“A live performance is another leap of faith, because it's live performance. It's not manipulated. You cannot go back. So it's a wonderful adventure,” Pretty Yende tells me.
We’re backstage at the Royal Opera House. The soprano is between coaching sessions, relaxed at the piano in athleisure gear and explaining how each performance is something like falling in love. “We meet for the first time and it's a bit awkward, but we kind of like each other. We have this common ground, which is the music,” she explains. “Then it takes us, out of our heads and by the end of the evening, we have connected in the heart.”
And if there’s anybody who can connect the crowd to the music, it’s Yende. Now 40, she is currently starring in the title role of Handel’s Semele at the Royal Opera House, which isn’t for the faint of heart: Oliver Mears’ production is a very dark interpretation of an opera that already includes kidnapping and forced marriage. “It's a heavy tale,” Yende explains. “Although it can seem very light, with all the nice music that Handel wrote, the actual story of my character is quite intense. What is amazing about the production is that visually you get the sense of that.”
Growing up in a small town in South Africa, Yende initially learned the choruses of the opera through the choir she started out in. “It was an amazing full circle moment,” she says. “I had to relearn my lines, which is the main lady now, not in the chorus. It was wonderful bringing back memories of when my journey started.”
It’s been quite the journey. Yende has sung at top opera houses, but British viewers may be most familiar with her starring role in the coronation of King Charles III. She sang a new piece written for the occasion by British composer Sarah Class, Sacred Fire, wearing a stunning canary yellow dress by Stéphane Rolland and oodles of Graff diamonds.
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The costume is not quite as dramatic in this opera. But Semele is often a role that focuses on the character’s vanity – “Myself I shall adore” is the blockbuster aria after all – but Yende sought to round out her emotional range.
“She might seem superficial in vain, but we found even more depth in her because as human beings we are complex,” Yende says. “I could relate to what it means to be determined, what it means to believe that you deserve love, and you have to do whatever it takes. Because we do deserve love, and what is life without love anyway?
With the intensity of the journey Yende goes on as Semele each night, it must be hard to shake off once the curtain comes down. But the soprano assures me she has a solid routine to come back to herself. “I need to be with people who know me, whom I can talk to, to detox the emotions. It's hard for the brain to know that that was not real because when I'm on stage, I'm not pretending.”
She will go out with the cast for a drink, or call her family, a route back to herself before a shower, prayer and bed. The way she describes it sounds like a short yet intense kind of method acting, becoming a conduit for her role. “I embody people who don't have a body and I give them voice,” says Yende. “I am truly 100 per cent available to be the vessel of the music and the character in that time.”
When not performing or recovering from a performance, Yende is learning new music for her repertoire and working with vocal coaches. She’s lucky, she tells me, that she’s a quick study and can keep lots of different scores in her brain. It’s an exciting time in her life as a soprano – where her voice has matured and the techniques she has trained can truly come into play.
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“I'm in that period right now where the voice is truly nearing the launch. The time of my career where everything comes together,” she says. “The past 10 years have been truly helping me to navigate to the full majority of the voice. “I've grown a lot as well as a person. I've learned some hard lessons in life and some good lessons as well.”
Like every top musician, practice and training is the backbone of the work. But for singers, she says, it’s an entire lifestyle. “The voice is one instrument that requires so much more because it depends more on the person, on your personal life, how balanced you are,” she says. “Are you a happy person? Are you surrounded by support, by love? Are you getting rest?” If you’re not in balance within yourself, it will affect your inner instrument.
It’s so key, she explains, because the raw power of opera comes from singing without the aid of a microphone. “The purity of the voice, the power of the voice, and the connection from soul to soul is something that's very unique,” she says. “That makes opera very divine.”
Like all opera lovers, she hopes that a new generation will find their way to the art form and its emotive power. “It's literally soul food for real,” she says. “It's a gift to all humanity. This is our gift and we should we we should all feast in it because it's ours.”
Semele at the Royal Opera House, until July 17, tickets and information here
