Magdalena Kožená on L'extase

Debussy has long occupied a special place in Magdalena Kožená's repertoire, and her latest album L'extase (out tomorrow on Pentatone) sees her teaming up with Mitsuko Uchida for the Trois chansons de Bilitis, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire and the Ariettes Oubliées, plus selections from Messiaen's ecstatic Poèmes pour Mi - premiered by Marcelle Bunlet, who was a celebrated Isolde and Brünnhilde.

I spoke to Magdalena last month about the dynamics of her long-term recital partnership with Uchida and their shared passion for Debussy's music, her experience of falling in love with French repertoire behind the Iron Curtain as a teenager, the challenges and rewards of singing in the French language as a non-native speaker, and how getting to grips with the Messiaen cycle allowed her to tap into a new sense of fullness in her upper register...

How long have you been working with Mitsuko Uchida?

Mitsuko and I have known each other for twenty years now - we’ve done a few live projects together, but this is our first recording. As you probably know, Mitsuko is very particular in choosing her repertoire and even composers: there aren’t so many of them she wants to play! French song has always been a great passion of mine and I was delighted to discover that Mitsuko is very much in love with Debussy - even though he might not be a composer whom people particularly associate with her. 

The album has been a long time in the making, because Mitsuko is somebody who needs to understand the music from the inside out. She wants to know why every single note in each chord is important, and that obviously doesn’t happen overnight.  She likes to rehearse something then leave it for a few months (or even a few years!), then come back to it and explore new possibilities together. But it’s been worth waiting for: I think this recording is a peak of our collaboration over the last twenty years.

We recorded at Aldeburgh, and it was a live concert which we patched a bit the following day. It’s such a special experience, walking along the seaside there with nothing to disturb you except the odd seagull. Of course it reminds you of Peter Grimes, but there’s also a bit of Debussy in the air…

What technical and intellectual challenges do these songs pose?

The most complicated for me are the Baudelaire songs, which I hadn’t sung before. I took a long time to decide whether they were right for me, because they’re almost Wagnerian in places - ‘Le Balcon’ in particular is immense! Even getting to grips with the poems is very challenging, although I think it helps to feel the texts rather than get too hung up on literary analysis: like so much French poetry it’s about colours, images and perfumes, and I think it’s incredibly well interpreted in the music.

These songs aren’t sung so often, because they’re vocally very difficult and the tessitura is strange - the centre of gravity is quite low, but then you have to float these high light notes which are almost in soprano domain. I had to experiment with combining different technical approaches to make that work, but I learned a lot in the process and it was a fascinating journey.

Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi are scored for ‘grand soprano dramatique’, which I’m assuming isn’t quite how you’d describe yourself?

Absolutely not! But I’ve arrived at a stage where my voice has become that bit heavier and higher: I’d expected that it would get lower and richer with age, but when I turned fifty my high notes started feeling easier than ever before. I was always on the borderline between mezzo and soprano, but on the lighter end of the spectrum: it was easy to pop up above the stave in coloratura repertoire, but not so much in more dramatic territory.

That’s changed a bit lately, and I took special pleasure in exploring these Messiaen songs where you can really let loose and sing out in the upper register. At first I expected to find them challenging because they’re so dramatic and high, but in the end they were the most comfortable songs on the programme for me. It was particularly satisfying to sing them after the Debussy songs, where every note has to be so precisely placed and refined! 

How did your love of French song originate?

The Czech Republic was still a Communist country when I was growing up, and we were only allowed to learn German and Russian. English and French were more or less out of bounds so French music - especially songs - was basically non-existent at home. We had some editions in Czech translations and I bought myself the complete Debussy songs when I was in my late teens, but I didn’t know the French language at all. I studied piano alongside singing, so I played the Préludes a lot when I was young; that universe somehow felt familiar to me from the beginning, even though I grew up with a more Germanic way of teaching and had been set a lot of Brahms, Schubert and Schumann. 

When the Iron Curtain fell and I was free to go abroad, I started to work with Marc Minkowski who started me off with small roles in Gluck’s French operas and gradually fed me bigger assignments. That was my first real contact with French music and Marc used me for so many of his projects that I eventually moved to Paris for four years: it was my second home for a while, and I finally learned French properly! 

How do you enjoy singing in French?

It’s not an easy language for singers: it takes work to find the right space for all those nasal vowels, so that you’re producing a nice sound but keeping your diction clear. But the flipside is that it offers so many colours and possibilities; the vowel-sounds aren’t as clear-cut as they are in Italian, so you can play with that much more and still sound relatively natural to a native French-speaker. That last point is important because in most French repertoire the text is even more important than the melodies - it’s eternal recitative, especially in Debussy. You still have to sing rather than speak, but it’s like painting with a very fine brush. The French poets take such pleasure in wordplay, so if you change one letter or syllable the meaning often becomes something else entirely. It’s very different to singing in Italian, where you just open the vowels and drop the consonants in at the last minute so that the sound flows out in one beautiful tube!

