When time doesn't exist
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| Vec Makropulos / La Fenice-Venezia. Photo by William Corró |
It's five o’clock of a radiant spring afternoon in Barcelona. I go to a café in the Francesc Macià Square to interview the soprano Ángeles Blancas. The memory of the first time I enjoyed her art live continually haunts me these days. It was at the Gran Teatre del Liceu playing Donna Anna in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni under the production of the always brilliant Calixto Bieito. Later it was in the concert Me llaman la primorosa in which she reviewed some pieces of the world of zarzuela in the Palau de la Música. Barcelona, Madrid, London, Venice, Buenos Aires, New York ... her international career draws a present and future path that is deep, passionate and with a will increasingly contemporary and risky. Her recent and extraordinary public success at the Fenice in Venice playing Emilia Marty in the opera Vec Makropulos of Leoš Janáček with the stage direction of Robert Carsen and the orchestra conduction of Gabriele Ferro, has been accompanied by a long applause to her talent by critics. She debuted in a concert with Placido Domingo and has been praised by stage directors like Bieito and orchestral directors like Nello Santi and Marco Armiliato. Lover of interpretation and creativity, she shows herself free, unafraid to express her thoughts, her dreams and efforts to fight for a way of life that comes from passion, a wonderful gift, as it is to enjoy her talent and her conversation.
Who are your angels?
My very good friends. I have very good friends.
And continuing with your name, what does the white colour mean to you?
Cleanliness, purity. But it is also absence, the absence of color. Perhaps it’s an open door to the imagination.
Your parents were musicians.
Yes, they were opera singers both.
As a child, how did you live the music?
As a very natural thing. As a profession lived with passion which needs a really hard work. Lived with much truth.
Do you feel the music as a part of you or as a means of expression?
Both. I have my hobbies which are painting and sculpture. But the music, the voice, the union of voice and performance has become my medium of transmission. With them I can tell stories which is so important to me.
So is music with what you feel most free?
Performing on stage. Music is the vehicle. I’m so fortunate to be able to express things with a different poetry each time.
The last work you've performed is Vec Makropulos of Leoš Janáček which was originally a theatre play.
Yes, written by Karel Čapek in early twentieth century. Janáček composed the music and wrote the script being very faithful to the original play.
Being a very theatrical opera it has allowed you to combine your actress and singer facets.
Yes. This is the fate of the twentieth century repertoire especially from the fifties and sixties, in which there is a great rapport between the music and the dramaturgical text.
Have you ever thought about developing your role as an actress?
In a way I already am. I will continue in music until I get tired of walking through these worlds of God. I wish I had some acting experience in a prose play on stage and I talked with a manager about it. I do not know if it will come true but it is a completely different world.
You work also painting and sculpture. What do they give you?
Give me freedom because I am myself. I decide my limits or not. In opera I have the stage director and the orchestra conductor, is a very large building with great synergy bordering you on one side or another. In painting and sculpture is not this way.
Makropulos has been showed at the Fenice of Venice with a critical success which has especially praised your work.
Yes but it is the work of all because it is a great company on stage, which does not always happen, the actors and the musicians and singers were very good. And so far, you are not alone. I play Emilia Marty who is the protagonist but you need everyone because you give to them and they do to you too. This is the reason for success. And I had my friend Enric Martínez-Castignani as scene partner. Two Spaniards in Italy has been fun!
You've been for twenty years in the scene, what is your balance?
As life itself. Full of great and tremendous things, sorrow and joy. Illusion not stupid, smart illusion for life, illusion for searching. A beating heart that walks, that can be wrong and gets recovered. That is life. They are twenty years in one day, as it had not been. Years of a great evolution and I’m still there working away, in spite of ... but everything is that way.
And there have been many despites?
Yes, of course, and there are. This is not a walk of roses. Opera singer is not a divine profession but very human, very worldly, almost hellish. But onstage moments are priceless.
But the public use to have such a divine vision of opera singers, the figure of the diva.
Yes, and there are. But I think it's old fashioned.
Now maybe an aesthetic closer to pop music is trendier.
Yes, it has that media point. And behind it one must see if there is truly a genuine artistic substance. But the media is what moves the world in general.
