Diva, unbridled
It takes a few moments to process what Anna Netrebko just said.
Here she is, the opera world's dark-eyed diva-in-waiting, sitting poolside at a Los Angeles apartment with a princess's posture. And she's talking about going to a strip club.
Ms. Netrebko liked to venture out in New York on nights during her run of performances earlier this year in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" - when more prudent singers might have been at home tending to frayed nerves and pampering their vocal cords. Her nights of reveling spilled into mornings, with dancing and - surely - no small amount of laughing.
Netrebko laughs at almost every opportunity, displaying a giddy grin and erupting in unrepentant appreciation of her own daring.
And when she lets loose, this much rings as clear as a high C: Netrebko has not become one of the most coveted names in opera just because her voice flows over audiences in a silken stream of pitch and melody, though it does. Netrebko has not been hailed as the next Beverly Sills or Maria Callas simply because her face and figure evoke Milan runway models rather than Viking horns and helmets, though they do. Anna Netrebko has reached this moment, on the edge of becoming the first great soprano of the new century, because she is fearless.
That fearlessness is as much a part of her repertory as any aria by Mozart or Mussorgsky. It guides the phrasings of her life both on the stage and off.
Here, in the stillness of a secluded courtyard massaged by the gurgle of a nearby fountain, it seems to take on a sort of endearing guilelessness. In front of an expectant audience it becomes the soul of her art, expressed in the utter abandon of her acting.
"It really isn't a stretch to use the word 'miracle,' " wrote a critic for Die Presse, a daily newspaper in Vienna, after Netreb-ko's debut as Violetta in the legendary Vienna Staatsoper's production of "La Traviata." "Here one singing actress brought together everything that opera fans could hitherto only dream of."
She is, in this way, the perfect product of her times - a unique package of voice and face, acting and attitude that satisfies often-divergent demands. For the old school, she is the golden voice. For a new generation of operagoers weaned on four-minute musical fusions of MTV, she is the hottie who doesn't trundle around on stage as if she were an animated armchair.
All of this is wrapped into the dark hair and playful accent of the Russian ingenue, and the mix is intoxicating. Opera companies the world over - from San Francisco to Salzburg, Austria - have fallen over each other in hopes of becoming the next stop for this musical debutante.
But there are dangers in that kind of demand. For a generation, opera has been waiting for the next Callas, the next Scotto, the next Sutherland. Others have come before Netrebko, and most have been ground up and spat out by opera houses and recording companies who push for too much, too soon. The rise of the jet plane - allowing singers to shuttle themselves around the world in hours instead of days - began the fall of opera, some say.
It is a crucial moment for Netrebko - and, to a lesser degree, for opera itself. Whether she can resist the pressure to cash in now on her rising profile and movie-star looks in favor of her vocal well-being could determine whether she becomes one of the transcendent singers of her time or little more than an operatic asterisk. In Netrebko lies the promise of all that could be great in modern opera - all that could go wrong.
