I heard Gerhaher at the Met in 2023 in Runnicles’ Tannhäuser, which happened to be Gerhaher’s Met debut. There was master-level pianissimo and incredibly fine dynamic shaping. At first it still felt slightly Lieder-like, but especially by the final act, once he really opened up the voice, that bronze-toned sound flooded the entire house. Extremely thrilling.
Of course, I already knew how extraordinary Gerhaher is in terms of timbre, intonation and diction, but the depth of anguish he brought to Amfortas this time went beyond anything I had heard from him before.
The shame felt physical. The wound could not be hidden. The suffering was not something thought into existence—it was the body suffering instinctively. The weight of every sentence in the text was pressed into the voice, while those long breaths seemed to carry an endless despair.
The qualities of Vogt (timbre) and Schager (sheer explosive vocal power) are irreplaceable, but after hearing that kind of singing often enough, I do get a little tired of it. Gerhaher, on the other hand—a singer coming from a Lieder background who then sings opera—becomes more and more interesting to me the more I hear him:
language > vocal display
psychological analysis > simply singing beautifully
Wagner singing does not ultimately succeed through sheer vocal size. It is language, musical intelligence and an understanding of character that finally make a singer convincing in the opera house.
Callas could change her timbre for a character, sacrifice a beautiful sound, alter her vibrato, change the way she pronounced words—she never insisted that the voice had to remain beautiful at all times.
(Gerhaher is already one of the absolute top singers in the world and he’s still willing to go completely nude onstage. Insane commitment 😂)