A QUICK WORD WITH THE DIVA

Typecasting doesn’t come much neater than it will when the Royal Opera unveils its first production in a hundred years of Cilea’s melodramatic “Adriana Lecouvreur”. The eponymous heroine—based on a real-life star of the 18th-century Comédie Française—is the prima diva of her day, surrounded by admirers, and hated by a rival whom she worsts with theatrical flamboyance in an onstage duel; her comeuppance finally arrives in the form of a bouquet of poisoned violets. She will be incarnated by Angela Gheorghiu: take away the violets, and the celebrity case-study you’re left with chimes rather well.

Or does it? “Oh, that question,” sighs Gheorghiu. “All the time we singers try to be another personnage, we try to make people believe we are them—but we are not. I’m not Adriana, I’m not Tosca, not Violetta in ‘Traviata’—I am Angela!” But she concedes that she is well suited to this role, and has been preparing for it since she was 20 by singing Adriana’s arias in recital. And this is in every sense her show, built round her by the production team of her choice, with her current favourite tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, cast as her lover. The scene she most looks forward to is the one where she destroys her rival by delivering a blistering speech from Racine’s “Phèdre”—the archetypal avenging queen.

"Adriana Lecouvreur" Royal Opera House, London, from November 18th

~ MICHAEL CHURCH