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 Dessay, the petite gamine of the French opera world, soared
to fame as the mechanical doll Olympia in Offenbach's "Tales of
Hoffmann" and scared the living daylights out of her male
counterparts as the mad, knife-wielding Lucia in Donizetti's
"Lucia di Lammermoor".
But at age 50, she says the opera is no longer for her.
"I have no roles anymore, I've done everything I could do and I
don't want to repeat myself over and over," Dessay told Reuters
in an interview at London's Barbican.
At the weekend she gave a recital there that received largely
favorable notices, including one in The Telegraph that said: "Dessay's
sublime voice has found its way to our hearts".
With reviews like that, why has she cast off a two-decade-long
opera career that won her an adoring audience everywhere from
London's Covent Garden to the Paris Opera to Salzburg and to the
Metropolitan Opera in New York?
"I was frustrated because when you have to sing you can't really
express yourself as an actress as much as you want, because
you're constrained by the music," she said.
"I always wanted to be an actress and I define myself as an
actress who happened to sing. What I really like is being on
stage playing characters."
What anyone who had the luck to see Dessay on the opera stage
will recall is how she made her characters come to life.
Her portrayal of the betrayed Lucia, for example, was famously
powerful -- and the Met Opera papered New York with posters of
Dessay in the role for a revival there in 2011.
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"I try to understand what she's going through, but I'm not playing
the madness, I'm playing the suffering, and that's enough," she
said.
With opera behind her, Dessay is alternating song recitals, with
piano accompanist Philippe Cassard, and tours with the French pop
song and film composer Michel Legrand, but her real passion is for
live theater.
She recently starred in a French revival of the British playwright
Howard Barker's dark, one-woman play "Und", about a Jewish woman
whose guest is overdue for tea, and who will not accept that the
reason her house comes under a series of escalating malicious
attacks is because the visitor is a German camp officer.
She is looking for more such roles, but in the meantime she hopes
her opera audiences will look out for her in the different venues
where she will still be performing.
"It turns all the time around the same thing," she said. "How to
make people travel with me, how to tell them stories in different
ways."
(Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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