Young singers looking to build an international career (one that is booked up five years in advance) could do worse than look toward Anna Netrebko as a role model. The Russian soprano, who turns 40 this month, has an 18-year professional career that is remarkably well represented on commercial recordings. From the Kirov’s productions of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (produced and released on CD in 1997 and issued on DVD in 2003) and Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery (also performed and released on CD in 1998 and on DVD in 2005), to discs of both Pergolesi’s and Rossini’s Stabat Maters and a DVD of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, all released in this past year, Netrebko’s career has progressed in front of our eyes and ears, giving musicians a virtual textbook of vocal and theatrical progression and growth over nearly two decades.
There is, of course, good reason for the singer’s extensive archival catalog: Netrebko is one of those rare birds who can balance a rich, espresso-dark lower register with a lighter, creamier top, creating on the whole a sound in which one can do nothing but luxuriate. Her first solo album for Deutsche Grammophon, released in 2003, displays an overwhelmingly agile technique (if not the odd grapple with trills and diction, no matter for the effectiveness of the overall product), hitting Mozart’s en pointe precise coloratura in selections from Idomeneo and Don Giovanni and capturing the lush lyricism of Rusalka’s “Song to the Moon” and Benvenuto Cellini’s “Les belles fleurs.” She moves into fuller-bodied Bel Canto works with the following year’s Sempre Libera, which previewed her champion roles of Violetta, Lucia, and I puritani’s Elvira and showcased her vocal theatricality in some exquisitely fragile mad scenes that leave listeners on the edge of their seats.
Not one to be pigeonholed, Netrebko shied away from heart-on-the-sleeve Italian rep and mined her native roots for 2006’s Russian Album, recorded with her original mentor Valery Gergiev and offering a ravishing Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin plus rarer moments from works like A Life for the Tsar, Iolanta, War and Peace, and The Snow Maiden. Two years later, she turned to effervescent and sepia-toned works from operetta and fin-de-siècle art song in Souvenirs, and last March she issued a live recording of her Salzburg Festival recital with Daniel Barenboim, coupling Lieder by Rimsky-Korsakov with that of Tchaikovsky. In between, there are CD full recordings of operas by Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, and Bellini. Added to that are DVDs of Donizetti, Massenet, and Prokofiev, among others.
Perhaps it’s her recording history that sums up the seemingly incongruous science behind Anna Netrebko. Many choose to write her off as what a Canadian colleague once dubbed “the operatic puck bunny,” a reference to female hockey fans motivated by their attraction to the players rather than the game. She’s a singer who loves to talk about her addiction to shopping with interviewers, admitting to British newspaper the Guardian that she’s unaware of her responsibilities as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader but is intimately familiar with watch manufacturer Chopard (she has been a global ambassador for the latter since 2006). When in New York for an appearance at the Metropolitan Opera, she balanced singing Donizetti with throwing down Patrón as a judge for the New York City Wine and Food Festival’s Tacos and Tequila competition. She’s willing to make music videos of arias, singing Dvořák while floating in a pool on an inflatable raft or going through Gounod’s “Jewel Song” in three different “material girl” scenarios—and doles out advice on her favorite ice cream flavor and beauty products on her viral vlog, “Ask Anna.”
Yet that’s just one side of Netrebko. Born in Krasnodar and trained professionally in St. Petersburg, the soprano has a training rooted in the exactitude of the USSR that has played no small part in shaping her titanium career. “It’s a very Soviet Union thing,” Netrebko says in a corner of the Metropolitan Opera house. “And that’s what I’m missing now,” she adds owing to her packed schedule that, as she laughs, keeps her residing primarily in “Vienna, New York, and all the rest of the world.”
There is another Anna Netrebko, one who is obsessed with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and the headier aspects of Russian culture, from Prokofiev and Glinka to Bulgakov’s Faustian masterwork The Master and Margarita. She may have won a can-can competition at a St. Petersburg nightclub in 2004, but if she were not a singer, this daughter of a geologist thinks she may have become a surgeon. Bubbly though she may be, Netrebko adheres to a philosophy that “Russians always need a little ‘crap’ in our lives—something to be concerned or worried about.”
