The virtuoso and high notes of a coloratura soprano always seemed to flow effortlessly and without any tension in the Slovak opera diva Edita Gruberová. She died on Monday at the age of 74 in her hometown of Zurich from a head injury after an accident, according to The Washington Post.
Casting head Peter Katona of the London opera house Covent Garden once praised her unparalleled voice control in an interview. “She can sing an aria as she pleases and others only as they can, who encounter their limitations. Gruberová’s almost superhuman technique had no limits.”
Gruberová was born in the then communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia as the daughter of a worker and a laundress. Her voice was discovered at a young age by a teacher, who told little Gruberová not to waste her musical talent. After the conservatory she made her debut in the Slovak theaters in her early twenties. In the late 1960s, her singing teacher managed to secretly arrange an audition at the Vienna State Opera, just eighty kilometers from Bratislava, but during the Cold War Vienna was behind the Iron Curtain.
Gruberová managed to conquer a place in the singing ensemble of this famous theater, but had to wait six years – and many supporting roles – for her breakthrough. Who came as Zerbinetta in the Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos. For two years she had learned this role inside and out on her own. “To the point that I dreamed about it almost every night,” she said in the interview book diva (1991) by Helena Matheopoulos. “When I first flipped through the score, I couldn’t believe my eyes. That role didn’t seem difficult, but impossible. I couldn’t imagine someone singing those millions of stratospheric notes.”
But Gruberová turned out to be able to do it. She convinced conductor Karl Böhm, who sighed during rehearsals: “If only Strauss himself could have heard this.” From that moment on, in 1976, she didn’t have to look back. All the opera houses lined up for the coloratura soprano who radiated so much fun and warmth.
Gruberová did not allow herself to be forced into roles that felt unnatural to her ‘small’ voice. She didn’t want to compete with too much orchestral ‘violence’. That philosophy kept her singing until last year.
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