Beautiful, young Met soprano has a darker past she wants to share
NEW YORK: There are things they don’t want me to talk about, Kristine Opolais says, poking a fork at her monkfish on a recent Sunday afternoon.
Who are they? Friends? Managers? The soprano waves off the question. This is how she speaks. She tosses out a curveball, a twist, but on her terms.
“I have people who are telling me, ‘Never tell about your horrible experience in your life before,’” she says. ‘Nothing bad, only good experiences.’” Opolais shrugs dismissively.
“Sometimes directors come to me when I have to play some horrible thing, scary or hysterical or crying, they ask, ‘Did you study somewhere to be an actress?’” she says. “No, this is life. That’s why I think I don’t want to say you need a really bad experience to be a good artiste, but bad experiences in your life say something.”
It is, to be fair, a blessed moment for Kristine (pronounced Kristina) Opolais. At 36, she is one of a select group of singers being groomed by the Metropolitan Opera. She’s currently starring in the title role of the Met’s new production of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and, in March, will open in “Madama Butterfly.” Opolais graces the cover of this month’s Opera News and forms half of classical music’s new power couple. It’s no wonder that Vanity Fair will feature her with her husband, Andris Nelsons, the dynamic music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, later this spring.
Still, not everything is “honey and sugar,” as she puts it.
On this day, after scurrying across Lincoln Centre courtyard for a lunchtime interview, Opolais acknowledges that she’s a bit flustered. Adriana, four, has had a rash. She’s fine, but it took a doctor’s visit to determine that. Parental adrenaline continues to flow.
“I do what I have to do, but I am a mother and I am taking care of my baby,” she says. “For me, that’s the most thing. To be honest, I am not too busy with myself now.”
The Latvian-born Opolais speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, and her English, while strong, is jagged in spots. In conversation, she bounces between confessional and cagey. She will say, for example, that betrayals early in her career have made it hard for her to trust people. But push her on what those betrayals were, and she’ll pass over the question. Opolais also has a complicated view of her image. She talks of the need to put less importance on appearance, yet she won’t pose for photographs unless she can approve them in advance. It’s a demand more typical of movie stars being featured in glossy magazines.
She started singing not by choice. As a girl, Opolais preferred Madonna and Michael Jackson to Matilla. But her mother, who had wanted to be a singer, pushed her only child. That meant long bus rides from her small Latvian town to a teacher in Riga.
The family struggled. In the early years, her father earned a good salary working as an official on a ship. But he was rarely home. In her teenage years, her father lost that job and got sick. (He died in 2009 of a liver ailment.)
The family moved to Riga when she was 18, poor and living in a dangerous neighbourhood.
That’s when Opolais grew more confident and also developed an almost stubborn determination to overcome all. At the prestigious Academy of Music, her tuition was covered for the first two years. Then, in the middle of her training, her scholarship slot was given to a singer who, she thought, wasn’t as good but was better connected. She left the conservatory and, at 21, got a position in the choir of the Latvian National Opera.
Nov 27, 2001. She remembers the date, because that’s when her life changed.
“I was so sorry I did not have a bed in the (opera) house, that I had to go home. In the conservatorium, I had a feeling I was dying, day by day. Here, I was listening to singers. And I said to my teacher, ‘Give me two years, I will be a soloist.’”
Nelsons, who met Opolais at the Latvian National Opera and became principal conductor there in 2003, believes these difficult times — including struggles with finances and the petty jealousies among young singers — hang with his wife today, even with all of her success.
“Childhood is a huge part of everything you do, and the thing is, the parts she performs, these are huge, challenging vocally but they’re also challenging personalities, big characters,” Nelsons says. “And I think you cannot really perform them well if you haven’t experienced certain things.”
She is sitting at a table, choosing the fish over the frittata because, at 165 pounds on her 5foot-8 frame, she is at her weight limit.
Opolais talks about how silly this is, that people spend so much time on appearance. She worries about the next generation of opera singers. Will they look like models and sing like robots?
