Tonight, touch wood, she?ll be on stage singing Marguerite in Gounod?s Faust, which later this week will be broadcast live from the Opera House to 140 cinemas across Britain. We meet just after the dress rehearsal and Gheorghiu is ?very tired. We had a little accident on stage during the rehearsal,? she adds enigmatically in her silky voice. What? I ask, but she waves me away with a manicured hand. ?Is past, it no longer matters.?
At 46, she is ravishing in a grey dress that flatters both her slender figure and operatic embonpoint. There are bright red shoes on her dainty feet and her raven hair is piled on top of her head.
Her sexy Romanian accent makes her ripe for caricature ? the Transylvanian connection, plus her insistence on never letting direct sunlight touch her ivory skin, have earned her the nickname ?Draculette?. But she?s happy to poke fun at herself. Her phone rings and she laughs throatily at the ringtone. ??'If you?re lookin? for trouble. Hah! You came to the right place.??? She gives a foxy wiggle as she crosses the room to pick it up. ?Pronto??
It is 20 years since Gheorghiu made her Opera House debut. She arrived in London, aged 26, from newly liberated Bucharest. Having photographed the shops full of food and clothes to show her disbelieving parents, she asked a stranger directions for the stage door. He turned out to be casting director Peter Katona, who gave Gheorghiu her first role as Zerlina, in Don Giovanni, opposite another unknown, Bryn Terfel.
Since then, her lack of punctuality has led to several rows and she once threw a bucket of water on noisy buskers in the piazza below. But, in comparison with others, the House has been relatively untouched by Gheorghiu scandals. Is it her favourite theatre? ?Yes!? she whoops. ?In the beginning I was more diplomatic not to make the others jealous. But now I can?t lie. It?s not just my career, it?s a personal thing. I fell in love with Roberto here and they have made so many roles for me. Just last week it is my birthday and all the company is there, Vittorio [Grigolo, her Faust] sings Happy Birthday to me and I say 'Ah! Here we are, all having fun!??
Fun, indeed, radiates from Gheorghiu, perhaps because there wasn?t much of it in her early life. She grew up in Ceausescu?s Romania, in the small town of Adjud. Her father was a train driver, her mother a dressmaker. At 14, she was sent to Bucharest to board at a music school, followed by six years at the country?s Academy of Music.
?I never dreamed to be famous, or to be rich ? bah! ? I just was doing everything that was necessary to become an artist, because I like to sing all the time. But I heard my recording voice for the first time when I was 18 and I loved it! I was sure from then on that my next step would be to go into a big theatre and sing only big roles.?
In her last year at the Academy, the Communist regime was toppled, and her destiny changed. At the time she was married to Andrei Gheorghiu, an engineer from a musical Romanian family. But she left him for Alagna, whose wife had recently died from cancer. It was all entirely amicable, she stresses.
She and her new husband exploited their double star-power, selling hundreds of thousands of albums of their duets, and dropping titbits to the press about how they liked to make love before a performance ?to relax the voice?. But she bristles at the suggestion that the marriage was a career booster. ?My career is not related to any man, thank God!?
Actually, her marriage may have hindered her reputation. She told the press her husband was jealous of her singing with other men ? but that she was having none of it. Was she jealous of him singing with other women? ?We are both Latins,? she laughs.
Meanwhile, she was testing the patience of both audiences and directors. Dates were cancelled all over the place. The couple were booted off a Franco Zeffirelli production of La Traviata after they complained about the sets, and Jonathan Miller nicknamed them ?Bonnie and Clyde? after artistic differences in Paris. Sweetly, Gheorghiu exacts her revenge. ?These English directors who speak no French or Italian! Imagine, I knew one who turned up at rehearsals with the booklet from my CD. Think if a Romanian director tried to put on Shakespeare with no English. Hah! It is impossible!?
Gheorghiu is endearingly unapologetic about her volte-faces. ?If I?m not happy I cannot sing. They want a good performance ? well, me too! I am on stage, I feel responsible, I want to be good.?
She once clashed with the Met?s opera manager Joe Volpe, refusing to wear the blonde wig he insisted on for Micaela in Carmen. After an ultimatum ? ?The wig is going on, with or without you? ? she donned it then covered it completely with a hood. But in this Faust she happily wears an identical hairpiece. Did the director, David McVicar, who has a fiery reputation, bully her into it? ?Hah! I?m more fiery than him!?
She exhales like a magnificent Persian horse. ?We all agree opera is going in a modern way, but not to make fun of a genius. Opera is a fantasy by itself. I won?t give a name ? but it?s not Mr X?s fantasy. For example, somebody in Vienna asked me to sing Rom�o et Juliette in blue jeans, which is OK, but then to dance like I am in a discotheque. I mean, come on! Other singers do it, but they have no courage to say no. But an opera
singer must think all the time that the voice and the score are the most important thing.?
She?s whimsical, she?s outspoken, but there?s a warmth to Gheorghiu that makes her eternally popular among her colleagues. She glows when she speaks of Alagna?s daughter, Ornella, now 20, and her niece, Uana, whom she adopted 15 years ago, after her parents died in a car crash. Now 21, she?s at the University of Kent. ?She?s a real Brit,? her aunt says proudly.
Who knows if, or how, she and Alagna have been reconciled. He wants them to settle down in the countryside ? there are homes in London, Romania, Paris and Geneva ? ?but I live where I have a contract?, she says.
Can Gheorghiu really be persuaded to lead a quieter life? Her dark eyes sparkle. ?I will fly to see him. To me a plane is a taxi. OK, so now I?m hungry.?
And suddenly, I?m in the corridor, left, like everyone this whirlwind encounters, dazed but elated.
'Faust?, starring Angela Gheorghiu, is in performance at the Royal Opera House and will be relayed live to selected cinemas on September 28. Visit www.roh.org.uk/cinema
Hammer Rex Harrison Laurence Harvey Helen Hayes Margaux Hemingway
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