Is art excessively at the service of the market?
Yes, the artist today is very conformist. I would lay into much more and we have field to do it. The artist should carry that torch. I do not know if the problem is to survive in this world but the culture is in very low levels although otherwise there are conceptual artists that create real wonders, so there is a very disparate situation.
And are you optimistic about the evolution of the art world?
We should speak of many things. I'm always optimistic about art because it evolves, absorbs, rejects, is something symbiotic that can disappear and then grow. An absolutely integral part of the human being. We are living a tremendous socio-political period and I believe in art. There is a substrate of enormous talents and I believe in them, but the policy is there pressing their tastes and qualities and attributes, which are often mediocre, unimaginative, lack of initiative and tension, afraid to make mistakes. I keep thinking about art in the early twentieth century when there was that communication between artists, philosophers ... Today is different, but they are more in the shadows, working in a more intimate way. We have to move people and so we have to make art go out into the street. The public needs it.
Emilia Marty brings together two aspects that could have been written for the current times: eternal youth and human manipulations. However it is a work which is not shown much.
It is a very complicated opera. It requires highly trained artists and also it depends on the current trends. Now the great directors are returning it to the scene and it starts to be more shown. It has a wonderful music and is of great interest because of its message, the importance of life because is so short, valuable and intense, and yet people let it go in a silly way like a glass of water. In all pessimistic side there is a flip side and we must learn to reverse it to get strength. Today more than ever. It is true that on the street and on TV there are horrible things and with a large audience. But also a large audience filled the five sessions of Makropulos. This is proof that if you raise something interesting to the public, no matter their condition, they think and wonder. So there is hope.
The first time I saw you live was at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona performing Mozart’s Don Giovanni under a very risky production of Calixto Bieito. When you choose a production to join are you more interested in the scenic direction or the music one?
The scenic one because it is my strength. Not that the music is not but I need the stage direction falls short of what I feel in my head and it should be powerful. Power, reality. Because music is written in the score and the more deep you are in compliance with the music, the better. And if you have to create an expressive dichotomy even better. Calixto is a very intelligent person, great sense of humor, very powerful, very loving and respectful affection with the artists, whatever they say. He is a hell of a guy and knew understand if you were prepared to do certain things or not. It was wonderful the purity of Mozart’s singing with such scenic force and even physical emaciation because you were completely destroyed on stage.
Do you think the opera audience in general is ready for innovative stage proposals?
Well, some yes and some not. There is everything as in life itself.
Is there much purism in the world of opera?
Yes, of course. Some think things have to be done in a certain way, but that is not so. I always say that I can go out dressed in vintage way but my performance is modern. I'm not going to be on stage like a statue making sounds. That's not me. It is true that some things are out of hand effectively because they change the meaning of the drama. Finally, we always talk about love, revenge ... always the same emotions with different faces.
Albert Boadella has just premiered the play El pimiento Verdi (The Verdi pepper) according to his own words because he thinks the audience of opera can be divided between Wagner and Verdi followers. If you had to define yourself by one of them, who would it be?
I’ve never played Wagner. I think I'm more of Verdi.
You can choose another one.
Yes, I was going to say Strauss or Janáček. We could talk about this dichotomy in the nineteenth century but not in the twenty first. They are also incomparable. Wagner expressed things in an almost eternal way, in four or five hours, while Verdi was more specific, wiser. Wagner wrote sublime things and Verdi was brief and pulsating.
I see you more Verdi.
Yes, I think so. Even Janáček with his power and intensity, which is very exciting.
The same way I see you very Verdi I also see you very twentieth century.
Yes, I am in a very interesting time. I do not start again but almost because I'm focusing on the twentieth century, with some Puccini, but feel very attracted to Strauss, Janáček ... Vocally I don’t need to think. I've thought a lot in twenty years!
Does that mean you have it all figured out?
How am I going to have it all figured out? If it was I would be full of wrinkles! No, I haven’t it all figured out but I feel like I have nothing to lose.
Not even the time?
Time does not exist, is a measure of change. Of life and currency.
And how do you see death?
