Natalie Dessay (soprano)

Natalie Dessay is one of the great singing actors of our time: a sparkling Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos), a convincing Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor) or a heartbreaking Violetta (La traviata). Armed with a near-perfect technique, she has carved out a unique place in the repertoire, demonstrating that coloratura is not just an end in itself but part of an integrated dramatic armoury. She’s a fine recitalist, too, as her Debussy disc revealed.

Geoffrey Norris interviewed Dessay for Gramophone in the March 2012 issue:

Drama Queen

For soprano Natalie Dessay, morphing into character on stage is second nature. But, finds Geoffrey Norris, returning to recitals after 15 years to sing Debussy has been more of a challenge

Within the heady realms of opera, the French soprano Natalie Dessay is a one-off, celebrated as much for her athletic acting skills as she is for her agile coloratura voice. If you happen to be staging Donizetti’s La fille du régiment and need a Marie who can peel potatoes, do the ironing and at the same time hurl out ringing top Cs, Dessay is your woman, as was indelibly proved when Laurent Pelly asked her to do just that in the production he made for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, five years ago. Dessay is also tailor-made for mad scenes, a Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor of terrifying intensity. She is as far from the stand-and-deliver school of opera singing as could possibly be imagined, a volcano of energy that seems to be constantly on the brink of eruption. And the source of that energy? ‘Rage,’ she tells me as we sit demurely in the Café Beaubourg opposite the Pompidou Centre in Paris. ‘Ever since childhood I’ve always been upset by everything. I’ve been against everyone. I express myself through rage. It’s a question of transforming something bad into something artistic. And that’s better than punching someone.’

Very true. I realise as we sit across the café table that I am well within striking distance. Dessay is petite, polite but full of surprises, so I swiftly move on to the question of exercise. Someone who expends so much energy on stage must have a fitness regime. ‘When I’m in a production I have to train almost every day,’ she admits. ‘I do yoga for back problems and for opening up the chest. I also do the flying trapeze,’ she says in a matter-of-fact way that suggests it might be part of everybody’s regular routine. The flying trapeze? I remark that this is a piece of equipment we haven’t yet acquired in my local gym. ‘It’s a recent discovery of mine,’ says Dessay. ‘You have to find a circus in which to train.’ Which is precisely what she has done. More than that, she has actually swung on a trapeze for French TV. In November she took part in the annual Gala de l’Union, a charitable spectacular raising funds for impecunious artists, in which actors, singers and showbiz stars all performed some sort of circus act. It seems entirely in Dessay’s risk-taking nature that she chose the trapeze. She modelled herself on the Italian actress Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s classic 1954 film La strada. ‘I was flying in the air and not doing anything else,’ she says blithely. But when safely back on the ground, she sang a song by the iconic Michel (‘The Windmills of your Mind’) Legrand. ‘He was there,’ she says. ‘To see him like that in front of me – I was so impressed.’ Legrand, a friend of Dessay’s, has written her a new song-cycle, which she plans to record.

It’s clear that Dessay’s versatility goes much further than even those who have witnessed her in the opera theatre might have imagined. And she has now branched out in yet another direction with a disc of Debussy songs, around the release of which she is embarking on a series of recitals with the pianist Philippe Cassard. ‘I haven’t done any recitals for 15 years,’ Dessay admits. ‘I stopped because I thought it was too difficult for me. We’ve done the recording, but I’m very afraid of the concerts.’ So why put yourself through it, I wonder? ‘Because of Philippe,’ is the swift retort. ‘He forced me. At the beginning I didn’t want to do it because I think it’s very, very difficult to sing songs and to do recitals. I didn’t have enough confidence. I still don’t. But he pursued me. I told him that there are other sopranos much better than I am, with much more beautiful voices and enthusiasm, but he insisted.’ Perhaps, I suggest, he thought she had special qualities that she could bring to Debussy’s songs? ‘I have no idea,’ is the casual reply. ‘Why me? I don’t know.’

So I ring up Philippe Cassard and ask him. The Debussy disc turns out to have a fascinating genesis. For several years, Cassard has been presenting radio programmes on piano interpretation, broadcast by France Musique. The sessions are open to the public, and one of the regular members of Cassard’s audience is the granddaughter of Gabriel Saint-René Taillandier, an organ pupil of César Franck and also a close friend of Debussy. Cassard takes up the story: ‘One day I’d been talking a lot about Debussy, and this lady came up to me and asked if I would like to visit her at home, because she had some things connected with Debussy that she thought I might like to see. In her study were manuscripts of 10 Debussy songs – four of them unpublished and two of them completely unknown.’ Cassard was thrilled, even more so when the lady gave him the manuscripts as a gift. They were authenticated, and then Cassard set about thinking who could sing them.

