Watch Diana Damrau perform
Five years have passed since the young German soprano Diana Damrau made her
sensational British opera debut as the Queen of Night at Covent Garden.
Since then, she has become one of the handful of singing superstars, a
specialist in the vertiginous, high-wire virtuoso roles, especially by
Mozart and Richard Strauss.
Since 2003, she has sung both the yodelling Fiakermilli in Strauss’s Arabella
at the ROH and a spectacular Zerbinetta — the sexiest and one of the most
brilliantly sung I have seen — in the same composer’s Ariadne auf Naxos. She
also appeared in two roles written expressly for her: the Gym Instructress
and Drunken Woman in Lorin Maazel’s 1984. Apart from a recent recital debut
at Wigmore Hall, we haven’t seen her in London for three years, but she is
back this season with a vengeance: in the female title role of Engelbert
Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel — opening at the ROH on December 9 — and as
the flighty landowner Adina in Donizetti’s bucolic comic romance L’Elisir
d’amore next spring. Her second solo album for Virgin Classics, Donna,
devoted entirely to Mozart, has just hit the shops.
Now 37, she is very much a singer of the moment, a star in Vienna, her home
(“Well, my storage, that’s where all my personal belongings are”), Munich
and especially at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where she is a key member
of Peter Gelb’s roster of good-looking divas. A dazzling blonde and a
brilliant actress, with glamour and charisma to spare, she has wowed Met
audiences with her Zerbinetta, her Rosina in The Barber of Seville, her
seductive Aithra in Strauss’s Helen in Egypt and, most recently, as
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.
It is therefore surprising, I said, when we met at the Met last month, to see
her returning to a relatively modest role such as Gretel, usually assigned
to very young sopranos at the beginning of their career (indeed, Damrau sang
Gretel in all three of the provincial houses in Germany — Würzburg, Mannheim
and Frankfurt — where she had successive contracts from 1996 to 2002).
“I need balance in my work, and that’s why I am so happy to be doing Gretel at
Covent Garden,” she enthuses. “Gretel is the kind of role that you only get
when you are on a permanent contract to a house. Nobody engages a guest as
Gretel because all the houses have at least two or three of their own. I
thought this role had gone for ever. When I was in London for 1984, I was in
a Covent Garden cafe, telling a friend, ‘That’s it with Gretel,’ and three
days later my agent called and said Covent Garden are doing Hänsel und
Gretel and do you want to do it? I couldn’t believe it. And I was free. It
was a miracle. Instead of screaming Der Hölle Rache [The Vengeance of Hell]
at the kids as the Queen of Night at Christmas, I get to be kissed by
angels,” she giggles. “It’s an amazing cast: Angelika Kirchschlager as my
Hänsel, Anja Silja as the Witch and Thomas Allen as my father.” Gretel is
certainly a far cry from the Queen of Night, which Damrau, having sung it in
most of the world’s great opera houses, has now forsaken. It used to be her
“showcase role” but, she says, the tightrope-walk of getting it absolutely
right, of hitting the exposed high Fs above top C, has got the better of
her.
“I don’t want to reject her. I love the character and the music, but it’s one
of those extreme roles. I don’t want to sing other roles at the same time,
and I don’t like so much pressure. You need time to recover from Queen of
Night. It’s quite a dramatic part, so I decided to stop doing it in stage
productions. I will still sing it in concert, as I did in Wales, at Bryn
Terfel’s Faenol Festival this year. That was a wonderful experience.”
Some famous Queens of Night drop the role because they find it boring, sitting
around for most of the evening waiting to sing just two show stoppers that
have to be jaw-droppingly good.
“I was never bored with the character. When I was a child during carnival, I
always wanted to be the mean stepmother. I had a red dress and a silver
crown and looked like a princess, but I was still the mean stepmother. As a
coloratura soprano, you often get only to sing the nice girls, the cheeky
girls, the funny girls, the sexy girls, but the Queen of Night is a mature
woman, a mother — she has demonic powers.”
Nowadays, Damrau sings the queen’s daughter, Pamina, in The Magic Flute. She
made the changeover at the Met a year ago, giving her last performances of
the queen and her first Met Paminas during the same run — and swapping the
light high roles for the more lyric and dramatic roles is the “theme” of her
Mozart album. Here, she sings both Susanna’s and the Countess’s arias from
Figaro, Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Blonde and Konstanze in
The Abduction from the Seraglio — and seems to find a different timbre for
each of the characters. She may be a “light” soprano, but she has a
cast-iron technique and a range of colour, with unusually resonant low
notes, which she displays to outstanding effect in Vitellia’s big scena from
La Clemenza di Tito. The highlight of the disc is perhaps her astonishing
ascents to the stratosphere. Mozart wrote it for his first beloved, Aloysia
Weber, later his sister-in-law, whose voice soared to top G. It fits Damrau
like a glove.
After Gretel, she moves seriously into the diva roles, but keeping a balance
between German, Italian and French parts. In addition to her Covent Garden
Adina, she has two more Donizettis in preparation, La Fille du régiment (in
San Francisco and at the Met) and the rarely staged Linda di Chamounix, and
she debuts as Massenet’s Manon and Strauss’s Die schweigsame Frau (The
Silent Woman) in Vienna. Even Donna Anna, once regarded as a dramatic
soprano but now frequently tackled by coloraturas, looms. So, it’s a time of
change.
“Sure, but I take my time. I’ve done everything step by step, with Mozart and
Strauss coloratura parts, and now the light bel canto roles. I’ve been
singing professionally for 13 years. When I was only 12, I saw Zeffirelli’s
La Traviata movie on TV, and I thought that was the most beautiful thing on
earth. I had no clue what it meant to be an opera singer.”
She hugs herself with gleeful disbelief at the strides she has made since
then.
Donna is available now on Virgin Classics
