Few operatic cat-and-mouse games are as dramatic as the confrontation in Puccini’s “Tosca” between the innocent title character and Scarpia, the brutal chief of the Roman police.
A pair of Metropolitan Opera stars, the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, were rehearsing the work at the Met last week, sharpening the charged interactions that culminate in murder. At one point, Terfel knelt down to retrieve Tosca’s shawl, involuntarily letting out the moan of a man whose knees are not as limber as they once were.
“You’re a couple of years older,” Radvanovsky said with a laugh.
While his voice is still capacious and he still moves with feisty authority, stiff knees notwithstanding, time has indeed marched on for Terfel, who turns 60 in November and has gradually been retiring his signature roles.
These four “Tosca” performances, starting on Thursday, will be his final staged Scarpias. They are also a return to the Met, where he was once a perennial favorite, after injuries and inopportune events kept him away for the past 13 years.
“I’ve been unfortunate, haven’t I?” Terfel said, recalling this series of forced cancellations in an interview at the theater that was a home base for nearly two decades. “I loved this opera house from the day I walked into my audition.”
He is not a singer you easily forget. Terfel’s imposing voice, coupled with his imposing height, made him one of the most memorable Met artists of his generation, starting with his 1994 debut as a freshly vibrant Figaro in Mozart’s opera.
“He has a stage presence unlike anyone else I’ve ever encountered,” said Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager.
As Figaro, Terfel emanated a fascinatingly changeable mixture of bearish geniality and brooding danger, qualities he also brought to Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the don’s manservant, Leporello; the sinister villains in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”; and the playful, nasty Sir John in Verdi’s “Falstaff.”
Though he became famous for a booming sound that matched his physicality, Terfel has always had a pungent way with the texts he sings — you can practically taste each word — and is capable of a restraint as powerful as his thunder. In rehearsal for “Tosca,” giving orders to his underlings at the start of the grand Te Deum that closes the first act, Terfel almost murmured.
“For all the hugeness of him, the bigness of his personality,” said the conductor Antonio Pappano, a frequent collaborator, “he could be so subtle, with so many colors.”
Terfel, the son of a Welsh sheep and cattle farmer, made his name by winning a prize at the prestigious Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 1989. He wasn’t instantly a leading man; in 1992, he appeared on a Plácido Domingo recording of “Tosca” not as Scarpia, but in the tiny role of Angelotti.
But by the time he made it to the Met a couple of years later, still in his 20s, it was in starring parts. A 100-performance run with the company culminated, in 2010-12, with his Wotan in Robert Lepage’s high-tech production of Wagner’s “Ring.”
Along the way, his voice evolved. “When he was very young, it was enormous,” Pappano said. “And then it got more baritonal through many years of big repertoire. The voice became more focused, and less wide. Now it’s matured, and there’s beef around that focus.”
Near the time of his achievement in the Met’s “Ring,” in which he managed to invest the faceless staging with vividness, he began little by little to curtail his opera engagements, particularly productions in the United States that sent him away from home in Wales for long stretches. This cleared time for more concerts, and special projects like a semi-staged “Sweeney Todd” alongside Emma Thompson that originated with the New York Philharmonic in 2014, then traveled to London.
Terfel was set to come back to the Met as Scarpia when its ornate current “Tosca” production, directed by David McVicar, opened in late 2017. But after arriving in New York to start rehearsals, he dropped out to have a polyp removed from his vocal cords. In early 2020, he was supposed to star in the Met’s first new staging in over three decades of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” but fell in Spain, broke his ankle and had to withdraw.
“He seemed to be cursed by the gods,” Gelb said.
Terfel appeared in one of the company’s pandemic-era video recitals, beaming in from a cathedral in Wales for a warmhearted holiday program in December 2020. But he was eager to return to the theater, even if it took a few more years before these “Tosca” performances could come together.
“I didn’t want it to end with a tri-tib break,” he said, referring to the triple fracture of his ankle that kept him out of “Holländer.”
Rehearsing at the Met last week, Terfel was walked through McVicar’s production, his blend of suavity and menace still potent. “You can play Scarpia with a smile on his face,” he said, “and then, of course, when people are not looking, that snarl can be very, very prominent.”
He stuck broadly to the blocking while constantly trying out new ideas, exploring the character and finding unexpected solutions to small challenges — like where Tosca’s left hand should go to distract him from the knife in her right.
“Our business can be a bit static,” Radvanovsky said. “The same old, same old. Bryn breathes such new life and energy into it. Every show is different, which allows me that freedom to change from day to day, too.”
Terfel has no future plans with the Met, so these “Tosca” performances should be savored as possibly his final ones with the company.
“I think at this point,” Gelb said, “we’re just thrilled that he’s coming back and doing this, and we’ll take it from there. He’s in the latter part of his career, but contemplating what he can bring to a role like Scarpia on our stage is truly exciting.”
There is not much new ground left for him to explore in the opera house. Terfel has signed on as a coach on the Welsh version of the reality show “The Voice,” and has toured a program of Beethoven’s arrangements of Scottish, Irish and Welsh folk songs. He is also developing a concert version of his most recent album, a program of sea shanties.
But he said he is still intrigued by two parts he never sang. They could hardly be more different: the tortured title soldier in Berg’s “Wozzeck” and the fun-loving Papageno in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” (“Am I too old for Papageno?” Terfel said. Surely any opera house would happily give him the chance to try it out.)
Even if neither “Wozzeck” nor “Flute” comes to pass, though, he is at peace with his decades in opera coming to an end.
“I should be hanging up my boots now,” he said. “The time is right.”
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