In a Bloomberg interview today, the great Wagnerian tenor likens his job to a soccer keeper’s: ‘I compare it to being a goalie who is waiting for 85 out of 90 minutes and there’s not one shot to the goal — it’s so difficult to keep 100 percent on power level without having anything to do.’
That gives him plenty of time for improving reflection on higher things in life than singing Wagner. As Albert Camus, a much-underrated French goalkeeper, once said: ‘what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and I learned it in the RUA (football team)’.
Kaufmann should also read Peter Handke who, in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick (Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter), describes how the waiting and the fear can lead a goalkeeper to motiveless murder.
Just like Wagner, really.
Here’s Jonas in soccer gear:
Regarding long waiting periods, maybe one of your opera aficionados can enlighten us as to the truth of the story that Melchior, upon missing a cue to enter on the swan in Lohengrin, said ‘what time does the next swan leave’?
It was Slezak.