German soprano Diana Damrau is one of the most exciting artists to come into the opera world in years, not only because of her impeccable technique, her perfectly clear coloratura and her evident musicality, but most of all, because she is a complete artist that gives everything onstage and who incarnates each of the characters she is singing with commitment and love for her art.

When you listen to any of her performances, she immediately captures your attention with her silvery tone, her amazing way of interpreting the text she sings and her elegant phrasing. She can be a menacing Queen of the Night, a tender Gilda, a majestic Konstanze, a gutsy Adina, an impressive Lucia or a charismatic Zerbinetta. All of this proves Damrau’s imminent way of transforming herself entirely in the role she is singing and as an audience, you have to thank an artist for such passion.

Last May, I had the opportunity of interviewing Ms. Damrau in London. We talked about her career, her roles and of her future plans. She is a charming and intelligent woman both on and off stage and it was a delight to have such an interesting conversation with this young German soprano that is conquering the most important opera houses around the world.

How was your childhood? Was your family into classical music?

Not much classical music, although we had a piano at home. My parents didn’t go so often to opera, but they usually went during Christmas holidays to the opera house to see “Die Fledermaus” or light operetta. We didn’t have musicians in the family but my mother did play the piano a bit. As soon as I found out that sound would come out of that wooden black box, she couldn’t take me off the piano. I loved acting and dancing, I was quite an open child. There were some talent and musicality in the family but I didn’t get in touch with it so early. I was never pushed into playing the piano. I wanted to study an instrument and it just was the first choice. Later I would find it useful because I needed the piano for my profession. A cousin of my mother was a singer, she sang in a chorus in Munich in the Gärtnerplatz Theater and she was married to a ballet dancer. They moved very early to England and I meet her every time I come to sing here. When they came to our house it was like having Christmas, Holidays, birthdays, all these celebrations together. There was music and dancing; they sang, they made jokes,… it was a private performance for us. He danced “Peer Gynt” at the Bayerische Staatsoper and he gave us the music. I was three years old, maybe four, when I listened to it. I danced through the living room with that music and I actually discovered my voice while singing along “Morgen Stimmung”, the first movement. I was singing with vibrato and everybody thought: What’s that??? I was in tune but my breathing technique was not that good. (She laughs). It was so funny!!!

Did you hear some other kind of music? Did you have hobbies?

Yes, I listened to hard rock! I also did some horse riding. My parents made me chose between ballet lessons or horse riding and I preferred being dirty and in touch with nature to ballet. It was too cute for me so I preferred riding horses! I danced all the other dances, there was the aerobics wave when I grew up. We performed in festivals, dances in the style of Michael Jackson, such was the kind of dancing that I did mostly!

Then I saw “La Traviata” movie on TV… By then, I was singing in choruses in school and from 90 students, I was the only one who chose singing in the chorus. Sometimes I had to sing with two voices! That was my classical upbringing till I saw the movie with Stratas and Domingo and that was the turning point for me. I was twelve years old and it blew me away. I remember sitting there seeing it and crying the whole opera and after that I said to myself: this is the most beautiful thing on earth. That was so complete, we had the movie, not the stage so it was real, bigger… We had this typecasting perfectly, visually stunning Zeffirelli production and then this opera! This piece, the novel of “La Dame aux Camelias”, these are treasures, jewels! Plus the words, the music… and the voices on top of that beauty! I just prayed to know how to do that. I also thought that I would love to sing properly, without the use of microphones, in a healthy way. Using every source the body has, without amplifying it or changing it with technical devices. It would be just the possibility of using the instrument that God had given me and finding out if I could do it.