Even after Perestroika, the school systems in Russia maintained a rigid system of methodical regulation and iron-fisted cultivation (one that this writer experienced first-hand in Moscow between 2003 and 2004). When Netrebko entered the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory at 16, just prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, she was not spared the rod. Though she suspected she had a commendable voice, Netrebko was told by other students that she may be better suited for the chorus. “I get offended, but not much,” she says in one of her “Ask Anna” vlogs, miming an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other gesture with criticisms that she once received from her colleagues and still garners today—it’s hard to be an international superstar and not be a polarizing figure.
In retrospect, however, she admires the system for its unflinching strength and comprehensive educational package—from solfège to acting to movement to history. “Everybody asks me why Russian ballet dancers are the best. Because they are being beaten in the schools,” Netrebko explains, before qualifying: “Practically beaten. They’re being told, ‘Your belly is fat! Look at yourselves! Start to work!’ Nobody cares about your tears or your blood. You want to be a star? Work your ass off.”
And work Netrebko did. While the conventional Cinderella story paints the soprano as a chambermaid at the Mariinsky Theatre, washing floors and ultimately being picked out of the cleaning crew by her own fairy godmother in Valery Gergiev, the story is much less rosy as she recounts it. “Don’t ask me to tell you about cleaning the floors,” she told CNN last November. “It wasn’t really a job. We were young, we wanted to spend a lot of time in the theater . . . we didn’t have to pay for any of that. Working there as a cleaning lady was very convenient.” Her encounters with Gergiev were far more “business as usual” when she auditioned for him with Die Zauberflöte’s stratospheric “Der Hölle Rache.” Even when she was taken under the passionate yet often piqued maestro’s wing, there were no shortcuts and no easy route to stardom.
“Maestro Gergiev was very hard. He was tough. And he was tough with the musicians especially,” she says of the conductor, but adds that, “it’s a dream for every singer [to work with him] because he’s wonderful.”
Yet whereas Gergiev is a workhorse—one whose habits have caused him some health woes in the past year and whose demanding schedule, in Netrebko’s eyes, is only comparable to that of Plácido Domingo’s—Netrebko cannot submit herself to that taxing a schedule. “I’m trying, but I’m a human being. [Gergiev and Domingo] are not. If I work like them, I will die.” Helping to keep her in check is a blood-iron deficiency that will occasionally weaken the muscles—including the vocal chords—which is when Netrebko knows to step back and take a break.
And perhaps that is where Netrebko’s party girl persona takes over. While her social life has slowed down considerably since giving birth to her son, Tiago, in 2008, Netrebko still forces herself to regulate her hectic schedule in such a way that she has a functioning work-life balance. A New York Times feature from this past January, part of its “Sunday Routine” series, shows Netrebko in her Manhattan apartment, in jeans, a hooded sweater, and sneakers, sans makeup, and with her hair pulled back. Playing with Tiago and making breakfast with her fiancé, Uruguayan baritone Erwin Schrott, she looks like any other working New York woman. Casual. Earthy. Unglamorous. Normal. It seems to be the secret to her success—spending Sunday evenings watching The Tudors and shopping at Whole Foods as opposed to monastically studying scores for her next half-decade’s worth of scheduled performances.
“That is the problem. When I am singing something else, I cannot prepare a new role. I can only listen and try to remember, but I cannot really sing it,” she admits. At the time of this interview, she was reprising her role of seductress Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but looming on the horizon was her Vienna role debut as the same composer’s Anna Bolena. The score was, in that moment, still virgin territory. “And because I am singing all the time something . . . there is no time.” The alternative is, in her view, to “squeeze it in” between performances and risk harming the role she is currently performing—even though both Norina and Anna Bolena are characters created by Donizetti, they come with their own sets of demands and prerequisites.
Netrebko’s debut as Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife was an out-of-town tryout of sorts for her assumption of the role at the Metropolitan Opera this month, the Met’s first production of Donizetti’s tragedy and its initial installment of the composer’s Tudor cycle. Unlike Beverly Sills, Netrebko will not sing the complete cycle herself—“I think Maria Stuarda is too late for me already because it needs a much lighter voice, and Roberto Devereux is too early,” she explains. And while, in terms of her preparation for Anna Bolena, she considers herself a late bloomer, Netrebko still throws herself wholly and completely when it comes time to ready a new role, reading histories, listening to varied recordings, and watching all things Tudor related. Sober tomes are coupled with Showtime’s hit miniseries. “Even if it’s kitsch, whatever, it’s so interesting,” she says, before noting that Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the actor who plays Henry VIII on The Tudors, bears an uncanny resemblance to her fiancé.
