Pizarro

Pizarro is not a man so much as a function: the governor who buried his rival Florestan in his own prison and has kept him alive only to forget him. By the time we meet him, mercy has already left the building. What remains is appetite — and a sudden, fatal awareness that the minister's carriage is on the road and the door is closing.

"Ha! Welch ein Augenblick!" is the sound of that clock starting. I sing it not as triumph but as panic dressed up as triumph — the upward thrusts are stabs, each one reaching for a height it cannot quite hold. Beethoven gives the bloodlust nowhere to spread; he locks it inside a rhythm that drives forward and never relents, so the menace has to be cut, consonant by consonant, against the orchestra's pulse.

That is the discipline of the part. The villainy is abstract — Pizarro stands for tyranny itself, not for any one cruelty — and the voice must stay symphonic where the instinct is to bark. I keep the line firm and dark and let the rigour do the threatening: a man rushing to kill before the light arrives.