Interview, Ermonela Jaho on Leoncavallo's Zazà

The Albanian lyric soprano Ermonela Jaho certainly has a reputation for suffering beautifully: her performances of the title-roles in La traviata, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica in particular have established her as one of the more visceral singing actresses around today. For her first major studio account of an operatic role, she’s taken on another, rather less familiar, heroine who makes a huge sacrifice for a child: the title-role in Leoncavallo’s Zazà on a new Opera Rara recording, conducted by Maurizio Benini and due for release tomorrow. (The live concert performance which was given at the Barbican following the recording-sessions prompted The Guardian to describe Jaho as ‘one of the great verismo interpreters’ and Opera Today to marvel at her ‘incredible commitment and vocal allure’).

The story of a music-hall singer who falls in love with a wealthy patron, Milio, only to discover that he’s married with a young daughter, Zazà premiered under Toscanini in 1900 and was immensely popular for several decades before falling into obscurity by the mid-twentieth century.

I met up with Ermonela for coffee whilst she was in London last month to collect the Readers Prize at the International Opera Awards in between Butterflys in Berlin – here’s what she had to say about getting to know this multi-faceted new character, the emotional and technical demands of verismo, and the novelty of not dying on stage for once!

Tell me a little about your character – how sympathetic do you find her?

She’s so complex but I have such sympathy with her! She’s a passionate woman, the Mediterranean type, and I feel very close to that, but musically speaking it was quite new for me and it was a big challenge - not just because it's so long, but because you don’t have a break. I sing Butterfly, which is a longer role than Zazà, but still you have moments where you ‘wait your turn’! With Zazà? No! You have all the colours of the human spirit there: you have the diva, yes, but inside the diva you have the woman who has suffered, who was rejected and abandoned, who’s waiting for real love. And it’s designed really beautifully, dramatically and musically.

How much verismo had you sung before?

Actually my repertoire is a little complicated: I started as a coloratura, I had a moment as a mezzo-soprano…I sang a lot of baroque, a lot of bel canto; of course it wasn’t my strong card, but it was so important because you have to have so many styles, so many cards in your hand, technically, to sing the roles I sing now. Because even in Traviata you have so much coloratura! If you go into it thinking ‘Oh, but I’m a dramatic voice…’, then you’re going to come unstuck. But what I discovered with age was that I loved Puccini so much: I feel so close to that, and I felt exactly the same with Zazà. I hope that in the future there will be the opportunity to sing it again, in a full production, but it’s an opera that’s so complicated and it takes a great stage director to take out the exact essence of the piece. Also, it’s real team work! Leoncavallo gave everybody certain leitmotifs, just to give you the complexity of what it is to live in a theatre: all these crazy characters (everybody’s crazy!), that kind of sparkle that happens in the theatre (at bit like you get in Pagliacci). And it’s so important to have a real team. I never believe in one star – you have the leading role, yes, but if you want a piece like this to work you have to have every player in the orchestra, every singer committing 100%, even if they just have one word to sing. Everybody has to be like an ensemble. Otherwise, it’s – well, it’s OK, and people come out thinking ‘beautiful singing, lovely tunes!’, but that’s not enough: everybody has to be prepared to be vulnerable. The public sometimes forget about even the mistakes, because we are not perfect, but we have to give that vulnerability to the public. Humans are not perfect, and we don’t like perfection!

What particular challenges did you encounter when you started preparing the role?

