How do we begin? It’s a good question to ask on January 1st.
I am a big fan of tenor Adam Klein. I saw him play Loge in the Robert Lepage production of Das Rheingold, just about the only singer who really took to The Machine without any signs of fear. He actually looked like a Nordic God which come to think of it, was the character he was playing.
Loge…! He’s the one in the picture hanging from a wire.
I interviewed him back in 2012. And I reviewed his film of Winterreise that he made with Eric Solstein. Adam is a fine musician and a superb actor.
Above all this blog is fun. I am a fan, chatting through Facebook Messenger with the artists I admire such as Adam Klein, keeping track of their work, reading their commentary. We don’t always agree. But I’m a huge admirer of Adam’s voice and his acting. And I feel fortunate that he answers my questions.
I’m starting off 2024, contemplating beginnings via an interview with Adam Klein. Pardon me as I offer a bit of a preamble as usual giving context. In fact there’s much more of my interview of Adam that’s still to come. But I asked him about a role he sang at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1970s: when he was just a boy.
Does everyone sing as a child? I think so. The sad fact I hear from people, sometimes when I’m playing at a gig, sometimes just chatting, is that so many people regret quitting piano lessons. More fundamentally, even if you don’t study piano, you surely sing as a child. Didn’t everyone?
And some do a lot more. I glimpsed that right in my neighbourhood.
Neighbourhood Church choir opportunity #1 that I observed was David Wright, my best friend who lived up the street from me at #55 Strathallan Blvd. I was also a child whose voice had not yet changed. I may have thought I was a better singer than David and had not yet learned modesty: but I was not in a church choir. David and his choir took part in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of The Luck of Ginger Coffey in 1967, one of two original operas commissioned for the centennial year. My mom took me to see it, and I was entranced, maybe a bit envious even though I was also very much in awe. But while my brother was studying singing and would soon be in the COC himself (and he too was a former child church choir singer please note), I was the guy playing the piano for him, on the sidelines.
Neighbourhood Church choir opportunity #2 that I observed was David Fallis who lived across the street at #8 Strathallan Blvd. I am kind of vague about this, but I recall that David sang in a production of Amahl and the Night Visitors. I was sitting way in the back, didn’t see too well but heard him sing. He sounded good.
David has gone on to be one of the most important figures in Canadian music, conducting choirs and also leading many productions of Opera Atelier, to name just a few of the things he has done.
Me? I didn’t sing in a church choir. While I played the King in my church pageant at St Ansgar Lutheran Church, the family stopped going to church.
If there’s a lesson it’s not just “stay in school kids” but also “stay in Sunday school and your church choir, kids!” Just as we see Wayne Gretzky learning hockey as a child, Pele learning his football wizardry at an early age, surely the opportunity to make music as a child is nothing to be sneezed at.
That’s all as a kind of introduction to talking about Adam Klein’s childhood experience with the role of Yniold at the Metropolitan Opera. On the first day of 2024 I will ask Adam about his first Metropolitan Opera role. Adam’s debut was Wednesday January 19, 1972 as Yniold, the little boy in Pelléas et Mélisande.
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Barczablog: As a child you sang the role of Yniold in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with the Metropolitan Opera. Do you remember much about the experience?
Adam Klein: I remember being in a room with my mom, and some people I didn’t know, from the Met Executive branch obviously, because it was to discuss how much I should be paid per performance, as I was the first boy soprano to do this principal role, and maybe the first boy ever to do a role that big, otherwise shouldn’t there have been precedent and the matter already settled?
But there I was, eleven years old, and a hundred dollars seemed like a huge amount of money to me, and no one told me how much the other leads were getting, and surprisingly in retrospect my entrepreneurial mother didn’t coach me beforehand to let her do the talking or anything; AND we had been getting paid in the Children’s Chorus at the rate of FOUR DOLLARS a performance for Boheme and Werther and Faust, a whopping five for Carmen since we were in TWO acts of that.
So when the Suits floated, “how about a hundred dollars?” I was perfectly fine with it, and after that my mom couldn’t say anything really. And so it was that while Blegen, Stuart, Tozzi et al were raking in thousands every show, my total gross pay for nine shows as Yniold in PELLÉAS in the 1971-72 season was nine hundred dollars.
