NINA STEMME: FRÅN OPERASKOLAN TILL SUPERSOPRANO

For Nina Stemme, it’s another city, another epic opera, and another anguished portrayal of a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, family tragedy, the traumatic end of a love affair, death — or possibly all four in quick succession. How, I ask her, can she possibly relate the larger-than-life characters she sings so thrillingly on stage to mundane 21st-century life? “But sometimes I think mundane life is worse!” she replies, wryly.

Sitting in a grand hotel by the lake in Lucerne, Stemme looks and sounds healthy, wealthy and wise in a very Swedish sort of way — a long way from the violent, degraded or neurotic women she portrays. And her discourse has a similar Scandinavian calm and cogency. “What you must remember about the operas I sing,” she continues, “is that most of them depict the worst day in a person’s life.”

The woman currently having the worst day of her life — at least in Stemme’s globe-hopping schedule of operatic death and destruction — is Leonore, the heroine of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Next season Stemme will sing the role on stage for the first time — at Covent Garden. But she is working up to that by degrees. Last year in Stockholm she tackled Leonore in concert. And as we talked last week she was about to step up several gears: singing the role in a weird semi-staging under Claudio Abbado’s magisterial baton, to open the Lucerne Festival.

After that she moves on to another great summer festival — the Proms — where she joins the Swedish Chamber Orchestra to sing Berlioz’s delightful song-cycle, Nuits d’été. Unexpected repertoire for a woman who specialises in the heavy end of the German repertoire? “Maybe, but I adore it, and I love to sing in French. It’s a true challenge because one must live up to those classic recordings — by Régine Crespin and Janet Baker, for instance.”

It’s typical of Stemme that she knows exactly which recordings set the gold standard in her repertoire. Whatever she’s doing, her preparation is meticulous. “It took me two and a half years to prepare for my first big Wagner role,” she says. Indeed, she only entered the insecure world of opera in the first place with the greatest show of caution — by doing an economics degree at the University of Stockholm.

“Well, of course!” she says, as if economics is an obvious training for any fledgeling Wagnerian soprano. “I was the first in my family to go into the arts. It’s a risky world. Since both my parents had studied academic subjects at university I thought that I should too, just to have a job.”

Were her parents supportive of her decision to switch to singing? “No, not particularly,” she replies candidly. “They didn’t openly disapprove, but they were even more cautious than I was. And I wasn’t especially talented early on. I just had this urge to do it.”

Caution wasn’t the only thing holding the young Stemme back. When she did apply to opera school in Sweden, she was rejected twice. Only at the third attempt did the woman now rated among the world’s top sopranos manage to convince the Swedish professors that she was worthy of any training. But perhaps that’s not surprising. In those days Stemme presented herself as a mezzo. “Probably because I had a low speaking voice,” she explains. “I was quite old when I finally decided to do this as a career.”

Even then, though, she was determined not to grab opportunities before she was ready — the curse of so many promising young singers. Winning Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition came as a total surprise — “I had barely sung with an orchestra before.” And when the Vienna State Opera offered her a two-year contract she boldly turned it down. That’s comparable to a teenage footballer snubbing Barcelona.

“I didn’t feel ready to cover ten soprano roles a year in such a high-profile place, when I hadn’t studied them first and wasn’t going to get lots of rehearsal. The director of the Vienna Opera was furious with me, but we’ve got over that now.”
Instead she went to a less prominent house, in Cologne, where she could develop at her own pace. And develop she did. “My first role there was fifth maid in Elektra,” she says. “My last role there was Sieglinde. Along the way I sang Mimi, Butterfly and Tosca.” Her Cologne years changed her in another way, too. “During that time I had two of my three children, which was generous of the opera house!”

Did she feel, even early on, that she had the voice to sing massive Strauss and Wagner? “I didn’t even dare to dream,” Stemme says. “And in truth, I wasn’t a big Wagner fan in my youth. But every time I took a heavier role the voice grew more.”
Unusually, however, she has been able to maintain her Italian repertoire as well. “Normally,” she says, “after you have grown your voice for those big Wagner roles, there’s no way back.” Her problem with doing Italian operas now is quite different. She finds the productions boring. “It’s hard to find stagings where the relationships between protagonists are thoroughly developed in rehearsal. In Italian opera the direction tends to be more kind — and I use that word in quotation marks.
In other words, they leave you to stand and sing.”

She has certainly had more provocative direction in Wagner, particularly in the role she has made her own — Isolde. Indeed, Stemme has had the distinction, or misfortune, of being involved in many of the most controversial Tristans of recent times — including the Covent Garden staging last year by Christof Loy. In that show she was magnificent — “as powerful, volatile and tellingly nuanced in the Liebestod,” I wrote in these pages, “as she had been five hours earlier.” But Loy’s staging, which dispensed with ship and castle, was roundly booed. “It was very Bergmanesque,” Stemme recalls, “and for me very clear — the distinction between interior and exterior worlds. But some of my friends in the audience couldn’t take that in, because you have to be open to the work on a different level. The production was strange and absurd in some ways, but I didn’t feel it was against the spirit of the music.”

Does she ever have disagreements with directors? “Yes, but most directors are reasonable, so one can argue with them. And these days I’m quite careful with whom I work.” Note the punctilious English grammar. It tells you a lot.
Now comes the biggest challenge of her career: singing Brünnhilde in the entire Ring. That happens first in San Francisco next June — and then, presumably, all over the world. “The Walküre Brünnhilde isn’t a long sing, but you have to be explosive. The Siegfried Brünnhilde sings for only 50 minutes, but it’s much higher — a totally different tessitura. As for Götterdämmerung, it’s huge and I still have that in front of me. In San Francisco we do Walküre followed by a day off, Siegfried, day off, Götterdämmerung, two days off, then start again — for three weeks! I’ve never done anything like that in my life.”

Richard Morrison, The Times, 20 August 2010