Bernard Kruysen

In his memories published on Qobuz the disc editor Michel Bernstein furnished a beautiful portrait of Bernard Kruysen, from which follow large excerpts :

Imagine a tall and vivacious man, rather thin, with a sovereign power of attraction on stage, who appears to dominate through his serenity and the pianist who accompanies him, and the audience who listen with sustained attention. The contact was easy. He explained to me that he had never made discs, that he was a bit nervous of the prospect and that he would like to record with a pianist whom I had never heard of but with whom he worked and whom he seemed to trust. Anyway, the choice of Debussy collections sat very well with him.

The pianist was called Jean-Charles Richard and lived in Chartres where he taught. We went there. Richard was pleasant to approach, and affable, if a little bitter, rather nervous, and withdrawn in his own world. This was surely the result of his suffering following a serious accident which befell him as an adolescent: running with his friends to catch his daily tram, he slipped and a tram wheel cut through his leg. He had studied under Lazare Lévy and Walter Gieseking and he showed the mark of the latter in his sense of timbre, his floating touch and his very sharp style. We made an arrangement for a recording in Copenhagen, where I went in a car, taking on Bernard Kruysen - for he was the Dutch baritone - when I passed the Hague.

Bernard Kruysen was the son of the Dutch painter Tom Kruysen, who most often lived in Chartres. His parents had divorced and his mother had remarried, to a singer from La Monnaie in Brussels, which would be a fact of no small importance for the young Bernard's development. But all his youth was spent in Provence, and when I announced that I was going to record Debussy melodies with an unknown Dutch baritone, my friends all mocked me until, when they heard the first samples, they realised that the Batavian accent which they had expected in fact bore the scent of Bormes-les-Mimosas and Lavandou!

Kruysen was thin but tall and from his youth his face had been marked like a sailor's. He was a sea-dog indeed, he who, not knowing how to swim, became the Dutch champion of underwater diving. Every year he spent his holidays in Corsica or Ibiza to shoot films in the depths. It is a passion which he shared all his life with this love of music and the discreet relations he formed with women. His relationship with music came from listening to his stepfather. He gave his first concert at the age of eleven, for young people from Provence, who knew nothing of the art: the ovation they reserved for him made him realise the power he could wield over a room, a realisation which never left him.

Kruysen was exclusively passionate about singing. He forged his culture from experience, and never in academic or intellectual circles. Also, he only read music very roughly and he would play works which he would memorise all at once, even the most complex contemporary compositions. The education which had the greatest effect on him was that of Pierre Bernac, but he only worked with him once he was already a famous soloist. In Bernac, he sought a spiritual guide and counsel much more than a teacher. This brought him the opportunity to give some concerts with Francis Poulenc, whom he adored. Instrumental music seemed to him to be an abstract construct, one he found incomprehensible.

So we went to Copenhagen in 1961 to record the first Bernard Kruysen record. This went excellently, and the Debussy was finished in little time. I took the opportunity to record two discs of Ravel with Jean-Charles Richard, the pianist whom Kruysen had introduced to me, and who impressed me greatly with his touch - forget that the piano is an instrument of hammers, as Debussy said - and his aptitude for recreating the poetry of French pieces from the early 20th Century.

The Debussy disc met with triumphant acclaim. Besides an immediate Prix du Disque, the critics saw a competitor to Gérard Souzay, who in the previous decade had been the great interpreter of French melodies and of Lieder. I was developing plans for Kruysen, who was all too keen to record, but only programmes which had been prepared and matured. So he soon spoke to me of his desire to record the melodies of Francis Poulenc, who had just died, and whom Kruysen had always sung. Under the circumstances I had to be rather psychologically firm: I didn't like to take this kind of oeuvre, which I thought to be rather old-fashioned salon music. So, as Michel Garcin, the artistic director of Eracto, had wanted me to let him use Kruysen for Fauré's Requiem, understanding that I was not enthusiastic for the Poulenc melodies, he hastened to record them. I made an error then, which, with the benefit of experience I would not make today. That is why the work with Kruysen and Richard continued with Schumann: first the Dichterliebe, then the Liederkreis, Opus 39 and the Lieder from Opus 90. Finally we made a Ravel record.

