth, destiny and rebirth.

The Korea National Opera's “Wagner Gala” will be held at four p.m. on the afternoons of Saturday and Sunday at the Opera Theater, Seoul Arts Center in southern Seoul.