Angela Gheorghiu interview: ‘I need applause like people need water’ Angela Gheorghiu is preparing to go on stage as Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, later this month […]

Angela Gheorghiu is preparing to go on stage as Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, later this month and she’s so excited you would think it’s her debut. “It’s my dream stage. It always has been. And it’s my Tosca. Covent Garden’s music director Tony Pappano dropped me but now I’m back!”

Diva, yes, and one that bears a grudge. “Why did Tony Pappano drop me? Ask him. Do you know who else dropped me? The tenor Jonas Kaufmann. I discovered him – on a DVD I came across in Switzerland – and decided he would be my new tenor after Roberto (Alagna) and I split up. I asked for Jonas, and Tony, to star with me, and record with me, as much as I could. And then they both just dropped me altogether.”

Jonas Kaufmann could, possibly, get back into Gheorghiu’s good books if he requested her as his Desdemona alongside his Othello: “I dream of playing Desdemona, I really want to do Otello. My dream team for it would be the baritone George Petean, as Iago, and for Othello? Joseph Calleja would be perfect. Yes, Jonas does the voice for it perfectly but I don’t really believe him for it physically.”

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My voice hasn’t changed since I started out, all my colleagues say to me ‘Angela, how do you do it?’

Now 52, the Romanian superstar soprano still has a long list of roles she’s dying to do but not has not yet got the break. One gets the feeling it’s more to do with her temperament than her voice – “My voice hasn’t changed since I started out, all my colleagues say to me ‘Angela, how do you do it?’ There are all the heavy roles I was too young for, before, but now I’m ready for them! Manon Lescaut, Don Carlo, Fedora… But I don’t want to ask for it. I want to be sought out, deserved. I’m a woman. And I’m an artist.”

And a diva. Let’s say it again. Though Gheorghiu is quick to add that everyone, and mostly politicians, want to be a diva these days. “Actually, I’m an opera singer, not a diva. I need an audience’s applause like other people need water.”

Angela Gheorghiu is still a hot ticket but opera houses are cautious of her, now, it seems, more than ever. She is known for her high demands, not all of which seem unreasonable. “Can you believe that the recent La Boheme I saw at Paris Opera Bastille was set on the moon?! On the moon! For me to star in that, I would need an interpreter. All I ask is that the story that Puccini and his librettist wrote is told as they wrote it”.

It’s 25 years since Angela Gheorghiu made her debut at the Royal Opera House. She was barely out of the Bucharest Conservatoire – which followed her Romanian music-emphasised boarding school from the age of 14 – when Georg Solti conducted her in La Traviata, and famously was reduced to tears. “Do you know that, at the same time as meeting Georg, at the stage door of Covent Garden, I met Placido Domingo and Roberto Alagna. It was a fateful meeting for the three of us! And there was a small fight, but that is history…”

I knew after one year that he wasn’t right for me. But I wanted to keep going for professional reasons. Our careers needed us to be together.

One gets the sense that there have been many small fights in Gheorghiu’s journey. In person she is radiant, passionate and charming, but there are, also, knives out, ready, and sharpened. Would she ever sing with Roberto Alagna again? The Italian tenor was the other half of the dream pair; their relationship ended in divorce four years ago. “If he dared!” I ask her whether she understands, now, why their relationship broke down? “I knew after one year that he wasn’t right for me. But I wanted to keep going for professional reasons. Our careers needed us to be together.”

A much younger, and kindly, Romanian man, Mihai Ciortea has Gheorghiu’s attention now. “I’m very much in love, yes, I’m very happy”. She’s touching the wood of the table we’re sitting at to ‘protect’ their relationship. One of the reasons their relationship seems to work is that Ciortea dedicates much of his time to accompany his leading lady around the world. There is no competition here; she is the star and he is her runner. With Alagna there were two egos competing and Alagna didn’t want to make way for hers. “He couldn’t even accept me keeping my own name. He wanted me to take his.”

That name had been painstakingly built up since the age of 14, when Gheorghiu’s music training began in earnest. “I performed at every national state occasion going… I performed for Gorbachev… the elite of Bucharest adored me. The best way to describe it is that, for six years, no good performances happened without Angela.”

Slipping into the third person, also regularly dipping into French and Italian (“basta!”), are part of Gheorghiu’s language. She’s more Mediterranean superstar than Romanian, though she has made Bucharest her main home now. “My family is there, and my friends”. She has two adopted daughters: one, ‘my British girl’ (she went to school in London from the age of 10 and still lives here), whom she adopted after her sister, Elena, also brilliantly musical, tragically died, 11 years ago; and the other whom she refers to as ‘Roberto’s daughter’ – a daughter from his first marriage, who has cut off relations with her since the two of them split up. What is remarkable is that neither Gheorghiu nor her sister Elena were exposed to music at home; their mother was a seamstress and their father, a train driver.

The audience should pity me. I am sitting in my room crying and I simply am not well enough to go on stage.

We race through topics not yet covered: Harry and Meghan: “I love it. I think they are sincere and the Royal Family must say yes to change”; Music Director of New York Met’s James Levine’s fall from grace (The music director was suspended last month after three men came forward with accusations that the conductor had sexually abused them decades ago, when the men were teenagers): “Everyone in the opera world knew. It was the first thing I was told when I arrived there in ‘93”; mass hysteria when she pulls out of a performance: “I understand the disappointment but the audience should pity me. I am sitting in my room crying and I simply am not well enough to go on stage.”

She’s so passionate, so emotional, so in love – with herself and her achievements, yes – but with life. Angela Gheorghiu is the best advert for a diva I have seen in a while.

Angela Gheorghiu appears in ‘Tosca’ at the Royal Opera House, London on 24 and 27 January (020 7304 4000); her new album of arias, ‘Eternamente’, is out now on Warner Classics