‘I like to say,” says Angela Gheorghiu confidentially, “that the fairies visited me when I was born and gave me what I needed to be an artist.” This visit took place 58 years ago in a town called Adjud, when little Angela became first child to a seamstress mother and train driver father. Her parents must have been surprised since in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, fairies, like political dissent, did not officially exist.
Even fairies could not have foreseen how Gheorghiu would turn out. The woman sharing a sofa with me in a windowless room in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is one of the world’s leading sopranos. She is back in her beloved London to sing Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème. She has sung Mimi, she reckons, several hundred times since her professional debut in the role at the Romanian National Opera in 1990. She is also promoting an album of Puccini’s songs, called A Te (To You). It’s a recording that shows, Gheorghiu tells me, that her voice “remains as fresh as ever. Otherwise I would have not sung it, since this is a permanent record.”
Of all the divas I’ve interviewed – Anna Netrebko, Cecilia Bartoli, Robert de Niro – Gheorghiu is my favourite. She once demanded a hair stylist for an interview on Radio 3. She is celebrated for fabulous tantrums. At Paris’s Bastille Opera she told director Jonathan Miller that she didn’t care for his vision of Violetta’s death on a hospital ward in Verdi’s La Traviata. “Impossible! I die alone!”
Today, dressed in thigh-high suede boots, an off-white beret with a spangly veil and a cream puffer jacket which she shows no signs of removing, even though the room is if anything too warm, she is true to the words on her website: “The world’s most glamorous opera star.” It’s hard to credit that her first husband was a plumbing engineer. “I am not scary to men,” she tells me at one point.
If she didn’t exist, Gheorghiu would need to be invented as counterpoint to the rest of us who bury our glories in faux humility. “When you have a charisma,” the glamorous Romanian singer tells the bald Englishman, “when you have the voice, when you have the beauty of what are you doing and everything you do with your body – well! This is what I mean when I say opera is to touch the soul of another.
“I am not everybody” she adds. “We are all human beings but not all of us go on stage and are judged. On every contract I have signed there have been only two names, mine and the composer’s. I am there to interpret him. Everything else is not very important. What I do is most important.”
So performing artists are secular gods and the audience’s role is to adore? She doesn’t demur when I put this to her, but instead tells me when she is happiest on stage. “It is not when I’m singing but the silences in between. When thousands of people in the audience are silent, the orchestra and choir too, waiting for my next phrase. Oh!” She says, throwing her scarf around her neck with one hand and clutching her heart with the other.
Gheorghiu has touched a lot of souls since those early days. Thirty years ago, the great conductor Sir Georg Solti was reduced to tears when she auditioned to sing Violetta in La Traviata. “The girl is wonderful,” he announced. “She can do anything. She’s extremely musical in that the music dictates her emotions.”
And then there was that moment in Washington in 2009 when Gheorghiu, De Niro, Bruce Springsteen and Grace Bumbry received awards from President Obama. “I was the only European,” Gheorghiu recalls. She sang Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s Tosca.
“And then Meryl Streep came up to me, fell on her knees and said, ‘Oh my god! My next life I want to be like you!’ I adore Meryl!”
I’ve read this story already in her memoirs and in other interviews. If it bears retelling it is because it recapitulates how Gheorghiu thinks about herself and her fairy-proffered bounty. “Of all the talents the voice is the most sensitive,” she explains. “It is like a diamond, like a pearl. A person may be ugly or corpulent, but when they start to play or sing on stage they become beautiful.”
It would be a mistake to suppose that a sprinkling of fairy dust was all it took for Gheorghiu to become a great singer. “Everything has been work, work, work.” She was never in doubt, though, about her destiny, “because I have two ears and a brain. It was obvious! When I was in kindergarten I knew.”
Her gift required sacrifices. “I needed to choose to make a career or to have children. And I said I never will, because nobody can assure you that having children won’t change your body. When you’re pregnant something happens to the body. So I was very cautious.”
Her sister Elena, born a year after Angela, was also an opera singer but died in a car crash in 1996, leaving husband Andrei Dan and daughter Ioana. After Dan’s death in 2001, Ioana was adopted by Angela. At the time, Angela was married to fellow singer Roberto Alagna: the couple raised two girls, Ioana, and Alagna’s daughter Ornella from his first marriage. “I call them my two princesses.”
Gheorghiu now lives on the shores of Lake Lugano, Switzerland, but considers London her spiritual home. She studied in the National University of Music in Bucharest and graduated a year after Ceaușescu’s fall. The collapse of his regime enabled Gheorghiu to seek an international career. To which end, one day in 1992, she found herself on London’s Floral Street in a red cape. She asked a passerby the way to the Opera House’s stage door. “It was only five metres away! I have told this story before.” She has, but still: what a story for an opera!
Later that year she made her London debut as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. To be signed up by one of the world’s top opera houses was a remarkable coup for someone who had recently graduated, but it was her performance at Covent Garden as Mimi in La Bohème a few months later that was the more important element of the fairy story. “I was rehearsing Mimi and Roberto [Alagna, singing Rodolfo] was late. He stood outside the door and heard me singing. He hears an angelic voice and imagines, I think, I am rather …” – she puffs her cheeks. “Fat?” I suggest. “Yes! But I am not. I am wearing a short kilt skirt and looking very good.”
Was it love at first sight? “You could say so!” Certainly they soon gave joint interviews in which, reporters disclosed, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Gheorghiu said that they always made love before a performance to relax their voices. It’s a technique that, if not yet peer-reviewed, makes intuitive sense.
They were married by now-disgraced New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, while they were singing another Bohème at the Met. Opera houses were quick to book them as a double act, and the new power couple became known, in Britain at least, as opera’s Posh and Becks.
The fairy tale didn’t last. They divorced in 2013. “I last saw him eight years ago in New York. We didn’t talk. He is still angry with me.” She has for many years since been in a relationship with Romanian dentist Mihai Ciortea, 22 years her junior and about whom she will tell me nothing. She’d rather talk about her career. How long will you keep singing? “I sing three hours a day but I do not push my voice. I don’t want to have a short-lived career like Maria Callas. I want to sing for ever.”
But doesn’t it become increasingly incongruous to be singing Mimi, Violetta and other young heroines? She laughs at me, flicks the scarf over her shoulder. “It is true that the roles do not exist for older women. But each time I sing Mimi, I bring something new.” How can you bear to sing the same role year after year, night after night? She looks at me pityingly. “Every performance is a new one. Every moment is different.”
That said, she is hoping to diversify her recorded repertoire. “Monteverdi, Vivaldi - I want to leave a record of my interpretations of them. I still have ambitions to do new things.”
We walk out into the London night past admirers who pay homage in various languages. After a quick selfie, she skips off to her flat. I watch her go – the force of destiny that Verdi and all those other mere men never dared imagine.
Angela Gheorgiu sings in La Bohème at the Royal Opera House, London, from 24 January to 16 February. A te, Puccini is out on Signum Classics on 26 January.
