(A short version of this interview appeared in The Independent on 26 October. Karita Mattila sings Marie in Berg's Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House, opening 31 October.)
Karita Mattila is not eight feet tall, but such is the force of her presence and her voice that she almost seems it. At 53, the soprano nicknamed "the Finnish Venus" is among today's most powerful operatic stars, not only vocally, but also as a visceral actress. When she performed the final scene from Strauss's Salome at the Royal Festival Hall recently, a mesmerised audience lived the princess's horror-laden sensuality almost as voraciously as she did.
It is no wonder that opera directors often play to her
strengths. “Because I’m such a physical person, they find a physical way for me
to serve the character,” she says.
“I understand singing, too, as a physical process, so it becomes
fascinating to put those things together.”
A farmer’s daughter from rural Finland, whose career
launched when she won the 1983 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, she has grown as an artist and kept on growing. The increasing range of her pure-yet-soul-shattering voice has brought thrilling new roles within her grasp. She began as a classic Mozartian. Now she is singing Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck for the first
time, at the Royal Opera House: next year she is doing her first Ariadne
auf Naxos and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, while Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre
and the Kostelnicka in Jenufa by Janacek are in view.
She prepares her roles rigorously: “I try to do my
homework,” she declares. “I think it would be an impossibility for me to go on
stage and try to do a part without knowing who the character is. In a nutshell,
I feel I can’t use my instrument in full if I don’t understand the dramatic
background. It’s not just learning your part and knowing the story; you read
and you listen to all the material you can get these days. I think it’s
wonderful we have everything in the Internet – you can read all kinds of
analysis. Then you go to the rehearsals and hope that the director and the
conductor are well prepared too – which,” she adds darkly, “is not always the
case.”
You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of this lady. “I
work hard before I come to rehearsals, so I’m quite demanding towards the
others,” she says. “I demand so much of myself because I know my level and it’s
very hard for me to reach it, so I’m expecting everyone else to do their
homework too. I’m sure there are directors or conductors who think I’m a
piece of work. But you know, I am the most willing tool – if I am convinced
that the person who is about to direct me or conduct knows what they are
doing.”
Despite that, she insists she has only ever walked out once for anything but health reasons: “It was a concert, a performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The conductor not only mocked me in front of the whole orchestra, but tried to blackmail me into doing something that it had been agreed I wouldn’t do, a recording on the morning of the performance. At first I thought, ‘Oh, he sounds like my father’ and didn’t walk out – but I realised I could not be at the mercy of a conductor whose goal is not the music, but a personal putting-down.” It was a traumatic moment. “Luckily I was old enough and experienced enough to come to terms with the idea that those kind of fossils, those kind of dinosaurs, still exist. And they will soon be dead.”
Despite that, she insists she has only ever walked out once for anything but health reasons: “It was a concert, a performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The conductor not only mocked me in front of the whole orchestra, but tried to blackmail me into doing something that it had been agreed I wouldn’t do, a recording on the morning of the performance. At first I thought, ‘Oh, he sounds like my father’ and didn’t walk out – but I realised I could not be at the mercy of a conductor whose goal is not the music, but a personal putting-down.” It was a traumatic moment. “Luckily I was old enough and experienced enough to come to terms with the idea that those kind of fossils, those kind of dinosaurs, still exist. And they will soon be dead.”
She pinpoints a few
key moments that inspired her and opened up new vistas: “When I did my first
Fidelio with Jürgen Flimm directing, at the Met in New York, I went out of the
first rehearsal determined that I was going to cut my hair and dye it brown!”
Leonore in Fidelio is desperately misunderstood too often, she insists: “Flimm
made her this wonderful woman, so moving, so bright, so brave. But there are so
many chauvinist directors - maybe it’s
this patriarchal society, that the directors are in their own prison with their
ideas! I remember reading such crap analyses written by such men, who didn’t
have a clue about Fidelio. There were
even women who thought ‘Leonore is so ruthless’!” Now Mattila is on fire: “As if you wouldn’t be ruthless when your
husband is in jail and it’s up to you to save him! Any woman in love with her
husband would do anything for that!”
Many might modestly put enduring success down to good
fortune, but Mattila insists that it’s plain hard work. “My big film idol,
Jeremy Irons, once said in an interview that the people who succeed are the
ones who work a little harder. They put a little more of themselves into
things, they make more sacrifices and they don’t even think about it. That’s
exactly how I feel. Yes, you have to be lucky, and I’ve been lucky to be in the
right place at the right time and to have the type of voice that I have – but
luck alone wouldn’t have got me to the place I’m in now. I’m proud of this
wonderful life.”