It’s a painful transformation. There is much talk of quantum physics and quantum matter but really what we have is affection, love. And when a loved one passes away we have the pain of loss but for him it is a change and he goes into another existence, another shape.
In love we're like Icarus flying to the sun so our wings always melt and we fall?
If the wings melt is because they are not real. So it would not be an authentic love [laughs]. But when you go straight you don’t burn anything, the contrary.
Do you believe much in love?
Yes, I believe much in love. It is a generative and regenerative force, like death. It’s a constant feedback: up and down, up and down.
Returning to the theme of death, recently you performed the opera Dialogues des Carmélites by Poulenc which is based on the persecution of the Order of the Carmelites during the French Revolution.
Yes it is a true fact. The names of these nuns are registered. I play the second prioress, who appears in the second act. She is a realistic and simple woman. And simplicity does not mean stupidity. Advocates prayer as an act of purity.
Do you own a spiritual conception of life?
I am not religious. Religion interests me a lot as a study. People get stuck and bugging by religion which is a real tower of Babel. I'm spiritual, yes, in terms of human responsibility over their actions. You have to get your life and solve your problems because we are very alone. The spirituality of which I speak about is to have a broad view of life, of your surroundings, of being part of it.
This opera is about the persecution under the guise of liberation.
It is an act of power. Destruction and torture exists because of the strength. Religion also has been sustenance of power and handling. Emilia Marty, in my last opera Makropulos, in the original theatre play says, "For some love is the force of life, for others wealth, for others the power."
And you think the main force now is...
Ignorance. There is so much ignorance and a tremendous audacity. And many people in the wrong places, in positions of importance. But there is another side to this coin: a great current of spirituality and people struggling otherwise. This is very important: one extreme creates the opposite response.
Do you believe much in change?
There is a large seizure today and will go further.
Are you a liberated person?
I feel comfortable with myself, maybe yes there is a point of release.
And it shows in your work?
Yes, even when risk at work and work less to live a little too. Last year I needed to stop and now I'm on a new project and we’ll see how it goes. The stronger things will come in September and October. It will be a busy year.
And all this intensity will take you back to Barcelona?
No. [Laughs]
Do you want to come back?
Yes, I want. With the Catalan public I feel happy since I debuted in 2001 playing Cleopatra with a terrific chemical contact. They know me and love me very much. The Liceu is going through some special moments and is struggling to solve them. I think it will. The situation is tremendous so we have to be more creative than ever. Artists have so much to say.
And finally, could you explain a dream?
I recently had a dream that is an image. I wanted to be in the middle of a field of almond trees in blossom, only that.
Ángeles Blancas | Videos here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Ángeles Blancas website www.angelesblancas.com
Photo by William Corró. © 2013 William Corró
All Rights Reserved
Who are your angels?
My very good friends. I have very good friends.
And continuing with your name, what does the white colour mean to you?
Cleanliness, purity. But it is also absence, the absence of color. Perhaps it’s an open door to the imagination.
Your parents were musicians.
Yes, they were opera singers both.
As a child, how did you live the music?
As a very natural thing. As a profession lived with passion which needs a really hard work. Lived with much truth.
Do you feel the music as a part of you or as a means of expression?
Both. I have my hobbies which are painting and sculpture. But the music, the voice, the union of voice and performance has become my medium of transmission. With them I can tell stories which is so important to me.
So is music with what you feel most free?
Performing on stage. Music is the vehicle. I’m so fortunate to be able to express things with a different poetry each time.
The last work you've performed is Vec Makropulos of Leoš Janáček which was originally a theatre play.
Yes, written by Karel Čapek in early twentieth century. Janáček composed the music and wrote the script being very faithful to the original play.
Being a very theatrical opera it has allowed you to combine your actress and singer facets.
Yes. This is the fate of the twentieth century repertoire especially from the fifties and sixties, in which there is a great rapport between the music and the dramaturgical text.
Have you ever thought about developing your role as an actress?
In a way I already am. I will continue in music until I get tired of walking through these worlds of God. I wish I had some acting experience in a prose play on stage and I talked with a manager about it. I do not know if it will come true but it is a completely different world.
