Renowned bass Ferruccio Furlanetto is known throughout the world for his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand, whether he is singing Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s King Philip II, or Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. He has a unique ability to blend music and text together by way of his rich voluminous sound, clear articulation, and expressive acting and physicality, thus creating larger-than-life characters that touch the hearts of all of those who see and hear him. Next month he will open the San Diego Opera season with his much-anticipated portrayal of Boris Godunov.
My first introduction to Furlanetto was when I watched his performance as Leporello in a taped production of Don Giovanni from the 1987 Salzburg Festival. His Leporello stole my heart, and I began watching every video and DVD I could find that featured my new favorite singer. I watched his portrayals of King Philip II in Don Carlo, Sparafucile in Rigoletto, Guglielmo in Così fan tutte and Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and in each instance I was amazed at the lush quality of his dark rich bass coupled with his dynamic characterizations.
Needless to say, when Furlanetto came to Los Angeles last September to perform for the first time in L.A. Opera’s production of Don Carlo, I jumped at the opportunity to interview him. He was extremely personable and accepted my invitation to talk in the tranquil surroundings of my home near Beverly Hills. We sat around my kitchen table for some very serious conversation about the progression of his career from Mozart to Verdi and Mussorgsky.
As the year commemorating Mozart’s 250th birthday comes to a close, so marks Furlanetto’s continued resolve to refrain from singing the physically demanding Mozart roles in fully staged productions, with the exception of maybe Giovanni—although he says he still plans to sing the roles in concerts and recordings.
“Mozart was a big part of my artistic life in my 30s and early 40s,” he adds with a charming Italian accent. “When you are a young man, then you should be a Giovanni, Figaro, Leporello, or whatever. The roles go together with the elasticity of your body, your jumping attitudes, and your physicality. Then comes a time in your life when these kinds of things which before were giving you extreme happiness become physical fatigue, and at that moment you start to love less and less these roles.”
Furlanetto sang Leporello in a concert version last spring. “I sang him in Vienna after at least four years since my last Don Giovanni, and I was surprised that everything was so easy, so beautiful, so fantastic. I never had that vocal easiness before, so that is proof that the unhappiness is purely linked to the staging of the character,” he says. “Vocally, the voice is more mature and bigger now. You realize that Mozart roles don’t need that kind of weight, and you don’t want to get rid of that weight because it is so beautiful in other roles. Therefore I decided to go back to my original repertoire, the Verdis, and to open myself up to the Russian repertoire.”
The Beginning
Furlanetto, 57, became aware of his voice when he was very young. “You grow up with the knowledge of having a voice with a range that is different from normality,” he tells me. “That was the second half of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s. It was the best time for pop music. Every day there was a release of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or this or that. I had a group. I was playing guitar so I was totally involved with pop music. I also did some professional singing because I was recording with CBS, and I was on TV programs a few times, but I never really liked the ambiance of professional pop. There were already drugs going around, promiscuity, the things that were not right for a kid coming from a country with a very healthy education. So I just forgot pop music and continued my studies, which included ancient Greek, Latin, philosophy, Italian, literature, science, mathematics, and forestry because I had a strong passion and love for nature. Such subjects open up the mind to different possibilities.
“My great-grandfather was teaching me opera,” he recalls. “When I was a kid, I never had what you would call a soprano voice or white voice. I had the voice of a light tenor, and so I was singing just to please him and to please myself because I loved to sing. I couldn’t have cared less about opera though because I thought that it was something for my great-grandfather rather than for a young boy.”
Furlanetto was a tenor until the age of 13. “Then my voice changed, and I became a bass,” he remembers. His aunt, who possessed a nice operatic voice but never cultivated a career, sent him a score and a recording of bass arias, with the suggestion that he consider studying opera. He learned an aria from Simon Boccanegra and went to Mantua to be heard by the famous voice teacher Ettore Campogalliani, who had taught Renata Scotto, Mirella Freni, and Luciano Pavarotti.
“This guy didn’t want to listen to the ‘Boccanegra’ aria,” says Furlanetto. “He just sat [at] the piano and said, ‘Let’s vocalize to understand what kind of voice you have.’”
Furlanetto started studying with Campogalliani three times a week. It was a long trip for him because he lived in the northeastern part of Italy in Friuli, but he wanted to learn.
