Die schöne Müllerin at the Berlin Philharmonic

There comes a time in every woman's life when she must swallow her pride and wait outside the stage door to meet her favorite tenor.

Some of you may recall that when I met Erwin Schrott, I didn't take a pic with him because I'm completely uncomfortable asking celebrities to smile at the camera with me. It's very high on my list of no-nos, to be honest (right up there with doing math and talking in the theater). But...it's Kaufmann. And I knew that if I didn't, no one would ever, ever let me forget about it. But let me start at the beginning.

The Berlin classical music scene has a great program for students/under-30s/the unemployed etc: the Classic Card. A certain number of tickets are reserved for Classic Card holders and go on sale an hour before curtain time. With this in mind, I arrived at the Berlin Philharmonie yesterday at 9:30 in the morning. The plan: beat out to twenty other people waiting and get a really good seat for the Barenboim Zyklus I: Die schöne Müllerin sung by Jonas Kaufmann, accompanied by Barenboim. And it worked: I got a fantastic, fabulous, normally hella expensive seat in Block A: right in the front. Row 9, to be precise. This is another reason why I love the classic card: the seats are always reeeeeeally good.

The program started shortly after 11. If this had been a rock concert, everyone would have been screaming, but seeing as it was the (slightly) more refined world of classical music, everyone settled for clapping loudly and squeeing to themselves. Kaufmann launched right into Das wandern ist das Mullers lust, and boy, can that man sing. He was the journeyman miller; you could see it in his eyes, in his posture. And we the audience just ate it up with a spoon. There wasn't a peep to be heard during the music: we held the coughs and sneezes for the breaks between songs, when all hell broke loose.

The best part of the whole performance was immediately after Der Neugierige. "Sag, Bächlein, liebt sie mich?" Kaufmann sang, and the piano sparkled away into silence. And then it began: a wave of coughing that grew and grew until it sounded like we were the inmates of a tuberculosis ward. Kaufmann was the first to start grinning, then chuckling, and a sheepish giggle swept the hall. Barenboim turned away from the keyboard and very exaggeratedly took out his handkerchief to cough into, and everyone just lost it. Laughter and applause swept the hall, and the concert carried on.

How can I describe the music? Die schöne Müllerin is a gorgeous, lush song cycle, telling the story of a young journeyman miller who falls in love with his employers daughter, but eventually loses her to a local hunter. The miller, in despair, drowns himself in the stream. The stream itself is a character, flowing and lilting under the miller's songs, until, at the end, it sings its own tender lullaby, soothing its "darling boy" and cursing the titular Müllerin for her cruelty. That is the song that always gets me when I listen to it, and yesterday was no difference. It's almost as though the Bächlein, as the miller calls it, is a woman, waiting patiently while the miller goes through this hellish ordeal, and finally comforts him. I could (and let's face it, probably will) write a whole story or novella around it. Kaufmann brought the entire cycle to life in such a way that I was emotionally wrung-out by the time he was done with me.

As you can imagine, we made der Jonas do three encores, and this is where it really began to resemble a rock concert more than a lieder matinee. He got a standing ovation, flowers, screeches, bravos, and general hysterical carrying-on (which, let's face it, he'd probably expected). There were three encores: the first was about a "fischlein" (I'm not good with lieder titles), then second was Der Jüngling an der Quelle, which was so sexy as to be borderline indecent. Half the audience just fainted dead away as Kaufmann caressed the name "Luise" (it's really common around here). I didn't catch the third encore because I was too bust recovering from the second. And then a wave, and a huge grin, and they were gone.

And this, dear reader, was where I shelved my pride and parked myself outside the stage door for a chance to see the man up close, in person. I admit, I had a mission: I wanted to ask why he'd withdrawn from the Deutsche Oper gala, with it's performance of Fidelio. So I joined the throng of German women outside and waited.

And waited. Forty-five minutes later, Kaufmann appeared in his street clothes, bag slung over his shoulders, and was mobbed. ("Did he have a security detail?" my mom asked when I told her all this, and was shocked when I said no.) I waited until he was shunted almost literally into me, and it was then that my super polite I'm-meeting-someone-I-admire attitude kicked in. I thanked him for the performance and got my program squiggled in. And then, because I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't, I summoned my courage and said, "Can I ask why you had to withdraw from the Fidelio?"

"Yes, we tried so, so hard to get the management at the Staatsoper to cancel a Tosca, but they just couldn't. And so I'd be singing three nights in a row, and who knows what would happen, maybe an airline would strike and I'd then be six hours in the train, and it just wasn't practical. So unfortunately I had to cancel." From the horse's mouth, people. He was then pulled away by the crowd, but turned back to me a minute later and said, "You have a camera. Did you want a picture?"

"Yes, if that's cool," I replied.
"Sure, if we hurry," he said, because every single other camera in the vicinity had suddenly turned on us.

Kaufmann put his hand on my back and smiled (sort of). So I shoved my camera into a random lady's hands and got my picture. And then I took pics for everyone else. And then I left the group and went home. Shaking. Because, you know, reaction sets in after an intense situation.

Altogether, yesterday was lovely. :-)