With tears in her voice

Angela Gheorghiu

If Puccini were alive today, I'd be in love with him. I am sure of it. He knew how to write for sopranos: he really loved them," says Angela Gheorghiu.

And this soprano knows Puccini's heroines well, having most of them in her repertoire or in her plans.

On her latest CD, Puccini Arias, she steps into the shoes of all his major soprano characters, with the exception of the adulterous Giorgetta in Puccini's most impressionistic score, Il Tabarro.

With her reputation for expensive tastes and well-publicised desire to be treated like a prima donna of old, Gheorghiu would have enjoyed sharing Puccini's flamboyant lifestyle, his interest in stylish clothes, his penchant for fast cars and speedboats, and his willingness to be photographed.

She has defended her liking for luxury, the elaborate conditions she lays down before interviews and photoshoots, and her reputation for prickliness.

Pop stars, models, footballers' wives, film stars, even celebrity smallfry make similar demands, so why are hers outrageous? She says it's a matter of professionalism.

The trouble is, people are not used to it in the arts world, bewildered that anyone would need a hairdresser and make-up assistant for a radio interview, as Gheorghiu did.

The limousines to ferry her around, the insistence that tiny creases be ironed out of dresses before appearances, touching up her lippy in the middle of a Verdi requiem televised live to millions - all are greeted with disbelief.

But it's not so unusual in someone who so clearly styles herself on the legendary operatic divas of the past. She is surely being optimistic, however, if she thinks she could have persuaded Puccini to drop his hobby of shooting anything with wings, or broken the chain-smoking habit that led to his death from throat cancer. "Maybe I could have convinced him not to," she says, only half-joking.

And the failure and misery of his marriage, the complexity of his emotions and his roving eye might have driven even her to despair. But she is clearly seduced by his attitude to his operatic heroines and the sumptuous music he created for them.

It was with Puccini, as Mimi in La Boheme, that she made her debut, in Bucharest. She was the daughter of a train driver and a dressmaker, living in Ceausescu's Romania. But since making her Covent Garden debut as Zerlina in one performance opposite Bryn Terfel's Masetto in Don Giovanni in 1992, and returning to sing Mimi a few months later, her big moment came in 1994 as Violetta in La Traviata under Sir Georg Solti. It was then that the critics dubbed her "a diva to die for".

The name Gheorghiu is a relic of a previous marriage to a plumbing engineer. At 39, at the height of her career, does she regret not changing it?

"It's not so important. My family name was Burlacu. But the name Gheorghiu belongs to one of the most important artistic families in Romania, and I am on good terms with my ex-husband's family. His father, Stefan, was a violinist, and his uncle Valentin a pianist and composer, so I am really just keeping a great musical tradition going," she says.

Gheorghiu's partnership with her French-Sicilian tenor husband, Roberto Alagna, dating back to their first encounter at Covent Garden in La Boheme in 1992, has resulted in acclaimed performances on stage, disc and film.

They married in 1996 in New York during a run of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera, and their lives quickly became the stuff of romantic legend, their relationship the focus of media attention, their behaviour criticised, every appearance scrutinised.

Now, questions about their relationship, once paraded in their parallel careers, are discouraged. The fact that he's branching out on his own, taking roles in operas not in her repertoire - Aida and Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance - she dismisses as "coincidence".

Yet when I ask her who chooses in which opera houses and in what repertoire she'll sing, she replies adamantly that she, and she alone, makes those decisions. Could it be that Alagna can no longer compete with the lyrical beauty, gorgeous tone and classy acting that have made his wife so highly sought after? Or maybe he's just tired of Puccini and wants to move on.

When today's most celebrated husband-and-wife opera partnership can apparently command a third "duet" fee on top of their solo fees, it's strange that their musical paths seem to be diverging.

But the secret once spilled by a lovestruck Gheorghiu that she and Alagna made love before performances to relax their vocal cords sounds a bit sad now.

She switched record companies to share the same label as her husband, and EMI quickly issued an album of love duets. But Alagna has since moved to a different label, making merely a cameo appearance on her Puccini CD. As Pinkerton, he utters just three impassioned cries of, "Butterfly", and is only slightly more in evidence as Calaf the unknown prince in In questa reggia from Turandot.

Despite her desire to keep her personal and professional lives separate, Gheorghiu mentions his name particularly in connection with their "daughters". Ornella, Alagna's daughter with his first wife (who died of a brain tumour), lives in Paris; and Uana, who lives in London, is Gheorghiu's niece, whom they have looked after since the death of Gheorghiu's sister in a car accident.

Gheorghiu and Alagna have lived near Geneva for 10 years, yet she is little known in Switzerland, where restrictions on foreign nationals have limited her appearances.

So what is it about Puccini that she finds so compelling? "He really understood theatre, the look and feel of a play, so that everything is in the score," she says.

She feels at ease with the flow of natural speech in his melodies. "I prefer that to the rigidity of bel canto - introduction, aria and cabaletta. A Puccini aria is really a small drama in itself, a big story distilled into just three or four minutes. In Mozart, you have to go over and over things: andiamo, andiamo, andiamo ... okay, I get it," she laughs.

Gheorghiu is passionate about exploiting modern technology. She and Alagna have made two opera films, a 90-minute reduction of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette for television, and a screen version of Tosca.

"It was hard work, but I'd like to make more, maybe La Rondine," she says. "Opera in film is still quite rare, and opera fans don't much like it. They think the use of playback somehow makes it false. But it's a matter of quality and how you do it."

Tosca is presented as a fully costumed operatic performance intercut with black-and-white documentary footage of the recording. Purists could grumble not only that the visuals interrupt the drama, but that they'd also prefer not to be exposed to Gheorghiu and Alagna having to lip-sync to a pre-recorded soundtrack.

"I am sorry, but the opera public has very old-fashioned ideas," Gheorghiu says with a shrug. "These people are nostalgic and always want things to be as they were, or as they thought they were.

"But the world is changing and I am living now and want to use all the equipment and developments of my time. I believe in the use of microphones and making CDs and films - that is part of my testimony.

"Opera is theatre with music, and in the most powerful drama everyone likes to cry. It's human. Besides, I have tears in my voice. I was born like that. I don't know why or how, but I feel lucky to have both words and music, two tools with which to build dramatic situations.

"I like Puccini's emotional tenderness, too, the range of emotions and the difference in personality between the teenage Manon Lescaut, the abused Butterfly, or the icy princess Turandot. They suit my voice and my temperament, even though I always seem to be killing myself!"

Performance

* Who: Angela Gheorghiu, Romanian-born soprano and international opera star

* What: Puccini Arias, Orchestra Sinfonico di Milano Giuseppe Verdi/Anton Coppola, out now

- INDEPENDENT