"Das richtige Repertoire zu finden..."

“Finding the right repertoire is the most important thing.”

Corinne recently sat down with Lotte Thaler of VAN Magazin to discuss her journey with repertoire and the role of Kát’a Kabanová.

Corinne Winters started out as a mezzo, success on the opera stage came when she switched to soprano. A conversation about Janáček's 'Káťa Kabanová', her special vocal technique and the female roles that excite her. It has taken US soprano Corinne Winters from Maryland exactly ten years to make her triumphal march onto the opera world stages: in 2013, she appeared for the first time as Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata at the English National Opera in London; in the meantime, she has sung in Vienna and Salzburg, in Rome and Madrid, in Geneva and Lyon, in Seattle and Sydney. She has just been seen as Cio-Cio-San in the revival of Puccini's Madame Butterfly in Frankfurt, where she made her debut in 2021 as Iolanta in Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name. Nowhere can one escape her stage presence: a ‘femme fragile’ with the expressiveness of a heroine.

VAN: Can you remember the first opera you saw live on stage?

Corinne Winters: Yes, it was La Juive by Jacques Fromental Halévy, with Neil Shicoff and Krassimira Stoyanova at the Metropolitan Opera. I was in New York with my family and we said, let's go to the opera! But the performance lasted so long that after a while I started to get bored - not exactly the most suitable piece for an opera introduction.

… and the music?

... breathtaking! A few years ago I sang Rachel myself, the title role of La Juive, and I loved the piece. But we performed it with more cuts.

How old were you when you first went to the opera? 

About twenty. Growing up in America outside of the big cities, you hardly ever have the opportunity to go to an opera. It's not part of mainstream culture. In Europe, it's still very rooted, which is why I see a lot of young people at performances here. When I went to opera school at eighteen, I wasn't sure I wanted to do this professionally. I liked singing, but didn't know much about singing. It wasn't until I saw a performance at the Met that I was convinced. I'm a real late bloomer!

The deciding factor was also the change in your vocal range from mezzo to soprano. Did you not want to be a mezzo-soprano on stage?

Not that I didn't want to be a mezzo but it didn't feel coherent - difficult to explain. After all, we live in these roles - as singers and actresses - and these mezzo roles don't spring from my personality. I didn't like comic opera very much. Purely vocally, of course, these roles were great, but they didn't fit my body and didn't feel authentic. So at first I thought opera wasn't for me. Then, when I switched to soprano the year after attending La Juive, I immediately felt with all my heart and soul: this is me! But then I had to look for the appropriate repertoire. And that's what I keep telling the young singers: finding the right repertoire is the most important thing.

In addition, there was also a special vocal technique...

Yes, I am a fan of the chest voice, which means: I bring my speaking voice a little higher when I sing. Singing in chest voice keeps the air in the body more, and the sound becomes clearer and also more audible.

So you are a lyric-dramatic soprano?

I always come from the lyric. My voice has power, but I am not the loudest soprano. It is not loudness but richness and lines that make my voice. In the Káťa Kabanová I can make my voice more dramatic, of course, but always from the lyrical perspective. Putting beauty and feeling into the sound and increasing it dramatically at certain points is, I think, what I do best.

Between August 2022 and May 2023, you performed as Káťa Kabanová on four different stages in a very short time: in Salzburg, Geneva, Stuttgart and Lyon. What was that experience like?

The most difficult performance for me was the one in Stuttgart, because it was a revival. There was not enough time to try out new things, and I just did what I already knew from previous performances. I much prefer to rehearse Káťa Kabanová, precisely because I know her so well and she is now really in my bones. She is a part of me, and the more often you perform Janáček, the more you love him. It also takes time to absorb the piece, you can't say 'Oh, that was lovely...' as you can with Puccini's Bohème, for example. Káťa is very complex and multi-layered. As a revival, I will not sing it again. The other three productions, however, there were rehearsals. In the process, the use of my voice has also changed. In Salzburg I sang in Czech, but I didn't know the language. When I was in Geneva, I learned Czech, and in Lyon I could already converse in Czech.

Why did you start learning Czech?

Since I sing so much Czech repertoire, I thought I had to learn the language as well - very, very difficult, especially for an American. In Salzburg, I learned a lot about pronunciation - the conductor Jakub Hrůša is Czech himself - and I got it reasonably authentic, but it was still very stiff. I got the speech sound, but not the flow. My goal now is to give an interview in the national language at my next performance in the Czech Republic. With all Czech music, but especially with Janáček, the voice has to follow the tone of the language - or it sounds wrong. You have to be able to hear not only the words, but also the timbres of the words. That's why I think my last performance in Lyon was the best - because my Czech got better and better.