“Campogalliani had a voice like a crow, but he was a sensational pianist and a man of huge culture,” Furlanetto says. “His breathing technique was to inhale fast and release slow, or vice versa, to inhale fast and throw it out fast. But the important mark of Campogalliani was what we call ‘la linea di canto’ or ‘the line of singing,’ which is what makes a beautiful phrase have a beginning, a development, and a very healthy end. … It should be like a cello, which makes what we call ‘noble singing.’”
After a year of lessons, Furlanetto won some competition prizes, and a half year later he was singing Sparafucile in a small theater next to Vicenza. He was then engaged to sing Prince de Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur with Montserrat Caballé and José Carreras in Trieste. When he arrived for rehearsals, however, Caballé wasn’t there, and the opera was changed to La bohème. He didn’t know La bohème and panicked because he didn’t want to lose the opportunity. A pianist there came to his rescue and worked with him. After just seven and a half hours of study, he had learned the role of Colline by heart.
For the first four years of his career, he sang in Italy. “I was doing minor roles as a young bass, which is good because you don’t get exposed to the public attention in roles that are too big for your age and for your experience, and at the same time you can build experience which will allow you to face bigger roles ahead in your career,” he says.
Although he started with Verdi and real Italian bass roles, his idol became Cesare Siepi. “Cesare Siepi had the most beautiful Italian [bass] voice—this cantábile that was sensational—and he was singing a lot of Mozart,” Furlanetto remembers. “So I decided I wanted to go in that direction and started to study Giovanni and Figaro because I wanted to have a career in the direction of Cesare Siepi.” Then Furlanetto won a competition where the prize was to play Don Giovanni in Treviso, which led to additional Giovannis in Torino and other cities.
Although bass-baritones and baritones often sing the roles of Figaro and Giovanni, Furlanetto insists he never intentionally lightens his voice. “It’s like in golf. If you want to have a trajectory of the ball, you need to change clubs not your strength, and it’s the same thing with the voice. … Because you want to preserve your voice in a tessitura, in a range that is maybe not ideal for a bass, then you might just sing in a higher position without touching your chest. You do this unconsciously at a certain level,” he explains. “The sound that will come out from this throat will always be the voice of a bass.
“Mozart must be sung from a singer with the most natural vocality without any constriction, without thinking that as a bass, when he comes to an E-flat he has to cover it,” Furlanetto continues. “In Mozart, you have to use the voice in the most natural way. You have to use the words, and if you sing things very clearly, you don’t have time to go deep. The word is as important as the music. The technique of using words applies to Verdi and Mussorgsky as well, but for those composers, you have space for another way of creating sound. The word is the most important vehicle to reach somebody’s heart.”
Furlanetto began his international career in 1978 in New Orleans, then San Francisco and New York. He has been singing at La Scala since 1979 and debuted at the Wiener Staatsoper in 1985.
On Directors
Furlanetto attributes much of his success to the knowledge he acquired from some great stage and film directors of the past, including Franco Zeffirelli, Luchino Visconti, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and the extraordinary conductor-director Herbert von Karajan.
In 1986 and ’87, Karajan was responsible for the music and stage direction when Furlanetto sang King Philip II and Leporello in Salzburg. “Just being part of the Karajan clan was enormous for me,” Furlanetto says, “because just being touched by Karajan put your name in the world. He really belonged to another planet in comparison to all the others. He was so charismatic. He really was a god. In Giovanni rehearsals, he worked with us on recitatives because he wanted us to become the character. I remember going to his dressing room a few minutes before the performance of Don Carlo where we were about to have world telecasts and everything that was possible then. He said to me, ‘Since there is a camera and there is a movie, remember not to look at me. Just maybe cheat. In the aria [‘Ella giammai m’amò’], you sing it as you can sing and we will accompany you.’
“Nobody will do that [today],” declares Furlanetto. “They will tell you, ‘Remember to follow me’ instead.”
Another great influence on his career was Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. “You have to be born with the acting capability in your genes, and then you need to find at the beginning of your career somebody who realizes that you have this possibility to draw it out, and I had this with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle,” he discloses.
Directors also taught Furlanetto the importance of his hands in creating characterizations. As King Philip in Los Angeles Opera’s Don Carlo, when he raised his hand or even a finger, the movement was somehow visible to the entire audience and seemed to make a statement. “I learned that with the minimum movement of one hand at the right moment, like the flick of a wrist, if you do it in a moment of perfect stillness, you can make something happen that is big like a palace,” he says.
