SFist Interviews: Thomas Hampson

You are here for the 30th anniversary of SF Performances.

I actually started this whole series with Ruth Felt, SF Performances. I've sung probably 15 recitals over the last 20 years. I'm a pretty regular recitalist in San Francisco, and I really enjoy it. I have a pretty active life with the Symphony and the opera over the years as well.

This program on Wednesday, I've done the Mahler, the Schubert, all these sorts of things, actually Songs of America as well. And this '09-'10 season, I'm doing a lot of recitals that are celebrating 250 years of the first song written by an American, Francis Hopkinson, who is a signer of the declaration of Independence. And it's a nice frame of reference to come back, this is the 2nd Song of America tour that I've done in collaboration with the Library of Congress. We're going to visit 30 states by the end of this tour, exploring and celebrating arts and letters in America as seen through the eyes of our poets and heard through the ears of our composers, really articulating a kind of history of American culture, and that's really the thrust of this project.

An history of American culture, it's much wider than just American song.

Yeah, it's wider in its effect. You see, what Americans have done for so many years, we've kinda gone looking for all Schubert, or all Fauré, or all Brahms or all Mahler. But with American art songs, specifically poetry set to music, you are really better off looking at a ten or fifteen years periods of American history, and listening and reading at what artists of those times told us, what it was like to be alive, for lack of a better phrase. It really is more of a diary of a culture becoming a culture; and a myriad influences of many different races and even other cultures becoming this collective American culture. We are a nation of many races. I have lived in Europe for many years, and it always amuses me to be conversing with people who talk about the French this, the German this, the Czech that, the Austrian this, and then somebody finally says: "yes, but the Americans," and I say, wait a minute, which Americans do you want to talk about? You want to talk about the East coast, the West coast, the Northwest, the Southeast, Florida, new America, old America, the influence of the Swedes, the French, the German, the Dutch, not to mention the Asian or the Mexican? We really must, as Americans, understand in such a fundamental way, what our great motto, E Pluribus Unum, means.

And I think we find the answer to that in the liberal arts and arts and humanity of our country.

As a mix of all these cultures, and with the globalization of culture we see, is American culture just a microcosm of a global culture?

Interesting point. I have done a lot of American songs, either whole recitals or half recitals in Europe, even at Le Chatelet in Paris. The point is that more than a world culture, America is not just a place, it's an idea. And a lot of American poetry resonates with various aspects of this great idea and ideal called America, which a lot of people who never lived in America, or have lived in America or would want to live in America, would profess to have as part of their ideas. It has a much larger resonance than just America. It is a world of ideas, it is not a political campaign. I think that it is very good for us as Americans to understand and embrace our own history of ideas and ideals more substantially than we have of late, and if we do that, perhaps we will understand other cultures and their ideas and ideals better as well. I do believe that song, specifically, poetry set to music, resonating in various cultures and various languages, is a great meeting ground for understanding our motives and morals and fears.

On Forum, you ">discussed with Michael Krasny the fact that pianos, and songs as a consequence, are not a staple of each household anymore. But isn't poetry disappearing as well?

You are asking important questions that this project is asking. If you go to a recital and you listen to songs, one of the first questions anyone either loving poetry or having never read a poem in their life is going to say: Gee, what an amazing use of language. What is poetry, and what don't we read more poetry. We are in a turbulent time of refocusing on values and ways to interconnect with people. Quite frankly, all of these things have a direct bearing on education. I think that one of the huge issues that I as an artist want to participate in the conversation, is that there is a significant difference between information and knowledge. And we live in an information visual society, and I'm an artist of a knowledge based oral tradition [laughs]. And I think that's important. I think that we artists must harken to another side of our imagination and keep those things valid. I'm not denying progress, I'm not denying metamorphosis of the species, but I do believe, as your question implies, that there is a different way to ingest language than CNN all the time.

Can you learn poems through songs?

A lot of poets gets very aggravated by having a poem set to music as it distorts their structure. I think that's a very important point to say, that it's been a long argument and always will be. Prima la musica e poi le parole. I think it's the wrong question, it's a question that does not need to be asked, that's really the point as far as I'm concerned. A poem should be learned and can be learned and enjoyed without ever coming anywhere, anywhere within any distance of a melody. No question about that. And some poems and some poets are better left unencumbered by musical language. But that's another conversation. The point is that a poem set to music is no longer that poem, it becomes another art form, called "song." That the inter-relationship, the dialogue between music as a language with language as a symbol of several metaphors and poetry becomes its own gestalt. It has different textures, different thrusts, different universes, different modes of departure, and it is no longer, and it should no longer be looked at, like the setting of a poem and do I get more or less of that poem because of its setting.

If we hear "American song," jazz standards come to our mind.

