'I would rather be a teacher'

Sitting in on a rehearsal at the Royal Opera House is a rare privilege. When it is Amanda Roocroft being put through her paces in Katya Kabanova, which opens at Covent Garden on Friday, it is something more than that. The power and commitment she brings to the rehearsal, throwing herself to the floor and ignoring concerned offers of knee-pads, makes you wonder how this performance can be topped on stage.

Roocroft has become inseparable from Janacek’s self-destructive heroine, who rebels against her oppressive marriage. She triumphed in the role at Glyndebourne in 1998 and has come to see it as the turning point in a career that had seemed to be going off the rails. “The three years leading up to that Katya were bleak and empty,” she says. “I’m glad they’re over.” This unhappiest of operas has, oddly, become her lucky charm.

In rehearsal, Roocroft appears to have boundless confidence: playing the role to the hilt; listening intently to director David Edwards and conductor Simone Young but having her always succinct say too; producing her throaty laugh when things go wrong. But talk to her and the confidence evaporates: she dislikes interviews, critical scrutiny, the whole ego-driven business of opera.

Her crisis in the mid-1990s was part professional, part personal. She felt others’ expectations were enveloping her and that her record company at the time, EMI, was interested only in turning her into a marketable commodity. Her marriage to German baritone Manfred Hemm was also on the point of breakdown. They are now divorced and Roocroft has married David Gowland, the vocal coach whom she met while rehearsing that life-changing Glyndebourne Katya.

The break-up of her marriage clearly informed her playing of the role at Glyndebourne, but she says her understanding of what it is to feel repressed and alienated lies deeper than that. “From a very early age I wanted to be a singer, and my friends didn’t understand that. I always felt like the outsider and never really felt that I belonged in a group. If Katya were to leave her marriage and go off with Boris [her weak-willed lover], that relationship wouldn’t last either. She is unique. She doesn’t belong here – she doesn’t belong anywhere.”

Empathy is crucial for Roocroft. She needs to get under a character’s skin and says that her failures as Pamina in The Magic Flute reflect her inability to find anything of substance in the role. Katya is evidently someone with whom she feels a considerable affinity.

Was it difficult reprising the role two years on? “I rubbed out all the translation and musical notes and started again. I retranslated it, relearned it. I’m older now. I’ve seen more, done more. It’s like an actor approaching a role he’s done 20 times before. He would find new ways of saying the same thing.” Roocroft also played Janacek’s other tragic heroine, Jenufa, at Glyndebourne this summer, winning acclaim in a widely admired production. “Katya and Jenufa are gifts for a soprano and for me, because I enjoy the acting side of it. What makes it more liberating is the language. Because I don’t speak Czech, I have to convey emotions through sound. I have to act with my voice, and not knowing the language challenges you to do that.”

She is careful to draw a distinction between the two characters, both of whom are trapped by their domestic circumstances and dominated by powerful older women – Katya by her mother-in-law, Jenufa by her stepmother. “Jenufa is more rounded than Katya,” she says. “Katya is on a one-way street to self-destruction, whereas Jenufa’s is the journey of young girl to mature woman. She lives a lot along the way and is a big person, capable of tremendous forgiveness.”

The repression that both women suffer in closed, conservative communities can be difficult for modern, liberal-minded audiences to comprehend, but Roocroft understands the setting. “I was brought up in Coppull, a mining village in Lancashire. It was very small and everybody knew everyone else’s business. My mother was from a town 10 miles away and we were viewed with suspicion because we weren’t born and bred in the village. It took 20 years to be accepted.”

Her parents were teachers, and her mother was a pianist who had put her family ahead of a potential career as a musician. Roocroft played piano and cornet – she was in the local brass band until she was 21 – but she always wanted to be a professional singer. She studied singing at the Royal Northern College of Music and was hailed as a rising star, but now believes that such instant recognition damaged her.

“I wanted to be a singer from the age of eight. I enjoyed the sensation of singing, exploring roles. But then people heard about me and I felt I had to live up to their hopes. At college, there’s always a flavour of the month and it was me. I thought, ‘OK, it’s me; it’ll be somebody else next.’ But it continued after college. I was a young girl in the profession who had to earn her right to be there.”

She had some bad notices, both for stage performances and for her debut recital disc, and she reacted badly. “There was one particularly unkind review of the recording, which I read in a taxi on the day of the launch,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘If I just stayed in this taxi and told him to drive, I could just go and get lost and never be found.’ From then on, I was fighting constantly with my confidence.”

Her relationship with EMI ended, largely because Roocroft refused to play the role of diva. “I didn’t want to be a superstar,” she insists. “I wanted to do a good job and be respected in my profession for that. EMI couldn’t understand that I didn’t want to do interviews. I tasted stardom twice [first when she burst on to the professional stage in the early 90s, then when EMI promoted her] and I realised that it’s not for me.” She also resented attempts to cast her as a Lesley Garrett-style Lancashire lass. A Daily Mail photographer once turned up with a pint of beer as a prop; she asked him what had happened to the flat cap and ferret.

Roocroft is now without a record contract and has no immediate prospect of recording her core roles: Katya, Jenufa, Fiordiligi, Mimi, Desdemona. This disappoints her. “It would be nice to have a few things on disc for my grandchildren to listen to.”

Looking back, she can make sense of what went wrong in those early days. “I fretted terribly in my 20s. I felt the responsibility to do the roles justice and I thought about the history of the roles and the performers who had done them. There was an expectation that I would be the next great star, and I felt that I had to look to these people and deliver what they did. Now I realise I don’t have to do that.”

Again, it was Katya who helped her find herself. “I didn’t know anything about her. Glyndebourne offered me the video and I said I’d rather not see it. I wanted to create the role afresh, and they allowed me to do that within the framework of the original production. It has given me the confidence to say, ‘OK, this is my way. I can’t be anybody else.’ “

Roocroft lives in Sussex (she has been flooded out in recent weeks) with her husband and two sons, four-year-old Dominic and one-year-old James. With Dominic starting school she has made sure she will be working in the UK a great deal over the next two years – as well as Katya, she will be singing three other major roles at Covent Garden in that period.

She is a paradoxical figure: in love with singing but uncomfortable with stardom. There were times when she considered giving it up, depressed by being constantly judged, the artificial friendships developed in the brief but intense period of rehearsal and performance.

“This is a horrid profession, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t imagine my life without singing I would take a degree in teaching, and go and teach infants,” she says. That would no doubt have been teaching’s gain, but opera’s grave loss.

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