Håkan Hagegård made his operatic debut in 1968 as Papageno with the Stockholm Opera, and came to international attention when he reprised the role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Throughout his career, the great Swedish baritone appeared in the world’s top opera houses, singing roles including Don Giovanni, Scarpia, and Figaro. He also became one of the music world’s celebrated recitalists, and his love of art song led him to establish the Singers Studio in Stockholm. This month, Hagegård is in residence at San Francisco’s Lieder Alive, and on Sept. 8 at 6 p.m. he’ll employ his unique teaching methods in a public master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Joining him will be mezzo-sopranos Kindra Scharich, Jordan McClellan, and Kate Allen, and basses Kirk Eichelberger and Adam Lau, accompanied by pianist John Parr. Hagegård spoke to SFCV recently about his love for lieder, and his approach to teaching.
You’ll be giving a master class for Lieder Alive at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. What will it cover?
We call it Lieder in German, but in English it means art song. It’s mostly songs with piano, and it can be in any language. I’m now doing a website called SwedishSong.com, where I read about 3,000 poems that have been set to music. It’s a lot of text, if you take all the languages that have been set to music, especially with piano. That’s art song, and that’s what we’ll talk a lot about. You can talk about it in different ways — how to interpret the text and the music, how to communicate that with an audience, how to do things differently to make it more understood by a modern audience. Because we cannot perform things the way they were performed 100 or 200 years ago and expect young people today to understand it, we have to modernize a little. So that’s what I do with the students. Also, the philosophy behind why we perform: why does the audience need to hear songs? and what can the voice do to help them understand the text?
Looking at the program, these are all very fine singers, some at different stages, and all with different goals, issues, and voice types. How do you approach such a varied group?
I treat everyone equally. Young, old, experienced, it’s all the same to me. If they need to achieve more technique, that’s something they have to work on themselves. They might get insight into what they need from working with me, but I don’t treat them differently. Very often when I go to a concert, I hear someone who is not so experienced or advanced in voice, but is a fabulous performer. And I get very excited about that. Then, I can hear the most famous, developed star, and if there is something lacking in the communication, I will lose interest. So for me, I don’t go to listen to stars; I listen to performers. I tell my students that I actually don’t like singers, but I love performers! I don’t want them to lose themselves in becoming singers, or stars.
I treat everyone equally. Young, old, experienced, it’s all the same to me.
Do you think some training programs miss that? In general, what is useful for young singers to know in order to become performers?
When they are out of training and about to start their careers, I think the acting part of it is very important — that you know acting skills, theater technique, and that you know how to reach an audience. In order to be clear in your storytelling, you need to know yourself. You need to know who you are. It’s very important to have a life that forms your identity as a person, not only as a performer. Then it will be easier for you to handle the profession. There are a lot of things going on in this profession; it’s not just opening the mouth and letting the voice come out. It’s to know the right repertoire, to present it in a way that’s understood by the audience. That has to do with staging, with acting skill, with voice technique, interpretation, and research of the material you’re presenting.
That’s nothing new. But I think audiences of today are less familiar with art song than they used to be. In those days, when you listened to radio and read poems aloud to each other, it was easier. The Schubertiads in people’s homes were the venues for lieder singing. Now, for better or worse, you have to have bigger audiences, bigger halls, to make it financially OK. There you immediately lose a little of the intimacy of performing at home. If you’re lucky enough to have musicians at home, then you have very happy people. When I started out, I stood next to my mother; I was 12, 13 years old, and we read through all the Schubert and Schumann books. Not necessarily to perfect them, but it was a way of communicating, and of having fun.
That quality has always been evident in your San Francisco performances. I remember when you sang the Winterreise at Herbst Theatre — it was such an intimate, spiritual journey. Is it possible to teach that spiritual quality to young singers?
Absolutely. One important thing is to understand movement, and what lights can do. To not just leave that to a lighting director, but actually getting involved yourself, so you can use the lights onstage to create an intimate feeling. Today, you have to know a little more of these things yourself, because we are more and more dependent on the production that we make ourselves.
In the old days — take Germany, for example — you went to school and learned a couple of opera parts, and then you walked across the street and got a job at the theater. That’s not how it works today. Now it’s up to the artist to do their own act — to dream up artistic ideas and projects, and see that they happen. Which is a fun thing.
It gives me tremendous pleasure to see these young singers cry after the concert and say, “I actually did that.”
I see in my students that when they get these things, they get so happy. This is why I have formed the Singers Studio Sweden, which is [modeled] a little after the Actors Studio in New York. There I do master classes without a master. The singers try out their work — a song, a cycle, a theme — and the audience gives a response to this, in a positive way, to tell if they understand it, and to point out little things for the singer. The singer can listen to that, make adjustments, and try the piece again. They may do this for maybe an hour. I’m the moderator, without ever telling them what to do. At the end, the students come out with very strong self-confidence, saying, “I did this. This was my work.” It’s not about being told what to do. I believe that telling what to do can start a chain reaction that can actually lower their energy and make it more difficult to perform. So I’ve done this for about three years now, and it works very well.
Are today’s young singers pushed too hard: to look good, to do more, to have a wider range of repertoire?
Well, I certainly think they are pushed to sing loud and high, and look good onstage. I think presenting things has gone a little too far, which sometimes can backfire and make the audience wonder Is this about Schubert, or is it about your dress?
It also seems that many young singers have trouble scaling the voice down for recital.
Yes, and of course we know that you’re more likely to make your living out of opera singing than lieder singing, because recital series are being cancelled all over the world and there aren’t that many opportunities. But I think there is a way around this, and I believe it is possible to do both. But you need teachers and coaches who also believe it’s possible, so they are encouraged to believe in themselves’ being able to sing in a more lyric way. Self-confidence is the key word there — and technique, of course.
For you, why is it important to carry on this tradition and continue to teach the art of recital singing?
Well, I think it’s important, because in the smaller venues we will find new ways of performing, and new pieces to perform, to develop the art. To develop the art in big venues and opera houses is extremely expensive. So I think there’s more creativity in smaller venues, and the possibility for young singers to actually feel they are creating something is much greater in a smaller venue.
A few days ago, I did a concert at Tanglewood with seven singers, doing Swedish songs in Swedish, and a little minimalistic staging to it. When they came out after the concert, having done this with everything memorized, they all just went bananas. That gives me tremendous pleasure, to see these young singers cry after the concert and say, “I actually did that.” If I can encourage more singers to have that feeling, then I’m very happy. It’s not necessarily that I want them to do what I did, because it’s a different time and they might find other ways. We’re using online instruments, mobile phones, and computers for performing today, and they will find a lot more things coming up. But to see the joy in their eyes, and to see what they can do to the audience, then I know there is still a need in people to have that kind of intimate communication in our troubled world today — to show that there is a way for beauty, and there is a way for love.