It was a challenge because it was unknown: when you’re preparing a famous role, somehow you have an idea – for Zazà, nothing! I tried, because I found two or three recordings, but there were a lot of cuts because it’s so demanding as a role: when it was high, they put it down; when it was low, they put it up! So generally, I studied by myself, note by note, every day. When I started I thought it was impossible to learn: musically it’s so difficult, it modulates every page, pretty much every bar, because that’s her spirit. And I think it’s a little different from the other verismo operas I’ve done before because it’s halfway between the French style and the Italian style, and the orchestration is so delicate. We expect verismo to go directly to the emotion, but here it’s not like that, not 100% - the emotional explosions build bit by bit, it’s not like Puccini. I read a lot of Leoncavallo’s writings, and he talks about wanting to challenge people, audiences, more than to challenge Puccini or other composers: he wanted to do something more complete. You have the whole picture, because in verismo sometimes you jump from one situation to another: for instance, in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut you have this big jump between the first and second acts, whereas in Massenet’s Manon it’s more complete. And so in Zazà: the story builds step-by-step to give you the idea of the whole life of this woman. I wanted to find something to connect with her, because if you don’t connect, especially in verismo, the story is so commonplace: woman in love, woman abandoned etc etc. In verismo, every note has to speak real emotion – if you don’t find a connection, it’s a long three hours!

What are the special moments in the score for you?

When I was first studying the role, I arrived at a certain point in the third act and I remembered my youth, because my mother was abandoned by her parents, and found I was crying. When you’re a child, maybe you don’t understand certain behaviour from your parents: my mother was always so sad about her own parents, and the first time I sang through the aria where Zazà explains to Totò [her lover's young daughter] about her parents, I was in tears and thinking ‘WHY am I in tears?’. And then I thought back to my mother and I said ‘YES. THIS is the connection.’ Because you have to try to be honest on stage: you have to sing from your soul, and only the truth can connect with people. And that's a particular challenge with a work like this: now, you know, it’s easy to sell Butterfly, or Traviata, but sometimes it’s important to discover new things. And for me it was like a sort of therapy, because finally I understood my mother.

With Zazà, her mother takes all the money and is always drunk: Zazà feels a little embarrassed, but still she remembers her from when she was a child. There are these two pages where Cascart [Zazà's colleague, friend and ex-lover] says ‘Come on, you’re working so hard, and your mother is spending all the money! You have to let her go!’, and at that moment you see her say ‘Yes, I understand: but YOU can’t understand how much she suffered. You can’t ignore how difficult it is for a woman to be abandoned with a child’. It’s like the soul of Zazà remembering her childhood – in just two pages!

In my modest opinion, this sort of thing is why the work never took off, because emotionally it’s so difficult, so subtle: it’s not all screaming and crying! Sometimes you can suffer inside, and in Zazà you have that. She suffers with such dignity – you have to vocalise your soul.

And the ending of the opera, which is almost understated, really bears that out - it's quite rare for you to play a woman who's still alive at the curtain-call! How do you imagine things might play out for Zazà afterwards...?

That’s a good question – I’ve never thought about that! Maybe she goes back to her old life, maybe she marries Cascart – because we know that he forgives her. (In fact HE is the one who discovers that Milio is married: he tells her "You have to be careful, this passionate love...", and that little aria, ‘Zazà, piccolo zingara’, is one of the most touching, most beautiful moments in the score). At the end it’s a bit like La Rondine because nobody dies, physically - but sometimes it’s so painful when you die emotionally, internally. I think it is so beautiful the way the opera finishes, because she had a choice: she could have ruined the life of this child, but the dialogue with Totò, again it’s like therapy for her. When she meets Milio she builds this castle of dreams, this checklist: "I want to be the best wife, the most beautiful woman; I would love to have a home, a family, to be the mother of his children". Then she faces the reality: the beautiful house? Well, he had that already! But still she thinks, "I’m going to face his wife, because that’s my duty: I’m an artist, I’m special!", but when she see Totò she sees in a certain way herself. And it’s like confronting a reflection in a mirror: she doesn’t want another to suffer in the same way as she did. And there’s her dilemma: "I have to go forward, ruin his family, his marriage – or I have to save this child, like my father didn’t do with me". What a soul this woman has! In a sense, she’s similar to Violetta (in Traviata), but for me Zazà is the most complete woman in verismo.