Click here to watch
Anna Netrebko's performance at the Last Night of the Proms
”I am big,” she insists, dark eyes widening. “I am big!” At the age of 36,
Anna Netrebko is certainly as substantial a star as any in the new operatic
firmament. The evidence of the Russian soprano’s gigawattage just keeps
piling up. As much as any of her cute blonde compatriots who wield a tennis
racket, the pretty heartshaped face, framed today by a silver-grey woollen
beanie, has launched a thousand products. A year ago, she was listed,
between Youssou N’Dour and Justin Timberlake, among Time’s 100 most
influential people, the first such accolade for a diva. The influential
directory of classical music, Musical America, has pronounced her Musician
of the Year for 2008. In November, she sang for Martin Scorsese at the White
House. “I was so scared, I lost my voice,” she says. “First two phrases I
was‘ooeerr bleurghblabla’.” And, lest we forget,there are the backed-up
bookings stretching far into the future, including the mouthwatering
prospect of Tatiana in Eugene Onegin at the Met in New York in 2012. The
latest, a couple of days after finishing in Roméo et Juliette in New York,
is her umpteenth Traviata, but her first at Covent Garden.
So, yes, Anna Netrebko is very, very big.
That’s why people who overlook the darker, steelier timbre of her voice keep
on bringing up the C word: Callas. There’s only one Maria, but Netrebko’s
voice, allied to an intoxicating air of sinful glamour, makes her a poster
girl on whom opera is pinning an awful lot of its hopes for rejuvenation.
Not that that’s the bigness she’s referring to.
“I’m big here.” We’re sitting in a small room somewhere in the rabbit warren
that is the Royal Opera House. She leans forward on a sofa, pointing to a
pair of robust shoulders under her sparkly charcoal-grey minidress. “I love
to eat. If you let me, I’ll never stop. This is almost my biggest passion.
And here it’s big, and it’s getting bigger because of the singing.” She
presses the heels of her palms into the lats under her armpits. “Because of
the breaths. All my dresses are getting small for me. I have to give them to
my girlfriends – my pretty designer clothes. Before, I didn’t have any
problem. After thirtysomething, I started to put on weight. I like it. Men
like it. My boyfriend says, ‘Never lose it!’ But we’ll see. I don’t want to
be fat, because I want to fit the beautiful clothes. This is most important.”
It somehow seems appropriate that Netrebko made her Kirov debut as the back
legs of a firebird in Le Coq d’or.
Her Violetta at the 2005 Salzburg festival modelled a ravishing short red
cocktail dress from which slender pins gaminely strutted. She was in white
bathers for her video of Dvorak’s Song to the Moon, and in the Vienna State
Opera’s Manon, last year, she rolled out of bed in a skimpy black negligee
she sourced from Dior. “But Staatsoper are paying for that. I told them,
‘Listen, it has to be sexy but covered. I don’t want to see [with hands and
voice she mimes a wobbling embonpoint] because, when you’re singing,
sometimes, you know, it’s [more miming]. Nobody comes to see that – it’s not
beautiful.”
It rather depends on the diva. Hasn’t she heard about the naked Rhinemaidens
in Covent Garden’s recent Rheingold? “This may be too much,” she says, with
perfectly turned understatement. “There is only one opera when you have to
get naked, as far as I know: Salome. I want to do Salome, but it may be the
last day of my career. It’s very big.” Er, so is she saying she wants to go
the whole way? “Exactly! I want to get naked on the stage!”
It’s hard to tell just how much such an exceptionally jolly person is joking.
She attributes her demonstrative ways to her roots in the southwestern tip
of Russia.
“Like everywhere in any country, south people are loud, coming without any
phone call, opening the door, sitting on the table, opening your
refrigerator, eating everything you have.” It took a while to persuade the
world of her seriousness. “Lots of critics, especially, were for a long time
very much against me. Just because of all this press media, they thought,
‘No, she cannot, she cannot, she cannot.’” But the opera world has long
since decided to sink in its talons. After her latest Violetta, she will
ignore the siren call of the Grammys in LA, despite being up for an award,
to make a one-night stopoff at the Mariinsky theatre in St Peters-burg to
sing in La bohème, then film it in Vienna, then record her next CD for
Deutsche Grammophon in Prague.
“Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine what is happening now,” she
says. “I’m meeting all these leaders – Bush and Merkel and Putin.” From
Putin, she received the prestigious State Prize three years ago, despite the
fact that her appearances at home are strictly limited. “That was a big
deal. After that, they say that I his lover, in internet.” She rolls her
eyeballs. It makes a change from her previous experience of Russian leaders.
The model Young Pioneer developed a formative allergy to classical music
thanks to a succession of deaths in the Kremlin. “It means for the whole day
on the TV channel, it’s going to be classical music. Nothing else. People
hated it. Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, they all died one after another. It
was like a whole bunch of classical music on TV.” Now she goes cross-eyed.
Despite this aversion, she sang in a church choir and was encouraged by a
teacher to have lessons. At 16 she was in what was then Leningrad, cleaning
at the Mariinsky to make ends meet, until she passed an audition for Valery
Gergiev and entered the conservatoire. In 1994, Gergiev cast her as Susanna
in The Marriage of Figaro. A year later, she made her American debut in San
Francisco.
Her vertical ascent has not cauterised memories of deprivation in 1991. “It
was a hunger. Nothing to eat. Empty. They give us the cards to buy the
bread. No money, cold. Yeah, very scary.” No wonder, like many of the new
Russian elite, she guiltlessly enjoys the novelty of untold wealth to the
full. But, she counsels, there is a difference. “Lots of the Russians,
unfortunately, they don’t know how to work. They’re lazy. They want easy
life. And this is wrong.”
Nobody could say that Netrebko doesn’t work. The first syllable of her surname
says “no”, but she has only lately learnt to stop saying yes. She recently
cancelled a Russian engagement with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic
– “Because I don’t have programme. He wanted to sing me the Strauss Four
Last Songs. It’s a huge work. I cannot do that in this amount of time. And,
plus, it’s too early. I just said, ‘I’m really sorry.’ He understood.”
The perils of burnout are particularly evident to Netrebko in the mysterious
breakdown suffered last year by Rolando Villazon, the Mexican tenor with
whom she has sung sizzlingly on stage and on CD. “I knew what is going to
happen. I know that he was not well for a long time. It’s very sad, it’s
horrible. He cut all the contacts with everybody, so I didn’t talk to him.
He doesn’t want to see no one. It’s hard. And, of course, the most horrible
thing is there is not much good tenors around, and he was one of the best.
We’re all missing him so badly. We had a energy. Very kind of like close and
crazy. I like [Jonas] Kaufmann,” she adds, diplomatically, of her Covent
Garden Alfredo. “He’s fantastic also.”
After two days in rehearsal, and two months since her last Traviata in Berlin,
she has still to erase the precious memory of Salzburg. “It was very modern,
very aggressive, lots of movements and lots of passionate singing, which
will not work here in a traditional production. I started to move too much,
and they told me, ‘Quiet, quiet, quiet – it’s the 19th century.’
Once I will have this huge crinoline, I will immediately understand what
they mean.”
As Netrebko brings her signature role of the consumptive courtesan to London,
she will hope for a more auspicious run than when, at Covent Garden last
year, she had to pull out of the premiere of Don Giovanni and made it only
as far as the interval in her last performance. “I am actually kind of
strong, but of course everybody can get sick. I’m trying to be smart, and
don’t sing too many Traviatas, because this is really ruining your voice.
I’m singing only in important houses. When the Metropolitan invite you, and
Covent Garden and Vienna Staatsoper and Paris, of course I want. How I say
no? The problem is the periods. I would be happy if I will have at least two
weeks in between, but I never have it. And this is not so good. Last five or
six years was really crazy. But it’s okay. I’m still young. Young people has
to have all this rock’n’roll.”
Anna Netrebko appears in La Traviata at the Royal Opera House, WC2, from
Monday until February 14