He is somewhat disturbed by the lack of quality stage directors who direct opera today. “Of the living ones, I can say that I really adore Patrice Chéreau, with whom I did a gorgeous Don Giovanni in Salzburg ten years ago,” he confides. “What is happening today is that you find yourself [wanting] to teach a director what he should do. Ninety-nine percent of them are coming from theater. They do not know music or singing. They do not use the score because they cannot read the score. They might ask you to do something during a particular phrase that you cannot do. Maybe you could do it in the bar before or after. … They give you the blocking and the concept that they have of the piece, but 99 percent of the time, the concept is wrong because it goes against the text and music.
“Patrice was different [when I worked with him]. Patrice had a close artistic relationship with [conductor] Daniel Barenboim. They sat together for hours and days and Patrice would ask, ‘Can I do this and this at this moment?’ And Barenboim would say, ‘Yes’ then ‘No.’ Patrice knew what he was doing even though he wasn’t a musician.”
A seasoned performer, Furlanetto doesn’t need much concept help. “I know exactly how I want to do my Philip or my Boris,” he says. “What I do is just to move around the new set, the new situation that the director has created, and in a polite way, I always find a way to be faithful to my concept of the role.”
Today’s directors give the singers with the most experience the greatest freedom, explains Furlanetto, and often don’t give the younger singers enough direction. “I try to help my [less experienced] colleagues, because somebody has to do it.”
On Boris
He is looking forward to working with Lotfi Mansouri, who is directing him in San Diego Opera’s Boris Godunov next month. “He [Mansouri] is somebody that belongs in the world of opera,” Furlanetto says. “We did Don Carlo in San Diego and ‘Gioconda’ in San Francisco together. I enjoy working with him because I find myself with a professional.”
Boris is not a new role for Furlanetto, and he is well prepared. He sang Boris for the first time in Rome in 1999, at La Scala in 2002, under the baton of Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 2003, and in Florence at the Maggio Musicale in 2005. He is singing the original 1869 Mussorgsky version of “Boris” in San Diego, and the longer revised version at the Wiener Staatsoper in Vienna in May and June.
He learned the shorter version in the late 1990s in New York when he was singing at the Met. A Russian-language teacher came to his home for four months, and at the end of that time, he’d memorized both the score and the libretto. “I do not have an accent in Russian. I would have never done Boris if the pronunciation would not have been good enough,” he says. It was helpful that he had already become familiar with the language in 1991 when he was preparing for a Russian Lieder recital with pianist Alexis Weissenberg, a recital which he still performs today.
Then on the Nov. 24, 1999, ten days before rehearsals were supposed to begin in Rome, the conductor backed out, and the new conductor and director decided to stage the longer version with the addition of the Marina character. “It’s at least 30 [percent] to 40 percent more than the first version in music and text,” Furlanetto says. “I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t want to lose the opportunity, so I studied for a week an average of sixteen hours a day. When I went to Rome for the first rehearsal, I was ready.
“I was the first Italian to play Boris in Russia. It was extremely thrilling to be in front of a Russian audience that was so enthusiastic,” he recounts reminiscently. “We had a dress rehearsal the day before the opening, and at the end of the rehearsal, the Russian chorus and orchestra of the Mariinsky stood up and applauded, and this was really touching. When you go to Russia, you realize that when this audience is listening to ‘Boris,’ it is their life and their history they are seeing. It’s such an amazing feeling. It’s difficult to describe.
“Playing Boris is a universe for a singing actor because the voice is important, but then you need to create this character with the incredible beauty of the Russian soul,” he continues. “Boris is a mystery character. There are so many questions.”
The real Boris became the czar of Russia after Dmitri, the rightful successor to the throne, was mysteriously murdered in 1591. Many believed that Boris was responsible for his death, but according to the 13th edition of The Victor Book of the Opera, scholars in the twentieth century acquitted Boris of the deed. In the opera, when Grigory (Dmitri’s pretender) arrives on the scene, Boris lapses into insanity and subsequently dies. The hallucination monologue in Scene 5 and the death scene in Scene 7 of the original version are among the most dramatic in all of opera, and Furlanetto relishes the opportunity to perform them.
Furlanetto has a unique relationship with San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell and loves to spend time in San Diego. “It’s like a family there,” he says.
The two met in 1983 when Campbell was assistant artistic administrator at the Met and Furlanetto was singing Alvise in La gioconda. Then when Campbell became general director of San Diego Opera, he cast Furlanetto as the lead in the company’s 1985 production of Verdi’s Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio. Since then Furlanetto has sung Giovanni and Gounod’s Méphistophélès there twice, as well as King Philip II and Rossini’s Don Basilio.
