Jane Eaglen has become one of the foremost Wagnerian sopranos of our time—the Isolde and Brünnhilde of choice in most of the world’s opera houses in the early part of the 21st century. She has sung around the world, though Seattle is her home base and where she prefers to live.
Eaglen was born in Lincoln, England. She began studying piano at the age of 5 and wanted a career in music. During her final year of high school, her piano teacher suggested she take singing lessons and she subsequently entered the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester as a vocal student. She decided very early that she wanted to specialize in the Wagnerian repertory.
Eaglen began singing professionally with the English National Opera in London in 1984. Since her voice had the flexibility for coloratura, she sang roles in Gilbert and Sullivan, and Bel Canto roles in operas by Rossini and Donizetti—but the music she wanted most to sing was Wagner’s. By the middle of the 1990s, she was singing her favorite roles, Norma and Brünnhilde. She sang the role of Norma at the Seattle Opera in 1994 with great success, and sang the role at other opera houses as well, including the Met.
Eaglen first sang Brünnhilde in a complete “Ring” cycle at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1996, to very positive reviews. The next year she sang Brünnhilde in the “Ring” in Vienna, also to great acclaim. In 2000, she sang the same role in the “Ring” cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, then again in the spring of 2004.
Earlier, in 1998, she sang Isolde at the Seattle Opera, with Ben Heppner as Tristan, and in 1999, they sang these roles at the Met. Eaglen has specialized in the most difficult of the Wagnerian soprano roles, Brünnhilde and Isolde, and sung them with apparent ease and singular success at opera houses around the world. I spoke with her about her insights into the Wagnerian soprano repertory.
Tell me how your career developed and how you became interested in singing Wagnerian opera.
The first time I heard Wagner, as a teenager, I immediately liked the music. I began by studying the piano, and thought I might have a career as a pianist or conductor. I was attending the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and I began studying voice with Joseph Ward—and I am still studying with him, by the way.
Is he the one who said you should consider singing rather than piano playing as a career?
Yes. I was only l7 years old at the time, but he heard me sing and immediately said that I would one day sing Brünnhilde and Norma.
It must have been a large voice even back then.
Actually, it was not a large voice back then, but he heard some quality in my voice that told him I had the potential of being a Wagnerian soprano. He was a wonderful voice teacher for me and made my career possible. When I first heard Wagner, I was bowled over by the use of the orchestra—this was clearly symphonic music rather than regular operatic music—but then I noticed his use of the voice and his dramatic characterization, and I became hooked.
Why were you drawn to sing Brünnhilde?
I love her character—I love both her music and her personality. I see her as an exuberant teenager in the beginning who is very smart and fearless, but gradually, she learns fear. She enters life with a lot of enthusiasm but gradually comes to wisdom over the course of the three operas she appears in. She is a big fun girl—like me. Every time I sing her I find something new in her character that makes her appear interesting and lifelike in a new way.
Who is the most important man in her life?
Wotan is the most important man in her life. She is the hero Wotan is looking for during his monologue in Act II of Die Walküre. Wotan says he is looking for a hero, but he does not know that the hero is sitting right next to him.
What about Siegfried?
Siegfried is very important too, because he is her destiny, and through him she becomes a real human being.
Does she love him?
Yes, she does, which explains her fury when she sees him about to marry another woman in Götterdämmerung. Siegmund is also important to her. During the second act of “Walküre,” she does not understand why he does not want to go to Valhalla with her but instead wants to stay with that sleeping woman, Sieglinde.
Yes, during the Todesverkundigungmusik, she tells him of his own death and that he must leave the earth, and leave Sieglinde to come to Valhalla.
Brünnhilde learns from him something about the power of love. From his son, Siegfried, she learns about the sexual side of love and what being a human being really means. As a goddess, she could never know this.
When Wotan takes away her godhood at the end of Die Walküre, he is actually doing her a real service, since by then he concludes that the gods are all doomed to death.
And when Brünnhilde is with her sister, Waltraute, in the first act of Götterdämmerung, she is mirroring her old self in the second act of Die Walküre, because Waltraute can not understand why Brünnhilde is unwilling to give up the ring for some mere mortal. Brünnhilde explains to her uncomprehending sister something of the nature and power of love itself.
Why does Brünnhilde commit suicide? The “Ring” cycle ends with her suicide right after she sings the Immolation scene.
She doesn’t have a choice really. This is her destiny. She was wrong to plot Siegfried’s murder and she knows that the ring must be returned to the Rhine and the Rhine-maidens.
Is her suicide an attempt to reconnect with Wotan?
Well, she does sing most of the Immolation scene to her father, Wotan. But now her life’s work is done and she wants to reconnect with both Wotan and Siegfried in some way—though there is no clear indication of a belief in an afterlife in the “Ring”.
Her love of Siegfried also contains some hatred, which we see most fully in Götterdämmerung.
That is part of her impetuous nature. Love and hate are different sides of the same coin and part of the complex nature of the human experience of love.
Long before Sigmund Freud, Wagner presents the paradoxical nature of love in the “Ring.” Aside from the dramatic challenges, what are the vocal challenges in the role of Brünnhilde?