Debussy’s Mélisande has been a bit of a signature-role for you - is it still in your repertoire?

Yes, I have two productions next year, which makes me very happy. It’ll have to stop one day, but it’s the role that’s been there for me through my whole career and it’s a little bit like a drug! Every time it finishes I think ‘When can I get my next hit?!’. There are some passages in the Baudelaire songs which remind me of Pélleas, for instance in the third song which sounds a lot like the scene where Pélleas and Mélisande go to the cave; there’s a mysterious atmosphere there which is unique to Debussy.  

Do you feel any kinship between Messiaen and Debussy in terms of the atmospheres which they create?

I do, even though they’re so different in terms of texture and expression: Debussy is always swimming between mysterious worlds, but Messiaen is completely clear about what he wants to express. And Messiaen’s writing is so vertical – he has these sequences of chords which just go from one to the other without any of the transitions that you find in Debussy’s writing. 

I find his music very straightforward and honest; we know that he was very devout, but in these texts which he wrote himself he combines this religious love with upfront eroticism. He doesn’t see love for God and physical, sexual love as mutually exclusive things. The cycle ends with this wild dance crowned with a crazy laugh: an ecstatic moment where he lets go of everything. With Debussy it’s much more controlled and cerebral: you always have to know where you’re going in each phrase, whereas with Messiaen you can give yourself over to instinct.

I performed the Messiaen songs with orchestra recently, and I’m going to sing them again in Prague this year with my husband [Simon Rattle] conducting. That’s much more challenging than doing them with piano, because the orchestra is huge – Simon did them a long time ago with Maria Ewing, and he had to slightly reorchestrate certain passages because it was too heavy even for her! I’m so looking forward to doing this with him because I know he approaches the music in a very transparent way, and if you get that right the effect is fantastically beautiful. 

Projecting to the back row of a big concert-hall can be exciting with something like the Poèmes pour Mi, but other songs just work best in a more intimate environment. It’s not just about the sound you’re producing, but about the contact with the audience. Mitsuko and I gave a recital in a private house recently, and it’s so great because you can tell the story to everybody on an individual level; they’re hanging on your lips from two or three metres away, so you can really whisper if that’s what the song requires. It’s a private moment shared with a handful of people, and so many songs were originally composed for that dynamic - they were written for voice and piano for a reason!

What’s coming up for you in terms of recitals? 

I have some Wigmore Hall concerts with my dear friend Malcolm Martineau, and also some dates in Oxford and Cambridge. In these university cities you get such incredibly knowledgeable audiences who really appreciate these poems, and that’s becoming increasingly rare these days. So many of the younger generation don’t even read books, let alone poetry by Verlaine! My two boys hardly ever pick up a novel because they think it’s too much work - they’ll read on their computer or tablet, but that’s it. 

We’re all bombarded by constant distractions in this day and age, switching from text-messages to emails to social media alerts, and I worry that we’re losing our passion and focus in the process. When I recorded my album of Czech songs last year I offered to make a four-minute trailer introducing the music, but I was told that people wouldn’t engage if it was longer than twenty seconds. What can you really say in such a short amount of time? If that makes me a dinosaur, then so be it!

You mentioned that new ease in your upper register - will that be exploited in future opera roles?

Yes. One role which I wouldn’t have touched ten years ago is Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni: I’ve already sung it in concert and I’m doing my first staged production in Aix-en-Provence this summer. I’m also doing the Fox in Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen in Berlin, which again felt too high until recently. In 2023 I sang the title-role in Alcina for Marc Minkowski, and Agrippina is coming up next season which is another one that sits right on the edge for a mezzo. 

At the other extreme I’m definitely going to do Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle, which is often sung by dramatic sopranos but generally sits quite low. That high C when she opens the Fifth Door is really a scream - it doesn’t have to be the most sensational note ever! Beyond that, we will see…I’m also thinking about some other Janáček operas, but his soprano roles are real soprano roles!

Do you still play the piano for pleasure?

I play a little bit for myself, but I never practise properly. I can’t call myself a pianist anymore, but I can be slightly annoying for my performance partners because I always correct them when they get a rhythm or harmony wrong – I may not be able to play it myself, but I always know what’s going on underneath me! Sometimes I pick up Mozart or Beethoven sonatas that I used to play as a student and have a go…it’s enjoyable up to a point, but then I get frustrated because I know exactly how I want it to sound and my fingers aren’t co-operating. And I don’t want to disturb Simon with that!

But I still love the piano so much. For a long time I preferred it to singing, so maybe one day when I don’t sing any more I will set aside time to sit with it properly again because it just gives me immense pleasure.