Then I started taking singing lessons when I was fifteen. “Das Veilchen” and “Ständchen” were my first lieder. My teachers were Hanna Ludwig and Carmen Hanganu. Frau Hanganu was the wife of my music teacher in school, she was a Romanian soprano. She and her husband left Romania due to the political circumstances; they settled in Günzburg, my hometown, and became a music teacher in our Gymnasium. She taught children how to play the piano and gave concerts. I talk to my Aunt Christa and she told me not to start singing lessons until I turn fifteen because the body and the voice change, even in girls. You shouldn’t be training your voice and body in this way when you are too young. You can hurt it very much. You need a very good teacher who doesn’t push you to sing a heavy repertory. Some force 17 year old girls to sing the arias of the Queen of the Night with all the light coloraturas because they have easy high notes and they end up destroying the voices. They can ruin a possible great future career because of their ego trying to show that they are the best teachers. The voice is such a delicate and unique instrument and it needs too much care and a lot of responsibility from voice teachers. Everybody wants to start with the difficult repertory, the big arias… but you have to grow to learn how to do it. Then you can make a long, healthy career.

Do you think that it also has to do with the emotional fact that, with age you get also the experience to portray different states of mind and of emotions?

Absolutely, you have to learn a little bit about life. I think an artist is like wine, it grows with age. Also the voice needs to mature, although there are very good voices at age 17 or 18, but every single artist is a unique package, it’s a process and each one has its own time. It’s not only the voice, it’s the character, the personality, the nerves; you have to have discipline because you need to work very hard. If you don’t, you can’t get where you want. If you don’t dare to confront yourself with your problems, you can’t hide in singing. It’s constant work with yourself; singing is a psychological work. There are very big obstacles you have to climb. When you have the big career, even if you are not constantly travelling around, it’s difficult to have a family, to find the right partner, especially for women. I talked to Aunt Christa and to many professors about this and I remember a long conversation I had with a singer from a theatre from Germany and she was bitter! She said to me the truth. She told me all the bad things that can happen and you have to make your choices and be strong. You must love this profession very much, if not, it can be torture. It is so hard to find every evening your voice, your body.

My first teacher said to me, when I had a little breakdown during a singing lesson, I was about 20 and I had problems with my boyfriend. I wanted to cry and thought I could do so in front of her because I just couldn’t sing! She said: I can see you are not happy but we are like in the military! She then explained to me that she had to sing “The Merry Widow” when her father died. There was no chance to get out of the engagement and she had to sing it. So, she said: you have to learn this. It is sometimes like schizophrenia: you have to cut yourself sometimes from your personal problems to be able to go onstage. It is not easy but it’s the most beautiful profession in the world! I love what I’m doing. It also nurtures the soul of the audience, it’s not only a distraction. Human kind can’t live without music! Sound is the first thing we give. If you go in the tube, almost everyone is listening to music in their ipods. Music releases energy, it makes you think, it makes you cry, which is also good, it brings you into contact with your emotios and with your inner soul. The things that are bottled up, come out. That’s what I want to do! To make people feel, whatever they want and have to feel. Music is my religion!

In lieder recitals I love the contact you have with the audience. When I am doing an opera, I can’t see the audience clearly, I can’t make contact with all of them, but I can feel the energy and the exchange of it. In lieder recitals, I take people in a journey, I choose what I’m going to show them and I chose how I’m going to sing it, how I pull the people into the stories. I see their reaction and guide them. It’s like a massage sometimes, it’s not physical but I just feel this person, sitting there, and how she or he feels comfort while they hear me singing. That happened in Toulouse: a woman came to me and said “thank you so much”. I said to her that I had seen her during the concert and I could see that she was relaxed, like giving herself as when you receive a massage. Certain lyrical aria had that effect on her.

For me, the highest of all experiences is church music. It contains everything! It’s another dimension, especially with Mozart. I am singing in the celebration of the 1000th years of the Mainz Cathedral this weekend (May 16th and 17th), doing “Let the bright Seraphim”, “Pie jesu” by Fauré, plus a duet with a mezzosoprano and a trio from the Mass in C minor by Mozart. In those moments, Diana is gone and it’s just the joy of living, the joy of love! 

Speaking of the qualities of your voice, I do think that your voice has this thrilling characteristic of transmitting emotions and the fact that there is a beautiful soul within this voice.

Thank you! I don’t see singing as just technique, as something instrumental. In order also to touch people with your voice, you also need the words. That is why, for me, it is the most complete form of art. We have the movements of dancing, we have the instrumental music,

which we feel around us, we create melodies and sounds like a solo instrument, but we have the words: they have feelings and meanings. We have to transport it.