All three Brünnhildes are in a way different in the three operas of the Ring she appears in. In Die Walküre it is a low role, except for her opening war cries of course. The Siegfried Brünnhilde is higher but shorter, and I find that the most difficult of the three. She must lie down on an often dirty, dusty set and there is no chance to warm up. I would rather sing five hours in the other Wagner operas, but the love music for Brünnhilde at the end of Siegfried is so glorious. She has lost her godhead and she is about to lose her maidenhead, so she is naturally afraid, but also joyful and excited.
The Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde is longer, but I do not find it as difficult to sing, and the changing nature of her character makes all three roles terrific. I used to sing Turandot, but have given it up, since I find the character not interesting enough.
Well, she only has one opera after all! Brünnhilde has the whole “Ring” cycle to develop and change. I find it interesting that she threatens suicide in the last act of Die Walküre—and of course, the “Ring” ends with her suicide.
She is very impulsive and she is very human, but suicide is a ploy and a threat to get what she wants from her father. She is a very rounded character—Turandot seems so one-dimensional in comparison. Wagner certainly knew how to create interesting roles for women. For a man, he certainly understood how woman change and develop, and what they are really interested in. As an opera composer he is absolutely the best—on both the dramatic and musical levels.
Some feminist critics have argued that Wagner actually was interested in torturing women. I have read that the new “Ring” cycle at the English National Opera in London in 2004 emphasized this misogynist approach. Would you agree with this view of Wagner?
Frankly, I find that point of view rather silly. Wagner’s women don’t just take poison at the end—as in some operas I could mention—but instead they initiate the action. Sieglinde, too, initiates much of the action in the “Ring”.
Are you tempted to sing Sieglinde?
I do not find her as interesting as Brünnhilde, frankly. She moans too much and is not as interesting and complicated.
But she appears in only one of the four operas. Only Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Alberich appear in three of the “Ring” operas.
Yes, and both women are active rather than passive characters.
Yes, and that reminds me of your wonderful Isolde. She too has a complex balance of love and hate for her lover, Tristan.
Tristan is actually quite passive in that opera, since it is really Isolde who initiates all the action there.
She tries to murder poor Tristan in the first act, and he knows it. They have actually entered a suicide pact, which she initiates. I also like the fact that your Isolde does not die at the end—Wagner’s final stage directions are vague since he doesn’t say she dies but sinks on Tristan’s body.
Yes, I do not think Isolde should die at the end—just as Ortrud does not die, nor does Elsa die, either—she “sinks lifeless,” which does not mean that she is dead.
Does the role of Elsa interest you?
Elsa is lighter and higher than Ortrud and I am more comfortable at this point in my career with Ortrud.
What about Kundry? You would be terrific in that role, I think.
That role is too low for me—it is actually a mezzo-soprano voice.
Why do you think the “Ring” cycle is being done so frequently these days, and what do you think are the main themes of the work?
I think the “Ring” deals mostly with personal relationships. People who are afraid of the “Ring” cycle think that it is about gods and dwarves, and politics, and philosophy, but I think it is really about personal relationships—father-daughter, father-son, husband-wife. The “Ring” is a huge piece—the biggest in all opera—but most of the scenes actually contain only two people in conflict. Wagner remains the most intimate of opera composers, and sees and portrays the complexity of human relationships.
Many people are afraid of Wagner. They think he is very philosophical and profound, and also rather scary—perhaps because of his tragic anti-Semitism.
Yes, and for a whole generation of people, Wagner was spoiled because of Hitler’s horrible use of him.
Exactly. Wagner died in 1883 and Hitler took over in Germany 50 years later. He was a thug who wanted to give his band of thugs some intellectual pretense. If Wagner had been alive during the Hitler period, he would probably have ended in a concentration camp since he would have never taken orders from a dictator or agreed with his lunacy.
Those horrible associations have died off with the passage of time and Wagner’s wonderful “Ring” is being staged all over the whole world now with greater and greater frequency. This huge tetralogy is too wonderful to be ignored, and every opera company in the world wants to stage it.
What kind of “Ring” production do you like?
I like the naturalistic ones best—like the productions at the Met and the Seattle Opera.
I agree with you. Many European directors seem to think that realism in the “Ring” means kitsch—but it does not have to. Realism does not have to reflect Walt Disney’s view of nature.
I too like a realistic or naturalistic production which is visually interesting [and] emphasizes the world of nature, which is so clearly the basis of the “Ring’s” world view. I am quite passionate about Wagner and feel very lucky to be a part of this incredible series of four operas. I think the most wonderful music in the whole cycle occurs in the five minutes after the immolation. That music always brings tears to my eyes when I hear it backstage after the Immolation scene.
Some people think I sing too much Wagner, yet I really think he was one of the greatest geniuses of all art and of all time. I know some “Ring” groupies who will go anywhere in the world to see a “Ring” cycle, and I can understand that, since Wagner’s “Ring” generates that kind of excitement and adulation. I feel very fortunate to be able to recreate this great art, and what Wagner was as a person is totally irrelevant to his art.
