“I was very drawn to the adventure with Wagner”

The famous Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth showed this year the new Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Valentin Schwarz and musically directed by Cornelius Meister. The part of the supreme god Wotan is performed by the Polish bass Tomasz Konechny. Possessor of a powerful voice of thick dark timbre Tomasz Konieczny told Vladimir Dudin about victories and defeats, about the pandemic apocalypse and why Wagner should not be growled.

— What is it like for the Polish bass to be in the role of the supreme god of the German-Scandinavian mythology, and even on the Bayreuth stage?

– On the one hand, I am not German, not Icelander, not Swede, my cultural background is completely different. But this does not prevent me from admiring the same German mythology, and German culture – bookish and artistic – has always impressed me. And I was very drawn to the adventure with Wagner, his operas are limitless material, within which you can create entire worlds. Nevertheless, at the beginning of my career, I did not sing Wagner at all, and I did not speak German either. It wasn’t until I came to Dresden for vocal studies and then started working at the Leipzig Opera that German became my second language. Today, young people have more opportunities: there are opera academies in London, New York, Paris, Zurich, and Munich. In my time, this was not the case, we did not know about such people – it was unprofitable for our Polish professors to let us go abroad. It was a time, of course, already after the political shifts in the 1990s, but we were still cut off from the world. I chose a country neighboring Poland, because I met a vocal teacher from there – Professor Christian Elsner, who invited me to Dresden. And in the fourth year of my stay in Germany, when I ended up on the staff of the theater in Lübeck, where I sang the main Italian parts, I was offered a tour in Ireland and England with the parts of Fasolt and Gunther in Der Ring des Nibelungen – these were my first Wagner works. . I then went to all the orchestral rehearsals and eagerly listened to them with the clavier of the “Ring” in my hands, in order to understand what Wagner wrote about there. And I fell in love with this literature as a musician, as an aspiring actor and director – this tetralogy has a huge dramatic potential.

– And what exactly helped you take off from those samples to the big and stellar Wagner works, in your opinion?

– There was no instant take-off, I didn’t get to the top right away – everything happened gradually during my long years at the Vienna Opera. But it is very difficult to hold on to these positions, I assure you. You always have to endure and experience some kind of defeat. And yet I love everything I do on stage – without constant development there is no real excitement, no real pleasure.

— But you were lucky in the sense that you started your career with one of the best conductors of our time — Franz Welser-Möst.

— Yes, and there are several other conductors who helped me a lot in my development. Franz Welser-Möst was the artistic director of the Vienna Opera when I started working there, and I prepared my first Viennese Der Ring des Nibelungen with him. He also helped me when I first performed at the Salzburg Festival. Speaking of the German repertoire, I must also mention Christian Thielemann, with whom I have done four projects, and Adam Fischer, to whom I am most grateful. It was with him in Mannheim that I went through the science of all my German games. But, fortunately for us, new conductors are also appearing – the younger generation, which has something to say. The same Cornelius Meister, who conducts The Ring this season in Bayreuth, feels this music very keenly, and this is extremely important for the production, in which director Valentin Schwartz resolutely opens the doors of myth into modernity.

— What, in your opinion, is happening with the Bayreuth Festival in general?

— When I performed in Bayreuth a few years ago, I had the impression that the festival was, how shall I put it, brewing in its own juice. This is not about the artistic and musical level – it is generally very high there, but about a somewhat, in my opinion, erroneous understanding of the significance of this place in the context of world culture. At the same time, I did not cease to admire this absolutely magical theater, of course. But today, the changes are very tangible, especially after the pandemic restrictions: everything is seething, everyone wants a real life.

– There is a widespread idea that a real Wagnerian voice is necessarily beaten. This is true?

— For many years I have been trying to dispel the myth that Wagner needs to growl and that you can lose your voice in his operas. In fact, the voice can be lost in any other case, if it is used incorrectly. And Wagner actually sometimes even needs to be sung quietly. Wotan’s monologue from “Valkyrie” gives the impression of melore-reading, somewhere in a whisper, somewhere in an undertone. If you do not realize that Wagner created and cultivated a great, real theater, and not some tortured and pathos-monumental one, it is better not to take on his music. To perform Wagner, you need to have theatrical temperament, passion, hypersensitivity. This is the most important thing in Wagner’s later, and partly in his early, works.

– But still, being a Wagnerian specialist is not a narrowing of possibilities, including vocal ones? How do you perceive your own voice?

“I keep looking for him, it’s an endless process. I am faithful to the principle that Professor Elsner instilled in me at one time: “Try different arias, look for a voice in different directions.” Yes, it’s not so easy when you are kept mainly by the Wagnerian repertoire. My voice is definitely strong, with a lot of metal, probably heroic, not lyrical. He is ready for loads – it is not for nothing that German music lends itself to him. But I know that it can be very characteristic, but ultimately still pleasant to the ear. And so I want to develop further, look for other colors, shades. I have already sung Wozzeck in Chicago, I am attracted by the parts of Macbeth, the Marquis di Posa, Iago, Scarpia. Thank God there are many opportunities.

– You recently released a disc called “Apocalypse”. Did it take time?

“For me, the pandemic was a terrible time. Sometimes I wanted to howl from pain, from the inability to go on stage. During this period, my mother died. These two circumstances became the reason for the “apocalyptic” disc. It included Mahler’s “Songs about Dead Children”, which I have been singing for many years and which seemed to me the perfect composition for such an occasion, and three poems by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, which I dreamed of setting to music from a young age. I found the wonderful composer Alexander Novak, who was very enthusiastic about this idea. Then I got in the way of the outstanding multimedia artist Adam Dudka, who designed the booklet of the disc, where the shirt of the deceased is depicted on the cover. You know, almost every one of us had to clean up his apartment after the death of someone close. I also had a hard experience after my mother left. Now, unfortunately, we have to think about the Apocalypse in connection with today’s events, but I really hope that someone will stop this absolute madness and mass extermination of people. Opera was, is and will be needed by people both before and after this unjust, fratricidal war.