BERLIN.- You might know her as world-famous diva Emilia Marty. Or as Ellian MacGregor maybe even Eugenia Montez or Elsa Müller. Its an open question in Janaceks operatic thriller The Makropulos Case, about the twilight of a woman who has adopted an assortment of identities throughout her unnaturally long life.
Her real name is Elina Makropulos, born 337 years ago on Crete and still going, thanks to an elixir her father tested on her as a teenager. Shes not so different from Marlis Petersen, the soprano playing the part in a new production that premieres at the Berlin State Opera on Sunday.
OK, Petersen is a mere 54. But like Emilia, she comes from Greece and is currently inhabiting just the latest in a long line of personas. There are few singers with Petersens dramatic ferocity and intelligence who understand that opera is, fundamentally, theater.
In the beginning of my career, the singing was most important, she said in a recent interview at the Berlin opera house. Then the music became as important as the text, and then came playing the role. And I wouldnt say its 33-33-33. Its three times 100.
She loves, she added, to linger in and study the psychologies of women. Its what has made her, despite a voice on the slender side, one of todays greatest singer-actors a small club with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Asmik Grigorian and Karita Mattila and a directors dream.
Shes in this extra class of singer, said Claus Guth, who is directing the new Makropulos Case. This is to a certain degree people with an energy and a little craziness, in a positive way. I would tell Marlis, We do everything upside down and on the moon, and she would say, Lets go for it.
Perhaps surprisingly, Petersen never studied acting beyond basic movement in school. Its like a gift from nature that I have, she said. It came to me by God.
Opera, too, was more of a random discovery than a deliberate plan. Born in Southern Germany, Petersen said music was a big nothingness in her house while she was growing up. She learned piano and flute but didnt hear much classical music; she listened to pop, but her parents considered a lot of it dirty, like her treasured ABBA cassette tape.
Still, they were supportive, and Petersens piano teacher exposed her, she recalled, to everything from Bach to Hindemith. In a school music class, her voice was noticed, which led to singing in a church choir and learning the sacred repertory of Schubert, Mozart and more. When she was 15, her parents took her to her first opera, Verdis Rigoletto. She fell asleep.
I didnt understand anything, Petersen said. I came late to opera, actually.
That happened when she studied voice in Stuttgart, financing her education in part by performing in a cover band called Square on weekends. Petersen played keyboard and sang hits like Celine Dions The Power of Love and Whitney Houstons I Wanna Dance With Somebody. With a keyboardist colleague, she would do gigs that included performing Starlight Express on roller skates.
It was good training, because the nights were long, and there was a bit of toughness involved, Petersen said. She imitated the voices of the original singers, a skill that paid off later when she entered a competition with categories for classical repertory, then chansons and musical theater. She won the top prize in both, channeling Barbra Streisand in Yentl for her show tune.
But once she turned 25, she focused entirely on opera. She joined the ensembles of houses in Nuremberg and Düsseldorf. As a light coloratura soprano, she sang roles like Ännchen in Der Freischütz and Oscar in Un Ballo in Maschera. Then, in 2003, she went freelance.
Petersen began to develop a more personal repertory and signature roles. There was Susanna in Mozarts Le Nozze di Figaro, whom she saw as a quick, funny and inventive kindred spirit. And the title antiheroine of Bergs Lulu, which she sang in about 10 runs before retiring it at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015. That role, notorious for the complexity and extremity of its music and psychology, was, she said, the big thing in my life.
There is a little of Lulu in Petersens Emilia Marty the chilly pragmatism and canny manipulation but she said that this debut has been a challenge. Her colleague Ludovit Ludha, however, who is singing Albert Gregor, Emilias pawn, in the production, said that when he first rehearsed with her, he asked her whether she was sure she had no Czech in her blood, she navigated the language so well.
In each rehearsal, I was crying, he added. Its basically unprofessional from my side, but shes so impressive.
Guths staging is also tailored, in part, to Petersen. Handsomely designed and stylized, the production has a crucial intervention: a white void, occupied by Emilia in the opening and between acts.
There is no single moment where Emilia is alone, Guth said, Shes always playing a role. So I invented a special room for her, where we see the emptiness of someone who is going for 300 years through life.
Without music or text, these interludes depend entirely on Petersens silent acting. Dressed in a slip and mostly bald, with patches of wiry white hair, she wears Emilias true age on her face and throughout her body as she wearily dons the costume for the coming act. The scenes that follow are long decrescendos; always, by the end, her energy is depleted.
This, Guth said, is a very specific quality that only Marlis can give me.
Barrie Kosky, who directed her role debut as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier at the Bavarian State Opera last season a production she returns to this spring said that in the rehearsal room, theres never anything less than 100%, adding, There may be marking high notes, but theres no marking with acting.
He recalled that in preparing the first act of Der Rosenkavalier, she began to eagerly eat a croissant when it was brought into the scene. She told him that if her character had been having sex all night, she would be starving.
I thought, he said, there is a God in the theater, and hes given us Marlis Petersen.
Many of Petersens latest triumphs have been at the Bavarian State Opera, where last summer she was named Kammersängerin, designating a special relationship with the company an old title, but a lovely surprise, she said. There, she found a partner in conductor Kirill Petrenko, the houses former music director, with whom she sang in Lulu, Korngolds Die Tote Stadt and Strauss Salome.
Around the time she was learning that opera, she bought a Harley-Davidson, which she named Salome. I wanted to give her yes, her a fiery name, Petersen said. The motorcycle is in Munich now, but she otherwise keeps it with her in Greece, where she has lived since 2009: first in Athens, then in a house she built on land she has long owned in the Peloponnese.
I cry when I come home, she said. Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.
Home is where she also keeps busy with her second calling: olive oil. Her region, she said, produces olives that are second only to those on Crete, and with the harvest on her property, she makes oil that she sells and gives away to friends. (Kosky has a small collection at his apartment in Berlin.)
The label? In a coincidence that might remind you of The Makropulos Case, its called Divas Elixir.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.