Angela Gheorghiu - We made all our rehearsals

Angela Assoluta from Opera News

Outspoken and opinionated, Angela Gheorghiu isn't afraid to act like a diva when the occasion demands it. OUSSAMA ZAHR visits with the soprano, the glamorous centerpiece of the Met's gala La Rondine on New Year's Eve.

Angela Gheorghiu is the picture of breezy success. Dressed in jeans and a brown hoodie-camisole, with just a naughty peek of a leopard-print bra, she arranges herself for the videographer she has brought to tape our interview in the café of Manhattan's exquisite Mandarin Oriental hotel. But as he sets up his camera, the hotel's management descends upon us to forbid its use. Gheorghiu is just as quick to act. She collects her things, muttering, "We can go to another place. I don't care about this hotel," and turns to her interviewer with equal decision. "You have your recording," she teases, gesturing to my audio recorder, "and I have mine." And with that, like Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, we make our way into the harsh light of a balmy Manhattan afternoon for a chat in Central Park — Angela, me, the Romanian videographer and her publicist, smiling bravely as he can. Gheorghiu is a bit of an anomaly on the opera scene today. She hasn't embraced the conciliatory attitude of her colleagues. Other singers wear the provided costumes and pepper their interviews with praise for their peers or the necessary demurrals. They talk about the stability of family life and the importance of recognizing the transience of applause and public devotion. Gheorghiu does not abide by this modern value-system. She likes to request new costumes, is honest about a performer's desire to be adored, and when she says, "No comment," it usually means something akin to "We're just getting started." But what you won't necessarily get from the gossip or press releases is that she is flirty and fascinating, sweet and self-possessed. She has many kind words for her fellow singers, fewer for some directors, and considers herself lucky that she has the clout to sit down with a company's impresario for a nice dinner to talk about the future. Gheorghiu returns to the Met this month in Nicolas Joël's romantic, art-deco-inspired staging of La Rondine. Gheorghiu seems to have a better relationship with general manager Peter Gelb than she did with his predecessor, Joe Volpe, who fired her from a run of Traviata, among other disciplinary actions, though he did continue to engage her until his retirement. (Of Volpe, Gheorghiu says, "He need[ed] publicity, but bad publicity.") Gelb is committed to bringing the soprano to the house more often and with greater fanfare — he booked her for an HD transmission of Bohème (now available on DVD), a concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park last summer and a forthcoming new production of Carmen. And Gelb isn't the only one. David Gockley, general director of San Francisco Opera, arranged for Gheorghiu to make her debut with his company in 2007, utilizing the same production of Rondine she brings to the Met this month. After fifteen years as a star, Gheorghiu is still a marketing force to be reckoned with, and they must know it. "[Gockley] really wanted me to be there, and to have a production that I love. He saw the production in Covent Garden, so the production we do here, it's my production, no?" she says with a smile, "so it's my fault." Gheorghiu seems to like the character of Magda, the opera's heroine. "She is Violetta with a happy end. She is Manon with a happy end…. I am happy I am not dying for once." Puccini's Magda begins the opera as a romantic dreamer but acts pragmatically in the end, deciding against a romanticized life with a man to pursue her own path. "You know Puccini, he wrote at least three type of finale," Gheorghiu explains. "I choose the one that is most appropriate and near the title of the opera, La Rondine [the swallow]. She's flying, she's flying. It's a mystery. You don't know exactly where she is going — maybe to the previous life, maybe her home. You don't know where."

