Tenor Jerry Hadley Funny Debut Story
JERRY HADLEY -- A THOUGHTFUL TENOR
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July 20, 1986
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One thing that makes the tragedy of Werther so heart-rending,'' explains Jerry Hadley, the tenor who will sing the title role in Massenet's work when the New York City Opera unveils its new production this Wednesday, ''is the fact that when the opera begins, Werther is enamored of everything in life. It seems, for that instant, that he's found all those things we all crave: He's one with nature, he's found the perfect partner, he's at peace inside, and he's bursting with enthusiasm. Then Charlotte tells him that she has made a vow to her dying mother that she would marry Albert. Werther respects her need to honor that vow, but because they must therefore deny their love for one another, we are watching Werther's decline - and in a sense, Charlotte's, too - for the rest of the opera.
''It's a role,'' he added in a between-rehearsals interview in a cafe near Lincoln Center, ''that really runs the gamut of emotions. If it has a weakness, it's that the libretto, like all condensations of literary works for the stage, necessarily limits the scope of the character. We see a lot of Werther's suffering, and except for his first scene, we don't really see that Romantic joie de vivre that's such an important part of him. There is a danger of falling victim to self-pity. But what I'm hoping we can manifest, in this production, is that decline from youthful exuberance to the real loathing of life of ends in Werther's suicide.''
Mr. Hadley has never sung Werther before, but he has clearly devoted a good deal of thought to the opera and to the character Goethe created in the novel on which it is based. That probing attention to detail and the evident enthusiasm he brings to the parts he undertakes, along with his technically secure, lyric voice and a flair for acting, have propelled this 34-year-old tenor from the Illinois farmlands along the path of a promising career. In recent seasons, his City Opera performances as Tom Rakewell in ''The Rake's Progress,'' the Chevalier Des Grieux in ''Manon,'' Nadir in ''The Pearl Fishers'' and the Duke in ''Rigoletto'' have frequently been singled out for critical praise. He has done equally well with other American companies and with several in Europe, including the Vienna State Opera, Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. Still ahead of him is his Metropolitan Opera debut, scheduled for the 1989-90 season.
He is not in a hurry to conquer the opera world, though. When Beverly Sills offered him a City Opera contract, after hearing him sing at the National Opera Institute auditions in 1978, he was splitting his time between regional opera singing and a couple of teaching jobs in Connecticut, and he harbored doubts about whether he was ready to sing in New York. And although he sensed that the City Opera contract was too good an opportunity to let slip by, he resolved early on to avoid what he calls the ''fatal mistake'' of taking on too much, too soon. Lately, in fact, he has been taking a second look at his repertory, and he has dropped a few roles in which he enjoyed early successes - among them Pinkerton in ''Madama Butterfly'' - and declined offers to sing other central tenor roles on the grounds that their vocal weight and coloration make him uncomfortable.
''To be perfectly honest,'' he says, ''I feel as though I'm just now learning how to sing. A lot of things are coming together for me, vocally, and although I know I can sing Pinkerton now with greater ease and greater artistic satisfaction than I did four years ago, I've come to the conclusion that to sing that kind of role simply because I can is not necessarily the right thing to do. And at the moment, there are other things that interest me more.
''I see myself, for the next decade, honing in on the French repertory, the Mozart operas and the bel canto works. I like to do the occasional 'Boheme,' and there are some Verdi roles I want to continue - the Duke, Fenton and Alfredo - as well as a few Russian roles. Within those parameters, there's a lot of variety. Perhaps I'll return to the heavier roles in my late 40's or 50's, if ever, when I'll feel ready to try them, and when, I hope, people will be willing to accept what I do with them. Right now, I would rather have people saying, 'He sings Werther beautifully; I bet he can sing Cavaradossi well,' than 'Why is he singing Cavaradossi when Des Grieux is much more natural for him?' ''
The prospect of becoming an opera singer didn't occur to Mr. Hadley until he was in college. He grew up on a 600-acre farm near Princeton, Ill. (his family later moved to Peoria), and had some fleeting early encounters with opera at the knee of a maternal great-grandfather from Italy. He was also fascinated by the brief performances by opera singers on the Ed Sullivan Show. ''But,'' he explains, ''I come from a part of the country where very few people had ever gone to the symphony, and fewer had heard an opera.'' In fact, his own musical interests veered toward popular music for a while. He taught himself to play the guitar, formed a band, and spent his evenings playing country music at Beulah's Tap, a truck stop where the proprietress dealt with rowdy patrons by banging them on the head with a cast-iron frying pan.
