Runaway scales, spiked staccati, rippling triplets, and top notes skyrocketing to 10 stratospheric high F’s! All that in a grand total of just nine minutes onstage. Yes, Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute is quite the high-wire act. Since her Berlin debut in the role 13 years ago, the American soprano Kathryn Lewek, 41, has made “Queen” her own, chalking up a record-shattering 64 performances at the Metropolitan Opera alone. As the daughter of a Navy lieutenant aboard a Cold War nuclear submarine and the sister of a recently retired Coast Guard commander who flew rescue helicopters, she makes light of the challenges. “Compared to what my dad and brother did for a living, high notes aren’t that dangerous.”
Queen’s duplicity and thirst for vengeance make a stunning showcase for Lewek’s electric sense of drama, brilliant tone, and spitfire technique. But all that downtime! “I threw out that broad very quickly,” quoth the nonpareil American diva Beverly Sills a half-century ago. “I realized she wasn’t for me when I found I could address 250 Christmas cards in my dressing room between her first act aria and her second act aria.”
Lewek refuses to let herself get bored. “The lull,” she says, “gives me a perfect built-in hour or more to practice my new rep.” Her portfolio includes such other plums as Handel’s Ginevra opposite Cecilia Bartoli’s Ariodante, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Gounod’s Juliette, and Cunégonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide.
Plus, new this summer at the Salzburg Festival, the four lost loves of the eponymous poet in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann—avatars so unalike as commonly to be assigned to four different artists, contrary to the composer’s wishes. Meet Olympia, the automaton whose pyrotechnics resemble the Queen of the Night’s; the shut-in, deathly ill Antonia, akin in her fashion to the moribund Violetta of La Traviata; and the serial siren Giulietta, a calculating counterpart to the devil-may-care Carmen. Blink and you’ll miss Stella, a real-live opera star of flesh and blood, smitten with Hoffmann but easily pried away by Hoffmann’s shape-shifting nemesis, popularly known as the Four Villains.
Once this female foursome could pass as a fancy-dress super hat trick for chameleon divas on the order of La Sills, Joan Sutherland, Carol Vaness, and Diana Damrau. In our hyper-politicized age, the characters cry out for collective empowerment. “The women’s roles in Hoffmann are frustrating, to say the least,” says the Paris native Mariame Clément, who directs the opera in her Salzburg debut. “To me, it is essential to create real characters of flesh and blood, with their own agencies, feelings, and paths—not just projections of Hoffmann’s fantasies and desires. To me, this is the most satisfying way of dealing with these characters, all the more as we are blessed with an exceptional artist who will embody them all and is ready to explore new ideas.”
“I’m so thrilled!,” Lewek says. “I have a lot of untapped energy and emotional diversity. Given my career experience, I’m quite comfortable with Olympia’s coloratura—but Antonia and Giulietta and even Stella have a depth Queen can never offer me. Queen has given me much to be proud of, and I’m super grateful for that. But I feel a bit like the Little Mermaid, longing to explore life on land, beyond her comfort zone.”
Les Contes d’Hoffmann is on at the Salzburg Festival until August 30
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
