Sandrine Piau: “I am a sad clown”<

A few months after an extraordinary Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, Sandrine Piau offers us three examples of her universal curiosity, a Passion by Handel, a concert aria by Haydn and a recital with orchestra, Clair-Obscur, in which she sings in particular Alban Berg or Richard Strauss, a repertoire where you don't necessarily expect it... The opportunity to go a little further with her. Encounter.

In all this confinement, I benefited from a coquetry of the calendars, which wanted me to finish recording the Clair-Obscur disc on the first day of the first confinement, and we did a vote by hand raised to find out if we were going all the way, because we were in Besançon, therefore in the eye of the storm, and because for the second confinement I finished a Handel record just in time, which is to be released... each time, it was just in time and the next day everything closed…

The chance of releases means that you have three discs released at the same time, Clair-Obscur therefore, Haydn's Scene from Bérénice included in the album L'Addio by Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini, and then the Handel's Brockes-Passion, where you sing the part of the Daughter of Sion, very important and dramatic, under the direction of Jonathan Cohen with the Arcangelo ensemble, It's a group shot, which shows your eclecticism, your all-out curiosity , with an extraordinary range of musical styles and vocal colors….

I remember saying to Didier Martin, who is basically my mentor at Alpha, that this simultaneous release of Clair-Obscur, in which there are songs by Alban Berg and Richard Strauss, among others, and of the Brockes-Passion, it wasn't necessarily bad, because I built myself on the Baroque and some people will never give up the image they have of me, just as some will never give up the stratospheric roles of Patricia Petibon, since the public associates us with certain things – and it is moreover a tribute since it is there that we were first loved… So me, it was the vocalizing Handeliennes, what do I know… However, before becoming a singer, when I was a harpist, I only listened to music close to this Clair-Obscur, I loved the School of Vienna, the second, I played a lot of contemporary, I knew absolutely nothing about baroque until I met Philippe Herreweghe, first in the choirs, then William Christie in his class, then in concert…. So I really learned everything from this style, I who was really a modern instrumentalist! And the fact that these discs appear at the same time reconciles me with a spectrum of my personality which has always existed, which has been obscured during all these years by the success of the baroque current, of all those who took it along, the Kuijkens, Leonhard, Malgoire, Christie, and so many others, this current that carried me too...

But Sandrine, this opening towards Mitteleuropa at the beginning of the century is not quite a revelation for us: you were already singing Richard Strauss and Zemlinsky in the album Evocation, with Susan Manoff on the piano, at Naïve in 2009…

Yes, and with Susan Manoff too, we made the Chimère disc where I sing Debussy and Wolf. We gladly accept a baroque singer who makes melody with piano, but for Clair-Obscur, I tackle a more heady repertoire with orchestra, and I don't think we're expecting it. I had done Handel and Mozart recitals with orchestra…

But precisely, from Mozart to Richard Strauss, it is the royal and natural voice...

Exactly, Strauss, Britten…. It's true that I have a big hole in bel canto...

Yes, I saw somewhere that you said you didn't understand anything about this style...

I understand it musically of course, it's not that difficult, but I don't understand it viscerally. You know, I was an instrumentalist…. I wouldn't want to reduce bel canto to the ploum-ploum-ploum side and the voice considered as voce prima, the voice above all, but it's a genre that gives a responsibility to the singer that maybe I have afraid to endorse. And then you have to have a type of voice, an ambition, a courage….

Rossini, it would have been possible, right?

Yes, but at the time when Rossini would have been possible, I had a little snobbish side that prevented me from doing it. And then I have always been attracted by tragic things! But there you are, I had a light voice which meant that I was not pushed towards melancholy or dramatic things. So as soon as I was offered openings in this range of feelings, I rushed, and it could be for example Dialogues des Carmélites, even if I was given a luminous role, always because of my voice, but everything likewise, it was music that spoke to me more. At Rossini, there were roles that would have been accessible to me, but that virtuosity did not speak to me. Whereas Handel, yes. Handel is my bel canto, he wrote for male and female singers, he knew the voices by heart, and there is this mixture of great virtuosity and expression. In Vivaldi too, there are slow airs that I find more beautiful than virtuoso airs, and in one as in the other, even when you have a not very heady voice, not very heavy, you find sublime airs. When you sing the aria from Cleopatra or the aria from Alcina, even a young premiere like Almirena, who has that Lascia ch'io pianga that everyone takes hold of these days, even if you have a light voice, you have the right to cry, to have emotions, to reach a depth.