When you study an aria, or a lied or an opera, do you study the words first or do you see first the music?

It happens all together. You can interpret words in a thousand different ways and in lied, for instance, the same poem has been put into music by different composers. We can see the richness that a language has through some of these lyrics. Words are there for describing the feelings and situations. Nowadays, when I talk about German, and also with other languages, you see them growing and changing. It is wonderful to go down to the base of every language and see the richness of Spanish, French, English, Italian. I love the connection between words and music. Actually, in lied I think there is this highest form of this connection. Not in a surreal way, it is the deepest. With all these adjectives we have you can put the finger right into the wound. You really can express the slightest difference in feelings. I just love languages!

Speaking of this power of words, I remember listening to your “Mozart Donna” CD and felt very curious about how you sang the aria of Donna Anna, “Non mi dir”,  a role you will be singing in Switzerland for the first time this year, by the way. I felt that you are one of the few sopranos nowadays that knew how to capture Anna’s dilemma in this aria. It is a perfect example of how to intertwine the words and the music with the inner feelings of a character in a specific moment.

Absolutely, in concerts or during a recording session, without the stage or the costumes, without the whole story, I always try to imagine the moment when the aria happens, the reasons why she is singing this, to whom she is talking, what happened before. Sure, it’s all personal, I’m not saying that this is THE way to do it, this is the way that works for me. That is why I called the CD “Donna”, it’s what we women feel in different ways. Mozart is a master in the art of portraying women and oh… he knew women very well! I wanted to show this different type of women; none of them are the same age.

I saw Blonde differently as when I did it onstage. I wanted to make her a little bit more cheeky and then have Konstanze’s aria, which was an experiment, doing it so fast. I only sang Blonde once, in Salzburg and then moved to Konstanze in a performance in Frankfurt one month later. 

Do you think that singing both roles in such a short period of time helped you understand them more?

Well, Konstanze and Blonde don’t have a lot of interaction during the opera, not much singing together. I made my homework on how to sing Konstanze and having that music… it just guides you and shows you what you have to do. I actually wanted to feel what she was feeling, it’s all written in the score. Callas said it: just look at the music, it’s all there!

Do you think Konstanze is stronger than Belomonte? She gets very powerful music and expresses herself in a very modern way.

That’s true! And Mozart wrote it that way. We should forget all the circus around the Seraglio and the Eastern world, which was fashion to play exotic environments in Turkey. In Mozart operas, there is always a deep psychology and a deep connection between the characters. Look at “Cosí fan Tutte”, for example; it is the perfect and master example of it! Also in “Le Nozze di Figaro”.

And speaking of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, you sang the role of Susanna at La Scala in 2006. Was it your first time singing it?

Yes, it was my role debut.

It didn’t show because of the way you carried yourself so comfortable and at ease with the role. I also thought that you and Ildebrando D’Arcangelo (Figaro) portrayed a perfect couple showing Figaro and Susanna’s wit and larger than life personalities.

They have to be a team, of course.

I think she is more intelligent than Figaro…

Well, probably… She is faster, for sure!

This was your second performance at La Scala because the first one was in the reopening of the theatre with the Salieri opera “L’Europa Riconosciuta”. That brings me also to your first CD in Virgin Classics, “Arie di Bravure” with arias by Righini, Salieri and Mozart.

It was such a wonderful experience to sing both roles at La Scala, and they are very contrasting. Susanna goes a bit low in the tessitura and Europa goes very high!

Can you tell us about the experience of singing Europa in this important event at La Scala’s reopening?

It was a very big event, almost historical. It was quite overwhelming! I tried to push all the fears away, have my little space and stay calm, concentrating on creating the role of Europa. I studied a lot this opera. It was played in 1778 and there had just been one or two revivals of it. There was no translation for it, I got the whole score to study, there was no synopsis, so I studied and read every part to find out how the characters are connected, to find out the story, where my character comes from. It was the first time that the world broadcasted an event of such importance, before even the MET did the big cinema broadcasts. Big screens were outside in the streets and many people watched the performance outside the theatre and it was in all the big cinemas around Italy.