The following season the Drei Knaben got one hundred each the days we sang and fifty each the days we covered. I hope this wage inequality has been rectified since then.
Barczablog: I suspect the reason you show up with two different debuts in the Met Opera database (that I looked up) is that pay scale. Those $100 roles perhaps don’t really count in the Met’s way of thinking, even though your Debussy was nothing to sneeze at.
Yes it’s a long time ago, but can you remember who you sang with?
Adam Klein: Giorgio Tozzi was the Arkel in the PELLÉAS I did in 1972.
There was one performance when he went up on his lines, in his big long speech at Mélisande’s deathbed, and he just kept uttering unintelligible syllables for quite a long time. As soon as the curtain came down, Judy Blegen in the bed burst out laughing and said something like, “Oh George!” That’s the only time I worked with him.
I remember Joe Andreacchi my cover never got to go on for me, not even the day I was sick. My mom pumped tea with lemon and honey into me all day and I don’t remember having any trouble for that performance.
The guy who sang the Shepherd was Gene Boucher, I think, you can check; he had a faster vibrato than the rest of the cast, not a goat-bleat by any means. Every syllable right on pitch with that fast vibrato. My boy soprano instrument never developed a vibrato, though some do; and as an adult I have a more declamatory style that many, to the point that I still don’t use vibrato on the shorter syllables.
Possibly I was influenced by Gerhard Stolze in that regard; I learned Herod and Mime using his recordings of them. (Mind you I DO NOT learn roles from recordings, I just listen to them once I’m familiar with the score as a memorization and/or stylistic aid, and though the close-miking on studio opera recordings is mostly a detriment to the live experience in an opera house, Gerhard’s pronunciation was always crystal clear.)
Personally I think varying the amount of vibrato is interesting; Dan Montez the founder and still director of Taconic Opera, in his oratorios anyway, insists on vibrato on every note, from start to finish, which I’ve done my best to comply with. He hasn’t harped on it much at all for the opera roles he’s hired me for though. But obviously this is a matter of taste.
But I remember thinking about how much he (Gene Boucher) was able to use that vibrato in his ONE LINE that he had. “Parce que ce n’est pas le chemin de l’étable.“
Barczablog: OMG, I love that line, that is my favourite scene of the opera, a scene that alas is sometimes cut. It’s a subtler form of what we get in the film Silence of the Lambs. Clarice is like Yniold, traumatized by what’s happening to the lambs, although Maeterlinck (and then Debussy) don’t hit us over the head with it. We simply see the little perplexed boy asking the shepherd why the lambs are silent.
“Parce que ce n’est pas le chemin de l’étable.” Or in other words, “because this wasn’t the path back to the stable:” but rather (unspoken) the path to the slaughterhouse.
Adam Klein OH, “Parce que c’est n’est pas le chemin de l’étable”…. of course… duh… yes I performed that scene and it should never be cut. I just never made the connection with the movie because I don’t associate slaughterhouses with anything Hannibal Lecter said, even the part about the lambs… also I only saw it once and what comes to mind if I’m ever reminded of it is “Dr. Lecter…. Dr. Lecter….” followed by Jodie Foster’s behaviour upon accepting the Oscar for whatever movie she got that for… I’m not a fan of horror movies in general. And… when I did the role I maybe knew the sheep (moutons — not agneaux which might be another reason I don’t associate the two: it’s not called “Silence of the Sheep”) were going to a slaughterhouse, but if I did, I thought they stopped bleating because they were confused as to why they weren’t going to the stable, and so they all stopped at once instead of one by one. Also, the Met provided no sound effect.
I personally had no trouble learning the music, and neither did my cover Joe Andreacchi. But then, musicianship has always been one of my strengths. Yes, subtle, as an impressionist work is wont to be.
And Yniold should ALWAYS be done by a boy, or a girl dressed as a boy. With the haircut they gave me one couldn’t tell what I was.
Barczablog: Perhaps in Debussy’s time it was hard to find anyone competent for the role.
Adam Klein: I can’t say whether the Met had a boy do it then because they knew they had boys in the chorus who could handle it. Probably everyone who made that decision is gone now.
Another Yniold memory isn’t from performances but from the review. I forget the name of the lady who reviewed the show for The New York Times, but she criticized my French.
