Anna Netrebko is just a little hungover. It's the day after the Metropolitan Opera's Pension Fund Gala at which she and her costar, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón, dazzled a black-tie crowd with selections from the repertoire. After the concert, the 36-year-old Russian—whom BBC Music Magazine has called "the Greatest Living Soprano"—was feted by New York's opera elite at a Champagne reception at the Met's Grand Tier. Netrebko simply had no time to eat, which is crucial after three hours of athletic arias, she explains over a restorative pomegranate margarita at Rosa Mexicano, a stone's throw from Lincoln Center and a block from her recently acquired New York apartment. Soon enough, she tells me, she was as tipsy as Violetta in Act One of La Traviata.
Netrebko is used to being the toast of the town, from New York to Salzburg to Tokyo. "I'm happy that my music is bringing so much interest from so many different kinds of people," she says in her girlish Russian accent. "But the pressure and the responsibility are very big. You have to be in perfect health." Margaritas notwithstanding, her schedule doesn't leave much room for downtime. After all, Netrebko is perhaps the most sought-after soprano in the business: She's booked solid for the next three years, and the Met has her contracted for two shows a season until 2012. This fall, she and Villazón return to the Met as the world's most famous lovers in Gounod's languorous Roméo et Juliette.
Opera is a supremely sensual art form, and Netrebko unabashedly enjoys the sensual side of her being. On the day we meet, she's wearing a knitted beret that holds up her lustrous raven hair, a short wool skirt, and black stockings over slender legs so often hidden under the period gowns of all the 'Ettas and 'Inas she plays onstage. She's quite particular about her characters' costumes. "This is my only diva behavior," she says, her dark eyes flashing. "If I don't like some kind of costume, I might say, 'Change it. Make the costume work for me.'" Not surprisingly, designers are drawn to her hourglass curves.
As everyone in opera knows by now, Netrebko's start was the stuff of fairy tales—a Cinderella story of cleaning floors at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, the home of the Kirov Opera, only to impress maestro Valery Gergiev with her superb voice. ("It's boring," the Krasnodar native says with a note of petulance when asked about the improbable origins of her career.) Ever since, she's been praised not just for her coloratura soprano but also for her acting ability: "Audrey Hepburn with a voice," wrote one critic when she made her 2002 Met debut as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace.
But at times, it has seemed as if her beauty would overshadow her talent. When the outspoken Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli was once asked if she'd rather have Netrebko's voice or legs, she said you can't separate the two. Netrebko brushes it all off, explaining that her voice has matured over the years. "I have very big?...here," she says, expanding her slender frame with a deep breath as she tries to find the right word. "Lungs! This is all from singing."