Kruysen's relationship with Richard had become somewhat neurotic. Now, since the start I had thought to have Kruysen work with Noël Lee. From that moment - this was in 1965 -  Noël Lee was the preferred partner for Bernard Kruysen, even if he was not exclusive. This is why the duo lasted as long as Kruysen was making records and playing concerts. If it worked for over twenty years, there is every indication that it was a success.

It was at this time that I wanted to have Bernard dig a little deeper into that realm which we did not yet refer to as baroque. There were so many connections between French melodies from around 1900 and the song of the 17th and 18th Centuries that I began to dream of Kruysen with the old repertoire. We began with two of Bach's Cantates for solo baritone, Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, BWV 56 and Ich habe genug, BWV 82. The recording was made with the Barmen Orchestra, conducted by Helmuth Kahlhöfer. Now, the association of these two cantatas had become classic, and the discography was dominated by the Fischer-Dieskau record which has been made at the start of the 1950s with the Sarre Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Karl Ristenpart. Quite apart from any value judgement, Kruysen's career - that of Gérard Souzay and others - would suffer greatly from the monopoly enjoyed by the great Dietrich.

If, in French music, Kruysen was well in the lead, and even if in Schumann he could stand comparison and present a different and equally valid conception of the Romantic German Lied, things were rather more complicated in Bach, where Fischer-Dieskau had signed one of his best records, a milestone work. Kruysen's Cantata BWV 82 is certainly remarkable; I am not certain that BWV 56 is unforgettable. In fact, this very nice, very honourable, and sometimes very moving record could not stand alongside its predecessor. It is also a matter of culture.

Another effort would strike me as more pertinent today. La Lettera amorosa by Monteverdi with the Scherzi Musicali a voce sola. Listened to again today, the Lettera amorosa seems to me to be one of the most fulgurating moments, by its inner character and the contained fervour of its musical interpretation. Kruysen intuitively finds everything which would lead to the rediscovery of baroque, to which he adds the whispered power of emotion. Having arrived too soon, and having a culture that was too raw, Kruysen was not taken up by the baroque movement, which rejected him, even if some of its actors, like Max von Egmond, came to work with him to learn his secrets. But it is to be regretted that he was not able to be integrated into the renaissance of Italian culture which developed in the 1990s. He was its direct precursor.

The Mussorgsky record is a fine testament to Kruysen's art and work. The two cycles: Songs and Dances of Death in the original tessitura (i.e. the conductor in tenor) and Without Sun. We had entered into the cliché according to which this music requires strong and deep voices, without realising that Without Sun is a Debussyist recitative, which reaches the boundaries of ennui, of despair. Kruysen, who did not speak Russian, found that there lived near him an old tutor of the Grande Epoque, who taught him the language, the articulation, the prosody. And this voice, with a middling strength but an enormous dynamic range, passed from a cry to a whisper with an unbearable lyricism and weight. Incidentally, after every concert where he sang this music, Russians in the audience would come to speak to him in Russian, refusing to believe that he had not mastered the language beyond what he needed for the performance.

For the Schumann project, for which eight records were produced, Rémy Stricker, who I had brought into the project as an eminent Schumann scholar, introduced me to a young soprano with a clear voice by the name of Danielle Galland. Besides the fact that certain Schumann cycles are meant for a woman's voice, I insisted that I would not have a man sing poems which clearly demanded a woman's interpretation. Now, some of Schumann's works alternate poems for male and female interpretations. When I heard her in concert, Danielle Galland impressed me. She possessed a very pleasing voice and she had real stage presence. When recording, these qualities did not seem to be enough. The artist was in too good health to get across the message of suffering which is a part of Schumann's Lieder. This was not a technical question, and neither was it a matter of deficient musicality. It was simply an approach which was insufficiently existential, and too bourgeois. So, in the work in question, the alternation between Bernard Kruysen and Danielle Galland struck me as frustrating.

Today, still, to list the best of the moments we spent together, and the greatest successes of his records: the first Debussy, the second Ravel, Mussorgsky, Monteverdi and the first two Schumanns, all possess the pain of memory, moments which shall never return.

But I think that the absolute and incomparable success of Kruysen with Debussy belongs to the last two poems of the Promenoir des deux Amants by Tristan L’Hermitte : « Crois mon conseil, chère Climène » and « Je tremble en voyant ton visage »

All the refinement and all the melancholy of the world...

Bernard Kruysen left us on 30 October 2000. He was sixty-seven.

Michel Bernstein