A legend in his lifetime, Jon Vickers has come out of retirement to celebrate his 75th birthday with, astonishingly, his Wigmore Hall debut. The Canadian tenor, whose Otello, Tristan and Peter Grimes were considered definitive by some, has chosen not to sing, however, but to speak in public for his comeback.
Strauss's curious Enoch Arden forms his material. A melodrama for reciter and piano, it was written in 1897 for the sometime actor Ernst von Possart, who was Strauss's boss at the Munich Court Opera. Tennyson's poem is the source. Enoch, a mariner who has fallen on hard times, sets off on a voyage to the orient, only to be shipwrecked on a desert island on the return journey. He's eventually rescued and returns to England to find that his wife Annie, believing him dead, has married their childhood friend Phillip. Enoch conceals his identity and spends the rest of his life living a lie so that the couple can remain in peace.
Tennyson might seem an odd choice for Strauss, though the poem examines several themes that he was later to explore more fully in his operas. The emphasis on the formation of new relationships as a consolation for the desperation of abandonment prefigures Ariadne auf Naxos. There's more than a hint of Rosenkavalier in Enoch's decision to sacrifice himself for the happiness of his beloved. There's also a strong whiff of anti-clericalism in the work. Tennyson uses the tale to question the workings of a seemingly less than beneficent deity. This may have appealed to Strauss, who was an atheist.
Vickers, however, is a committed Christian and he strips the vein of sardonic irony from the piece to replace it with intense religious fervour. His delivery is slow, incantatory. He speaks as he once sang, with a mixture of delicacy and raw power. His voice remains beautiful, its bronze tone undimmed by age. He has a fondness for lingering over pauses which occasionally breaks the flow of the verse, though there are terrifying moments - Annie's grief, Enoch's horror when he realises what has happened in his absence - where Vickers scales the tremendous heights of declamatory, tragic intensity that infused his operatic performances and made him one of the greatest of postwar artists.
The piano-writing, which punctuates the narrative rather than illustrates it, betrays a strong debt to Schumann and more of Brahms's influence than Strauss would ever have admitted. But there are some wonderful effects - pungent chromatic surging, and weird, uneasy trickles over sustained pedals - and Vickers's accompanist, the Brazilian Jose Feghali, plays it immaculately. The ovations, both when Vickers walked on to the platform and when the performance was over, were extended and heartfelt. Many, myself included, were simply grateful to have the chance to hear this remarkable man once again.