You assume your difference...

I don't see why we should do like in peplums where all the men are beardless, where all the women have big hair... These are stereotypes. The physical characteristics, those of the voice, are not necessarily in agreement with what we feel, with what we are deeply. You can have a light voice and not want to be confined to the roles of young women and light women. Even if I know very well that a light voice, especially if you listen to it without an image, has as its primary quality a kind of light, of purity, whereas if the voice is more heady, you naturally imagine a more painful hinterland, rich in experience. But we know, and we know it particularly with what we are going through at the moment, that pain and drama are not the prerogative of maturity, and that a young person, therefore a young voice, can express a range of dramatic expressions. One of the advantages of baroque is that, even if you don't have a heavy voice, you find all the ingredients of drama and the most sublime airs of sadness... And that's why I got into it! But on the other hand I have always been connected with the twentieth and today the twenty-first century.

One of the most beautiful things you have done, in my opinion, is Alcina, in the direction, fortunately filmed, by Pierre Audi, and under the direction of Christophe Rousset with the sublime aria Ah mio cor… You wore a dazzling dress there, your hair was up, and you were a great tragedian there, in acting and in voice...

I have always been blessed with a chameleon voice. If I sing Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres, I can still make very straight, very pure sounds, even if I'm more at ease now, because I've been on the road for thirty-five years, in rounder, more heady sounds, but here I am coming out of Il Primo Omicidio by Scarlatti, with Philippe Jaroussky as conductor (we did a filming of his first concert) and I was singing very, very baroque music, but it's true that Alcina really offered me a role as a tragic actress. People were surprised and I told them that when the repertoire is open, it opens up the voice! If we take certain more intermediate voices, they cannot be reduced, whereas I can always go a little bigger! Not the infinitely large, we agree! But Alcina is a role that intimately suits me better than Morgana, in the same opera. Notice that lately I'm being asked more for Morgana again, while Alcina, after what I've been through in my life, is a better fit for me. But I offered myself this coquetry to redo Morgana, firstly because Cecila Bartoli asked me to, she doing Alcina, and I found it interesting, because it symbolized what I am: always with my ass between two chairs! Really in between! I have never been able, either vocally or physically, to abandon one pitch for another...

But it's not bad to be on all terrains...

That’s not bad, unless I wanted to go to roles closer to me…. Note that it's ambiguous... What I like about opera is that you can still cheat on youth. I can still jump on a set, because I'm lucky enough to be a bit thin, like that... I can maintain this somewhat ageless state that we have on stage, this somewhat magical thing, except when it's is obviously filmed… Film is proximity and opera is distance. What I like about opera is playing an old man when you're young, a man when you're a woman, it's this freedom from pretense. The interesting thing is not to do realism… There are other places to do realism. Note that on occasion it can be interesting to do something very realistic, to choose a cast that is of the order of the cinema, people who have the age or the physique of the role. But what is also and above all interesting is to do the complete opposite, to create something which, in my opinion, is the very DNA of opera, something unrealistic and dreamy. You may find it ridiculous, but I like it because it doesn't define genres and it blows all the boxes. Finally, I said to myself that, until the end of my singing career, there will probably be no real choice. I see some colleagues who decide to go in a certain direction, whose voice grows heavy, and who cannot go back. Me, it's less clear-cut, so I choose not to choose, and maybe that corresponds to something in my psychology. I work like this. I make beautiful escapes towards other things, but I don't renounce this repertoire and this vocal identity on which I built myself, a kind of light, of purity... And I tell myself that at my old age, purity is a luxury, so let's take advantage of it!

