Life as the greatest Wagnerian soprano
Nina Stemme talks to Rupert Christiansen about her return to Covent Garden and winning a $1m prize
It’s been a year since soprano Nina Stemme donned helmet and breastplate for her skittish impersonation of Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms. Now she’s back in London wearing the armour for real, as the warrior maiden Brünnhilde in four eagerly anticipated and long sold-out cycles of Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen at Covent Garden.
In between these events, Stemme received, last May, the supreme accolade of her distinguished career: the award of the Birgit Nilsson Prize, classical music’s equivalent of the Nobel, carrying a bounty of $1million, to be formally granted at a regal ceremony in Stockholm next month. Full disclosure: I was on the jury and believe her range, the organ-like richness of her voice, her stage presence and her intense musical intelligence make her the greatest Wagnerian soprano of her age.
The prize has a special significance this year, as 2018 marks Birgit Nilsson’s centenary – the great soprano died in 2005. As a greenhorn, Stemme regarded fellow-swede Nilsson with awe and although she is too young to have heard her sing live, she benefited from her advice and friendship. Sometimes this came with a dash of Nilsson’s legendary wit: on hearing that Stemme was pregnant with her third child, Nilsson quipped: “I know that the Bible says ‘Go forth and multiply’, but he didn’t mean you should do it single-handedly.”
The award came as a stunning shock, without any warning beyond an invitation from Rutbert Reisch, president of the Birgit Nilsson Foundation, to lunch in Vienna, with a vague request to discuss the centenary celebrations. “I thought he might ask me to sing at a concert,” she recalls. “When he told me about the prize, I just muttered ‘No, no, no’ in blank amazement. Then I thought, ‘well, it’s happening, so I’d better learn to handle it’. Now it’s making me think a lot about what is really important in my life – work and my family.”
What will she do with the money? “I haven’t had time to decide. Something in harmony with Birgit’s spirit, that’s for sure” – by which she surely means generous-spirited, no-nonsense and unimpressed by gimmickry.
Such a response tells you a lot about Stemme: 55, married with three teenage children, highly articulate and straightforward, she’s someone whose head isn’t easily turned. Before music, she studied for an MBA, and what she imbibed from the degree still feeds into her ethos of practical professionalism. “I hope I am grounded,” as she puts it. “I know I have to work constantly to stay where I am.”
So how does she cope with the inflated egos and capricious hysteria for which the opera world has always been legendary? “Well, I don’t know what it is like everywhere, but on the level at which I am lucky enough to perform, I don’t see that. All my colleagues have been on a long road and learnt the value of respect and patience. There’s so much talent waiting out there, you can’t get away with rotten behaviour – you’d soon be pushed out of the game. But the stress is high, and if someone is suffering a bad day from it, you can understand and make allowances.”
A Ring cycle is supremely testing, a massive feat of concentration requiring phenomenal resources of energy and peak fitness. Stemme has been singing Brünnhilde for seven years now in five different complete stagings, but it still feels like “climbing Everest. I stand at the bottom feeling very humble. Even if you don’t feel 100per cent, that’s what you have to give it.”
The three episodes – Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung – in which the character appears, all present different challenges and exploit different areas of vocal technique. From the whooping “Hojotoho”, where she has to sound “a bit like Pippi Longstocking with no problems in her life and perhaps rather obnoxious”, to the emotional grandeur of the final immolation scene, “there are so many complexities and so many facets that there is always room for new interpretation”. She has a special affection for Siegfried, “where the goddess becomes a woman and the music is just so wonderfully lyrical”.
Do Wagner’s views, in particular his vicious anti-semitism, disturb her?
“Of course, they do. I think he was an awful man, and that should not be forgotten: I wouldn’t have wanted to spend 15 seconds in his company.”
But she doesn’t agree with those who say music by Wagner, who was Hitler’s favourite composer, should be banned. (Earlier this month an Israeli radio station issued a public apology after one of its presenters played part of Götterdämmerung.)
“You have to separate the opinions from the art,” she says. “Once the music is out there, it has its own life.”
At Covent Garden, having recovered from a bout of bronchitis, she is working with director Keith Warner. How does she feel about the stage-high ladder that he requires Brünnhilde to descend, attached to a harness, in Die Walküre – a showy effect that left one poor soprano trapped in a humiliating tussle with a safety clasp, just when she needed to be singing full pelt?
“We haven’t rehearsed it yet on stage, so at this point I am keeping an open mind. What I need to know in such situations is why the director wants me to do this and what he thinks it adds to the drama. Then I can go for it. But I believe these things can be resolved by mutual trust and negotiation – there won’t be any shouting.”
With a diary booked up until 2021, what does exercise her is the difficulty of being spontaneous. “It’s not that I’ve been following a great life plan: everything has happened step by step. But sometimes I wish I could just take a little time to learn some new music or do something different.”
One unexpected move that she did succeed in making – with six years’ notice – was her participation in a new opera based on Hitchcock’s film noir Notorious, in which she played the role taken in the movie by another Swedish icon, Ingrid Bergman. Premiered in Gothenburg in 2015, it was a labour of love. “Rehearsals were very hard as I hadn’t had enough time to prepare it, but in the end, it turned out to be a wonderful experience. It’s just such a pity that it doesn’t seem to be living on. The sets have been destroyed… But I think its time may come later.”
As Stemme is all too aware, it all comes down to money and the fragility of opera’s economic base. “Yes, that does make me worry for opera’s future: it is so very expensive in every way, and the cost in human resources is so unavoidably high. But on the other hand, as a combination of art forms, it is unique. And the incredible, intense enthusiasm that performances can generate proves how much it can still mean to people.”
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to spend 15 seconds in Wagner’s company, but you have to separate the opinions from the art’