Observations on Jonas Kaufmann

There have been a number of comments that I have seen about Kaufmann that were particularly nasty. Not sure why there are people out there who have such animosity towards him. While people of good will can argue as to whether he is trying to sing roles that he should not, I believe he has put forward some reasonable comments that he does not want to get bored with just singing the same roles over and over again. Domingo is certainly even more guilty considering he is trying to do baritone roles that are totally unsuited to his timbre. Hitting the notes is not the whole story, he is not a baritone. One can just listen to Leonard Warren, who could sing a nice high C with little effort but he was no tenor. IMHO, Jonas is as as good as it gets now and certainly even on an absolute scale is an intelligent and interesting singer to listen to. There are surely those who do not like the dark quality of his voice and he does not have a lot of squillo but one can say that of other singers as well. Sure, we can go back and make comparisons with Di Stefano, Lanza, Corelli, Bergonzi, Bjoerling and on an on but to what avail. The guy is a good singer and worth going to see.