You work also painting and sculpture. What do they give you?
Give me freedom because I am myself. I decide my limits or not. In opera I have the stage director and the orchestra conductor, is a very large building with great synergy bordering you on one side or another. In painting and sculpture is not this way.
Makropulos has been showed at the Fenice of Venice with a critical success which has especially praised your work.
Yes but it is the work of all because it is a great company on stage, which does not always happen, the actors and the musicians and singers were very good. And so far, you are not alone. I play Emilia Marty who is the protagonist but you need everyone because you give to them and they do to you too. This is the reason for success. And I had my friend Enric Martínez-Castignani as scene partner. Two Spaniards in Italy has been fun!
You've been for twenty years in the scene, what is your balance?
As life itself. Full of great and tremendous things, sorrow and joy. Illusion not stupid, smart illusion for life, illusion for searching. A beating heart that walks, that can be wrong and gets recovered. That is life. They are twenty years in one day, as it had not been. Years of a great evolution and I’m still there working away, in spite of ... but everything is that way.
And there have been many despites?
Yes, of course, and there are. This is not a walk of roses. Opera singer is not a divine profession but very human, very worldly, almost hellish. But onstage moments are priceless.
But the public use to have such a divine vision of opera singers, the figure of the diva.
Yes, and there are. But I think it's old fashioned.
Now maybe an aesthetic closer to pop music is trendier.
Yes, it has that media point. And behind it one must see if there is truly a genuine artistic substance. But the media is what moves the world in general.
Is art excessively at the service of the market?
Yes, the artist today is very conformist. I would lay into much more and we have field to do it. The artist should carry that torch. I do not know if the problem is to survive in this world but the culture is in very low levels although otherwise there are conceptual artists that create real wonders, so there is a very disparate situation.
And are you optimistic about the evolution of the art world?
We should speak of many things. I'm always optimistic about art because it evolves, absorbs, rejects, is something symbiotic that can disappear and then grow. An absolutely integral part of the human being. We are living a tremendous socio-political period and I believe in art. There is a substrate of enormous talents and I believe in them, but the policy is there pressing their tastes and qualities and attributes, which are often mediocre, unimaginative, lack of initiative and tension, afraid to make mistakes. I keep thinking about art in the early twentieth century when there was that communication between artists, philosophers ... Today is different, but they are more in the shadows, working in a more intimate way. We have to move people and so we have to make art go out into the street. The public needs it.
Emilia Marty brings together two aspects that could have been written for the current times: eternal youth and human manipulations. However it is a work which is not shown much.
It is a very complicated opera. It requires highly trained artists and also it depends on the current trends. Now the great directors are returning it to the scene and it starts to be more shown. It has a wonderful music and is of great interest because of its message, the importance of life because is so short, valuable and intense, and yet people let it go in a silly way like a glass of water. In all pessimistic side there is a flip side and we must learn to reverse it to get strength. Today more than ever. It is true that on the street and on TV there are horrible things and with a large audience. But also a large audience filled the five sessions of Makropulos. This is proof that if you raise something interesting to the public, no matter their condition, they think and wonder. So there is hope.
The first time I saw you live was at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona performing Mozart’s Don Giovanni under a very risky production of Calixto Bieito. When you choose a production to join are you more interested in the scenic direction or the music one?
The scenic one because it is my strength. Not that the music is not but I need the stage direction falls short of what I feel in my head and it should be powerful. Power, reality. Because music is written in the score and the more deep you are in compliance with the music, the better. And if you have to create an expressive dichotomy even better. Calixto is a very intelligent person, great sense of humor, very powerful, very loving and respectful affection with the artists, whatever they say. He is a hell of a guy and knew understand if you were prepared to do certain things or not. It was wonderful the purity of Mozart’s singing with such scenic force and even physical emaciation because you were completely destroyed on stage.
Do you think the opera audience in general is ready for innovative stage proposals?
Well, some yes and some not. There is everything as in life itself.
Is there much purism in the world of opera?
Yes, of course. Some think things have to be done in a certain way, but that is not so. I always say that I can go out dressed in vintage way but my performance is modern. I'm not going to be on stage like a statue making sounds. That's not me. It is true that some things are out of hand effectively because they change the meaning of the drama. Finally, we always talk about love, revenge ... always the same emotions with different faces.
