Diva fever: Angela Gheorghiu

10 April 2012

Angela Gheorghiu is probably the most famous operatic soprano in the world. And like Maria Callas, the prima donna to whom she is most often compared, this fame has as much to do with her colourful private life as with the velvety timbre of her voice. When, in 1996, she married Roberto Alagna (aka the Fourth Tenor), the couple were christened opera's Posh and Becks. On stage, they gave voice to some of the greatest tragic love stories – Alfredo and Violetta in

La Traviata

La Bohème

Roméo et Juliette

Then, last year, the dream imploded. Alagna announced that they had separated but that Angela was refusing a divorce, which triggered fury from the diva. She responded by putting out a statement on her website that she 'awaits the finalisation of their divorce as soon as possible' and twisted the knife further in an interview with Corriere della Sera, announcing that the relationship had failed because of Alagna's humble origins (he's a self-taught French Sicilian from the banlieue who started off singing pop in cabarets for tips) and his jealousy of her career. 'Men can't stand a successful woman. When I made the Butterfly CD he disappeared for ten days. But he checked on me to see if I betrayed him.' They signed to different labels and declared that they would never sing together again.

So when I sit down with the Romanian singer backstage at the Royal Opera House, I am naturally keen to find out if there have been any further developments in this operatic War of the Roses. Is she, I wonder, even on speaking terms with Alagna these days?

'Roberto and I are still friendly,' says Angela, 45, to my astonishment. 'We are still together when we have the time.' In fact, despite all the mud-slinging, they aren't now getting a divorce after all. 'No, no. Roberto doesn't accept it. He wants to be married to me, so we are still married.' Does she love him? 'Of course I love Roberto,' she says with a little laugh. 'The truth about our relations is that we are not singing together, so he needs to respect my choice. It was easier for our private life before because we sang together so much, but I decided to have a break.' Why? 'Personal reasons, artistic reasons. Too much pressure and emotion,' she says. 'It's enough. When I'm with Roberto, it's like feeling everything double. And then I want to taste freedom, to sing with other people.' Whatever the current state of the marriage, she is about to make her role debut in the opera Adriana Lecouvreur – appropriately enough, the story of a jealous rivalry between theatrical types – opposite the brooding German tenor Jonas Kaufmann.

When I arrive at the Opera House to meet her, the photographic session is still going on in the wings while ballet dancers, arriving for that night's performance of Sylvia, clamber over our lighting cables. The reason we're running late, it seems, is that Angela has let loose her (never very dormant) inner diva, and after complaining about the dress, the make-up, the pictures and the draught backstage, has disappeared to her dressing room. The crew are looking distinctly harassed. 'Has she started throwing things yet?' enquires a passing stagehand, deepening the general gloom. Clearly, Angela is planning to live up to her nickname of 'Draculette'.

Suddenly, she sweeps back to us, her mood completely altered. She flings off her coat to reveal an hour-glass figure encased in a shimmering gold dress, tosses back her raven mane and poses like a pro. Physically, she reminds me of Paloma Picasso: she's not classically beautiful but strong, with big dark eyes, a proud nose and large red-lipped mouth. The Draculette tag may refer, at least partly, to her comedy Romanian accent, but her voice is soft, sexy and beautiful to listen to.

'You can't go unless you sing us a song,' coaxes the hairdresser when it's all over. I cringe, waiting for the inevitable put-down. Angela considers for a minute, then delivers a Romanian religious song in a voice as rich and smooth as melted chocolate that transforms all ten of us into doting admirers. She graciously acknowledges the applause before setting off for her dressing room, where she swiftly changes into a little black puffball dress with a coquettish diagonal zip down the front, high boots on her shapely legs and a jewelled black beret.

I've never done that before,' she says of her impromptu performance for the crew. 'I don't know why I did it. Maybe because we were on stage?' She shrugs; she doesn't seem very interested in the 'why' of things anyway. 'I always trust my instincts in everything,' she declares, settling into an armchair. 'I never ask anybody else: "What do you think? Shall I sing this, or have a love affair with that?" I go all the time with my feelings. For me, my instinct is a barometer. If I've decided, I've decided.'

No surprise, then, that she divides opinion like Marmite, and even her fans acknowledge that she has a reputation for being a bit of a madam, almost as famous for her no-shows as for her performances. Last year she pulled out of the premiere of a new production of Bizet's Carmen at New York's Metropolitan Opera because she would have to star opposite her estranged (or not) husband. And when I ask why she's sharing the lead in Adriana with the much lesser-known soprano Angeles Blancas Gulin, she looks rather chilly, then admits: 'It's my fault. I ask the theatre to accept only six performances, so they need to put in somebody else.'

Obviously, one sympathises with thwarted Manhattan opera-goers who paid premium prices for their tickets only to see an understudy. But it's not hard to understand why personal freedom might be worth more than a professional reputation for reliability to a woman who grew up under the repressive regime of Ceausescu's Romania.