Isn't this eclecticism excellent for the health of the voice? To always cultivate the clarity of the tone, while looking for something deeper, more rooted, singing Strauss or Zemlinsky?

I would like to make an analogy between singing and sports. It is the whole question of the relationship to the body. The back and forth is something important. I always have in mind the image of the tightrope walker, who oscillates from right to left, his arms outstretched, but who keeps his center. In life as in singing, the most difficult thing is to keep a line, to trace a path that is unique to you, that you have to be able to define in relation to yourself. You have to set your own limits, and then tell yourself that the whole point of the game – because of course you have to take it all as a game in the little time that is given to you – will be to transgress your limits. , to go a little too much to the left, a little too much to the right, to risk falling perhaps, but to stop just before. It is true that some singers have a different approach. There are all scenarios… There are singers who are very cautious, or more fragile, because there is an element of luck, we are more or less solid… And then there are others who go for it towards a role and who burn themselves out, who go after their dream knowing that they will lose a part of themselves, and that's wonderful too...

So it is the physical that is decisive?

I don't know, maybe it's because I did a little dancing, and a little floor gymnastics, until my harp teacher told me "If you come each time with a bandaged arm, it's going to go a lot worse…”, but I've always had a very close relationship with my body. The body does not lie. A dancer may want to do this type of dance, but it is his body that will tell him which one is right for him. Some bodies will work in strength, others in flexibility. When you are a dancer or an athlete, you have to be very humble in relation to the body that nature has given you. When you're a singer, you can allow yourself to be a little more flexible with these constraints, but ultimately it's much more treacherous: if you decide to do a certain repertoire, and your voice doesn't actually correspond to it at all , you will burn your wings. This is Icarus. We must accept this dichotomy. You have to accept that, in our profession, it is fifty percent the physique that decides. Then there is obviously the mind, and what is magnificent is that through the magic of energy, of envy, of desire, one can decide to make a mistake, to go one bit too far. If we are careful, and we do not do it constantly, we will not pay a high price. If a dancer allows himself, the sanction is immediate. We are lucky enough to be able to allow ourselves to be wrong...

Were there any roles where you felt like you were putting your voice at risk?

Let me think… Yes, there was Constanze, in The Abduction from the Seraglio. There, I was really in trouble. I had already approached the role in Bordeaux, and it had gone rather well. But it's a bit of an extreme role for me, there are all these tunes that follow one another, Martern aller Arten, Traurigkeit war mir zum Lose, etc. and then there were all those marvelous singers who did it, with very lyrical voices, all those high notes… In short, I arrived in Münich, a bit as a substitute, I no longer remember the directors, c was a tandem… I kind of obscured all that… It was horrible, we were on sofas, we couldn't move, there was no break between the two tunes, we were all in difficulty. You should know that in opera, you have to fully master your role, because the staging can further complicate your life, you have to have some leeway. There, I had none, and I was not well. And suddenly, I never sang Constanze again, perhaps wrongly, and I did not return to Munich, except for concerts. But it didn't leave a mark, you don't damage your voice in a single production, you really have to pull the cord for there to be damage, add up several risky productions. But there is the psychological dimension. Me who was an instrumentalist, I found the singers fragile, and then I became a singer and I understood this fragility. Our instrument is in us, and when someone tells you "You suck", we take it for ourselves, when we should separate the instrument from who we are. I was lucky to have been an instrumentalist, and therefore to be able to create this distance. If some days the instrument is rebellious, that does not mean that you are on the wrong track. You can be less well for a fortnight or three weeks. If it falls during a production, it's a shame, but you have to accept it.

There is obviously a balance that is established between the physical and the mental...

