Angelic Purity, Raw Urgency

By Michael Walsh.

Soprano Teresa Stratas' art and life imitate each other

Scenes from the life of Soprano Teresa Stratas:

Calcutta, spring, 1981. "Hell on earth, wall-to-wall misery." Forsaking singing for a time, Teresa Stratas enters Mother Teresa's mission to work at the orphanage, with sick children and, finally, with the terminally ill. At the top of the stairs stands a little girl, hanging on to the railing. "She was blind, ugly--and so beautiful. When she smiled, it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. She hung on to me and I wanted to bring her home. When the time came to leave, I had to take her arms away from me, and the smile went away and it was terrible."

New York, autumn, 1981. "Lenya chose me to die with." During the last four weeks in the life of Lotte Lenya, widow of Composer Kurt Weill, Stratas is at her side, nursing her, even sleeping in her room. On one gray autumn day, Lenya asks her companion if she likes the fall. "No, I don't," Stratas says. "It makes me sad. Spring is my favorite, and so is summer. What is your favorite season, Lenya?" The dying woman's reply: "All of them."

The Metropolitan Opera, winter, 1981-82. "The greatest operatic production I have ever been part of and exposed to." AS Mimi, the consumptive heroine of Puccini's La Boheme, Stratas plays her death scene with an eerily quiet intensity.

"You're crying?" she asks her lover and friends. "I'm all right. Here, my love .. . always with you." Stratas' voice, so robust in the earlier acts, has trailed off to a musical whisper; her strong and forceful gestures are reduced to one outstretched arm, which falls to her side as the opera ends.

"Whatever I do," says Teresa Stratas, "I do totally, one hundred percent." At 43, Stratas is engaged in a perpetual quest for transcendent meaning in life. Secure at the top of one of the world's most demanding professions, she is strangely unimpressed by her accomplishments. "I don't think of myself as an opera singer," she says offhandedly in a dark, deep voice resonant with the accent of her native Toronto. "I don't know what I am. Just me."

Her search began with her birth on a dining room table in her Greek immigrant family's tiny apartment above a Chinese laundry. Unwanted as an extra mouth to feed, Stratas survived tuberculosis at the age of four. She began singing early--her mother discovered her serenading some sewer rats in the basement at the age of five. In her teens she moved up to the local club circuit, where she specialized in pop music. Auditioning for the University of Toronto's music department at 17, she knew so little about classical music that she had to sing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But she was accepted at once. By 1959 she had won a contract at the Met for small roles. Her big break came two years later, when she substituted for Lucine Amara as Liu in Turandot and found herself onstage with Tenor Franco Corelli and Supersoprano Birgit Nilsson.

During her career, she has enjoyed triumphs for which other sopranos would give their last high C--in spite of a well-deserved reputation for temperamental perfectionism that has given headaches to many a colleague and caused her to cancel a number of important engagements. Blessed with a large voice that easily spans three octaves, Stratas was selected to sing the title role in Alban Berg's thorny twelve-tone shocker Lulu, when the complete opera--with its suppressed third act orchestrated by Friedrich Cerha--was given its world premiere in Paris in 1979. The late conductor Karl Boehm, mindful of Stratas' electric stage presence and lithe figure, chose her for his filmed version of Richard Strauss's decadently erotic opera Salome. And her capacity, both vocally and dramatically, to range from angelic purity to raw urgency made her a superb choice to sing Mimi opposite Tenor Jose Carreras' Rodolfo in Franco Zeffirelli's spectacularly realistic new production of La Boheme at the Met--perhaps the most lavish setting ever created for Puccini's tale. (The production, which PBS is televising nationally this Wednesday on Live from the Met, surpasses in opulence even Zeffirelli's famous La Scala staging of 1963. In the second act, it seems that tout Paris is milling about the Cafe Momus.)

Dominating the action--in a way that most Mimis never quite manage--is the 5-ft., 100-odd-lb. figure of Teresa Stratas. Instead of the usual wisp of pathetic winsomeness, Stratas makes of Mimi a complete woman, one with physical and emotional desires and the will to achieve them. Impulsively planting a kiss on Rodolfo's cheek near the end of Act I, calmly singing at the center of the maelstrom of Act II, reaching out to her lover amid the snowdrifts of Act III or expiring serenely in Act IV, Stratas holds the attention with both her voice and body, giving the opera a strong central fulcrum.

Although an international star, Stratas shuns fancy limousines after her performances, trudging up Broadway to a rambling old West Side apartment crammed with memorabilia. A multilinguist, she reads voraciously (among her current projects: the Bhagavad-Gita). At home, she munches on pecans grown on the ramshackle 50-acre Florida farm she recently bought. Her sometimes tempestuous private life, no less than her professional one, is marked by what she describes as "a restlessness, a need to explore, to find out, to learn."

Last April, when she abruptly canceled all her operatic engagements (with the exception of La Boheme) and set out for India, she carried only a single change of clothing in her backpack. Traveling from Calcutta to Nepal and Kashmir, she lived in cheap hotels and sometimes washed her clothes on the rocks beside rivers. In the depths of Calcutta's desperate poverty, she was ushered into Mother Teresa's presence and found herself awestruck: "That face is so gorgeous, with its millions of lines. She held my hands and looked at me with those eyes of strength, calm, determination, wisdom. In a dark time, she is truly a light." Except for her personal expenses, Stratas is donating her Met Boheme fees to Mother Teresa.

Stratas met Lenya during the rehearsals for Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Met in 1979. At first Lenya made Stratas nervous; she sensed the older woman's resentment at being supplanted in one of her roles. "It was hard for me to see that shock of red hair and that stern face in the empty house," remembers Stratas. "She was Jenny and I thought that I was hopeless." Only later, as Lenya was dying, did Stratas learn that her performance had deeply affected her colleague--so much so that Lenya gave her a stack of Weill songs that she had been keeping in a safe for years, waiting for the right interpreter to come along. Those songs became the basis of a treasurable record, The Unknown Kurt Weill, which has been nominated this year for two Grammy awards. Says Stratas: "Somewhere we were both aware she was handing over a torch, her reason for living."

Yet Stratas still feels, "I haven't found the track of what I am going to do in my life." Her dark brown eyes--part of her Cretan heritage--shine with fervor as she says: "Music is tied in with it--it is part of something leading me somewhere. I don't know where it is or what, but I have bigger things I am going to do. Opera has never been enough.'' --By Michael Walsh. Reported by Nancy Neuman/New York

With reporting by Nancy Neuman/New York

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