There is, as the English would say, no side to the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, no attempt to project the image of the diva whose talent sets her apart from mere mortals. In its place there is a similarly English reserve and something that was once called dignity. She is, after all, the singer whose talent Cecilia Bartoli has called “majestic.” Even a brief meeting suggests that she learned politeness as an infant. The reserve, of which she is refreshingly proud, flashed to the surface during our conversation in Vienna when she remarked, “People are, after all, afraid of me,” though her grin splattered the remark with irony. Part of that fear no doubt comes from the austere appearance of the classic Nordic ice queen: tall, blonde, clear and direct of gaze. The complete absence of self-importance and the humor and wit that bubble up in her conversation, however, quickly melt that image.
Further, the reserved manner is something she has had to learn, as many singers must. In the beginning of her career, she said, she drew no line between her personal and her professional life, and she now seemed to regret some of the confusion that resulted from having presented herself as affable and friendly to people she later came to realize were interested in her only because of her talent or her fame. One suspects that, however friendly and affable the professional woman might appear, she spends a fair bit of time on the other side of the rampart she has built between official and private. As her career progressed, she said, she had to separate her life into two sides, and she adds that it was a wise decision, something she believes necessary for all singers. Like many famous sopranos and mezzos, she has had her fair share of fans who can most politely be described as excessive, though one suspects that excess would not long survive her displeasure.
As we spoke, lines of Andrew Marvell came to mind: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” However unlikely it might be that this seventeenth-century English poet had the plight of twenty-first-century sopranos and mezzo-sopranos in mind when he wrote those words, they do seem to apply not only to singers but to most of the women who work in that vast world now known as “entertainment.” Opera lovers or, to give us a truer name, opera junkies would probably scorn the use of the term “entertainment” to describe that glorious thing that musicians do and that drives us wild, but it is foolish to believe that the same forces that govern film and theater would bow down in reverence before the muse of music and not make the same demands of singers they make of actresses. In a world of disposable bimbos, of actresses who can find work only so long as they can remain young, a world that has popularized vanity surgery, small dispensation is given to singers. Indeed, the demand is even more onerous, for singers not only must keep their youthful appearance but must preserve the fresh and youthful sheen that is one of the qualities that make the female singing voice so beautiful.
Reference to this surfaced more than once during our conversation, for von Otter was about to sing the role of Sesto—gloriously, as it turned out—the stepson of Cornelia in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. “I’m at an age now when it is not natural for me to be singing, at least not certain roles,” she observed with disconcerting honesty. “There are many younger singers, good ones, and I’m often the oldest one in the cast, as is the case with Giulio Cesare.” When asked if this demand for eternal youthfulness was more rigorous for women than for men, she considered for a moment and then said that, no, there were as many tenors and baritones as sopranos and mezzos among the vocal desaparecidos. But she did not deny that cultural forces make an audience more willing to accept a fifty-year-old Rodolfo than a Mimi “of a certain age.” Mezzos, who are seldom required to sing the role of the sweet young thing, have a greater chance at theatrical longevity.
Interviews are by nature perilous: the subjects must resist the normal human temptation to speak openly or to answer a question fully. And they must, alas, discipline themselves to resist the impulse to gossip. Singers, save perhaps in the privacy of their chambers, or maybe only in the shower, seldom speak badly of other singers, no matter how cunningly the interviewer attempts to seduce them into doing so. I once believed this resulted from fear that the chickens would come home to roost when and if the vagaries of casting put the gossip on the stage opposite the vilified colleague. This, however, presupposes that singers read interviews with other singers, which need not necessarily be the case. Nor does it result from the fear of getting a reputation as a disloyal colleague. I’ve come, over the years, to believe that their reticence results from nothing more than the fact that they sing, too. They also get out there in front of a thousand, two thousand, three thousand people and stake their reputation and peace of mind on the perfection of a single performance, sometimes on a single note. So singers are the only ones who really know, know from the inside, what it is like to be out there in the glow of the lights, and in the even sharper blaze of people’s expectations, when the most minimal errors can turn applause to jeers and whistles. Given this, their charity and forbearance are not at all surprising, nor is the fact that most singers will go no further than referring to a “bad performance.”
Proof of this came, as we continued to talk about the sell-by date that society has put on singers, when I named a certain tenor and suggested that he would stop singing only when a wooden stake was driven through his heart. She remained seated, though just barely, else I would be able to say that she leaped to his defense. Instead, she leaned forward in his defense and insisted, “His is still a great voice. And a great singer.” This impulsive generosity flashed out more than once when other singers were named, though she was less kind with certain conductors. Of one, she said, not without restrained regret, “He was my biggest fan fifteen years ago. He is no longer my fan.”