And I have to say that that day… I had a cold! I saw the doctor the day of the first performance. My nerves had been destroyed but thank God, everything went beautifully!

But your relationship with Salieri started way back in Würzburg, in 1998, when you performed in “Cublai, gran Khan dei Tartari”. Then came the recording of the CD, along with the Mozart and Righini arias. Was it a discovery to find so much common ground between Salieri and these other two composers?

That was such a wonderful project! When I got the contract with EMI/Virgin, they asked me what I wanted to record. I thought they would give me a schedule of what I had to do and what would be best but I had the chance of giving my suggestion and I said: well, I would like to do Mozart and Salieri. There was a moment of silence and then… YES! I explained about my past performance in “Cublai…”, I was also going to sing “Prima la musica, poi le parole” and then “L’Europa Riconosciuta”. Somehow, Salieri and I got stuck with each other and then, when I sang a recital at La Scala, after “Europa..”, I sang Salieri songs.

I wanted to go on with the investigation of his music and, actually, the idea came during my studies, when I saw the “Amadeus” movie and I thought that the portrayal they did of Salieri was so unfair. I read about him and what a great man he was, how great a teacher he was and the great influence he had in music and how serious he was about his artistry and he could tell the genius in Mozart. I didn’t like that many plays and movies portrayed Salieri as the loser, he is not! He was a wonderful talent, he had lots of qualities and he was also a man of theatre. You can notice this quality in both “Cublai,…” and “L’Europa Riconosciuta”, which is like an action movie. The action is constantly moving, the scenes are fast, it’s quite thrilling. Salieri created the tension very well. There are a lot of beautiful arias and it’s extremely difficult to sing. I have to say that Mozart wrote a little bit more easy for the voice than Salieri. The pitch of the instruments were lower, a modern orchestra is tuned higher so it is more difficult to sing the high notes nowadays.

Coming back to the CD, the executives accepted my idea of Salieri, Righini, Mozart and they said: ok, chose your repertory. I needed some specialists and so I found Claudio Osele and also Otto Biba from Vienna. Osele has a lot of Salieri scores, and when I was holding the original scores in my hands…that was magic!!! From the pieces that seemed best, I made copies and I had tons of handwritten scores. It was so hard to read… then I needed a pianist for that!!! I can’t play an orchestra score that fast and do the coloratura. I worked with two wonderful pianists, Junji Mitsuishi and Alessandro misciasci, and made a team work!

And you also bumped into Righini…

Yes, Claudio Osele put the music in the pile. I loved that Righini had a connection with Salieri and Mozart. I could have chosen other composers from the time but I really wanted a link between them. Righini has a special connection with Mozart because one of his clarinet concertos was premiered with Righini’s “Il Natal d’Apolo”. Righini replaced Salieri in Paris and Viena to perform his work; he was a singer, a conductor and composer. I just love his music. It has more Italian influence and I chose the two arias that appear in the CD.

So it was not only a recording of a CD but also a research work…

Yes, it was a wonderful work. There are also two arias with the same words but with different music: “Basta, vincesti!” They are both so different from each other, but both jewels!

You kind of have revindicated Salieri’s music…

Well,…I saw that Cecilia Bartoli had done a CD of his music before mine and I was like AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! But I was happy to do mine also. That is why I dared to do the combination and not just focus on one composer. It’s great to explore other repertory.

I think it is really important, even for students, not to stick only with the same pieces. There is so much repertory that they can find and the suitable pieces for their voices, which are not just the typical five or six arias that EVEYONE knows. They can also grow as artists with other repertory, apart from the well-known one!

Speaking of rarely performed pieces, I love that you included the aria of Giunia from “Lucio Silla” in your CD.

This arias is so often cut that I decided to include it in the CD, not the big one. It has the staccato and I just love it!

Going to “Mozart Donna” CD again, how did you choose those arias?

