Keeping Company With Mozart : There’s More to Klaus and Helen Donath Than Meets the Ear at Pacific Symphony

It’s right there in indisputable black and white on Pacific Symphony press releases: The guest conductor for performances of music by Mozart and Schubert tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa will be “Mozart specialist Klaus Donath.”

All well and good, but is Donath really a “Mozart specialist”?

“Here I do Mozart, Mozart, Mozart,” said the German conductor, who will also provide keyboard accompaniment for his wife, soprano Helen Donath, in one of two Mozart arias she’ll sing.

“There was ‘Mozart-in-the-Meadows’ last year with Pacific Symphony,” he said by phone from New York City, where the couple appeared in recital at Alice Tully Hall. “ ‘Don Giovanni,’ ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ ‘The Magic Flute’ with Opera Pacific. . . . “ And now there’s his Symphony No. 23, and the concert arias Ch’io mi scordi di te and Bella mia fiamma, addio.

“But I just did ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ in Portland two weeks ago, and they immediately invited me back. In Denver, in February and March, it’s ‘The Flying Dutchman.’ I’ve done a lot of Wagner. I was in Hanover seven years, Darmstadt for four, and it wasn’t just Mozart. We did plenty of Puccini!”

So he’s an Orange County Mozart specialist?

“Actually, I’m a DiChiera Mozart specialist,” he said, referring to David DiChiera, general director of Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa and Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit, and erstwhile director of Dayton Opera in Ohio; Donath has conducted “Don Giovanni” at all three.

DiChiera also is the composer of a set of songs called “Four Sonnets: Songs Set to Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” which the Donaths have performed in recital in Toronto (DiChiera attended) and last week in New York City. In Hanover, Helen Donath reported, “the older listeners loved the Mahler, but the younger generation went mad over David’s songs!”

Helen Donath has appeared at such opera companies as La Scala, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera; among engagements this season is “Tannhauser” with the Austin Lyric Opera under guest conductor Carl St.Clair, music director of the Pacific Symphony. Klaus Donath is music director of England’s Bath City Orchestra and Bath and Wessex Opera and permanent guest conductor of Romania’s Banatul Philharmonic.

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As for all those other “Mozart specialists,” Helen said, “They’re murdering Mozart; that’s the problem. They’re trying to reinvent Mozart.

“Mozart from the heart is what you have to do,” she said. “You have to think about the zart in Mozart--what is tender, what is refined.” (Zart means “tender” in German.)

Added Klaus: “Mozart with a big string section, this is wrong. Zart, I try to do that, but it is most difficult to do. Most orchestras think forte, forte, forte!”

Helen was born in Corpus Christi, Texas. She was 21 when she moved to Europe; she met Klaus, three years her senior, two years later, and married him two years after that. Klaus turns 59 on Thursday; the couple have been married 30 years and live in Brelingen, a village north of Hanover.

“We met over Bizet,” Helen said. “I was doing Michaela in ‘Carmen,’ but Pamina [in ‘The Magic Flute’] followed almost immediately. Klaus taught me [that role]. Klaus taught me everything, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky.”

As a result, what few artistic disagreements they have are not settled by democratic process.

“Not at all,” said Helen with a laugh. “It’s completely Klaus; he is a dictator, but in a nice way, in a wonderful way. Like Tito, not like Hitler. And I love it, I love it. . . . It took me a few years to realize that Klaus was always right, but that’s just the way it is. I’m the loudmouth, but he is the one who is right.”

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Countered Klaus: “I like to help her. That’s not a dictator. That’s a coach.”

Still, sometimes . . .

“Sometimes, if I wanted to do something, make a crescendo, and Klaus says, ‘No, keep it; crescendo later,’ we would call friends and have them listen. Always Klaus was the one that hit their fancy, and I’d say, ‘Oh, darn!’ But once in a while, I’d get it, and I screamed, ‘Yippee!’ He’d say, ‘You have to be right once every few years’--but he’d say it so lovingly.

“Besides making music together,” Helen said, “we have a really divine marriage, a wonderful life. We’re daily thankful for this. . . . Klaus is very sensitive, and so am I. We know that some artists live in dissonance with each other, sometimes even just for monetary purposes--we could never live that way.”

* Klaus Donath leads the Pacific Symphony in works by Mozart and Schubert tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Helen Donath is soprano soloist. 8 p.m. $15 to $65. (714) 755-5799.