Music: No More Mr. Nice Guy

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Baritone Hermann Prey is spicing up his image

Onstage, he cuts a splendid figure: blond and handsome, with impossibly blue eyes, an athletic carriage and an assured, commanding presence. His distinctive, honey-rich, seductive lyric baritone voice is equally adept at the histrionic demands of opera and the more intimate sentiments of lieder. He is in demand at the world's great opera houses, has made dozens of recordings and in his native Germany has had his own television show. Along with his colleague and rival Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he has long been regarded as a leading German baritone of his generation, and possesses a more beautiful voice than Fischer-Dieskau. So why is Hermann Prey restless?

"Maybe I made a mistake in my career years ago," says Prey, 53, reflectively. "I should probably have switched to more dramatic roles earlier." Outstanding as the guileless Papageno in Mozart's The Magic Flute, the rakish Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and the clever Figaro in both Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Prey has unwillingly become typecast as an operatic nice guy. It is understandable. Who can see him as a villain?

Certainly not audiences across America, which have loudly acclaimed him on a solo recital tour that ended last week in Manhattan with a masterly program of Schubert songs set to Goethe texts. Prey has lost nothing of his fabled way with the German art song, whether communicating the unearthly calm of Meeres Stille, the wild terror of the Erlkönig, the heroic defiance of Prometheus or the soft tenderness of Versunken. And certainly not the opera audiences of San Francisco, which last month heard him sing his greatest role, Mozart's Figaro, in a musically radiant (though poorly lighted and directed) new production.

The Bayreuth Festival, however, can see him as something other than a stalwart. In a brilliant bit of casting against type, the suave, silken Prey has been portraying the cantankerous Beckmesser in Wagner's Die Meistersinger. It may be the first time in history that Beckmesser out-sings his tenor rival in the prize-song contest. "In his letters, Wagner said that Beckmesser should not be too comic," says Prey. "So I said I will sing this music like Schubert's Winterreise. "And he does.

What else lies in store? Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps. A demanding performer who turned down a request by Herbert von Karajan to sing Beckmesser because he disagreed with Karajan's concept, Prey is currently mulling a couple of offers to sing the foremost 20th century antihero. He plans to ignore the tradition of croaking and barking the role that has evolved since the challenging opera's premiere in 1925. "Berg wanted a beautiful voice," says Prey. "I want to sing every note as it is written."