Deborah Voigt

Deborah Voigt

I probably would have been just as happy falling into a career as a country singer or something else. For me, it's always been about the relationship between me and an audience, and feeling like I'm eliciting some kind of response from them. That it ended up being opera was due to a set of circumstances. That said, I feel I'm in the right place and doing the right thing.'

Deborah Voigt, soprano extraordinaire, is certainly doing the right thing for millions of opera lovers around the globe. But as she admits, her life could have taken a very different path. Although Voigt sang in church and took voice lessons early on, she mainly focussed on pop music and Broadway show tunes. By the time she entered Cal State Fullerton in southern California, she envisioned a career as a choral conductor. Dropping out after a year while her parents went through a difficult divorce, she worked as a computer operator but then resumed voice lessons. With her teacher's encouragement, she returned to music studies - this time as a vocal performance major.

'From the beginning of my life I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it'

'I sort of fell into my singing career,' she explains. 'I started voice competitions with the idea to make money to pay my American Express bill more than anything else. But I found myself winning. The prizes included concerts and recitals, and the next thing I knew, I was beginning a career as an opera singer. From the beginning of my life I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it - but it just wasn't that way. It was not some sort of divine inspiration.'

For a superstar singer, Voigt is refreshingly candid. She admits during our interview that she would rather be lounging in the spa with a girlfriend than conducting back-to-back phone interviews - especially when the conversation turns inevitably to the infamous little black dress that led to her dismissal (with full pay) from the Royal Opera House's 2004 production of Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. Considered too fat to satisfy the director's demands for a cocktail dress-sporting Ariadne, Voigt spent her paycheque on gastric bypass surgery, a procedure she had been considering for years, and lost 135 pounds (61kg).

• Print
• Email to friend
• Discuss