Theater:

Barbara Hannigan has a rare gift for drawing emotion

Barbara Hannigan loves to die on stage. “I like that journey from life to death. I serve the music, not the audience,” says the Canadian soprano.

applications from 39 countries, heard 120 of them sing and finally chose 18 who will work with her.

Hannigan’s relentless self-criticism does occasionally get the better of her. Early in her career, she got so nervous during an audition for the St Matthew Passion that she almost passed out. I ask her now whether this was due to a fear of failure. “It wasn’t about failure,” she says carefully. “I have trained out the negative in my brain. It’s about performance anxiety. That has changed a little bit, and I am not sure why, but I don’t get as nervous as I used to. Although I had to memorise one performance recently and I was terrified. Mathieu was laughing at me. He never usually sees me in that state.”

You could never imagine Hannigan pulling out of a performance. She has a “show must go on” mentality and speaks laconically about those world-famous divas — of both genders — who are prone to lastminute cancellations. “As a professional, if you’re 80 per cent OK, you’ve got to go out there. There will always be a reason why you don’t feel 100 per cent.”

The peripatetic whirlwind of Hannigan’s life may have come at a personal cost — her marriage to Dutch theatre director Gijs de Lange ended in 2015 — but she appears too focused on the multiple strands of her professional life to dwell on it. She recently bought an apartment in Paris. “I moved in in February and I have spent six nights there. I have unpacked half of the boxes — I unpacked my music and my kitchen and then I felt at home.”

Hannigan’s schedule makes an imminent return to Paris unlikely. Among her many engagements over the next year or so is the part of the she-wolf, Isabella of France, in George Benjamin’s eagerly awaited Lessons in Love and Violence

at the Royal Opera House in May next year. “George told me my character was intelligent, beautiful and very devious. I don’t think I get to die in this one, although I believe I play a part in the deaths of other people.”

Tonight, though, she will die one more time as Mélisande. “In this production, I am lying dead on a table for a good seven minutes. I am just lying there thinking: ‘Wow, I don’t have to do anything right now.’” For a moment, this indomitable spirit appears almost wistful. “At the end of a long day, that’s rather nice.”