Everything we experience has an influence on our voice. This is also true for instrumentalists, you can hear in the sound of a violinist that he is going through a difficult period. If your voice is affected by bereavement, or something that happens to you, it's wonderful, because your voice takes care of everything you're going through, but you have to contain that flow at the same time, because it can take you away. So working on yourself is doubly important for a singer. When I started to sing, I found it much easier than playing the harp… And objectively, yes! It takes about ten or fifteen years to make an instrumentalist, whereas if you have a slightly natural voice, you manage to sing very quickly... And that's where it gets complicated, because you'll have to build on this natural. If we don't attach ourselves to this work, it's later that everything will become difficult: we won't be able to make a sound anymore, because we will never have rationalized, never understood why we did things like this. or like that. A harpist sees her hand and analyzes its movement. A singer who has accomplished the same reflection on his voice will be protected throughout his career from all hazards.

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— arivumani Mon Feb 20 08:01:54 +0000 2017

Are you a hard worker?

I strongly believe in the power of hard work. You obviously can't practice six hours a day like an instrumentalist... Although I remember having worked at Pelléas in Belgium, one day when I didn't rehearse, for six hours in a row, at the table, studying orchestration, trying to figure out what might help me get started, and so on. This job protects you. After that, if you find yourself in front of a moron, it's easier… (laughs) Because these are things that happen, to be in front of someone who has no idea what happens in the opera… We've all experienced productions, where we tell ourselves from day one that it's going to be a long tunnel… Sometimes we have happy surprises (laughs). But when you are well prepared in your body, in your head, and you know more or less what you want to preserve no matter what happens when faced with a conductor or a director, you feel more solid. You have to both not be a wall and smile at all the proposals from others, because that's how you get rich, and at the same time keep the hard core of who you are. There are things you can't give up, and it's this duality that's interesting. If you're just modeling clay, you bring nothing, and if you're just resistance, you don't benefit from any of the wealth that others bring to you, but our job is only made of met.

How would you define what you absolutely do not want to give up, what is your hard core? In other words, what is the most you in you...

First a certain vocality. When we prepare a role, independently of any staging, this is what will give it its color. It is true that there are vocal limits that should not be exceeded. Rarely have I had to refuse certain ornaments in Handel. No doubt I was very lucky and it was very talented people who wrote them to me. It is true that I have never really had to oppose a refusal, but it has sometimes happened to me to say to myself that, if the staging was totally empty, or that the two or three things that were added to one tune were completely anecdotal, it was better not to move and let the music run free… I learned a lot with Pierre Audi. He never abandons you, each gesture is choreographed and necessary. There are sometimes tunes where very little happens, and Pierre will give you an indication, the one that will help you. But if a ten-minute aria is beautiful and well sung, isn't it better to be content with immobility, rather than adding useless gestures?

How do you approach a character?

When I prepare a role, I focus above all on its psychology, and the general character of the work. I'm trying to get an idea of ​​the character. Is an Alcina forte an Almirena forte? No. Alcina can overflow, and suddenly you can sound a bit ugly, a bit weird, because she's an ageless witch, and her seductiveness and her youthfulness are just decoys. It is with little things like that that we build a character, we keep them in memory and we keep this lighting in ourselves. A tragic character will have a particular way of crying or expressing his pain. The pain is universal, but a queen or a young first will not manifest it in the same way. How will such a character behave? Is he modest, is he monstrous, does he want to overflow on everyone else? This is how I create a kind of bubble that preserves my identity, but it is true that I did not have to fight much. Whether ! Sometimes I struggled with boredom, but even with certain uninventive stagings, once there are the lights, the sets, there is sometimes a kind of miracle that happens, because the music is there. And if a conductor takes tempi that don't suit you, I think you shouldn't fight back from the start, nor confront him, you have to give yourself a chance, try to adapt to it... I'm flexible , I like people suggesting things to me and guiding me. Afterwards, I can do it or I can't, and we discuss it! (laughs)

You probably know this interview of Callas by Jacques Bourgeois, where she says, a bit like you, that she first asks herself who the character she is going to interpret is, is it a queen, and therefore how does she stand... She gives the feeling of approaching a role by drawing a silhouette, and then the color of the voice comes naturally...

