The Damaskinos Report

People tend to be so used to the idea of obese opera divas that we often use the analogy of "the fat lady sings". We often assume that only women who are physically large can deliver the strong, booming voice required of singers, especially those doing demanding soprano roles. Names like Jessye Norman and, Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas comes to mind on this front. Even relatively slender stars like Angela Gheorgiu are, well, quite round by the standards of what people might normally expect from celebrities.

Of course, that has not always been the case, particularly in more recent times. Singers as Maria Ewing were, in her heyday, truly slim. There are now also increasing pressures for female singers to look the part (most lead roles involve female singers playing young beauties). Indeed, a well-known American opera singer called Deborah Voigt was dropped by the Royal Opera House from a Strauss opera in 2004 when she was deemed too fat to play the supposedly beautiful Ariadne in "Ariadne auf Naxos". At the time, she weighed around 25 stone.

Since that time, Voigt had stomach stapling surgery and now weighs around 10 stone. She has even been welcomed back to Covent Garden to sing in lead roles. From a recent interview she had with The Guardian, it seems that she has mixed feelings about the fact. On the one hand, she enjoys the improving health, more varied roles and generally greater fluency in movement. But on the other hand, Voigt laments her current inability to enjoy food and the sexism which made it unacceptable for her to be fat but forgivable for lead tenors to be overweight.

So is the move towards slimmer singers a good thing? I would say it probably is, provided that the same standards are applied to male and female leads. I have never been convinced by the idea that opera performances should only be about the singers' voice. If that is the case, why do we bother with opera? Are we not better off just having oratorios and cantatas, which do not involve elaborate staging, costume, and most importantly, acting?

Opera is both a musical as well as a dramatic art. Drama is both about the quality of a performer's acting skills and the extent to which he/she looks the part. Much as Luciano Pavarotti can sing "Nessun Dorma" beautifully, surely he struggles to convince as the supposedly handsome prince Calaf? Further, to draw an analogy with stage plays, they do not generally tolerate performers that are out of shape unless a particular role (eg Falstaff) calls for it. Even during Shakespearean times, when males played female parts, they had to be made up to look like females.

Alas, in the world of opera, lead roles are almost always supposedly beautiful looking characters. In that case, even if the singer himself/herself is not good looking (after all, audiences can't see their faces properly anyway), they should at least not be grossly out of shape.

In any event, weighing 25 stone cannot possibly be good for the health and agility of these singers. Look again at Pavarotti and all his health problems. Much as we want great performances from these people, surely we do not want to see people killing themselves doing it (and in any event there is no conclusive proof that being fatter makes your voice better).

Finally, having figures who can hardly move shuffle abjectly around a stage in heavy costumes surely is not music drama - at most it can only be called music. Again, if music is all we want, we don't need the opera format. Why bother forcing singers to pretend to act when the singers' bodies can't do it?