Albert Boadella has just premiered the play El pimiento Verdi (The Verdi pepper) according to his own words because he thinks the audience of opera can be divided between Wagner and Verdi followers. If you had to define yourself by one of them, who would it be?
I’ve never played Wagner. I think I'm more of Verdi.
You can choose another one.
Yes, I was going to say Strauss or Janáček. We could talk about this dichotomy in the nineteenth century but not in the twenty first. They are also incomparable. Wagner expressed things in an almost eternal way, in four or five hours, while Verdi was more specific, wiser. Wagner wrote sublime things and Verdi was brief and pulsating.
I see you more Verdi.
Yes, I think so. Even Janáček with his power and intensity, which is very exciting.
The same way I see you very Verdi I also see you very twentieth century.
Yes, I am in a very interesting time. I do not start again but almost because I'm focusing on the twentieth century, with some Puccini, but feel very attracted to Strauss, Janáček ... Vocally I don’t need to think. I've thought a lot in twenty years!
Does that mean you have it all figured out?
How am I going to have it all figured out? If it was I would be full of wrinkles! No, I haven’t it all figured out but I feel like I have nothing to lose.
Not even the time?
Time does not exist, is a measure of change. Of life and currency.
And how do you see death?
It’s a painful transformation. There is much talk of quantum physics and quantum matter but really what we have is affection, love. And when a loved one passes away we have the pain of loss but for him it is a change and he goes into another existence, another shape.
In love we're like Icarus flying to the sun so our wings always melt and we fall?
If the wings melt is because they are not real. So it would not be an authentic love [laughs]. But when you go straight you don’t burn anything, the contrary.
Do you believe much in love?
Yes, I believe much in love. It is a generative and regenerative force, like death. It’s a constant feedback: up and down, up and down.
Returning to the theme of death, recently you performed the opera Dialogues des Carmélites by Poulenc which is based on the persecution of the Order of the Carmelites during the French Revolution.
Yes it is a true fact. The names of these nuns are registered. I play the second prioress, who appears in the second act. She is a realistic and simple woman. And simplicity does not mean stupidity. Advocates prayer as an act of purity.
Do you own a spiritual conception of life?
I am not religious. Religion interests me a lot as a study. People get stuck and bugging by religion which is a real tower of Babel. I'm spiritual, yes, in terms of human responsibility over their actions. You have to get your life and solve your problems because we are very alone. The spirituality of which I speak about is to have a broad view of life, of your surroundings, of being part of it.
This opera is about the persecution under the guise of liberation.
It is an act of power. Destruction and torture exists because of the strength. Religion also has been sustenance of power and handling. Emilia Marty, in my last opera Makropulos, in the original theatre play says, "For some love is the force of life, for others wealth, for others the power."
And you think the main force now is...
Ignorance. There is so much ignorance and a tremendous audacity. And many people in the wrong places, in positions of importance. But there is another side to this coin: a great current of spirituality and people struggling otherwise. This is very important: one extreme creates the opposite response.
Do you believe much in change?
There is a large seizure today and will go further.
Are you a liberated person?
I feel comfortable with myself, maybe yes there is a point of release.
And it shows in your work?
Yes, even when risk at work and work less to live a little too. Last year I needed to stop and now I'm on a new project and we’ll see how it goes. The stronger things will come in September and October. It will be a busy year.
And all this intensity will take you back to Barcelona?
No. [Laughs]
Do you want to come back?
Yes, I want. With the Catalan public I feel happy since I debuted in 2001 playing Cleopatra with a terrific chemical contact. They know me and love me very much. The Liceu is going through some special moments and is struggling to solve them. I think it will. The situation is tremendous so we have to be more creative than ever. Artists have so much to say.
And finally, could you explain a dream?
I recently had a dream that is an image. I wanted to be in the middle of a field of almond trees in blossom, only that.
Ángeles Blancas | Videos here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Ángeles Blancas website www.angelesblancas.com
Photo by William Corró. © 2013 William Corró
All Rights Reserved