Nina Stemme: 'I have no interest in being a media product'

Into the room walks an attractive, slender woman, brisk, articulate and self-assured, with a beguiling smile: this is 51-year-old Nina Stemme from Stockholm. Meeting her unawares, you might imagine that she worked in the senior management of a large corporation – she’s clearly someone who knows what she does and doesn’t want. So it’s no surprise to learn that she took her degree in Business Studies and now travels the world for her career.

But her métier is something quite left-field: without question, she ranks as today’s greatest dramatic soprano, unsurpassed for more than a generation in her powerful yet expressive singing of the towering Wagnerian roles, and rated by opera buffs alongside her legendary Scandinavian predecessors Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson.

Her website catalogues her reviews over the last decade, and the cascades of superlatives they contain – “stupendous”, “astonishing”, “sublime” – are exhausting. It seems that she can do no wrong.

On December 5 she returns to the Royal Opera House to sing what is perhaps her supreme assumption, that of love-crazed Isolde in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – an interpretation that won her an Olivier Award in 2010 and which she first sang 11 years ago at Glyndebourne.

She’s played the part on stage now some 80 times in seven different productions, as well as recording it alongside Placido Domingo and the conductor of Covent Garden’s revival Antonio Pappano, but every performance still represents a marathon challenge that she confronts with the focus of an Olympic athlete.

Birgit Nilsson is said to have quipped that the secret of singing Wagner properly is a pair of flat shoes, but for Stemme it’s all about focus. “I eat generously the day before a performance, to build up the carbs, and stay in bed quite late in the morning. Pacing yourself, testing the voice gently, not getting stressed, warming up, eating a little but not too much – they are all factors which help you to keep control. Then when it’s over, there are after-effects. I may seem superficially like my normal self, but I’m not. It’s always hours before I can make myself sleep.”

Isolde remains her favourite role, “because it’s an endless learning experience. When I first played it at Glyndebourne, I found singing the more dramatic passages terrifying. Now they’re fine: it’s the ability to make quick emotional changes that is taxing. There are so many nuances to register.”

“What some people don’t realise is that Tristan is a chamber opera, delicately analysing the most intimate feelings. So I find more abstract productions difficult: it reads so much better if it seems human and specific.

“I used to be preoccupied with conveying Isolde’s status as a Princess and the reasons that she hated the love that she felt for Tristan – issues that dominate the first act. Now I’ve become more fascinated with what she feels about death. Tristan has always been suicidal, because he can’t believe he will ever be loved, but for her the idea of death as an escape is a new one.”

In Christof Loy’s production for Covent Garden, Isolde does not collapse and die, as is more usual (the libretto equivocally states that “she sinks, as if transfigured, over Tristan’s dead body”). Stemme interprets this as implying that “she goes back to her husband Marke and what will probably be an ordinary bourgeois existence. The important word is ‘transfigured’, ‘verklärt’: she will live on with the knowledge she has gained. So the ending of the opera contains something positive.”

Isolde now has a rival for Stemme’s attention in her absorption in Brünnhilde, the heroine of the Ring cycle and Wagner’s other great role for dramatic soprano. Always cautious about undertaking new assignments – she didn’t even launch herself professionally until she had turned 30 – she has approached this one gingerly, not least because playing the character over three operas takes up such a large chunk of her schedule. To date, she has sung the entire role in only two staged productions, in Vienna and San Francisco, as well as an unforgettable concert version at last year’s BBC Proms, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

“For a long time, I thought Brünnhilde wasn’t really for me, and I still think very carefully before I commit,” she says. “I want to know who is conducting, who my colleagues will be, and what the production is like. But she’s inside me now. I need to sing her more, and I shall.”

Stemme is good at that sort of determination – as befits someone with her MBA background, she spends a lot of time planning ahead. “I am good at long-range thinking, and knowing what my weaker points are. At the same time, my head is full of dreams and projects, so I have to remind myself to concentrate on the here-and-now.”

As a quid pro quo for Brünnhilde, she’s dropped some of the other Wagner heroines such as Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, “because they really need younger personalities and more lyrical voices than I can provide.” Kundry in Parsifal – in many respects, Wagner’s most complex female character – awaits her. “It will come, it’s in the diary. But first I have to get Elektra under my belt. ”

Strauss’s loud and furious one-act opera is perhaps the supreme challenge for a dramatic soprano, a relentless and intricate role as demanding of interpretative intelligence and histrionic skills as it is of memory and vocal technique. Stemme makes her debut in Vienna in March, and when she’s not rehearsing Isolde, she’s already busy excavating the bizarre psychological implications of Hofmannsthal’s text.

“It’s so difficult to internalise, and there are so many different ways she can be presented. I have to find my way.” On a night off from Tristan rehearsals, she’d been to see Kristin Scott Thomas at the Old Vic in Sophocles’ version, and found her approach so suggestive that she’s going back to see it again.

Earlier in Stemme’s career, Wagner and Strauss were more balanced by Verdi and Puccini, but there’s much less Italian in her diary now: “I haven’t sung any Verdi for a few years, and I miss it. Find me a good production please, there aren’t enough!” One project that disappointingly collapsed was a television film of Un Ballo in Maschera on the sites in Sweden where the action historically took place, directed by her friend Katie Mitchell. “It was too expensive, of course.”

Stemme doesn’t feel confined to the world of grand 19th-century opera – she’s sung Bartók and Weill recently, and feels “a responsibility to explore more music by women composers” – but she adamantly refuses to do crossover or sell herself through publicity stunts. “I have no interest in being a media product. I am not sacrificing my artistic freedom for anything or anybody.”

This steely integrity is evident in the way in which she has kept New York’s Metropolitan Opera waiting for so long. Although she is a fixture in the world’s other major opera houses, she has only sung at the Met twice, repeatedly turning down offers that weren’t artistically good enough. “It’s not that I am unknown in New York – when I sang Salome at Carnegie Hall, the reception was like a rock concert – and I’m often in San Francisco, but the Met has taken a long time. The problems are resolved now: in 2016-17, I will be there, on and off, for a total of seven months.”

Part of the problem has been separation from her family – a stage-designer husband and three teenage children based in Stockholm, where she maintains strong roots. Time with them is sacred, and holidays find her switching off from music for weeks on end – “nothing but Jacques Brel and the kids’ stuff”. She keeps fit with a Brompton bike that is part of her luggage, and loves sailing and walking in the wilds, “but I have no guilt about occasionally collapsing like a vegetable”.

She’s been blessed with a 20-year career in which a decade of steady growth has been crowned with a decade of sensational triumph, but she knows her prime can’t go on forever. “The moment you pass your ‘best-by’ date isn’t something that anyone can be mentally prepared for. I just have to be my own toughest critic, and hope that when the time comes, the people who function as my second pair of ears will be brutally honest with me.”

Tristan und Isolde is at the Royal Opera House, WC2 920 7304 4000), 5-21 December