We Know Just How He Feels

Richard Morrison, chief music critic of The Times (London), filed his review of the Royal Opera House’s production of Verdi’s La traviata, and had this to say about the Violetta:

Until last night sheer bad luck had shielded me from the full-on Anna Netrebko experience. But now that I’ve seen, heard, and inwardly drooled over the sensational 36-year-old Russian soprano at first hand, there’s no going back.

Shaken, stirred, and still quivering at the knees, I’m an altered man.

The odd thing is that Richard Eyre’s 13-year-old Royal Opera staging — hot on period detail, and flaunting surely the largest lampshade in London, but a little tepid in the debauchery department — doesn’t even give Netrebko the chance to display her famed visual divertissements.

When she played Violetta in a modern-dress Salzburg production of Verdi’s opera recently, her little red frock was widely considered the most exciting thing to happen in Austria since the war.

In Covent Garden’s crinolines, by contrast, she has to do it all with charisma and voice. But boy, does she do it! This is a Violetta whose every passing feeling — of hope and hopelessness, regret and resignation, passion and pain — is writ large not just in her face and gesture but in her singing as well.

I expected effortlessly commanding top notes and peachy tone, but not the wonderfully subtle variations in colour and phrasing. And the way she turns her final aria from deathbed murmur to fierce, fatalistic cry of pride and defiance is mesmerising.

If you like your fallen women wan and limpid, look elsewhere. Netrebko’s Violetta — glowing with inner fervour, even at the end — doesn’t have an ounce of self-pity. But she is utterly convincing and utterly natural. She seems to be concocting her thoughts, her words, even the very notes she sings, as she goes.

Compare with the following from this February 2007 post of ours:

So I tuned in the PBS telecast of the Met's Puritani last night. Why, you may ask, did I subject myself willingly to this risible piece of typical bel canto trash? To ogle Anna Netrebko, of course. Curious thing is, while I came to ogle, I left involved. With the opera, that is, so dramatically convincing was Netrebko's performance. No mean trick that, in this static Sicilian soap opera in which the music is pure organ grinder kitsch, and the drama, nonexistent.

Does Netrebko have a beautiful voice? Indeed she does: velvety plush, quite beautiful, and up to handling the vocal requirements of the role. Is she vocally on a par technically with a Sutherland or a Sills in this rep? She most decidedly is not. But, then, few are.

My point is that Netrebko was riveting in a role which is anything but riveting, and that, boys and girls, requires a native genius impossible to acquire. Anna Netrebko. Not just a drop-dead gorgeous babe with a gorgeous voice, but an opera phenomenon.

We know just how Mr. Morrison feels.