Yes, she was very strong like that. Me, I was asked to play little Gavroches, but it is true that I was rarely entrusted with very heady characters, I rarely played vamps! Titania, for example, evolves, she sways, it seems that she does not touch the ground, she is a kind of elf. Alcina, on the other hand, is a kind of queen who holds everyone in check, she wears a corset, and then the day she opens up to love, she loses all her strength, because her strength was in her straitjacket… She has nothing to do with Cleopatra… I have to say that I really like this somewhat American side when preparing for a role, knowing what it will look like physically. We don't necessarily know in advance what head the costumes will have... If we know that we will be half-naked, that motivates us to do abs. For Cléopatre des Hermann, I was very undressed, the navel in the air, and that amused me a lot, this physical side, and that obliges me to play sports... This question of the relationship with the physical is for me very important and very strong. And then sometimes you have to stop thinking, tying your brain in knots. You can have illusions about yourself, about what you can do, or think you can do, but if you listen to your body, things fall back into place. The body rarely lies.

I remember an interview where you said that you had been part of the mastery of Radio-France, which had led you to sing or appear on the stage of the Paris Opera, and that From the outset you loved everything backstage, remembering the smell of dust from behind the scenes… I'm telling this to show that your love of the stage comes from afar. Having said that, opera is one thing, but it also has the recital, the Lied and the melody, which seem to me to hold more and more space for you.

Yes, we talked a lot about opera, because we started with the question of the body, and anyway I did a lot of it, but what I want to say is that, curiously , I am much more attracted, and more deeply, by the recital. Naturally, there is less room for movement. Nevertheless, all this work of the body and the relationship to oneself exists there, and very exacerbated, but there, you are the only master on board, and you have more easily the possibility of not getting lost. When you are confronted with others, it is very beautiful, but it can be dangerous because you are trying to reflect what is expected of you. There can be plenty of elements that make you lose yourselves. In recital, especially with Suzan Manoff, with whom we form a real tandem, there is no fight, it's a real collaboration. In theatre, you build your strength through combat. The theatre, the opera, is a micro-society, with all that that implies in power games… There are the little young people who often have their lives poisoned, the stars who we dare not touch… It's a reflection of society with all its hierarchies, and then it takes forever, you create something for two months, you're faced with someone who spends their time shaping you…. You have to have a kind of resistance, a center to know who you are. While the recital is the absolute freedom to choose your repertoire, to choose the tempos you want... The other side of the coin, when nobody frames you, it's because you always wonder if you're right or wrong… And suddenly, it's another form of vertigo, because absolute freedom is very complicated too!

In the Clair-Obscur booklet, we can read a little text about you, which is quite surprising, because it seems very different from the image we have of you. We imagine you cheerful and light, perhaps because of the luminous voice that nature has given you, but you write this: "My loved ones know this obsession which never completely leaves me. The antagonism between light and darkness, the chiaroscuro... There are vestiges of paint in the music, flashes of shadow and light, flights like the suspended gesture of the painter. Because it is also a question of colors, shades, gradients, pointillism... Like a sketch, the staff embodies this link between writing and painting, between black and white, immobility and movement. Chiaroscuro, clash of absent colors, impossible meeting of opposites, symbolizes for me the richness of music which, adorned with mystery, creates unparalleled unions. »

Anyone who knows me knows that I am an extremely dark person. To be born to die, knowing that there is nothing after, this is the postulate with which we are confronted. When disasters happen, I am never surprised by anything, because I always see the glass half empty. But all my life, music has represented for me the possibility of flight. It's my way of flying. Not necessarily to escape reality. The reality is there, for example that of the opera, not always rosy, which we were talking about just now. No, no, it's a text that suits me perfectly, I wrote it in tandem with my daughter, Léa Weber. It explains very well this visual relationship I have to things, and this dark relationship I have to life. I am a sad clown. Anyway, the people who make everyone laugh most of the time have an extremely dark background. But paradoxically perhaps, this disenchanted or desperate vision makes you want to make life beautiful and get out of it...

So are you at home when you sing Alban Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder or Richard Strauss' Four Last Lieder, like on this record?

