The greatest challenge for every critic, bad critic, or music lover is to translate sound into the imperfect art of words. Talking about music is difficult because, as the philosopher Jankélévitch reminds us, it deals with the most ineffable thing in thought and expression, that which precisely cannot be spoken of, precisely that which is only explained by playing or singing. The aesthetician's job is especially tricky when one meditates on the human voice and the emotion that singing provokes, and this is how, when one tries to describe the sound that emerges from the vocal cords, we are forced to resort to unfortunate comparisons and describe a soprano's timbre as metallic or adjective a bass's depths as cavernous. The flaw is natural, since as children we know the voice, generally maternal, even before our little head discovers that it can communicate through phoneme, word, and syntax.
All this coffee-and-brandy metaphysics comes to mind because today La Punyalada is about a voice, my man's voice, the voice of the tenor who has accompanied me throughout my adult life and who turned 75 on the 5th. You will have read it in the newspapers and you already know the litany perfectly: Josep Carreras is, without a doubt, one of the top singers of the second half of the 20th century, a unique artist whom both the Gran Teatre del Liceu and all of Barcelona should honor and thank for his example of excellence, as well as his work in internationalizing the city and the country (as I write this article, the coliseum on La Rambla has not yet published a single tweet congratulating the singer nor has it announced any initiative to commemorate the tenor's time at the institution; no comment). All this is known by tutti quanti, it is prophecy and has much more importance than the horrifying star that crowns the Sagrada Familia.
The tenor's voice is one of the most curious artifices in musical history. In order to reach the natural notes in the female tessitura, tenors must strain almost their entire body, projecting the sound through the chest and facial mask, a task that requires the strength of a titan. For this reason, the virility of the sound itself, most music lovers have always adored the most robust and muscular voices that reached their acme during the 50s, such as Mario del Monaco or Franco Corelli, tenors who, during the rise of opera as a mass spectacle, were succeeded by Carreras' companions in the adventure of the three tenors; Pavarotti, with his Argentine high notes, and Domingo, who will surely go down in music history as the best tenor of the entire 20th century, precisely because of his prodigious ubiquity and the voracious spirit woven into the hundreds of roles he has interpreted with such solidity.
Carreras moves away from this prototype of the perfect and athletic singer, and that is why he is my tenor. I have always liked voices that adapt to human beings and also to the roles of the opera world, with all their flaws and fallibilities. At home, when it comes to gentlemen who sing, we have always been part of the club of Fritz Wunderlich with Mozart, Wolfgang Windgassen with Wagner and, obviously, Carreras in the Italian repertoire. Josep is a singer of effort, who always honestly manifests the energy that the music is demanding of him, and it is for this reason, for his human and imperfect character, that he can approach the suffering of Don José or Don Carlos with such veracity. Carreras has not been a great actor; on the contrary, on stage he has always tended to wander like a duck and resolve everything with the look of a clueless rogue. But it is precisely this that makes him approach theatrical artifice so radically.
Staged music is an almost surreal magic trick. Since its invention, by the grace of some wise men of the Bardi Camerata at the end of the 16th century (in imitation of Greek art, they considered that theater was projected by imposing the voice and singing the text), opera is the attempt to fuse all arts in a single space. This, beyond the megalomaniac will to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (with the egotistical zeal that Wagner always professed), has always fascinated me for its necessary imperfection. The artifice of opera, in this sense, attracts me as a perfect metaphor for the theater of the soul, of the most laughable aspect of the totalizing pretension of men and women when they make art. For this reason, as I told you before, I have been attracted to voices that have been woven semitone by semitone, the naked singing of artists who, through their throats, also show the limit of the effort involved in their work.
That's why I'm still thrilled to hear Josep Carreras's voice every day. I know my fellow critics will recommend his Cavaradossi or his unmatched version of Chénier. But I propose we travel to the corners of operatic art, far from arias and the big boom-boom. Run to Spotify and listen to Roméo et Juliette from the 82-3 season at the Liceu (yes, with Patricia Wise and Kurt Rydl). Minutes after the aria "O nuit divine!", Romeo bids farewell to Juliet. This is a fragment that often passes as a simple coda to the airy piece in question, but it is one of the measures of the repertoire that I adore the most. Gounod accompanies the tenor's voice as if he were singing a barcarole with which the enamored teenager intends to lull his beloved to sleep. Most tenors clumsily rush through it, thinking about how they will face the rest of the opera, and in most recordings, it happens without much fanfare.
Josep is a singer of effort, who always honestly manifests the energy that the music is demanding of him, and it is for this reason, for his human and imperfect character, that he can approach the suffering of Don José or Don Carlos with such veracity.But here we are talking about Carreras, my friends, the tenor of Karajan and Bernstein.Just as the motherfucker sings the first "Go! rest in peace" would be enough to kneel.Listen to the rest of the phrases; Josep says them as if he had been born in the very Place Saint-André-des-Arcs. Listen to our sublime tenor singing to Juliet as if he were kissing her ("A child's smile on your vermilion mouth"), filling the theater with waves even if he sings inmezzopiano, then pay attention to how the verse flattens "Gently come to rest!"; finally, as if he had just finished an angelic prayer, he tells Juliet that he loves her, perfectly supporting his voice on the R's, ("And still murmuring! I love you! in your ear, May the night breeze carry this kiss to you!") and prolonging this last buccal wish with a thread of a voice that makes you want to shit yourself. Listen to these three minutes of music, I beg you: what a singer!
Today La Punyalada celebrates that this voice, my favorite voice, has turned 75 and also, as time passes, that she has decided that soon she will hang up her vocal cords in Barcelona with a recital at Arc de Triomf. It would be worthwhile for the tribe to change its dreadful tradition of celebrating the glories of the homeland when they are already resting underground, and for this reason the City Council should give a street, a monument and if necessary an avenue to the artist who has done more than any administration and conselleria to export the country's art to the entire planet. While we're at it, let's do it right for once and celebrate our voice in life, which is also the most human voice. Per molts anys, mestre. I moltes gràcies per tot.