“We had such amazing singers with big bodies 50 years ago, but nobody wants to see fat people on stage,” she says. “But when you see a real artiste and real art on the stage, the soul and not just a beautiful body, it doesn’t matter if you’re big.”
That said, those who rave about Opolais do not just talk about her voice. They describe her energy and her acting.
Opera singer Renée Fleming first saw Opolais in Munich five years ago. She was starring in “Rusalka.”
“I didn’t know who she was, and I was so impressed,” she said. “She’s a wonderful actress and had to run around for the entire first part of the opera in a white negligee, which was pretty much a wet T-shirt contest. Then she had to sing this aria, which is the showpiece of the show.”
The performance stayed with Fleming.
“She represents a new style of performer,” she said. “Which is the total performer. Just like the Olympics, if we ask them to add another turn to their jump, they will do it.”
Opolais is very conscious of her age and how that applies to repertoire. Years ago, she says, her management wanted her to focus on Mozart. She didn’t feel it. She switched managers. As much as she loves portraying “Manon,” which she has taken on at Covent Garden, she is likely to phase out the part.
“As a person who wants to see and believe in the story, I don’t think women at age 50 are able to sing young girls,” she says. “You cannot be Tatyana when you are 50. You can make a CD. You can sing it in concert. And you cannot sing Isolde when you are 25, and Isolde is my dream. But this is a difficult role and a huge role, and you really need experience for it. The maximum I can catch the time and do it and be perfect in this role, vocally that my voice is still fresh, physically that I’m still pretty and lovely, that is maximum that I’m 47. It’s just my feeling. And I know that Mimi (in ‘La Boheme’) is in its last years. Maybe Mimi will be 40 or 42, maximum.”
One thing is clear: “I decide. Nobody is pushing me. Nobody is telling me what I do.”
Then there is her husband. They met when they were young, he the music director at the Latvian National Opera, she the singer who was willing to take on virtually anything offered, knowing multiple roles meant multiple paycheques. But as their careers grew, so did Opolais’ sense that she needed to make sure she was defined apart from him.
“I didn’t want to be Nelsons’ wife,” she says. “I wanted to be soprano Kristine Opolais.”
In Boston, where Nelsons conducts the BSO, Managing Director Mark Volpe has had Opolais sing several times, and says that were she not married to his music director, she would be on stage more often at Symphony Hall.
“She’s a great singer,” Volpe says. “She sings at the Met. She sings at Covent Garden. It’s not nepotism. She’s so hot right now.”
There is a chance that Opolais will be spending more time in Boston. The couple has homes in Munich and Riga. But Opolais has become concerned about the tensions in Germany over the increasing influx of immigrants.
“One year ago, when I spoke to Mark, I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I can’t because I have to think about the baby, and the baby is better in Europe,’” Opolais says. “But now, when it’s not so safe in Germany, and Boston is a very safe place ... now, maybe we will live in Boston.”
She acknowledges that there was a time when she worried more about her career than her personal life. That has changed. Is she on the cusp of stardom? Opolais says she doesn’t think about that. She doesn’t read reviews anymore, either. All of the feedback she needs comes from people cheering her performance.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is asked where Opolais fits in.
He talks of the short list of singers he has thought about carefully and whose schedules he has plotted out several years ahead.
Gelb’s plans for Opolais, not yet announced publicly, are considerable: the title role in a new production of “Rusalka,” “Tosca” and all three soprano roles in Puccini’s famous triple bill of one-act operas, “It trittico.”
“Kristine has such great potential,” Gelb says. “And it’s not like pop stars who are over the hill when they’re 20. She’s sort of just entering the beginning of her prime.” — WP-Bloomberg
I was so sorry I did not have a bed in the (opera) house, that I had to go home. In the conservatorium, I had a feeling I was dying, day by day. Here, I was listening to singers. And I said to my teacher,‘Give me two years, I will be a soloist.’
Kristine Opolais, soprano