This Diva Finds a Modern-Day Challenge in Roles

No future historian is likely to cite grand opera as a source of inspiration for the women’s movement. As soprano Diana Soviero noted, each of the heroines she regularly sings--Butterfly, Mimi, Violetta, Manon, Marguerite--meets an untimely and undeserved demise, either from disease or as a result of societal prejudice.

For Soviero, who is singing Marguerite in the San Diego Opera’s new production of Gounod’s “Faust,” getting into the character of these pre-liberation prima donnas adds a dramatic challenge to the obvious vocal one.

“As an actress, I have to find one link in the role that I can follow through as my own self,” Soviero said. “What I had to look for in Violetta (when Verdi’s courtesan character is confronted by her lover’s stern father) is respect one’s elders, although today you don’t find the same attitude expressed for the elderly. In the case of Marguerite, even though her brother rejects her, she still loves and respects him, keeps going toward him for forgiveness.”

As Soviero sees it, Marguerite’s rejection by her family is the key to her eventual insanity, the turning point in her craziness. In today’s social milieu, of course, a woman who has a child out of wedlock is more likely to raise the youngster and run for public office, courting the single-parent vote.

Soviero has had ample opportunity to digest the character of Goethe’s noble heroine, having sung both the Marguerite of Gounod’s “Faust” and the Margherita of Boito’s later opera on the same subject, “Mefistofele.”

She has frequently done the Gounod, one of her signature roles, for companies such as the New York City Opera and Lyric Opera Chicago, and will make her Paris Opera debut with it later this year.

A thoroughly American singer, Soviero studied and built her early career in this country before making the obligatory circuit of European houses. She even retains a trace of her native New Jersey accent in her speech--a trait no amount of vocal coaching has been able to obliterate entirely and one she discusses with unself-conscious amusement.

If divas indeed come in various molds, this soprano is alternately reflective and assertive. Her attitude toward stage directors clearly mirrors that duality.

“If he’s a good director, then I have great respect, but if he’s a jerk, forget it. Then I do my own thing,” she said.

Her attention to the director’s craft has been heightened by her marriage to Bernard Uzan, a French actor and director who is also general manager of the Tulsa Opera.

“He has been a great help to me as an actress,” Soviero said. “I try to do every role for the first time with him. Then I can deal with any director, because I know who I am.”

Should anyone for a moment imagine that a diva’s life is unmitigated glamour and applause, Soviero is quick to point out the down side. Maintaining a marriage tops her list.

“Trying to have a relationship long-distance is very hard,” she said. “And I won’t even mention the politics of opera. If we went into that it would take all day. Then there is the loneliness. I always have studying and mail to do (at night), but there’s that emptiness. That’s why I don’t mind rehearsing 10 hours a day so that I fall asleep in front of the TV.”

Politics and personality figured heavily in Soviero’s last engagement with the San Diego Opera, when she sang Mimi to Luciano Pavarotti’s Rudolpho in Puccini’s “La Boheme” in 1980.

When former general director Tito Capobianco cajoled the tenor superstar into singing an extra performance to enrich the company’s coffers, Pavarotti’s price was installing his then-paramour into the soprano lead of that extra performance. Soviero was less than amused by the turn of events. Neither Capobianco nor Pavarotti has spoken to Soviero since, but she no longer holds a grudge.

Would she perform again with Pavarotti?

“Yes,” Soviero responded. After a moment’s thought she added, “The world is too small for grudges.”

“Faust” opens Saturday at the Civic Theatre and runs through Feb. 21.

American tenor Richard Leech makes his local debut in the title role, and Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto sings Mephistopheles. The production’s director is Francesca Zambello, and San Diego Opera associate conductor Karen Keltner will lead the opera orchestra.