Of course! It’s all of a sudden reconciling my personality and what I sing. It was already true in Chimère, another recital with Suzan Manoff, where there were two of my favorite melodies, Sanglots by Poulenc and Apollinaire, and As Imperceptibly as Grief, by André Previn and Emily Dickinson, in addition to Lieder by Wolf or Schumann. With Evocation and After a Dream, it was a trilogy of sadness. Chimera, what is it? It's a fall. It is a momentum that has been broken. But this momentum took place, and the important thing is that it took place, too bad for the fall! It's one of my obsessions. The fall is there, it is inevitable. But what is needed is not to be hindered by the prospect of the fall, it is to do something. My whole conception of life is there. So dramatic roles, like Alcina, or the scene from Berenice by Haydn that I just recorded with Giovanni Antonini, these are things that correspond to my personality. But I happened to have this luminous voice, and I told myself that it wasn't necessarily bad to interpret or embody a kind of happiness, the epitome of which being Dialogues des Carmélites where I sang the little Constance, but I am poles apart from this character! I don't believe for a second in anything she is.

In fact, you were made to sing the first Prioress in Dialogues des Carmélites…

(Laughs) The one who dies at the end of the first act, yes, absolutely, it would have been her, it wasn't even Blanche! But here is the magic of pretense: when you play and when you sing, what is interesting is to make characters who are not at all yourself. And so during all these years, I have interpreted characters that are not myself. Or who are maybe a part of me, because a sad clown also has a clown part...

... It's your Gelsomina side... But, listening to you for a while, I have the feeling that you are saying in the background that you have been a bit trapped in your voice...

Well, still a little… I mean, I tried to respect what my voice was telling me, and I think I wouldn't be singing for thirty-five years now, if I hadn't done it. I always come back to respecting his body: I ​​have accepted the dichotomy between on the one hand what I am in my head, what those close to me really know about me, and on the other hand what my body and my voice gives off, what people feel about me, because it also exists, and what my body tells me to do. So this lightness, it exists somewhere, and maybe it's this balance that allows me not to be completely at the bottom of the hole! My physique is lighter than my spirit! And it is true that, when I was not well, at twenty, I rushed to go move or dance. I got up physically. The opposite is more difficult for me. I have had physical accidents, ligament problems, and I find that I have a lot of trouble recovering when my physique is not going well. I built myself on a dichotomy, and there, with this Mitteleuropa repertoire, maybe I reconcile everything that binds me to what I am, that is to say someone dark with a share of light … But there are so many people who are like that, who give off something bright when they are very dark. And then there are those who are the opposite, who have the tortured physique of tragedians, and who are fundamentally serene. I find it very fascinating, this image that we can have of people, the opposite of who they really are.

One of your most beautiful records, in my opinion, is the recital of Mozart arias that you did with Ivor Bolton and that you called Desperate Heroines… We are still in the same mood…

We always talk a lot with the record companies about the title…. For Clair-Obscur, it was very precise in my mind: I wanted to build a course going from day to night, with the threatening side of the night, but also the threatening side of the day... And Desperate Heroines echoed my whole first Mozart recital at Naïve where I was throwing out a pyrotechnic repertoire that I could do... Twenty years later, or I don't know how many years later, I was able to approach other heroines, a little more mature, and indeed for most of them very desperate. There were tunes taken from Lucio Silla or Mitridate, but there was also Donna Anna or Suzanna. Mozart was a backbone for me, I also sang Illia, Servilia, Konstanze, Pamina… There is a whole range of feelings there, but also something magical for the voice, it’s like a miracle cure. If you can sing Mozart, it's because the voice is doing pretty well. I even offered myself the luxury of singing the airs of the Countess, Porgi, amor and Dove sono, on the Magic Mozart disc with Laurence Equilbey!

Exactly, how do you do it when you've been singing for twenty-five years...