‘They are early songs,’ says Cassard, ‘composed when Debussy was 20 or 22 and written for Marie Vasnier, an amateur soprano who was the wife of one of Debussy’s early benefactors. Debussy was in love with her, and composed his first 40 songs for her. She was a high soprano, a soprano léger, and I thought immediately of Natalie. I’d heard her sing Mélisande at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and was impressed by the youth in her voice. My personal opinion is that she brings to the songs the fragrance of youth, spontaneity, poetry and intimacy. As a pianist I learnt a lot from her.’ Cassard does, however, confirm Dessay’s initial reticence to fall in with his plan. ‘She said she was an opera singer and hadn’t done recitals for 15 years, but little by little her memory of the Debussy songs she had sung many years ago returned clearly. In the Mallarmé setting, ‘Apparition’, she sang the high C as though she had done it only the day before. On the first day of recording we planned to do three songs. In the event we did nine, four of the songs in a single take.’

‘Apparition’ happens to be one of Dessay’s favourite songs. ‘Every time I sing it I hope I won’t destroy it because it’s so beautiful,’ she says. ‘It’s a big responsibility, but I’m always happy to sing in French. I can really express myself much better in French than in any other language, although I speak German quite well. Singing in English is really difficult for a French singer, but for my husband [the bass-baritone Laurent Naouri] it’s not difficult. He sings perfectly in English. When he sings jazz, people don’t know whether he’s American or French. When I sing Michel Legrand songs, everybody knows that I’m French. I really love my language, and I really love words.’

Philippe Cassard says that Dessay ‘speaks French beautifully’. He also observes that she seems to lead about 10 lives. She shares a love of horses with her teenage daughter, who plays the piano because, explains Dessay, ‘she’s a fan of Lady Gaga. So when she discovered that Lady Gaga is a real pianist, she started to work. Thank you, Lady Gaga,’ Dessay says gleefully. Her son plays the saxophone; he has joined his mother in the pursuit of yoga and is also being introduced to the delights of the flying trapeze. But over tea at the Café Beaubourg we return to her nervousness about performing recitals. ‘I’m frightened about everything,’ she maintains, ‘even about opera, but I have to do something to earn my money. But opera is easier, because I can hide myself behind a character, behind everything actually – costumes, the set, the orchestra – so that I am not so naked as with only a piano. For me, it’s much more difficult to learn a recital, because in opera you learn it beforehand, and then your body learns it when you do a production. I have a very, very bad memory, but if there are gestures and the motivation to go from one place to another I can remember the text. The whole physical part is important to me.’ 

Dessay’s presence on the opera stage is so visceral, so inventive, so highly charged with character and emotion that it is no surprise to learn that acting preceded singing as her possible career path. Before that, she had aspirations to be a dancer, but her vocal talents were spotted when she was doing acting classes in her younger days, and so music (her ‘third choice’, as she says) became the focus, but with a strong bias towards acting as well. The process of preparing a new role, she says, is protracted. ‘If I have to learn a new part, I take a long time, because I’m very, very slow, so I learn it maybe one or two years before. I need this time to have it in the body and the memory. I work a lot with myself, asking myself questions all the time, how to embody the character, how to walk on stage, whether I should do one gesture rather than another, how to look at partners – everything is a source of question.’ Dessay likes rehearsing thoroughly, which means that she can undertake no more than four productions a year, and she is certainly not one of those divas who arrives at rehearsals with fixed ideas. ‘I count a lot on the director,’ she says. ‘He has to make it alive. I have the music and the words, and I bring my own energy, of course, and some ideas also, but it’s always a case of what the director wants from me, what he proposes. I don’t rule anything out. It’s much more interesting to be like a puppet, but a puppet who receives life from the director.’

But what happens if the director turns out to be a dud? ‘I want to hear what the director has to say,’ Dessay answers, ‘and I’m OK with that most of the time, because I choose the directors I work with. Sometimes I don’t have a choice, and it can be a nightmare. If you can’t trust the person who is supposed to direct you, it’s hard.’ I sense a bit of an agenda here, but Dessay loyally goes no further. When we meet, she is in the final rehearsal process for a new production of Massenet’s Manon at Paris’s Opéra Bastille, and I notice in the press a few days later that it has been critically mauled for its directorial silliness. ‘I’m happy at least to do this Debussy with Philippe,’ says Dessay, ‘because he’s a wonderful pianist and a wonderful man also. It’s been a real encounter.’ Dessay is giving five recitals with Cassard of Debussy songs intermingled with mélodies by Chabrier, Chausson, Duparc and Fauré in France, Switzerland and England (ending up at London’s Wigmore Hall on March 4). After that, she is off to the Met for La traviata in April and May, and to La Scala for Manon in June and July. For the time being, at least, it looks as though the flying trapeze will be at a standstill. 

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