Success Was Child’s Play for Hot Tenor

NEW YORK —  Johan Botha remembers at age 5 listening to his father’s Richard Tucker records and singing along with the operatic tenor.

When his father told him to pipe down, he impudently replied that someday he’d be singing like that and his father couldn’t stop him.

In January, at age 31, Botha made his Metropolitan Opera debut in “Pagliacci.” His parents were there, full of pride and with no wish to stop him.

The New York Times ran a highly favorable review, calling Botha “a first-rate tenor for this house.”

“Botha has an even technique, a respectable musicality, a communicative personality, a pleasing [vocal] color and an authentic tenorial ping at the top of his voice,” the reviewer wrote.

Botha, who is a native of South Africa, was in his country’s army, playing percussion and guitar in the jazz band and singing in the choir. Then he entered opera school in Pretoria--as a bass-baritone.

One day, while rehearsing for a competition, Botha had trouble hitting low notes.

“I was very puzzled,” he says. “I went to my singing teacher. He had me sing scales. I finished with B-flat. He said, ‘You’re a bloody tenor!’ ”

Botha started retraining as a tenor. Six months later he sang a Mozart tenor role at the school. A year later, in 1989, he made his professional opera debut in Johannesburg as Max, the tenor lead in “Der Freischutz.”

He never looked back.

In 1990, the choral master at Bayreuth, the Wagner shrine in Germany, heard Botha at a competition and chose him as one of 10 new members of the 150-person Bayreuth chorus. Botha wanted to return the next year, but his solo career was taking off and he was too busy.

He has sung in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and soon will do “Die Meistersinger” and “The Flying Dutchman.” He has decided to sing no other Wagner roles, which require more stamina and vocal strength, until he’s 45.

After Bayreuth he went to two small German cities, Kaiserlautern and Hagen, for two seasons, then to Bonn for a season. He sang in “Madama Butterfly,” “Carmen” and “Pagliacci” in German translations.

Singing in German changes the rhythm, Botha says, so when he made his 1993 debut at the Bastille Opera in Paris in “Butterfly” he had to be careful to get the rhythm right. He learned it in Italian in two days, when another tenor had to cancel suddenly.

Botha’s manager sent invitations to top opera houses to hear the “Butterfly” in Paris.

“Within two weeks I had signed contracts with Covent Garden, the Met, Vienna Volksoper and Berlin Opera,” Botha says.

Botha has studied Canio, the character he sang for his Met debut in “Pagliacci,” and he has felt inner turmoil and anger like Canio’s as well. Canio, leader of a troupe of traveling actors, is jealous of his young wife, Nedda. As they act wife and betrayed husband in a play, Canio’s bottled-up emotions explode and he stabs her to death.

Botha says, “I believe everybody can learn from opera. I’m a very religious person. I believe God has put this music into my hands so I can warn somebody who is at the performance and having problems. He will see how jealousy can end.”

When Botha got out of the army, he says, the things he had seen at a border war upset him and filled him with aggressive feelings, which he tried to repress. He went to a therapist for help and poured himself into music.

His mother, a switchboard operator at a building site, wanted to introduce him to Sonja, the daughter of the contractor, but he resisted. She finally gave a picnic for Afrikaans-speaking co-workers, and Botha’s courtship of Sonja began that day. They married four years ago and have a son, Louis, born in August.

His turmoils were calmed, Botha says, by his “wonderful wife, who changed everything around in me.”

The Bothas live in Vienna but, he says, “I’ve got a feeling my basic career will be run here in America. The Met has said it wants me back.”

Botha’s parents met when both worked in the post office. When his father was offered a job buying equipment for a chrome mine, the family moved from Derby, southwest of Johannesburg, to Rustenburg, west of Pretoria.

His mother has a fiery personality, Botha says, and sometimes tries to argue with his father. His father says, “We speak later.”

Botha is training himself to be more like his father. “When I get mad, I will turn around, walk out of the room, calm down, come back, take the other person out for tea and discuss the problem.”

Botha declares that his goal isn’t money. He has turned down big fees to sing roles he considers too heavy for his still-developing voice.

“I’ve got a huge voice,” he says. “So, people ask, ‘Why don’t you sing so and so?’ I say, ‘If I do, I ruin the voice.’ Until you’re 45, the voice is still developing. You can start thinking about being crazy then.

“I don’t feel like a star and I don’t want to feel that way. Even if I reach the same heights as [Luciano] Pavarotti and [Placido] Domingo, which I pray and hope, I want to be known as a person who will listen to somebody who has got a problem and sometimes help.”

Like Pavarotti, Botha is a big man, tall and broad.

“I’ve done every diet you can think of,” he says. It hurts his feelings when he reads that he isn’t believable as a lover onstage.

“I sing like one,” he insists.