I wanted to show all these different kinds of women. The first CD was more about the coloraturas, arie di bravura. In this other CD I tried to do a mixture of styles. I wanted to go more deeply into painting the colors of each character, showing with one voice that a Blonde can be silvery and the Konstanze should sound different, that there are lyrical moments such as “Deh, vieni non tardar”.

It is possible in Mozart, as in Strauss, to sing more than one character in each of his operas. Not that I wanted to show off that I can do this or that role, I wanted to make it really hearable. People should put the CD and listen to it without saying: oh, no! Another fast aria! Or oh, no! another one with lots of high notes!

I really think you succeed in giving each character’s arias a personality, a special feeling. One example is the aria of Servilia, “S’altro che lacrime”, short but full of meaning.

She is a wonderful character to play. She is the only one in that opera who has the courage to stand up to Vitellia and tell her the truth. She is a great woman! She is not the whiny soprano, she is strong. I also wanted to include the aria from “La Finta Semplice” with the oboe solo. It is wonderful!

Now that you mentioned Strauss, I wanted to ask you: why do you think there is this connection between singing Mozart and Strauss? Many sopranos focus their repertory first in them and then start singing Italian repertory; Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Renée Fleming did it, Kiri Te Kanawa, you have done it like that…

I think that all music has to be sung with bel canto technique, holding your voice from top to bottom, it’s good to have coloraturas to maintain the flexibility of the voice and you need absolute control.

Speaking of Strauss and Mozart, with Mozart I think it’s the peak of singing, it’s the most fragile and see-through music. It shows you absolutely like a mirror, one to one, what works and what doesn’t. You can hear everything. In a way, it has more rules, you have to stay in the tempo, you have to forget about singing with portamenti, you have to sing as cleanly and beautiful as possible with all the technical demands, like the jumps of two octaves, for example. Everybody can tell you that something went wrong it you fail to sing it correctly. But then, you have to do all this, relax and perform it and make it sound as easy as possible.

In Strauss you have the “schwung” (the impulse); his music is moving more horizontal. It has more rubati, you can play with the voice, you can do the big lines, it can be more elastic. Both are composers for sopranos and that is why I love them.

You’ve done a lot of Strauss roles: Zerbinetta, Nayade, Zdenka, Fiakermilli, Sophie, and you are singing Aminta in “Die Schweigsame Frau”.

I’ve also sang Aithra in “Die Ägyptische Helena” at the MET and the Strauss songs. I’ve just sung them in Munich with Christian Thielemann and the Münchner Philharmoniker, we did almost 50 minutes of Strauss songs. My next CD will be of Strauss songs.

What attracts you most of Strauss heroines, like Zerbinetta who, always steals the show with “Grossmächtige Prinzessin!”.

You must know how to sing this music when you perform it, specially this long 15 minutes aria because you are alone on stage and running the show somehow. Strauss operas are masterpieces. Strauss and Von Hofmannsthal are like the Mozart- Da Ponte pair. You have the philosophical side, like in the way Zerbinetta speaks to Ariadne. She is not superficial, she knows, she lives her life with everything it offers to her. We can see she is longing for eternal love.

Do you think she is being honest during her brief exchange of feelings with the Composer?

Absolutely, she is not pretending. This moment shook her a lot. Even if it doesn’t show at the first impression, their souls are the same kind. In some productions, as the Marelli production, which I’ve sung twice; once in Mannheim (traditional) and the one in Dresden, he keeps the composer on stage during all the opera. Zerbinetta has even a section with the Composer in which she forces him to accompany her during the piano bit of the “Grossmächtige Prinzessin!”. She is improvising and he is doing the same, improvising, doing this aria for Ariadne. I get goosebumps in that moment because you can see the connection between them! Strauss writes she is cheeky but with finesse: “Ein Augenblick is wenig, ein Blick is viel”, but I think there is a lot of truth in her. She actually reveals her heart to him. You can also perform her like a bitch that is playing with him but I don’t think that is correct. The music says the contrary. It’s wonderful to portray her!

How was singing Aithra at the MET, being this a role debut for you?

