Interview - Met Opera's Playbill

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

Fresh off her triumphant recent turn in Bellini’s I Puritani—a performance The New York Times hailed as “exceptionally sung … with confidence, precision, and agility”—soprano Lisette Oropesa returns this month as Violetta in La Traviata. It is a role the New Orleans native has sung to wide acclaim in opera houses stretching from London to Tokyo, including at the Met in 2020. As she prepared to reprise her portrayal of Verdi’s heartbreaking heroine, Oropesa spoke to the Met’s Christopher Browner about making the touchstone role her own, and looked back on her two decades with the company.

You sing many of the most formidable roles in the soprano repertoire. For you, where does Violetta rank in that pantheon?
I’d say she’s right up at No. 1. Violetta is one of those quintessential characters in the repertoire—she’s timeless. For me, she’s the past, the present, and the future. The woman who inspired this story, Marie Duplessis, died very young, so it makes sense to sing this role when you’re young and can bring that youthful energy. But she experienced so much in her short lifetime that more mature sopranos can also bring something very moving to their performances. Verdi’s writing opens doors for different voice types, and they all are valid.

What are some of the vocal challenges of the role?
In Traviata, pacing is always the hardest part, since Violetta is a role that requires something different in every scene. Because of my bel canto background, people used to always tell me, “Oh, you’re a first-act Violetta,” but the first act has always been the hardest act for me. Within half an hour, when Violetta is exuberant and carefree, you have so much famous and technically challenging music with hardly any time to warm up. Then, over the course of the next two acts, Violetta becomes another, more mature person. These different contexts require different colors, but the same person has to deliver them all.

What is the key to a successful performance of Violetta?
What matters most is interpretive skill, and making the role your own. As much as I can appreciate and learn from the great Violettas of the past, I don’t try to sing Callas’s Violetta or Sutherland’s Violetta or Sills’s Violetta. I sing my Violetta. I sing this with my voice, my physique, my personality. Musically, my Violetta leans more bel canto in the beginning and more verismo in the end. It’s important that I bring the precision of my bel canto training in the first act, so that by the last act, I can put that aside and really take risks, push my boundaries, and give more extremes emotionally.

You must enjoy the opportunity to sink your teeth into the drama of the final scenes.
Definitely. As I get older, the third act is where I actually feel the most at home—it’s when the opera really becomes a living drama. It’s like “We’ve had our appetizer. We’ve had our main course. What’s the dessert?” And it’s got to be something really extraordinary. In just one act, Violetta goes from soft and weak to sick and suffering to hollering at the sky. It’s so difficult, but everything you’ve got left, you put on the table. I love that.

In September, you’ll mark 20 years since your Met debut. How do you feel when you reflect on that milestone?
I try not to look back and count the years too much. If anything, I like to focus on the people I’ve hopefully inspired. I remember being a Lindemann Young Artist and fan-girling over Natalie Dessay, and now I’m the one young singers are asking for selfies. I’d be crazy grateful if I’m able to sing ten or 20 more years, but I think the true mark of a great career is how you’ve touched people—left a mark on their hearts, made them want to achieve something, or maybe healed them in some way.

What do you hope audiences take away from this production?
A fundamental aspect of how I think about opera is that there are as many potential takeaways as there are audience members. I want to offer an interconnected web of narrative ideas, visual ideas, and conceptual ideas as a kind of forest for the audience to wander through and make the piece their own. Tristan und Isolde is probably the single hardest opera in the entire repertoire. It’s hard for the singers, who have to sing these enormous roles. It’s hard for the conductor and the orchestra, who go through such an endurance test playing this extraordinary score. And it’s hard for me as a director, as I try to find a theatrical language to convey everything Wagner is saying in this complex musical and dramatic text. The only people it’s not hard for are the audience. They get to go on a transformational ride into the unknown realms of ocean, cosmos, and self. So I hope they will let the vortex pull them in, and that they will wander through this forest with us.
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Interview by Matt Dobkin
Edited by Christopher Browner