Angela Gheorghiu celebrates 25 years with the Royal Opera House

The great soprano Angela Gheorghiu does not live in the same world as the rest of us.

Her life story doesn't have the same humdrum banalities: it is too grand, too dramatic. She herself is mythical – her voice, her beauty, her demands – and her existence is marked by romance and sorrow, greatness and impetuosity. It is impossible to think she might have been anything but a giant of opera; she is too interesting for anything else.

This year, she celebrates 25 years at the Royal Opera House and her performance on February 27, in the first revival of David McVicar’s 2010 take on Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, will be her 150th on the Covent Garden stage.

It is a stage that’s made her legend just as much as any of the diva stories – though it is fun to remember she once demanded hair and makeup for a radio interview, and refers to herself in the third person. It’s where she made her international debut in 1992, as Zerlina in Don Giovanni, which she followed a few months later with Mimi in La Bohème.

Mimi was a part she had performed many time in Romania, where she grew up while Ceaușescu ruled. She absorbed the state-mandated daily broadcast of classical music and began singing at six, later often telling interviewers: “I never thought for one second of my life to do something else.” She performed at Communist rallies – there wasn’t any choice about it – but, she’d say, "I was always alone". Little surprise choirs weren’t for her – television also cultivated a love of glamour.

When Ceaușescu was overthrown, murdered on Christmas Day 1990, she was free, and arrived in London 1991. Her first golden year came in 1994, again at the ROH. Gheorghiu proved a sensation as Violetta Valéry in Richard Eyre’s debut, a production of Verdi’s La Traviata. She had stunned the great maestro Sir Georg Solti in auditions, and in turn stunned audiences too, including BBC controllers Michael Jackson and Alan Yentob. So taken were they, in fact, that BBC2’s schedules were cleared the night after they had seen her for a live stream of the performance. Mainstream television had never before paid such attention to opera, certainly, but consider that television schedules are rarely cleared for anything: deaths, sometimes.

It was also the year she officially began her affair with French tenor Roberto Alagna, though they had met in 1992, for Bohème, when both were married. They were fiercely in love – the gorgeous Gheorghiu would tease the press by telling them she and Alagna slept together before every performance “to relax the voice” – and would later marry in New York, officiated by then-mayor, Rudy Giuliani. Opera houses across the globe went crazy to book them as a pair.

Years passed and her reputation grew, as did her reputation for difficulty and disappointment. She did not always turn up for shows and didn’t offer excuses, even when there was very good reason to: the couple pulled out of La Bohème in 1996 when Gheorghiu’s sister Elena and her husband were killed in a car crash. Gheorghiu took in their orphan daughter. She did not explain to anyone why she had cancelled until much later.

Still, there was no denying her marriage was tempestuous, and Jonathan Miller would later brand husband and wife ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, though this was perhaps the better of the insults: others nicknamed them, with a touch of xenophobia, "the Ceaușescus", and her “Draculette”. They announced divorce in 2009, reconciliation in 2011, and divorce again in 2013. The last time it was no Burton-Taylor move, and very definitely over. Gheorghiu publicly accused Alagna of domestic abuse.

Through it all, though, was the Royal Opera House. Gheorghiu was welcomed back on the Covent Garden stage time and again, with acclaim for performances in Carmen, Turandot, L'elisir d'amore, Faust, Tosca and many more besides. There are rumours the great diva has calmed a little with age, but it likely wouldn’t matter, so long as the voice were there. It still is.

That voice – that cleared the BBC’s schedule, that took her around the world, that saw her hailed as perhaps even finer than Maria Callus – is enough for her to be forgiven endlessly. At its top, it is as fine and fragile and human as a person’s voice can be, wavering like wings or spider silk in the wind. Its power is not the kind that shatters the ears, but that which pours into the blood with a cool shiver. If you have witnessed it, she can never be unheard, and in Covent Garden, her voice is sure continue to echo on for another twenty five years, and twenty five after that, and on and on and on, endlessly thrilling and inspiring everyone who follows her.

Adriana Lecouvreur is on at the Royal Opera House until March 2. Angela Gheorghiu will appear on February 17, 24 and 27. For more information, visit roh.org.uk