If I were a rival tenor, I think I’d find Juan Diego Flórez more than a little irksome. “My top note,” he says, with a smile, “is a high D. And that is more secure now, firmer than ever. In their late thirties most tenors start to lose their agility at the top. I think my voice is going the other way!”
Let’s just hold it there, and put this in context. Because without the context you can have little idea of why the 36-year-old Peruvian is the hottest ticket in opera. If you plucked a guitar’s highest string you would produce a note, an E, that’s at the top of an average male’s singing range. A professional tenor would go six or seven semitones higher. Eight semitones up and you’ve hit the famed “high C” that gets you solo spots at World Cup finals, or at least at good bar mitzvahs. Flórez, however, is talking about a note two semitones higher than that. Then he says that his voice is still going upwards! At this rate he could be singing Carmen by Christmas.
At La Scala two years ago he needed to hit only a top C — albeit nine times in a single aria — to make headlines round the world. The aria was Ah, mes amis in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment. So thrilling was Flórez’s rendition of this stratospheric showpiece — the equivalent of crossing the Grand Canyon on a tightrope — that he was allowed to give an encore, something that hasn’t happened in Milan since Toscanini banned them in 1933. The crowd wouldn’t let the show go on until Flórez had hurled out nine more Cs with pinpoint accuracy and white-hot timbre. And just to show that this wasn’t a fluke he did the same at Covent Garden last year. I was there. Not for a second did you fear that he would fluff a note. Unlike his fallible rivals, there’s an aura — or perhaps a halo — of flawlessness about him.
Inevitably, hundred of hacks reached for the phrase “the next Pavarotti”. That wasn’t just lazy journalism. It was also unfair on both gents. Flórez is lithe, slim, with Latinate good looks (somewhere between Tom Cruise and the footballer Ronaldo). To give himself energy before a show he eats not mountains of pasta, Pavarotti style, but a couscous-like Peruvian dish called quinoa (“such a complete food that Nasa feeds it to astronauts,” he says). His voice is trimmer, more agile, than Pavarotti's. And his field is the bel canto operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini — lots of whizzing about at a mad altitude — not heroic gut-busters such as Nessun dorma. But most of all, Flórez doesn’t want to be the next Pavarotti. Or so he says. “Pavarotti was different from any other singer before or since,” he declares. “His story was something that happened at a certain time because of a certain charisma in certain circumstances. For a while, opera was in every household. Now it’s not. And actually I’m happy that we are again a minority art.”
What? Wasn’t it good that Pavarotti touched millions? Didn’t that generate interest in opera among the general public, rather than among only the cognoscenti?
“Of course for a perfomer the public is like a fuel,” Flórez concedes. “But to appreciate opera properly requires a certain sensibility. Not social status, not money. Many of my fans are ordinary people who struggle to buy a ticket. But they have a sensibility for this music. If you try to reach out to a mass audience, you have to change the product so that everyone likes it. Then it stops being the real thing.”
Flórez was last at Covent Garden playing the misogynistic baddie Corradino in Matilde di Shabran. That’s the rare Rossini opera in which, at 23, he sprang to fame — singing the role at short notice at the 1996 Pesaro Festival. His deft comic touch at Covent Garden — he played it a bit like Alan Rickman hamming it up as the Sheriff of Nottingham — surprised many who had pigeonholed him as a voice on a stick.
“That show was demanding,” he recalls, “because I decided to make my character very hectic.” Chewing the scenery, as theatre critics say. “Exactly. And it’s hard to run up those stairs — 44 of them in that Covent Garden set! — and then sing hundreds of notes at the top.”
He’s back now as Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Easier work? “Vocally, probably as challenging. But the character is not so crazy. Carradino always sings as if he’s going into battle. Almaviva is much more seductive.”
Many promising singers ruin reputation and voice by greedily grabbing roles that don’t suit them, or by letting themselves be pushed too hard. But Flórez is a wise head on young shoulders. Like Dirty Harry, he senses that a man’s gotta know his limitations. “I used to do what opera houses told me, without question. But now I insist, for instance, on at least two days between performances, to recover.”
Doesn’t that create problems? For example, Flórez has dropped one of the Barber performances at Covent Garden because he feels the shows aren’t separated enough. He shrugs. “It was Pavarotti who told me: ‘Never do two performances with only one day off in between’. So I feel my case has force.”
And he’s cautious, too, about widening his repertoire. He will never touch Wagner, Strauss or Puccini. And even within the mid-19th-century repertoire he is selective. “Last year,” he says, “I added the Duke in Rigoletto. But that will be my only Verdi role.” Why? “Because even that is on the edge of what’s good for me. OK, it’s possible to sing many things. But is it good for the voice?”
When did Flórez realise he had a special talent? “It was a long process. As a teenager in Peru I wasn’t into opera at all. I loved Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys. I was performing rock and folk music [his dad was a folk singer], and writing songs to impress girls. At 17 I went to the National Conservatory, but not to be a tenor. I went to study pop. But there I discovered classical music. Then I auditioned for three US conservatoires, and they all offered me scholarships.”
Flórez chose one of the great musical hothouses: the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It didn’t work out. “I was taught to sing like a full-blooded American lyric tenor,” he says, and gives me a hilarious demo, putting on a vibrato-laden croon. “Of course this dark, covered sound can be noble — but for baritones, or maybe tenors with big voices. I needed a clear sound.” And he found it. Or rather, it was found for him. He sang for a veteran Peruvian tenor, Ernesto Palacio.
“He said to me: ‘You should sing bright; bring the voice forward, not bury it down your throat.’ I was shocked; it went against my training. But I tried it, and it made me what I am now. I was singing coloratura and high notes with ease.” Palacio is still his mentor. “I realise now,” Flórez continues, “that singing should be simple. So many young singers fail because they are stuck with teachers who overcomplicate. Singing should feel natural. If it feels complicated, there’s something wrong.”
Flórez is now a hero in his homeland. His wedding in Lima last year, to a glamorous German-born Australian, was an astonishing four-hour affair, broadcast live on TV then immediately repeated. “It was mad, I couldn’t control it!” Flórez says. “But all countries need role models, Peru especially. It’s a Third World country really.” Does he go back? “I do, because I am committed to a big project with youth orchestras. You know El Sistema in Venezuela?”
Of course. It’s the world’s most famous youth project.
“Well I’m trying to do the same in Peru. We have the same poor children that need rescuing through music. I went to Venezuela. I did a concert with Gustavo Dudamel, and took the chance to study the system in detail. Then I convinced Maestro Abreu [the founder of El Sistema] to come to Lima. We visited the President and many big companies. We raised money, and now it has taken off. If you’re famous in your own country, it’s nice to use that fame to open doors and make something good happen.”
The Barber of Seville opens at the Royal Opera House, WC2 (020-7304 4000; www.roh.org.uk), on Sat