Even if she’s cramming in cabaletta after cabaletta, Netrebko’s mien pays off handsomely. Her fan base is compared to that of Pavarotti’s, and of her Vienna debut as Bolena, Larry L. Lash of Opera News wrote that Netrebko’s performance “takes her one giant leap forward to claiming the title of diva assoluta del mondo.” Lash went on to add that “her huge, plummy voice sounded as beautiful as ever, but her technique showed newfound confidence in passage work, particularly in trills, and seamless runs even to the lowest notes. While some of the coloratura was executed just a tad too carefully, the Russian beauty never betrayed the slightest bit of strain. For a role debut, Netrebko showed more than just great promise.”
Listening to a radio broadcast of the same performance, it’s clear that Netrebko has eased into the meatier roles of the Bel Canto repertoire since her 2004 solo disc. Equally indicative of this is her 2008 Lucia, preserved on DVD through the Metropolitan Opera and Deutsche Grammophon, which demonstrates a developed richness of tone and additional lush expressiveness that came with the birth of Tiago (similarly, in 2010, she almost literally blew the roof off of the 3,000-plus-seat Metropolitan Opera House in the role of Mimì in La bohème).
“The voice got bigger,” she says with a hint of deadpan. “And it’s good; I feel more comfortable. Absolutely.” While some singers struggle with adapting to a new instrument after significant weight loss, Netrebko’s slight weight gain from her pregnancy has given her a similar challenge on the other side of the spectrum. New roles like Bolena (and what she hints at as possible forays into Elsa from Lohengrin and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut) are tailored to her freshly discovered vocal heft, while other roles like Norina and Violetta seem to be phased out from her repertoire.
Netrebko is all about her personal system of vocal checks and balances. Of her 2006 performance at the Met in I puritani, a production revived for her and one that she made entirely her own, singing a portion of Elvira’s mad scene while draped over the lip of the Met’s stage, she considered the foray to be “extreme.” She says, “OK, I did it once. Fine. I can put a star on my shoulder.” In a situation such as that, or such as this past spring with her first Bolena, Netrebko strives “to combine heavier roles with the lighter roles, but always go back and forth so it will stay in shape.” Her voice may not be anything like that of Marilyn Horne’s, but Netrebko agrees with the mezzo’s philosophy of massaging the throat with music of Handel and Rossini to counteract the farther reaches of the repertoire, never forgetting that the voice is a muscle.
Though she withdrew from the Metropolitan Opera tour to Japan, citing concerns over lasting radiation in the country after the nuclear meltdown in March of this year and residual stress over living through the Chernobyl disaster, Netrebko still spent this summer indulging in a sort of Canyon Ranch for her vocal cords, performing in concert with Schrott (a rarity for the couple to appear onstage together) and tenor Jonas Kaufmann plus a revisit with Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta for the Salzburg Festival. Following her reprisal of Bolena in New York—plus her Carnegie Hall recital debut, itself a repeat program of her Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov performance in Salzburg, she once again takes an active vocal rest with a run as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at La Scala before returning to New York in March for a new production of Massenet’s Manon.
“If you can sing lighter repertoire, that’s definitely keeping your voice in shape,” Netrebko says of Horne’s maxim, rattling off names like Donizetti, Bellini, and Mozart as her own personal picks for plusher rep to take the edge off. “I adore Puccini; it’s very easy to sing Puccini. But,” she adds, “it might be very dangerous if you’re singing it too much. I think it’s very important to come back.”
One role which Netrebko refuses to ever set aside, however, is that of a mother. She jokes that she calls Schrott her husband, even though they still have not had the chance to plan their wedding. And neither singer has designs on becoming the next Alagna and Gheorghiu pairing, performing in tandem. “We cannot just say to everyone, ‘Oh, we’re going to sing together all the time.’ It just won’t work,” she says. “And we are suffering when we’re not together.” But what will present the greater trial is negotiating two megawatt careers when Tiago becomes old enough for school. “I want him to interact with the kids—this is the time,” she says of her son entering kindergarten. Finding a stability that will allow Tiago to spend the school year in one place (most likely Vienna, given New York’s strict rules when it comes to attendance) may require a further shift in Netrebko’s—and Schrott’s—equilibriums, but it will be worth it. “I would never sacrifice family for career,” she states. “I would not sacrifice career for family as well. I think to find the right balance is very important.”
