Opera singers tend to come in two models. They either toe the line or
completely ignore the line’s existence. They are totally scrupulous or
totally spontaneous. Yet Angelika Kirchschlager, one of the world’s finest
lyric mezzo-sopranos, seems to have her foot in both camps.
One minute she is completely immersed in the minutiae of one of her favourite
characters – almost as immersed as if she were actually onstage – the next
she is telling me how easily she could have dropped opera and done
something, anything, instead. “I could have opened a stationery shop and
wrapped gifts. I would love to be a bookbinder. If I were starting all over
again, I’d be a carpenter. My carpenter makes so much money, and, hey, he’s
an artist too.”
I honestly think that she is only half-joking. Yes, Kirchschlager, who arrives
at the Barbican on Monday for a frothy but enticing programme of operetta
duets with her old friend, the baritone Simon Keenlyside, rose to the top in
seamless fashion. By the mid1990s she was already the Octavian and Cherubino
of choice for any top-flight production of Rosenkavalier or Figaro.
Now she sells out at the Wigmore Hall (we meet in London on the eve of a
recital there) and is one of the youngest singers to have been appointed Kammersängerin
at the Vienna State Opera.
But to chart that meteoric rise is to overlook the story of a live wire who
turned up to audition for the Vienna Music Academy on a whim, with hardly
any formal training. “Even when I decided to study singing it was more for
the fun. I went to Vienna, I had new friends and lots of parties. Then it
was over.” No one was more surprised than she when the career thing actually
happened as well. “I was always happy with what I had. Even when I was
Second Lady in The Magic Flute in a basement theatre I thought I’d
made it.”
Perhaps it’s this element of the unplanned in Kirchschlager’s career that has
led her to push at the boundaries of her repertoire. “But when you think you
can sing a part, when it suits your voice, when you feel comfortable with
it, why shouldn’t you sing it? I never worried about categories, I just sang
what came along and what suited me.”
She still sings Octavian, of course – and, for my money, is still the best
Octavian in the business. But this is also the singer who oozed a predatory
allure in Pelléas et Mélisande last year at the Royal
Opera House. And there is her most striking success to date, in the title
role of Nicholas Maw’s Sophie’s Choice – not a triumph
for Maw, admittedly, but a watershed for Kirchschlager. “That was the
ultimate challenge, where I had to go beyond everything I had done so far,
physically and mentally.”
Why? Seventeen costume changes in Trevor Nunn’s production were certainly part
of it. “I had 50 seconds to run through the vaults of Covent Garden,” she
remembers. “I took off all of my costume and I was running in my underwear.
There were five ladies waiting for me in the lift to the next set. And while
the lift was going up I did up my dress, put on my lipstick and fixed my
wig. By the next scene I was still panting.” That Maw’s opera pretty much
bombed didn’t faze her either. “I learnt a lot for my future – from Trevor
Nunn. I don’t read reviews.”
That’s also not hard to believe: she’s headstrong to the last. “Sometimes I
have this feeling that I go too far, you know? If I have to choose between
the beauty of a note or an expression then I always choose the expression.”
All the more reason why we should have heard her Carmen at Covent Garden when
Francesca Zambello’s staging landed in 2006 – an unusual but clever bit of
casting when it was first announced. But then the company changed its mind,
hiring a more traditionally sultry singer (the Italian soprano Anna Caterina
Antonacci) instead. Coaxed on to the subject, Kirchschlager is
diplomatically disappointed. “I felt that it was a good role for me. I don’t
know what happened but it was fine for me. And the house was so nice about
it.”
So it is Berlin that will see Kirchschlager’s first Carmen (at the Deutsche
Oper early next year); the consolation prize at the ROH was the choice of
whatever role she wanted. The result, perhaps unexpectedly, is Hänsel in
Humperdinck’s naively cheerful Hänsel und Gretel, which
opens in December. A backward step? “If I really want to have a good time, I
thought, then I’ll do Hänsel. And I want to have a good life. Singers with
my age and children pull back a little more. In the opera business, it
doesn’t get easier.”
Her first priority is bringing up her 13-year-old son (she is divorced from
his father, the baritone Hans-Peter Kammerer, but the two remain amicable
and he holds the fort in her Vienna apartment when she is away). And her
home life is now happily domestic. “Every vegetable farmer knew me when I
was on TV.
But I don’t really need it and I don’t like it. And I don’t do home stories
any more.” She means those Hello-style spreads – where “a
team of journalists and photographers comes into your house and watches you
cooking spaghetti, sitting on your couch, reading a book. I tried it out,
and now I don’t do it any more. Everyone knows what my living room looks
like.”
The only thing that irks now is the endless fascination in Austria with Anna
Netrebko, currently the hottest diva on the block. “They say, ‘How do you
feel that Netrebko got your place in Salzburg?’ Like I am not singing in
Salzburg because of Netrebko? Which is so stupid. I have my world and my
calendar is full.”
It’s no surprise to find out just how deep the friendship, or kinship, with
Keenlyside really goes: he’s another singer with his feet planted firmly in
the real world, impervious to opera’s celebrity culture. “We have the same
ideas about how we want to live, our priorities . . . we always know what we
mean, and when we sing together it’s so relaxed.”
So, yes, perhaps you could call Monday’s concert light relief, but don’t
expect anything less than 100 per cent, particularly since the Austrian is
on real home ground: operetta is in her blood. “I think this is a kind of
music that goes directly to your heart. I feel very cosy when I sing it, and
I always have the feeling that everything will have a happy end.” When it
comes to Kirchschlager, everything probably will.
Angelika Kirchschlager is at the Barbican, EC2 (020-7638 8891), on Monday;
Hänsel und Gretel opens at the Royal Opera House (020-7304
4000), on December 9 2008
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