What connection do you feel to the role of Káťa Kabanová?

She is obviously in an extreme situation. I myself have not experienced anything so extreme. But I grew up in a small town and always felt a bit different. I didn't really know where I belonged, was very emotional as a child, even within the family. I preferred to stay in my room, with music and books, completely in my inner world, surrounded by art. And I think Káťa is also of that kind. I don't think she is crazy. She sees life in colors, while the rest of society sees only black and white. And to people who don't know the whole color spectrum, Káťa seems intimidating and threatening. We see today how polarized many people are - either black or white. But real life has so many shades of gray. Káťa is artistic, emotional, very close to nature. Anyone who lives as passionately as she does must feel squeezed into a box. She is an extreme example of a sentiment that many of us have: not fitting in anywhere. And sometimes the best thing to do is just leave the situation. For Káťa, unfortunately, death is the only option in this story. I wish she could run away with her lover Boris! But finally she makes the decision herself, it is not forced on her. And I think she's actually at peace with her decision because the music at the end says: this is my way. I never want to see her portrayed as a victim. She is treated badly, people do terrible things to her, but she never asks for pity. Káťa is much more complex than victimhood could express.

Can you always carry through this idea of Káťa's personality in all the productions?

It's always a dialogue. I have yet to meet a director who has forbidden me to bring in my own ideas. Sometimes I have more influence on the director, sometimes less. The only thing I insist on, though, is that Káťa is not a victim. Everything else I'm willing to try. Actually, I want to be challenged because that keeps the role fresh for me. Otherwise, the audience would also get bored if they always saw me in the same way.

Do you occasionally refuse stage directions?

Yes. But I always look for collaboration first. If I don't feel comfortable with something, I try to keep the director's idea, but make it better suit me. Then, if he doesn't want to continue, I have to tell him that I can't implement what goes against my character or the character of the piece, or what seems superficial. If a director were to demand that I perform totally naked, even though there is no reason for it - why? Even in Salome, it doesn't have to be. The shocking is often not the most interesting - a secret is much more interesting. What I also don't agree with at all are changes to the libretto. There I am quite traditionalist - the text must remain as it is - apart from the cuts in some bel canto operas. After all, we don't go into an art gallery and change the pictures. Now I've reached a point where I can choose conductors like Jakub Hrůša, Tomáš Hanus or Michele Mariotti and directors like Claus Guth or Krzysztof Warlikowski, whom I've come to particularly appreciate. You can't control whether a production will be successful for the audience. But I can control how I feel every day at work, when I'm with people I love.

Your affinity for the Slavic repertoire also has a biographical background...

My paternal ancestors came from Ukraine. My Jewish great-grandparents emigrated from Kiev to New York. My grandfather changed his name Vinitzky to Winters to hide his Jewish origin. This was common in America at that time among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. I find it sad today because the Winters surname separated me from my heritage, especially after I was so drawn to the Slavic repertoire. Of course, I knew my family came from somewhere in the East. But it wasn't until I had a lineage test, a genetic blood test, done that I knew my family came from the Kiev area. That's really crazy, because I had no idea - and I was always so excited about the Russian repertoire, then the Polish, finally the Czech.

Do you still have relatives in Ukraine?

Probably not, because most of them perished in the Holocaust. If there were any left, they were very distant ones.

Is there a connection between the Slavic and your Italian repertoire?

Yes, partly because the operas come from a similar era, between 1900 and 1940. The style and text are different, but there is a common musical language and similar themes. It's about the truth of expression, both in the music and in the stories portrayed. The later Slavic repertoire and verismo are about real people, real circumstances, and these are stories I like to tell because they are more fragile and more heartfelt. Also, the women in these operas have tremendous conflicts. They are almost multiple personalities. I find that attractive. At the beginning of my career I was very often Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata, in about fifty performances, and I loved it because on the one hand she's very strong and independent, on the other hand she's very fragile and in need of love. And she fights all the time. Káťa wants to belong on the one hand, to be free on the other, wants to be herself in her sensuality and femininity and to be loved at the same time. Madame Butterfly is a woman of her culture and quite attached to tradition, but she wants a better life for herself - these conflicts appeal to me. Women who go only one way, like Puccini's Turandot, are too fundamentalist for me.

LOTTE THALER

... comes from a musical family in Baden-Baden, studied musicology, art history and Romance studies in Freiburg and Berlin. For ten years she lived in Frankfurt before returning to Baden-Baden as an editor, producer and concert organizer at SWR. In addition, she directed the Bach Week in Ansbach and the Badenweiler Music Days. She works as a journalist for various media and is a member of the jury of the German Record Critics' Award.

To read this article in the original published German, visit the link here: https://van-magazin.de/mag/corinne-winters/