It was a big challenge, the orchestra is immense underneath and I really loved her. She is very psychological! What Strauss and Hofmannsthal always do is making you go deep into history and mythology, as I also did when I sang Europa. I had to find all the connections in the story.  The action was transported to the present time and that is a quality that masterpieces have, they are universal.

I loved playing the sorceress because I even had a magic light as Aithra and do the “Abracadabra” thing! It was a very complex production, it mirrored the characters. Poseidon, Aithra’s husband who betrayed her, was there since the beginning and left her afterwards, leaving his shadow behind. It was a great adventure because I had to mirror and live through, feel and observe the other characters, as what Helena and Maenelaus are doing. She sees their fights, she plays destiny and stops and changes things. She also mirrors this into her personal life and her relationship with Poseidon. It’s a very complex role and I was the whole time onstage! You pause 20 minutes and then you have to start again and play very upset so, when I played it for the first time, I almost got a heart attack because my body was almost asleep as well and then BUM! Stand up and sing loud and very high with lots of movements! After that I thought I was going to faint.

How do you see Sophie in “Der Rosenkavalier”? DECCA recently released the DVD of your performance of this role in Baden-Baden with Fleming and Sophie Koch, which is amazing. I am very interested in knowing your view on this character.

Sophie is the typical daughter of her father, she has a lot of temperament, she can burst out quite easily and her heart is on her lips. But she is young, she grew up in a convent, she has to obey and marry for the sake of the family, of her father. Everyone has told her that this is what you look forward, to marry someone like the Baron Ochs, so she is looking forward to it. She would give in, like the Marschallin did; although I think she has a better destiny than the Marschallin. She gets the guy she loves so there will be a love marriage. Also, marriage gave you a different status, as a woman. She would pass form a girl to a respectable wife. When she meets Octavian and falls in love with him, they decide to fight for each other. They also have a very deep connection. That is why, when the Marschallin realizes the strength of their love, she gives Octavian to her, because in a way she doesn’t want Sophie to suffer what she’s been through.

What is your reaction, as Sophie, when at the end of the glorious trio “Hab’ mir’s gelobt”, you get Octavian and the Marschallin goes away?

Well, when we did it in Paris and Baden-Baden, at this precise part, the glance that Renée Fleming gave me really made me shiver and it was so sad.

Going now to your recent Italian repertory, I have to congratulate you for your excellent performance as Adina in “L’Elisir D’Amore” at Royal Opera House. It was a delight to see you in this role, which you have only done once before these performances: in Frankfurt, eight years ago. Do you feel any differences between singing it at that time and now?

It’s a different staging, more modern but the Frankfurt staging was very cute also. It was wonderful to do it there for the first time. Many things have changed since then: my voice, my technical abilities, my security onstage. And I have to say this role is wonderful but there is a danger, she can come across as fickle, as hard and not very sympathetic. You must avoid this interpretation, it depends also in the production. What I love in this production by Laurent Pelly, is that you can see that there is a community; you can see the connection between Nemorino and her in it. I think they grew up together, she is spoiled but she is still appreciated and a part of the community. She has the time to study and read while other people have to work in the fields. You see that she likes attention when the peasants ask her to tell the story of “Tristan and Isolde”.

I think that she and Nemorino had something going on before and they really know each other. Maybe Adina broke up the relationship because she thought he was so easy to have!

So she accepts Belcore to make Nemorino jealous or is she infatuated with the soldier?

No, it’s just a joke for her but it starts to get serious and she starts to freak out in the wedding scene. She realizes that it was a big mistake to accept the engagement. She does this to make Nemorino jealous and, unfortunately, he was not at the beginning of the ceremony to witness it!!! Adina is full of youth and temperament. I think, deep inside, she loves Nemorino. It is a relationship already!

In the opera, she is the character that has the biggest change, an evolution. She is cured by the Dottore without the elixir. In the canzonetta “Io son rico e tu sei bella”, Dulcamara is very clever to give her the part of the Gondoliera, especially with the words she sings about Zanetto and the Senatore. That was a little pushy!