It quickly became evident that she is, with ample cause, conductor Marc Minkowski’s biggest fan. Handel’s Ariodante, which she recorded for DGG with Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre in 1997, after a series of concert performances, is a disc upon which hard-core Handel junkies have been known to OD. Even more moderate listeners join reviewers in judging it to be one of the best recordings ever made of a Handel opera, her interpretation of Ariodante the one against which all future performances of the role will have to be measured. With Minkowski she has also recently recorded Handel’s oratorio Hercules and a collection of Offenbach arias and scenes so delicious as to lead the listener to long to see her sing in a staged performance of any one of his operas.
A look at her discography indicates that this is a singer who has chosen her repertory sparingly and has chosen it well. It also shows that she has arrived at the rare position, one generally held only by singers of pop and rock, where her record company has sufficient trust in her musical talent and taste to risk taking a recording chance on her.
This was certainly the case with her For the Stars disc, which she recorded with pop star Elvis Costello, long a great fan of hers. When I expressed some reservations about the disc, she defended it strongly, and I was persuaded that this defense was based on her sincere belief that the recording succeeded in showing that the two worlds of music, popular and classical, can be made to blend with each other and that fine singing is as at home in one as in the other. The tremendous success of the disc argues in her favor.
This led, as many things do when people who love opera and classical music talk together, to a discussion of what must be done, in a world where classical music makes up less than five percent of total disc sales, to preserve the art and, in more simple and pragmatic terms, enable singers and musicians to continue to find work. Von Otter was clear that part of the need to cultivate a future audience fell to the schools, and she expressed regret that many countries seem to have abandoned the attempt to teach children how to read musical notation or how to play an instrument. Revitalized music programs, she suggested, would be one way to instill an interest in classical music in children. She also said that opera houses, perhaps in conjunction with schools, should devote more time and energy to finding inventive programs to familiarize children with and interest them in what is done inside of opera and concert halls and to persuade them that opera is not an art intended only for rich old farts. When we agreed on this, she said she regretted the fact that opera houses must now spend so much time on these concerns that they have less time and less money to get on with their chief business, producing operas. Lastly, she expressed a wish that the either-or cultural distinction between pop and classical, high and low, could somehow be destroyed or, if not that, at least mitigated to a point where people unfamiliar with the world of classical music could approach it without the fear and trembling that come with the contemplation of strange or faintly fearful cultural environments. She was intensely aware, as are all people who think about the future of classical music, of the economic forces at work or, more accurately, not at work: less and less state money available for the arts, an aging market of consumers, and the general parlous state of the world economy, which cuts down not only on state subsidies but on the amount of money that private donors are willing to donate to the general cause of music.
At one point she remarked on the invasive and overwhelming presence of music as background noise in our lives—in post offices, on telephones, during and between most scenes on television—and went on to suggest that this ever present music dulls people’s ability to listen to music carefully. When asked, she admitted that her two sons had little interest in music but do have an interest in the theater, the world in which their father works.
I asked what her favorite role to date had been, and she shot back, without a second’s hesitation, “Carmen.” Referring back to the image many have of her as cool and reserved, I asked if this had in any way affected her decision to accept the role, in which she went on to enjoy a triumph this summer at Glyndebourne. She laughed at this, said how wonderful it had been not to have to hide behind costume tricks to play a boy but, instead, to be able to play the part of a woman in the middle of her life, not “giggly, stupid Dorabella.” It was evident in all she said that she not only enjoyed Carmen but loved playing Carmen.
“The music is fantastic,” claimed this mistress of Baroque style. “I’m not in love with full opera voice singing,” said the same woman who belted out an effortless high A during a bravura performance of Ariodante’s “Dopo Notte.” “With French, I don’t have to work hard to sing easily,” said a singer whose Italian diction is but one of the many perfections of her art.
She admitted that she had been very nervous about singing Carmen, sure she would be a nervous wreck if she did. To prepare for it, she moved with her family to Glyndebourne, amid the sheep and cows that dapple the local fields, and she settled in for six weeks of rehearsal, or what she called, citing the absence of the stage director during the first week, “paper rehearsals.” There followed three weeks of full stage rehearsals, during which she had sufficient time to prepare herself to present something different from “the tourist gypsy with a rose in her mouth.” This was, she said, the sort of role she enjoys, one where she did not always have to sing in the schooled sense of the word, one where she was not constrained to sing consistently with the full opera voice. Most European critics agreed that she had found the role to suit her talents.
Her schedule contains recitals and concerts for the next six months, but she is scheduled to perform in another opera in July of 2003, when she will sing Ruggiero in Handel’s Alcina at Drottningholm with Christophe Rousset. When asked about how she prepares a major role, she said that she likes six months to prepare, for the process of learning a new role is very hard on the voice. At the beginning, she will devote no more than forty-five minutes a day, with a pianist, to the role. The comparison she gave to feeling herself into and through a role was to the process of working out a crossword puzzle. “Suddenly, the words are there. Suddenly the tempi are real and you see how it has to be.”
