A Different Kind Of Diva

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Angelika Kirchschlager is not your usual opera star. An unruly mop of ringlets frames her impish features. Her soft voice breaks into a surprisingly boisterous laugh. She radiates an easy warmth, sports a leather jacket, chews gum and likes her cigarettes and wine — though they don't seem to cloud the celestial clarity of her voice. If Kirchschlager is the anti-diva, that makes her the perfect choice to star in Sophie's Choice, the new opera based on William Styron's best-selling 1979 novel. Because Sophie's Choice, which opened earlier this month at the Royal Opera House in London, is not your usual opera.

When Kirchschlager, 37, was offered the title role a couple of years ago, the Austrian mezzo-soprano thought it was a romantic part — she assumed the heroine's choice was between two handsome suitors. She had not read Styron's book or seen Meryl Streep's harrowing, Oscar-winning performance in the 1982 film. But she accepted without hesitation. With relatively few leading roles for mezzos — most of the celebrated heroines are sung by sopranos — how could she turn down a major new part tailored to her voice, let alone one that would give her the chance to make her Covent Garden debut? Then she read the book.

"I was a little bit anxious," she recalls, struggling to find the words in English to convey how overwhelmed she was by the story, whose central character, a Polish gentile survivor of Auschwitz, is forced to choose which of her two children will live. "I'm still a little anxious," she confessed shortly before opening night.

The emotional demands of Sophie's story frightened Kirchschlager, but also fired her creative energy. "I have to do things I've never done onstage before," she says. "I'm slapped in the face, I scream, I vomit, I lose my children, I'm degraded. It's so difficult, so emotionally demanding." The role requires speedy costume changes — some clothes are fitted with magnets that fasten unaided — and equally swift transitions in mood and tone, as the scenes shift between postwar Brooklyn and wartime Poland.

Fortunately for audiences and for Kirchschlager, she rose magnificently to the challenge. Though the opera itself, a four-hour-long work by British composer Nicholas Maw, has received mixed reviews, Kirchschlager's performance has won unanimous raves. The Sunday Times praised her "extraordinary eloquence." The Baltimore Sun said she "could not be more suited to the title role, physically, theatrically, vocally. If there were Oscars in opera, she'd win one as surely as Meryl Streep did."

A diva might have an assistant fax her glowing notices from around the world, but Kirchschlager generally avoids reading her reviews. "I'm afraid they might affect my interpretation of the role," she says. On her way to a photo shoot midway through Sophie's run, though, she can't resist a peak at a couple of clippings posted to an Opera House message board, and she beams with delight at the headlines. (The accolades for her acting are especially gratifying: she'd like a non-singing role someday.) The photo session lasts for more than an hour, but despite her obvious fatigue Kirchschlager poses, preens and clowns good-naturedly, taking a short break only to call her son Felix in Vienna to say good night.

Kirchschlager doesn't act the part of an opera grande dame and makes no apologies for her style. "I like to smoke and drink," she says. "I try to keep it down as much as I can, but I don't even know how my voice sounds without smoking." If Kirchschlager's habits are unconventional, so is the way she happened into her career. Though she is from Salzburg, she grew up dreaming of becoming a journalist or a broadcaster, not of singing arias by Mozart, the city's most famous son. She studied piano and percussion and only switched to singing when she scraped into the Vienna Music Academy by a narrow vote of the entrance panel. "I was the last one they admitted," she says, with a mix of relish and wonderment at how things have turned out. She made her debut at the opera house in Graz in 1992 and was later hired by the State Opera in Vienna. Despite growing international fame and engagements at prestigious venues like La Scala, the Met and the Opéra Bastille in Paris, she has remained with the State Opera, where she is paid the same salary as other house singers. Onstage in Vienna, she has made a specialty of mezzo-soprano roles in Mozart operas like Le Nozze di Figaro and La Clemenza di Tito, and she performs regularly in recitals and concerts around the world. Opera guru Christopher Raeburn, who was among the first to spot Kirchschlager's talent — he also helped put mezzo Cecilia Bartoli on the map — calls her Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier the finest he has heard. "I saw my first Rosenkavalier in 1938 and Angelika is the greatest."

Kirchschlager nearly came to Covent Garden eight years ago in Figaro, but had to cancel when she became pregnant. To bring Sophie to the stage, she had to leave Felix behind in Vienna, in the care of her estranged husband, Austrian baritone Hans-Peter Kammerer. Creating the character, she says, is so draining that "I could not do this with my child around. When I come home I need to sit down and think." But not too much. She's wary of delving too deeply into Sophie's emotional terrain. "You will never be able to imagine how that feels, to understand it," she says. "The important thing is to convey the feeling to the audience." One member of the opening night audience was certainly convinced by her portrayal. "She was devastating," says Styron. "The scene after she tells Stingo about her choice — the way she evoked pain through her body, writhing in agony on the bed and then getting down on the floor and crawling into a corner as if she could hide from her grief. It was just amazing."

It's just one of the opera's many wrenching moments — and Kirchschlager is on stage for 16 of the 17 scenes, veering between emotional extremes that require physical as much as vocal exertion. "The acting is probably the most important thing to me," she says. She was so determined to make the character her own that she stopped watching the movie of Sophie's Choice after less than 20 minutes because "I wanted to take the chance to create something by myself."

Kirchschlager has succeeded in creating a vivid character, but whether Sophie enters the pantheon of operatic heroines will depend ultimately on composer Maw's work. The opera is his third (and his first in over 20 years), and his experiences with sub-par productions of his first two left him "very disillusioned with the world of opera." But this time, he had the best midwives in the business: conductor Simon Rattle, temporarily back in London from his post as director of the Berlin Philharmonic, and renowned director Trevor Nunn. With top tickets selling at a third of the normal Covent Garden top price of $240, the six performances of Sophie's Choice sold out immediately.

Maw's first exposure to Sophie's Choice was the film, but his libretto is almost completely faithful to Styron's prose. So, he says, is his music. "It follows the rhythm and the emotional line of the text very closely. The way I would describe a lot of the music is 'lyric conversation.'" Some critics have faulted Maw for allowing the conversation to drone on too long. But Kirchschlager found the music fitted her voice perfectly. "It's very emotional, very different to the Mozart and Strauss I usually sing, which you have to sing in a very disciplined way," she says. "Now I can just sing." Whatever the opera's larger musical legacy, for Kirchschlager Sophie has been a transforming experience. She'll soon begin to prepare her next roles — she's back in Vienna on New Year's Eve for Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus and in January will head to Berlin, where she'll reunite with Rattle for Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. But Sophie will stay with her. "I think my artistic life will definitely be divided," she says. "Before Sophie and After Sophie."