Barczablog: After a deep dive into google and Adam’s files, we saw that the reviewer was actually a writer at the New York Post named Harriett Johnson, and not the NY Times after all.
While her review may have been wrong, it appears that it upset your mother more than it troubled you Adam… That’s kind of amusing.
Adam Klein: I actually remember not caring as a kid what Harriett wrote about my pronunciation, because I knew I said it right.
I was more surprised how mad my mom was.
Now A) I pronounced the words exactly as I’d been coached, so this comment should have been laid at the Met music staff’s door; and
B) I learned French from my mother who though born to British and American parents grew up outside Paris, in an area called Le Vésinet, and I learned it before I studied it in school, which at that school, Lincoln Square Academy and then Professional Children’s School, was every semester, every grade.
Of course, we know how critical the French are, even of their own populace, when it comes to singing French, but this reviewer was an American I believe. Anyway, my mother was absolutely infuriated that she criticized my pronunciation since to her Le Vésinet ear I pronounced everything perfectly. I don’t know if her letter got published. So, no complaints in the review about my pitch, or audibility, or acting. Just the pronunciation. Meanwhile, Thomas Stewart and all the others – the closest we had to a French singer in the cast was Barry McDaniel – weren’t taken to task for how they pronounced anything.
Here’s the New York Times review from January 1972 by Harold C Schonberg, far more flattering in its assessment.
“The role of Yniold was sung by the boy soprano Adam Klein. In the original production a child also was used. Debussy was unhappy with the uncertain pitches of the youngster, and shortly afterward assigned the role to a real soprano. So it was done ever after, with the smallest soprano in any company getting the role of Yniold. At the City Opera production last year, however, a return to the boy soprano was made. Young Master Klein at the Metropolitan Opera produced some attractive piping trebles as near to the pitch as could be expected of any youngster his age.”
Adam Klein: I think Schonberg was trying to be kind. BUT I don’t think it’s because he and my dad were colleagues.
Barczablog: You’re probably right (that he’s being kind). Even so Schonberg sounds like an arrogant windbag, resisting the impulse to be scathing in his critique of a child. Jerk. I bet you anything he didn’t know what Yniold’s pitches were supposed to be, likely couldn’t have sung it himself. So when he says “as near to the pitch as could be expected of any youngster his age” I seriously doubt he knew what he was talking about. Excuse me pompous critics make me crazy.
Adam Klein: I have the broadcast recording: my pitch was as dead on as any of the adults’.
Barczablog: I believe you! I did hear the broadcast, although (sorry!) I did fall asleep for some of it. Nothing personal. That was decades before I first chatted with you.
Adam Klein: But I can see sleeping through Pelléas…very dreamy music.
Paul-Émile Débert was the director [of Pelléas]: I remember he had bad breath. I remember everyone in the cast being very nice to me, and that it was very easy to work with Thomas Stewart.
I remember one night his cover performed; but it must have been scheduled that way because we did a run-through with him first. That was Louis Quilico.
Barczablog: I remember hearing about this because Quilico was my brother’s voice teacher, and one of the greatest baritone voices in the world. His debut was big news here in Toronto and across Canada.
Adam Klein: Quilico was shorter than Thomas: I guess one notices such things when up on their shoulders looking into a window, or just sitting on his knee.
I remember, every performance, once my last scene was over, going and sitting way down stage left to watch the rest of the show: this was the little space between the proscenium wall and the big gold curtain, you can get to it without being seen from the audience.
Even at age 11 I was a Debussy fan; I grew up hearing my dad play it a lot on his piano.
I remember the photo shoot we had for publicity reasons: I was asked to sit across from Judy Blegen and we were to smile at each other: I thought that was really weird because we never interacted in the show.
Barczablog: Here’s another photo of Adam as Yniold with Thomas Stewart, the original Golaud for the production.
In Part two of this interview Adam is grown-up, as with this photo from Tristan und Isolde in Seattle 2010. I will ask about The Machine in the Lepage Ring, Peter Gelb, the impacts of High Definition broadcasts and more.
Stay tuned, and Happy New Year.
I want to mention that the stunning works of Patricia Windrow (Adam’s mom) can be found by clicking on this link: https://www.windrowgalleries.com/intro.html.