Mr. Hadley also had a bookish side, a passion for history books and old films that he retains to this day and which, he says, have at least a peripheral effect on his stage work. ''It's an elusive thing,'' he says, ''but recently, I did 'Anna Bolena,' and having spent a lot of time last winter reading about that period of English history, I had the feeling that, as a character, I had a backlog of experience. And the more I read about Hogarthian England, the more at home I feel with the ambiance of 'The Rake's Progress.' '' His interest in classic films has given him what he describes as ''a sense of style. My experience is that directors often pay a great deal of attention to 'method acting' - on playing the role as you feel it. Which is important. But as boring and workaday as this may sound, unless you have the technique to get from one side of the stage to the other with some kind of grace and fluidity, it doesn't matter what you feel, you're going to look funny.
''Now, I'm not saying that when you watch me you're seeing the Olivier of opera. But one thing I've become extremely aware of, in watching the great English actors, is that they focus so intensely on what they're saying that often what happens histrionically is just a natural extension of their concentration on the words. I've tried to learn from that. When I begin to rehearse a role, I try very little physically until I've figured out exactly where I'm going emotionally and musically. The physicalization will then grow out of my understanding of what I'm saying, why I'm saying it, and to whom I'm saying it. For me, that works a lot better than cluttering up the role with a lot of generalized movement.''
It was during his undergraduate years as a choral conducting student at Bradley University in Peoria that Mr. Hadley began to think about singing, and, inspired by a Luciano Pavarotti LP called ''Primo Tenore,'' he began taking voice lessons. A few years later, when he entered the University of Illinois, his notions of the operatic literature were still vague. But he auditioned for David Lloyd (then the director of the school's opera department, and now the director of the American Opera Center, at the Juilliard School), who cast him in an array of roles. ''When I think back at what I was singing,'' the tenor says of his school days, ''I shudder. You know, ignorance really is bliss: As a student, you have no idea how difficult what you're trying to do is - or how badly you're doing it. But I owe David Lloyd a lot for the opportunities he gave me. I don't think 10 days went by, during the three years I was there, when I didn't sing either an opera performance, a recital or a few songs on a concert program. So during those years, I made up for a lot of lost time. But what surprises me now is how many singers out there have similar stories to tell.''
In 1976, he made his professional debut in a Lake George Opera producion of ''Cosi Fan Tutte.'' And although his City Opera debut, three years later, was not particularly auspicious - he sang Arturo in ''Lucia di Lammermoor,'' and as he waited for the evening's Lucia to join him in the wedding scene, the plume of his hat grazed a candelabra and caught fire - things have clearly gone much better since then. ''When I came to City Opera,'' he says, ''I had heard all the horror stories about limited rehearsals and wholesale cast changes from one performance to the next. In fact, when I made my debut, I had only four hours of rehearsal, and had not walked on the set, tried on the costume, or sung with the other principals until the night of the performance. That was a harrowing experience.
''But overall, I think Beverly Sills has done a yeoman's job of trying to correct the company's problems. And I think that in some respects, the City Opera has taken a bad rap from many singers over the years. We get very pampered on the regional scene, where we're not under the same critical scrutiny as in New York, and where we're the only game in town for three weeks. Then we come back to a theater like City Opera, where there are five or six operas running in repertory, and where rehearsal space is limited and schedules have to be juggled to make it all work. That's bound to cause conflicts from time to time. But I wonder whether it's possible for an opera company to run like a well-oiled machine. I don't think that's the nature of the beast. And given those inherent problems, the rehearsal situation is ultimately a matter of attitude. If you expect to be spoon-fed, you're dead. If you go in having prepared as well as you can, and you do your best under the conditions, you're going to accomplish a lot more in less time.''
Mr. Hadley says he would like to limit his opera work to 40 or 50 performances a year ''which,'' he points out, ''is nearly one performance a week, and that's a lot of singing.'' He would also like to do more recitals (in which he is often accompanied by his wife, the pianist Cheryll Drake Hadley). ''The problem with recitals for an opera singer,'' he says, ''is that until you make a name for yourself as an opera singer, nobody's interested in hearing you in recital. And when you are known as an opera singer, no matter what you do, you're accused of singing lieder too operatically. Obviously, there are stylistic differences to keep in mind; but it's a pity that people think of the vocal world as divided into opera, recital and oratorio singers. In the old days, when singers gave recitals, they sang.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/20/arts/jerry-hadley-a-thoughtful-tenor.html
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