I'm fascinated by jazz, I'm fascinated by musical theater, I'm fascinated by popular songs composers, I'm fascinated by contemporary. I think that Diana Krall is great, I sing that Ella Fitzgerald is one of the greatest singer to ever walk the planet. But I'm trying to be very specific about my study and my field of expertise. I'm not trying in any way to define what is an American songs, that's a waste of time. We got so many songs, and if you take songs as a metaphor for personal life, we got billions of songs. America has been an outstandingly creative country over the 200-some, almost 250 years, it's quite amazing what has been produced on this soil in the name of American arts or idealism or entertainment.

In classical music there has been a narrow search for things that someone can say: "that is in fact truly American, it does not sound like French influenced, or German influenced, he may be born in Timbuktu, but he is an iconic American voice or something." I think that most of these descriptions and pronouncements are rather narrow, and somewhere down the line in their own logic, they become defeated. It does not reflect what this nation of races is, and we're going to have myriad of influences. Why is it seemingly less American or interesting if a Swedish heritage Minnesotan finds their voice in Iowa plains Indian culture. Does that make it more or less American. I want to take the creative elements at face value rather than preoccupy myself with the customs or the dress or the superficial aspects of the composer.

There are so many different genres that we would call, if not typically American, at least exploited in America, like musical theater, like jazz. And they have in them also all kinds of American song. I am speaking specifically of poetry, poets as observers of human nature, as narrators of the time of life they were alive, and human emotions and psychology, and how that narration resonates with composers. And that seen through a specific time or timeline of America becoming America through the 19th and 20th century, and of course also contemporary.

Do you write poetry or music, or do you commission songs?

No, I don't write poetry. I only write email. I have commissioned many songs. Part of the foundation I have, is to keep commissioning, not just for myself, but for other people as well. If you commission a song cycle, it's fun to have a conversation with the composer, for instance Richard Danielpour, whom I commissioned for the foundation. He is also a great disciple of Walt Whitman. But we wanted to find Walt Whitman in his time. And he had to find poems that resonates with himself, and I certainly have suggestions of poems and poetry that I think are very worthwhile to set to music. But it is a very private process for the creative individual and I respect that.

How is San Francisco different from when you were in the Merola program?

I was invited in 1980 to come to the summer for the program, I won a competition in LA as part of the process to coming to the Merola program. It was very exciting. It's a huge program, very important for American singers. I was just getting started. I was not all convinced about coming into the business or becoming a professional singer. But I did want to learn how to sing, I respected that I had some ability related to that. I spent more time in college in liberal arts, but I had a good basis of singing technique. And I was fascinated by singing.

The Merola really program opened my eyes a lot to the metier of professional singing and to the insights to the opera house, that I had not really experienced. It was very exciting and I think that the Merola program is truly one of the most important young artist programs in the country and I continue to support it and I'm proud to be recognized as a distinguished alum of the program.

As for San Francisco, there was perhaps more incense in the air, as well as other kinds of smell in the air. I lived in a house above the Castro district, and that was certainly a little bit different in the eighties. I'm old enough to know what the 70s were like. I was in high school, and the whole Haight-Ashbury culture, the whole flower power culture, to me, it was a trip to come to CA and see the places that I would see in the news. It has always been a very vigorous social intellectual energy in this city and in Oakland and in Berkeley that means so much to the intellectual energy of this country. Of course it's made fun of, it's called left, it's called diverse, it's called many things. What it is, it's part of the national dialogue, the intellectual dialogue of this country, and our country would be infinitely weaker, infinitely less interesting and less self-aware, were we not to have the culture of the bay area.

You sung Macbeth here. We admired the singing, but the production had us scratching our head. Can you tell us what the typewriter on the prompter's box was about, what it means?

I'm not sure that "It" meant that much. I think that David Pountney's production was quite defensible. It ushered it into a kind of modern reading of the bizarre which we should associate with witches. This whole Macbeth tradition is somehow written or inhabited by the word, the word being almost a metaphor of the green lifeforce that goes through and connects Macbeth. Macbeth's existence is a total negation of life in every facet, and however bizarre those elements were, bizarre in the way that David presented them, --and I know that the production was not, as a production, very well, received,-- I did not find them offensive or ill-conceived. I was a little taken back how offended, or confused people were by it. Quite frankly, I could have done without the typewriter on the prompter's box as well, just because it became too iconic, it became too focusing. People were wondering "What the fuck is that typewriter doing on the prompter's box?" That certainly does not help. A lot of the bizarre metaphors and symbols that David was looking for and does present, I think the third act is very powerful. How is he going to portray something theatrically that has no basis in reality? There are elements that would have been respected more had we not got distracted by a typewriter on the prompter's box. It's like going to a production of Wagner, and seeing a toilet seat on the rock. You spend your all time wondering What on earth are they thinking. I respect that feeling, it's not good, it's troublesome.