'Freedom was just a word to us,' she says. 'You couldn't speak, have an opinion. It was against the law to tell a joke – if you told a joke against Ceausescu, it was really very bad. We were told: "You must have no heating, you must eat this, you must have that" That's why afterwards, I can't hear "you must". Must? Why must I? For an artist, the first essential is freedom. It was impossible for me to have a life and a career because I was stuck in Bucharest.'

Angela Burlacu was brought up with her sister Elena in a bungalow built by her grandfather in the small town of Adjud. Her father was a train driver and her mother a dressmaker. The family seem to have been fairly self-sufficient – they made their own clothes and wine and kept chickens – which was just as well. 'We had money, but there was nothing to buy,' she says. 'The shops were empty.'

Angela always knew she would be a singer. As a six-year-old, she was singled out from her classmates in kindergarten. 'They said, "Come on, Gina, let's hear your voice." ' So she sang Brahms' Lullaby as a duet with her equally talented sister. 'And from then on, I was the child standing in front,' she says.

The sisters used to perform Romanian Orthodox songs in the family's summerhouse in front of the local children. Both benefited from the Communist regime's obsession with culture. 'I was always being helped, and I felt respected and pushed,' says Angela.

At the age of 14, she was sent to Bucharest to board at a music school, and by the time she was 17 she was making recordings and appearing on national television. The following year, she went to Bucharest's Academy of Music to study singing for six years, where she was followed by Elena. The year she completed her studies, Romania revolted and overthrew its dictator. Angela was free. Though not entirely: by then, she had got married to engineer Andrei Gheorghiu, who was her first boyfriend.

They are still, she claims, on very good terms. 'I am in a perfect relationship with Andrei and his family. We adore each other,' she says. 'I never close a door, never, on anybody. I'm not that kind of person.' The compliant Gheorghiu certainly never stood in the way of his wife's career. She left shortly after the revolution, determined to have her first audition at Covent Garden. 'It was a fixation,' she admits. 'I really loved everything about it. So classy.'

Arriving in a dress made by her mother, she asked for directions to the stage door from the casting director Peter Katona, who happened to be passing. During her audition, he immediately offered her the tear-jerking role of Mimi in La Bohème, but she asked for a smaller part and debuted in 1992 as Zerlina, a flighty peasant girl, in Don Giovanni. When she did sing La Bohème at Covent Garden in 1994, the emotional charge of her performance was not entirely down to good acting. She had been cast opposite the handsome Alagna, who had recently lost his wife, Florence Lancien, to cancer, and the on-stage lovers were falling for each other off-stage, too.

So Angela divorced Gheorghiu, and two years later, after a matinée performance of Bohème at New York's Metropolitan Opera, she and Alagna were married by opera-mad mayor Rudy Giuliani, in the office of the Met's general manager Joseph Volpe.

Together, they had a ready-made family: Alagna's daughter Ornella, who was just two when her mother died, and Angela's niece Ioana, now at university in Kent, whom she adopted after the death of Elena in a car crash. This is a subject that's so painful that Angela simply refuses to discuss it, and it led to the break-up of her family. In the past Angela has said, 'She was more than a sister to me... she was another me.' Angela's parents split up and her father became an Orthodox monk in a Greek monastery where women aren't allowed. 'One day I understand it, the next day I don't,' she says of this retreat. 'But it's his choice and we need to respect other people's choices. He's doing what he feels is good for him and her.'

As a couple, Alagna and Gheorghiu were an even more bankable brand than as individuals. 'We sang so much,' she says. 'We did performances, recordings, we did a lot. It was easier for our private life. We were lucky because we had almost the same repertoire, and I was a soprano and Roberto was a tenor. Imagine if my husband was a baritone or a bass. Impossible! Your roles are different, it's very rare to be together.'

Which brings us back to the intriguingly complex subject of the marriage today. Angela admits she would rather be single, but understands her husband's desire to stay married and still spends time with him in their home in Paris (she also has homes in Switzerland and Romania). 'Artists try to be like others,' she explains. 'It's very healthy for our mentality, to have children, a house, a partner. But it's very egotistical. Because it's impossible to carry your husband, wife, children and schools in your luggage. Children in an artist's house are always a bit forgotten. I hear my colleagues' children: "Ohhhh, I never see my papa, I never see my mama!" The lucky artist is the person who has someone who really accepts them at home, but it's not always the case. An artist always has a personal life with problems.' She shrugs again. 'Of course, look at me. This month I'm in London, then it's New York, then Chicago, then Tokyo. I live wherever I have a contract.'

But it's not just geography that creates the difficulties, and she is well aware of this. 'I want to have the same feeling in my life as I have on stage,' she confesses, 'and it's not often the case. Life is sad compared with opera. Because artists give so much, there is an emptiness inside, and we want it back for us. And in real life that is not always the case.' She flashes me a dazzling smile, bright as the jewels on her beret. 'But the show must go on,' she says. Having delivered her exit line, she sweeps off-stage, leaving me elated, admiring and a little confused.

Angela is appearing in Adriana Lecouvreur
at the Royal Opera House on 18, 22, 25 and 30 November and 4 and 7 December (roh.org.uk)

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