Something else also ties Campbell and Furlanetto together—their love for a good game of golf. “Recently I was in Europe and received a call at the hotel from Ferruccio,” said Campbell by telephone. “He was not in the same city as I immediately thought, but was calling from the U.S. to say that he had just finished playing Augusta twice. Now that’s a true golfing friend.
“He is an honest and direct man, an artistic colleague who seeks the highest standards all the time, a true collaborator, and a man who can be relied upon,” continued Campbell. “The only thing I ever worry about is his driving. I will never forget a flight—for that is what it seemed like—from Venice to his hilltop village during which my knuckles assumed a whiteness I had never before seen, and my anxious feet just about pushed through the firewall of the car. He drives a ball long and a car fast.”
Furlanetto has three homes, which he shares with his wife and son: one in Italy, one in Vienna, and one in Florida. He considers his base to be Vienna though, since he sings a few months out of every year at the Wiener Staatsoper and has performed regularly at the Salzburg Festivals since the mid-1980s. When he told Ioan Holender, the director of the Wiener Staatsoper, that he would love to sing Boris there, he waited but never received an answer, so he asked again. Still no response. Shortly after he was awarded the highest honor that the German and Austrian governments bestow upon their artists, the title of Kammersänger. At the presentation ceremony in the Staatsoper, he finally heard Holender’s response. “I am very happy to announce that we will do a new ‘Boris’ production,” said Holender according to Furlanetto, “because in these years, I have learned that when Furlanetto asks twice to do something, you have to do it.” And that is the production in which Furlanetto will perform this May and June.
Furlanetto, cognizant of the world situation, has given concerts to raise money for the people fleeing from Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and he gives humanitarian concerts with conductor Riccardo Muti “to unify people and bring populations together who are not close anymore,” he explains. Toward that end, he has given Verdi concerts in Yerevan and Istanbul, and last July he performed with Maestro Muti, Piero Monti, Barbara Frittoli, and Sonia Ganassi in Morocco. He was named honorary ambassador to the United Nations with Montserrat Caballé and Alexis Weissenberg in Nantes, France.
Advice to Young Singers
Furlanetto is very interested in helping young singers realize their goals. “The profession is always hard at the beginning because you never know what will be the result of your career. It’s a big jump in the dark, but it could be rewarding. You must give it a try,” he advises. “If you don’t, you will always have this anguish inside wondering what would have happened if you had done it.
“To a young singer, if you do the Italian repertoire and are not Italian, I would recommend that you learn the language extremely well and try through text and music to live the characters in your soul and under your skin. You have to really suffer to live the characters, and you can only do so if the language allows you to do it,” he offers. “You need to be able to understand details and the possibility of double meanings in words. Only with this knowledge can you paint a character through music, words, and acting.
“You need to be a professional with good health and technique, good music preparation, and good stage preparation. You need to know how to use your voice and body, and then when you have all of these things, you need to be at the right place at the right moment so that luck can take its course.”
As for being in the right place, that’s a tough one. “In Italy, we have fourteen theaters with their own productions and money from the state doing a full season, and some private funding is just beginning. There are twenty or more smaller theaters as well,” he says.
In contrast, theaters in America survive mostly from private donations and therefore stage fewer productions. But according to Furlanetto, more young singers go to Germany than to Italy to begin their careers because Germany has state theaters that stage performances almost every day of the year except for holidays and in July. “They [the state theaters] need to have stable companies,” he says, “so they tend to hire people from other countries, offering them a monthly salary and maybe expenses. They can work and stay in a place to develop experience, but the risk is that they are compelled to do everything—Verdi, Rossini and modern pieces—and the modern operas are very dangerous because they are terribly written for the voice. In Italy we do not have this.”
So what is the alternative? Furlanetto didn’t address the Young Artist Programs in the United States. He did say, however, that singing in Vienna is preferred over a fixed contract in Germany, and that there are opportunities in France, England, Austria and Spain.
As for the 2006-07 season, in between his Boris Godunovs in San Diego and Vienna, he will sing Fiesco in Simon Boccanegra at the Met and Wiener Staatsoper, and Cardinal Brogni in La Juive at L’Opéra National de Paris. In 2009, he is set to sing the title role in Massenet’s Don Quichotte in San Diego. He hopes to return to Los Angeles Opera soon, and he is looking forward to many more King Philips around the world.
Furlanetto makes his American debut as Boris Godunov with San Diego Opera on Jan. 27 and 30, Feb. 2 and 4.
