Opera: Big Find

Her whole broad frame shakes when she laughs, and she laughs a lot. She says that she would love to play Salome swathed in seven veils, and laughs as she explains why she won’t. “Because of this!” she says, patting her midriff. No matter. Svelte or swelling, Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballé is the operatic find of the year.

Last week Caballé was cast in a role more befitting her regally commanding figure: Queen Elizabeth in the American Opera Society’s concert version of Roberto Devereux, a recently resurrected Donizetti opera that is absurdly complex in its amorous entanglements but brimming with singable music. Her extended, melting pianissimos lingered in the air like wisps of smoke. At the end of the second act, she showed the stuff great prima donnas are made of, held the final high note beyond everyone else on the stage and, with an arrogant toss of her head, strode off still singing full throttle. Her warm, artfully shaded voice is not as large as Birgit Nilsson’s, nor does she favor the bel canto filigrees of Joan Sutherland. Instead she infuses a role with an earthy energy reminiscent of Maria Callas, a quality which, above all else, excites.

Out of Nowhere. Lest this excitement be dissipated by fretting in the dressing room, Caballé likes to delay her arrival at the theater until a few minutes before curtain time. Then, “before 1 have time to think about it—pfft! I jump right in there.” Last April, seemingly from out of nowhere, she jumped right in as a substitute to sing the lead in the American Opera Society’s Lucrezia Borgia and pfft! She caused a sensation the likes of which Manhattan opera lovers have not witnessed since the arrival of Joan Sutherland four years ago.

Though she has had a successful career in Europe, Caballé came to the U.S. as an unknown. This was largely because she had made only one recording, and because she refuses to confine her repertory to her most flattering roles. At 32, she has already mastered a remarkable 46 roles—ranging from the Italian war horses to the starkly modern works of Nono, Berg and Stravinsky. Now the hottest new property on the opera circuit, she is scheduled to perform some seven roles in the U.S. over the next four months. This week she will make her debut with the Metropolitan Opera as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust.

Sun, Ruby, Rose. “I was born black, almost strangled by the umbilical cord,” she says. “Maybe that is why I have such good lung power.” It is why she was christened Montserrat. Her mother, fearing for the life of her black-faced baby, prayed to the Virgin of the nearby monastery of Montserrat, a statue sculpted in wood that has become so darkened by age and candle smoke fhat it is known as the Black Virgin. Daughter of an industrial chemist, Caballé was enrolled in Barcelona’s Conservatorio del Liceo at nine, worked as a seamstress to pay for her tuition, graduated at 23 with every honor in sight. Wed last year in the Montserrat monastery to Spanish Tenor Bernabé Martí, whom she met while singing Madama Butterfly in Barcelona, she says, “I am probably the only Cio-Cio-San who ever married her Pinkerton.”

One of her prize possessions is a gold bracelet strung with silver-dollar-sized charms depicting critics’ descriptions of her voice. In Mexico City it was “like a sun,” in Buenos Aires “like a single ruby in the center of the stage,” in her U.S. debut “like a brilliant red rose.” Last week, in anticipation of her Met debut, she was planning another charm, no matter what. “Even if they say my voice is like a radish,” she said, “I will have a gold radish made.”