Gheorghiu is notoriously picky about whom she performs with, where, why and in what production, so it's not surprising that both San Francisco and the Met have engaged her in a staging for which she has expressed an affinity. It eliminates the guesswork of pairing her with a director. "I'm not going [just] to have my fee. A performance for me, it's a part of me. It's a ritual — starting with solfeggio, starting with rehearsal, starting with doing my languages, my makeup — everything. After each performance, a part of my blood is there, but in a real way." She has little to no patience for productions that update the settings of operas or frame them in a different action. For her, the presentational style of the subject matter must match the style of the music. This isn't exactly a new idea. Divas of the old guard — those watchful sentinels of good taste — shake their heads and insist they never would have obliged the far-flung conceits of imaginative directors. But Gheorghiu is unique among active singers in braving such a stance. And boy does she do it publicly! It's gotten to the point where she doesn't even mention Jonathan Miller by name anymore, simply referring to a "Traviata in Paris" and a director who showed up with the booklet of her CD and little working knowledge of Italian and French. "This is a strange point — why nobody speaks opera languages. French or Italian. Because imagine somebody, a producer, making a new production, in English National Theatre, Shakespeare, and he's not speaking a word of English. In opera that happens very often — no comment." She continues, "It's like me not knowing the notes and the words. How can [a director] build a personnage on something [he doesn't] know? Thanks to us [the singers]. Oh, that's easy — so everybody can do it. It's unfair, it's unfair, it's unfair. When an opera singer comes, everybody asks us everything. To be nice with everybody, to know the role perfectly, the words, the pronunciation, not one mistake. If you do one mistake, whoa, everybody gets — no? Other people, they know zero, nothing. And we engage them. They don't have the lesson really prepared. And if we [the singers] are not prepared, everybody they are shooting us." Even her critically acclaimed performances don't always have an easy birth. Take, for instance, the sold-out run of Faust at Covent Garden in 2004. When asked about his working relationship with Gheorghiu on that production, director David McVicar chooses his words carefully: "I'm trying to put this into words that you can publish in something where you want to speak well of Angela. Presumably this is a positive profile you're doing of her." Silence. Then … several more minutes of silence. That was the end of the interview.

On one hand, there are artistic differences; on the other hand, there's Chicago. Gheorghiu's scheduled coast-to-coast U.S. itinerary last season, from Chicago to San Francisco to New York, suffered a false start when she was fired from a run of La Bohème at Lyric Opera of Chicago, her first engagement with the company since her 1999 debut in Roméo et Juliette, before performances began. She had left the Windy City during rehearsals to see her husband, tenor Roberto Alagna, perform at the Met in New York. Gheorghiu speaks openly about the debacle. "It's unfair for the public. [General director William Mason] made a really stupid and unfair and unrespectful [decision] for the public. He behaved like a child. Because it's much more important to have the respect for thousands of people who buy the ticket to see Angela than in front of two colleagues and himself. Because I asked them to go and see Roberto. So, I made all the rehearsals necessary for La Bohème and for Angela, eh? I remember they need a little bit of publicity because they have problems with unions in that period. I remember, Traviata and things." Gheorghiu is referring to the American Guild of Musical Artists' threatened strike of the season-opening La Traviata; the Associated Press reported on her firing and the strike, which never ultimately occurred, in the same article on September 28, 2007. "The cast — they are good colleagues. Of course, I spoke with everybody. I said, 'Ragazzi….' Everybody understands me. I am friend with everybody. It's not a matter of cast. We made all our rehearsals. I made rehearsal with orchestra and with everybody." Gheorghiu concludes by saying she had wanted to "cancel this before," because she didn't like the production. "The production — no comment. It's a poor Franco Zeffirelli production. Everyone accept her [director Renata Scotto], because she's a wonderful singer, but as a producer — no comment." (It should be noted that, though Scotto staged the revival, the original producer was Pier Luigi Pizzi.) In response to OPERA NEWS's request for a statement for this article, William Mason, general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, wrote, "Ms. Gheorghiu never asked Lyric management for a release. She missed more than half of her scheduled rehearsals and did not attend the costume fittings for the new costumes she requested. On the day of the stage/orchestra rehearsal we were informed by her assistant that she was en route to New York. Ms. Gheorghiu and the management of Lyric clearly have differing views on the respect owed to one's colleagues, including director Renata Scotto, and to the public, who deserve a well-rehearsed production befitting a major international opera house." But, as is only appropriate with opera, half the scandal comes from cancellations; the other half comes from the actual engagements. At least that's true in Italy. The London Times reported on the greeting Gheorghiu received from the Italian critics for her Traviata at La Scala in 2007, "Gheorghiu sings the way they used to sing in provincial opera houses a long time ago" (Il Giornale), and "She acts onstage like the diva she believes herself to be: with hysteria" (Corriere della Sera). The reviews are classic opera-as-spectator-sport fare, but they are not isolated observations. In a concert review for The London Times in May 2007, Neil Fisher criticized the "mincing and bizarre hand puppetry" that accompanied Gheorghiu's rendition of "Stridono lassù." The reviews refer to Gheorghiu's busy physicality and the way she plays with her hands in front of her face when she sings. Surely, she is no longer the lovingly restrained figure captured on video in Richard Eyre's 1994 Traviata from Covent Garden, when she was being hailed by many as the most magnificent voice of her generation. But if she seems undirected, it might be because she is. "[Some directors] listen to me sing and just sit with tears in their eyes and don't challenge me," she told Warwick Thompson of the London Times. "I need to have help, and I don't always get it."

