Andreas Schager bursts through the door, crosses the room in a single stride and engulfs my hand in a firm clasp. “Sorry I’m sweaty,” he grins. “I’ve been forging Nothung!” It’s a midweek lunchtime in a cluttered back office at London’s Royal Opera House, but hammering out a magical sword is all in a morning’s work for the world’s most in-demand Wagnerian leading man. Currently in rehearsals for Siegfried – the third panel of Covent Garden’s new staging of the Ring Cycle – Schager plans to spend the afternoon slaying a dragon and rescuing his beloved from an enchanted fire (after a spot of lunch, that is). But for now the tenor has a moment to catch his breath.
At 54, Schager is an anomaly in the opera world. Most careers – particularly ones singing Wagner, whose scores are longer and whose roles are bigger and more demanding than any other – are built over decades. As veteran agent Boris Orlob puts it: “You see Wagner singers coming from miles away, it’s a gradual process. You take the stairs, not the elevator.”
But Schager didn’t just take the elevator, he shot straight to the penthouse in 2013, when he swapped a handful of Wagner roles in small houses for the Berlin State Opera. Booked to sing the mature Siegfried in the Ring Cycle’s final opera, Götterdämmerung – a first-time try-out for conductor Daniel Barenboim – he was rehearsing in the building when it became apparent that the tenor scheduled to sing the same role in the much more demanding third opera of the cycle, Siegfried, had gone awol.
With only minutes’ notice, Schager found himself drafted in, dispatching the monumental demands of Act I – 90 minutes of pure power-singing, perhaps the most intense single act in the entire operatic repertoire – with remarkable assurance. When Barenboim brought him out for a special curtain-call the notoriously demanding audience roared their approval.
After Act I the original tenor took over, but Barenboim’s new star had already been anointed. Later that year Schager travelled to Milan’s La Scala and the BBC Proms with the conductor for further reputation-cementing performances in Götterdämmerung. “There are not many Siegfrieds and Tristans around, so my schedule quickly became very busy, very fast-paced.”
Accidental stardom is a theme for Schager. He grew up with four siblings on a farm in rural Austria. Music was part of family life – “In summer, when work was done, we’d all make music together” – but with no formal vocal training and no thought of making it a career, instead he headed to university in Vienna to study history and theology.
“Then I joined a chorus, and singing started taking up more and more space in my life. I heard someone there with a really fantastic voice, so of course I went up to him and asked: ‘How do you do that?’ That was how it started.”
“It” was initially a career in operetta – opera’s lighter, frothier cousin. Here he was the dashing young hero – Orpheus in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Ottokár in Johann Strauss’s The Gypsy Baron and Caramello in Strauss’s A Night in Venice – learning to act and hold the stage in shows where the singing is just the start. A decade of that, often performing two shows a day, could easily have turned into a lifetime. Would Schager have been content?
“Absolutely. I never had sharp elbows, never thought: ‘I’ve got to get to the top and be the best singer in the world.’” But then different doors started opening – “I just stepped through without thinking too much” – and in 2012 he was invited to audition for his first Siegfried: Wagner’s five-hour epic in which the hero is rarely offstage, singing almost throughout.
“I had no idea what that meant, what to prepare. I think my agent was even more surprised than me. I remember holding the score, turning over page after page – it just kept coming … Then I saw how high it all was. But I realised it was very similar to the role of Barinkay in The Gypsy Baron; the whole thing was equivalent to two performances of that show, which I had done regularly, so I said yes. I knew I could do it.”
On paper it looks like an impossible leap – going straight from parkrun to a marathon. But Schager sees it differently. “I went into it like I was just doing a new operetta role, and it was exactly the right approach.
“Siegfried is the operetta hero of the Ring Cycle. He wants to have fun, kill the dragon, meet the girl. He doesn’t even know what a woman is yet, but he still wants one! Everything is exciting for him, and you can’t convey that just by standing still on stage. You have to be joyful, active. Operetta taught me to be funny, to run and talk and dance and sing – all at the same time.”
Siegfried is also one of the toughest asks of opera. For a start he only arrives halfway through Wagner’s four-part cycle. We’ve already had the “story so far” of Das Rheingold – how the dwarf Alberich stole the enchanted gold and forged an all-powerful but cursed ring, as well as the incestuous love story of Siegfried’s parents, long-lost twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, in Die Walküre.
Now their son Siegfried, raised in ignorance of his origins by Alberich’s brother Mime, enters the plot. It’s his quest to kill the dragon Fafner and rescue the warrior maiden Brunnhilde that sets in motion the final cataclysmic events of Götterdämmerung.
Roundly dismissed by Wagner scholar Michael Tanner as a “bullying adolescent” and by psychiatrist and author Jeremy Holmes as “boorish, rebellious and demanding, lacking all tenderness and consideration”, Siegfried is far from an obvious romantic hero. How does Schager go about making this fearless lout sympathetic?
“I don’t have to; he’s a very natural figure: a young man full of emotions. He discovers that Mime has been lying to him his whole life, that the closest person to him actually hates him. That’s a very difficult psychological situation.
“But his nature is pure and – I think – sympathetic. We hear that in Act II. For the first time in his life he’s alone. Suddenly the music changes; suddenly he’s a lyric tenor singing about his mother and father. Only later in Götterdämmerung do we see him influenced by corrupt society. His character changes and his soul becomes dirty.”
That shift from angry innocent to cynical warrior is one each singer must find a way to convey. For Schager, counterintuitively, it’s about not trying too hard. “It’s important,” he says, “not to shape the tone, but to let the emotions produce it. I always compare it to babies. Every mother, hearing her baby cry, knows whether it’s hungry or in pain, even though the baby cannot speak. As singers we have to learn to do that all over again on stage.”
With a decade of Wagner and more than 10 Ring Cycles under his belt, Schager has to work harder these days to find the “blank pages” he hopes to bring to any new staging. “You have so many emotions and versions of this character embedded in you,” he says. “Sometimes it gets harder when you know too much.” But things have been helped in London by the “dream team” of conductor Antonio Pappano and director Barrie Kosky.
Kosky’s staging is rich in symbolism, full of beautiful, freighted stage-pictures: a tree oozing gold-like sap; a naked old woman, fragile and unashamed; a horde of ash-smeared Valkyrie hot from battle. Schager describes it as “old-fashioned in a very good way”: cleaving close to Wagner’s text, allowing music, story and singers to speak unencumbered.
This is just the start of a busy year for Schager. A glance at his schedule reveals a gruelling five different Wagner roles in the next six months (“Does it? I hadn’t counted”) including the title role in the first ever Rienzi to be staged at Bayreuth festival theatre – Wagner’s own opera house. It’s a “big honour”, he says, before touching on the charged political history of Hitler’s favourite opera. “Wagner is not responsible for what other people have done with his music.”
Time’s up, and Schager dashes back to rehearsal, his sandwich uneaten. He might be an accidental hero, but those dragons aren’t going to slay themselves.
• Siegfried is at the Royal Opera House, London, from 17 March to 6 April