She plays a lot with Nemorino’s feelings and, in this production, it also gets a bit physical. But when her feelings are hurt, she doesn’t like it and she feels excluded when Nemorino doesn’t pay attention to her in the scene with the girls from the village. She feels that she is losing him and gets a bit upset to see him happy without her! I think she has a journey until that part, she is shocked, then she finds out that she wants Nemorino and she decides to fight for him. In the aria “Prendi, per me sei libero”, she is now the one to put her heart in a silver plate for him but she is terribly scared to be rejected.

This opera, besides all the champagne music, all the funny parts and the teasing, it has so much heart. It’s Donizetti!

And speaking of Donizetti, last year, in October 2008, you had a great success in another role by this composer causing a sensation at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, receiving wonderful reviews. Of course, we are talking of your debut as Lucia di Lammermoor. How did you prepare for such a demanding role?

I was always fascinated by “Lucia di Lammermoor”. I’ve seen three productions of it, one in Mannheim, one in Munich and one in Vienna; I saw Gruberova in the role. For me, the Mad Scene is like death on stage; although for me, Gilda’s death is the most magnificent and real death scene in opera, heartbreaking. Lucia’s madness should be heartbreaking, shocking, you should feel she is shattered. I did my research work and talked to doctors about madness and about this special kind of madness because I think she is not mad from the beginning. She is in danger of becoming mad and has this bipolar behavior, which shows itself in the first aria.

Then, her brother is very aggressive an oppressive man and her family is in a very delicate political situation. The role of women in those days was nothing. She is emotionally in a lot of tension and in a fragile state. She is tricked and trapped by her brother and forced to marry someone she doesn’t love.

The return of Edgardo in her wedding is the moment in which something inside her breaks. In Mary Zimmerman’s production at the MET, many people hated the idea of having a photographer taking a picture during the sextet but I loved it! Normally, all the characters stand there, go into inner psychology and sing their parts, sing to the front and then they switch into action again. In the Zimmerman production, it was playing this “picture” of a perfect married couple and she has to be strong but you can see how she falls apart and she faints at the end of the sextet. It shows that this is such a fixed thing and nobody can do anything to stop it. Then, when Edgardo curses her because he thinks she betrays him, she is destroyed and the illness breaks out. There is so much in the music and the words.

I also listened to a lot of recordings and how to act it with my colleagues and find the way in this production, I somehow got to express what I wanted to. I loved the idea with the ghost at the beginning. For me, it worked very well!

How was singing the Mad Scene with the glass harmonica?

When I did it the first time, during the stage rehearsal, it was hard to pitch it. But then I stayed with my thoughts and my musical consciousness and took all what the orchestra gave me and got used to the sound of this instrument. It works very well, it’s like a special effect! I love that Lucia’s Mad Scene is because of an illness, it’s not aggressive or lyrical. She is not a sad teenager that thinks there is a problem, it is real madness and that is why it makes it so special among the mad scenes in opera. It’s more real.

Can you tell us now about your future engagements and recordings?

This year is full of role debuts: Marie in “La Fille du Régiment” (Laurent Pelly production specially production) at San Francisco and at the MET (February 2010), my first Donna Anna in Geneve and then, in January 2010, “Manon” with Ramón Vargas in Vienna. I am looking forward to singing with him! I’m singing Rosina in “Barbiere di Siviglia” at the MET also, Konstanze in Barcelona, Ophélie in “Hamlet” in Washington Opera, Elvira in “I Puritani” in Geneva, Countess Adéle in “Le Comte Ory” at the MET in 2011 plus, all the three women in “Les Contes D’Hoffmann” in Munich in maybe two years, and I’m planning to sing “La Traviata” in the near future.

Speaking of recordings, we did “L’Ercole sur Termodonte” by Vivaldi, which will be released at the end of this year, my “COLORaturaS” CD with my stage repertory with Italian, French, German and English opera arias, and then the Strauss orchestral songs, which will come out next year. I won’t do the Four Last Songs, it will be a full orchestral lied album.

Thank you very much for this lovely interview, Ms. Damrau, and we are looking forward to everything you will be doing. Congratulations for being such a great artist!

Thank you very much for the interview.