…It’s more like thirty-five that we should say…

…how do you keep the voice healthy, fresh, supple, wide, allowing you to play so many different repertoires at the same time…

I think there is a real injustice here. Some singers are more fragile than others, there are all the accidents of life that we can go through. Singers also go through hormonal stages, which can complicate things…

You had two children, I believe…

Two big children, yes, who are going around in circles in the house at the moment... But I can say that it hasn't affected my voice, I have regained my original weight... There is an injustice , make no mistake, there is a genetic injustice. Justice is an invention of man, we try to correct the injustice of nature. Nature is not good, it kills the weak and there are people who are more fragile than others. As for the voice, we are more likely to preserve it if we are careful than if we party from morning to night. I was very lucky. But you have to constantly question yourself, think carefully about what you are doing. As I no longer have a teacher, I force myself to look within myself for the why and how. As I was saying, you have to be open to what you are offered, but in order not to get lost, you must never adhere one hundred percent to what you are told. There is a part of yourself that you absolutely have to respect. And then work… Never force your voice. If you work your muscles in flexibility or endurance, it is not the same as if you work them in strength.

So we choose a voice, – or it chooses you, maybe. Me, I had chosen flexibility, I did not have a physique to be in force. So when I vocalize, I always try to start from the infinitely small, from threaded sounds... And then I open up, and I see how far I can develop, going towards strength. But not the opposite. That is to say, if I can't sing a piano passage, I will never be able to sing properly loudly. And if I leave the fort and I can't go to the piano, there's something wrong. It's my method, but a great voice won't work the same way, it will be more comfortable in heady, and it will try to tame something more suspended. Me, I built myself on spun sounds . The spun sound is a kind of freedom, it's a letting go. At some point, there is no more tension anywhere, you have to accept that there may be a hole in your voice at some point, that the sound won't come out... But when you get there, it is physically exhilarating. I was lucky to feel that and to be able to build myself on this tipping point. Too bad if there is a little hole, too bad if the voice stops, because everything is so suspended, like in the high notes of Pamina. You absolutely must not tighten... This letting go has protected me from many things, because it comes down to accepting failure, to agreeing to try a sound that may not hold. It happened to me like everyone else to be a little tired, and then we squeeze the kiki a little, as the other would say, and we ensure... But in my life as a singer, I always try to keep the remember this moment of freedom, of incredible relaxation. A spun sound, when you have properly balanced all these tiny, indescribable elements, you have the impression that you are escaping from your body, that you are no longer subject to your body. And then it's a real flight. The spun sound gives the impression of weightlessness, it is our way of flying. It's an image that I always keep, even if I know that the fight will be lost. When I was young. On the other hand, I kept a certain purity of voice, and then I have a lot more bass, I can do low Gs, things that I couldn't do at all, I won a fifth downstairs, which doesn't necessarily help me much in my job...

But who looks like you... You get closer to you...

Exactly, over the years, I have reconciled with the general spectrum of who I am, that's it! My body and my mind can finally be more in coherence. There was this dichotomy… But again, this dichotomy was interesting, because I think that when you play a dark or tormented character, and you add pain to pain, it's redundancy. I think it is better not to emphasize the line. I find it more interesting not to go into the evidence of the psychology or vocality of a role, to seek a counterweight. When a character takes themselves too seriously, because it's written like that, I like to find their share of flexibility. We come back to the pendulum of the tightrope walker. When music seems heavy, you have to look for lightness. In Strauss' Four Last Lieder, I said to myself that I was not Renée Fleming, which I had known for a long time, and that I had to go towards something that closely resembled me.

And you say that Im Abendrot is one of your favorite melodies..

Yes, one more thing that is not very cheerful...

And that the Rosenkavalier is one of your bedside operas. I know you almost sang Sophie twice, but it didn't happen. But, since you mentioned the Comtesse des Noces, why not the Maréchale?

I don't know. It is an opera that I have mourned. Sophie, I no longer have the age, nor the voice. But the Maréchale, yes, why not? Would it be offered to me now? We are waiting for a more heady voice... We need a conductor like our baroque conductors, who say that all tradition is bad and that we must always reinvent... Who knows? Julien Chauvin succeeded in convincing me that I could sing three of the Nuits d'Eté, and Jean-François Verdier played piano so much with the Victor Hugo orchestra, that I wondered if I could sing as piano as them... So the Maréchale, why not? Someone would have to want it... We always depend on the desires of others...