She will, during this process of creeping her way into the role, read through the entire libretto and then write a Swedish translation of her scenes and all the parts leading up to her scenes so that she has a clear dramatic idea of what has happened to lead her character to this point. It is also important for her to understand the message of the aria, not only in intellectual but in musical terms.
In the first stages of preparation, she will listen to a disc or watch a video of the opera. Having said this, she observed ironically, “You should be prevented from watching yourself on video.” As she works her way through the piece, she gradually gets a sense of whether the music is stronger than the text. Things improve for her once the director makes an appearance, for she enjoys having a director who will tell her what to do on stage while she concentrates on the singing. Recordings of operas, she believes, should be made live, for this captures the excitement of performance from start to finish. Repair sessions can attend to the errors made in the performance. During them, she likes to go through an aria once, then immediately through it again because she thinks the voice is too often cold the first time through. It is often the case that this second take will be used as the base for the recording, during which the recording engineer will “correct the spelling.”
Interested in this phrase, I asked if this was indeed the right comparison or if perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that the finished product, be it an aria or an entire opera, was a patchwork quilt, with bits and pieces from this take joined to bits and pieces from others, all of them stitched together so well by the sound engineer as to render the threads invisible/inaudible to the average listener.
“There’s no need for a listener to hear a wrong note,” she said, justly. “I want the result to be a particular way. Why should the listener have to listen to me sing badly?” she asked with equal justice. “If a record is nicely made, it can take a lot of listening before you’re tired of it.”
It was best for us not to waste time discussing this question, for there is no answer. It is in the nature of the printed word that the writer be given time to correct, rethink, change, adjust a text before it is presented to the reader; since the invention of writing, it has always been like this. Yet until the past century it was the very essence of opera that each performance was unique and that those who failed to put themselves in the physical presence of the singing of Malibran, Pasta, or Rubini would never be able to hear them sing that particular performance. Thus one of the defining characteristics of musical performance was that no performance could ever be repeated in the same way: art mirrored life in that each event was unique. The modern technology of sound recording has put paid to that and now offers us a limitless selection of note-perfect performances, which can then be committed to memory; it can even now go back and change the instruments with which singers such as Caruso sang, just as it can put the film Metropolis into color. These technological manipulations, though they provide people who could not attend a performance with an idea of what it sounded like, also raise the question of what “live” recording means.
In a world of decreasing state support to theaters and with the disappearance of Mr. Vilar’s millions, recordings also provide work. I asked why someone as famous and frequently interviewed as she had consented to give more interviews. Von Otter was quite frank: she felt that every person involved in a project that results in the making of a disc—as is the case, thank God, with Minkowski’s Giulio Cesare—needs to chip in and do their part to see that the disc sells. Thus she was willing to sit in the lobby of her Vienna hotel on a day when most performers would be far less generous with their time and answer the same old questions and sit for the same old photos.
Her intelligence and wit, however, flashed out with sufficient frequency to show that this was not just another celebrity on autopilot; so did the honesty of much of what she said. I remarked that she is now, and has long been, considered one of the world’s great singers, and she pushed this away by commenting on a series of bad reviews she had received in the (of course) French press, and one that said her voice was “in shreds.” She admitted that a review like this can still get to her, as can the habit of stupid people who ask her if she has read the review. Some bad reviews, she admitted, can be interesting and helpful (I’ve heard countless singers say the same thing, although this is the only time I actually believed the person who said it), but this particular review had done little but cause needless pain.
I asked about her future projects and her answer gladdened my Handelian heart: Ruggiero with Rousset and Xerses with Christie at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in November of 2003. There is also a fair bit of non-Handel, music that singers perform and, I have it on good authority, other people listen to: Les Nuits d’Eté and Béatrice et Bénédict, Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Das Lied von der Erde, and Capriccio, as well as concerts and recitals that will take her around the world. She will also teach a master class in Denmark. Would she ever think of directing an opera? No!
The cat who had slept on the sofa of the hotel all during our talk now stood up and stretched, perhaps expressing the sentiments von Otter was far too polite to display. This reminded me that two hours had passed, and it brought me back to time and its passing. Where is the voice going? Von Otter answered instantly that it/she would like to go into the more dramatic repertory, Janácˇek and Strauss’s wicked women. Since the heavy Verdi heroines are not parts into which she could put her heart, she said, she won’t miss never singing them.
She paused, her face flirted with a smile, and then she said, “Le Nozze di Figaro, ah, that’s gone now.”