Still, Gheorghiu has a voice that people want to hear. And what a strange and brilliant voice it is, not only for the way it sounds but for what it can do. The quality is itself paradoxical: it sounds unnervingly fragile, constantly shuddering on the verge of tears, but it also has a wild, stabbing thrust. Gheorghiu is that rare soprano with a slender sound that is so densely packed with color, strength and vibration that it can survive roles that make bigger, wobblier lyric voices split open. Still, it's not made of titanium, and Gheorghiu knows it. Aside from a warmly received Boccanegra Amelia, she takes few risks — Violetta, Marguerite, Mimì, Magda and L'Amico Fritz have been central to her repertoire for more than a decade. Until now. After countless offers to sing Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Gheorghiu finally went into the studio in July and recorded it. This is a leap. Gheorghiu is very aware that her past recordings have led to stage engagements — some of them rapturously received (La Rondine), others less so (Tosca). "I'm sad I don't have Puccini today, because otherwise, I could ask him not to do that second act [of Butterfly]. Because of the second act, it's too tough. I want to keep my voice." She thinks it would help to have the tenor around more in Act II, even though most people can agree that his absence is a dramatic necessity. But Gheorghiu is a romantic about it: she thinks Pinkerton was really in love. She and Jonas Kaufmann, her Pinkerton on the recording, disagreed on this point. Gheorghiu explains, with a laugh, "He thought [Pinkerton] is, he said in Italian, figlio di putana. I thought, at least once in the duo ['Vogliatemi bene'], he is in love and it is a love duet." Kaufmann, who clearly adores working with Gheorghiu, counters good-naturedly, "All the things he says about women — it's pretty disgusting." Still, he concedes, "The moment when the theme of the duet starts, it creates such a beautiful atmosphere. And in that atmosphere, obviously we are [carried] away." It's nice to know in this day and age, when full-length studio recordings are becoming rarer and rarer, that colleagues can still come together to record their thoughts on this literature. Gheorghiu is circumspect about other future roles. Elisabetta in Don Carlo? "I wanted to sing four acts, but Tony Pappano asked me to sing five. And I say no. This is absolutely truth. If you want it. I can't sing five acts. Maybe I'm too careful." (Gheorghiu is referring to her withdrawal from a scheduled Don Carlo at Covent Garden.) Mozart? "Maybe. You know what's happened with Mozart — I am too sauvage. Wild." Desdemona? "When Roberto will sing Otello, I will sing Desdemona. This is my condition. He will. Soon." Bel canto? "It's nice, Lucia, no?" She starts humming "Verranno a te." Do companies offer Norma? "Certo. From the very beginning. I'll see. I sang 'Casta diva' many times. So it's perfect, 'Casta diva.' But all the role, it's a bit too long." She may record it, she says.

Gheorghiu's new interest is having operas composed for her. "I dream of having composers thinking about my voice and writing music — and doing everything they want for me and me for them." Her one condition is that it must be "good to sing, [written] for an opera singer, not for an instrument. Because the voice it is an instrument, but a very sensitive instrument. And the technique to write for voice, it is not the same. Like you study harmony in school, you must study the voice." Vladimir Cosma wrote Marius et Fanny for the couple, and they performed it in Marseilles in 2007. The recording reveals a lush tonality in a lean orchestration with traces of late-nineteenth-century Italian opera and an eminently singable score. "I just sang Marius et Fanny, it was — mwah! Yum yum yum," she trills. "I have a bad wig, but it's okay." It's hard to end the interview without discussing the press. Her high-profile appearances in new productions at Covent Garden, arguably her operatic home base, are heralded with the kind of love/hate profiles in British periodicals that American tabloids such as Us Weekly and In Touch usually reserve for the likes of Britney Spears. Asked what she thinks about these sensationalistic articles, Gheorghiu laughs, "Which one? Remind me. Because I have a book." Her response, it turns out, is ingenious: she is commissioning operas on the subjects of Bonnie and Clyde and Draculette, two of the media's favorite points of reference for the diva. "They give us an idea — thank you very much!" She explains, "What can I do? I take the good part of it. Because finally I really try to understand their reactions. More than this, I never heard about Bonnie and Clyde, I never saw the movie, I never understand the connection. I didn't know who is Bonnie, who is Clyde — on my ears, seems both men or women. I had no idea. And finally, I thought, 'That's amusing. Why not? Okay, let's play.'" To anyone who was questioning it, Gheorghiu is still game.