Climbing the Valkyrie Rock

By Michael Walsh

Hildegard Behrens and Eva Marlon sing opera's toughest roles

The major romantic-opera composers, along with enriching the repertory, each toughened the requirements for those who perform their music. In addition to the usual considerations of vocal agility and purity of tone, Wagner demanded endurance, a prodigious memory and a sound that could cut like hot steel through his dense orchestrations. Puccini required singers capable of searing dramatic flights, coupled with limpid lyricism. And Richard Strauss, envisioning his ideal Salome, was only partly joking when he asked for a 16-year-old with the voice of Isolde. No wonder then that outstanding interpreters of such operatic peaks as Briinnhilde, Turandot and Elektra are in perennially short supply.

The world is currently waiting for a true Siegfried to climb the Valkyrie rock and rescue productions of Wagner's Ring cycle from the efforts of overstrained tenors, but the air is clearer at the higher vocal elevations. In Hildegard Behrens and Eva Marlon, both in their early 40s, there are two formidable sopranos who between them may rule the dramatic repertory for at least the next decade. Not since the heyday of Birgit Nilsson, now 67 and retired from the opera stage, has there been a singer who dominated the German roles and triumphed in dramatic Italian parts as well. What set Nilsson apart was not only the breadth of her rep ertoire but her vocal command. That famed voice, instantly identifiable, was a cross between a celestial trumpet and lighthouse beacon: blazing, soaring, shining, glowing.

Behrens has a similar distinctiveness.

Singing her first Briinnhildes last summer in Bayreuth, she emerged as one of the dismal production's few saving graces, a Wagnerian of fiery voice and passionate temperament. At the Metropolitan Opera last week, the German soprano solidified that reputation in Tristan und Isolde, harnessing the mercurial spirit of the Irish princess to a voice of raw, almost primal urgency in a finely calibrated, carefully nuanced reading that gave flesh and blood to a mythical archetype. Says Behrens: "I want to make music in its logical context. I sing the beautiful parts as beautifully as I can, and if the character is screaming, I make it ugly. If the voice is just big and loud and doesn't have texture and emotional variety, it is like fascistic columns--just imposing."

The Hungarian-born Marton, too, is electrifying audiences worldwide. Last month in the Opera Company of Boston's Turandot, she gave a regal account of Puccini's Chinese ice princess that could serve as an object lesson in how the role should be sung. Bringing the full weight of her massive voice to bear on the torturous part, Marton demolished its fearsome technical difficulties while touchingly developing the heroine from a frigid despot into a tender, vulnerable woman. This week at the Met she takes on another of opera's superwomen, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelia.

Although their repertoires overlap--Behrens also sings Leonore, and Marton will make her debut as Briinnhilde next year in San Francisco--their voices are strikingly dissimilar. Behrens' is light and bright, a laser beam that can knife through an orchestra to reach the top balcony with its incandescence. It is not as big as Nilsson's or as evenly produced throughout its range; some have wondered whether Behrens' voice will disintegrate under the stress of her all-out performing style, although so far she has shown no ill effects. Marton's soprano is fuller and richer, as firmly buttressed as a Gothic cathedral. Her challenge now is to vary tone and color, to make the sound more subtle and less overbearing. Onstage, Behrens, a striking actress, communicates almost as much physically as vocally; the less mobile Marlon prefers lo lei her singing carry most of the dramatic burden.

"I live very intensively, both onstage and off," says Behrens, whose unconventional life-style includes two children born oul of wedlock lo Iwo different fathers. "I am liberated," she says, "but on an individual basis. I don't believe in programs or ideologies." She is engaged in a relentless search for ultimate expressivily, trying, as she puts it, "to push out Ihe limits." Says she: "When I do something, I do it. Either I do it all, or I don't do it."

By contrast, Marlon is content with her offstage casting as a Hamburg hausfrau with two children and a surgeon husband. Bui her professional ambition burns just as fiercely as Behrens': to play all the great Wagnerian heroines. "This was a path I picked oul for myself," says Marton. "I want to do these roles while I am still young. My voice is probably Ihe most profound expression of myself, of my deepest thoughts that I cannot and do not speak. The time I have been waiting for has come."

Both singers know they must risk comparison with Nilsson as they take over her roles. Marton says she has never consciously modeled herself after her Swedish colleague. "Of course, Nilsson's name keeps coming up, because Nilsson was a great Bruennhilde," she says. "It remains to be seen if I will be as good." For her part, Behrens is flattered. "If I should be so considered, I am very honored," she says. "I feel absolutely ready." Thai is good news for American Wagnerites, who will have a new Ring production to savor at the Met in the late 1980s. Hildegard Behrens will be one of the two front-line Bruennhildes. The other? Eva Marlon. --By Michael Walsh. Reported by Adam Cohen/Boston and Nancy Newman/ New York

With reporting by Adam Cohen/Boston, Nancy Newman/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.