Kate Royal’s Lessons in Love

Springtime in New York City has brought abundant gifts to the beautifully voiced English soprano Kate Royal. Having just made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the heroine in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, she follows up the release of her latest EMI CD, A Lesson in Love, with recitals in Montreal, New York City, and in San Francisco on May 24 at Herbst Theatre [This concert has been cancelled]. Speaking to SFCV from New York, she speaks about celebrating a new chapter in her ongoing personal saga of love.

Are you now based in New York City?

We have relocated here for six months. My husband is rehearsing a new musical, Death Takes a Holiday, which will be at the Roundabout Theatre in New York. It was sheer coincidence that we were working here at the same time, which doesn’t happen very often.

Your son was born in October 2009. How do you handle both of you being in the profession and having a child?

It’s crazy. It’s completely insane. We spend a lot of time trying to plan it and trying to work out logistics. But what’s made it so difficult is, with my career, everything is planned two or three years in advance. With my husband’s acting career, things are planned very much more last-minute. Generally, our son travels with me. But it’s changing all the time.

How is your son doing through all this?

He’s good. He adaptable, because that’s what he knows, and he’s very, very sociable. We just make sure, wherever we are, we make connections with other children.

He misses our dog. Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite handle bringing him, as well. But he’s good. He loves it. It’s one big adventure. Obviously when he starts school, we have to really base ourselves in one place. But for now, we are able to bring him around with us, which is great.

I’ll bet you’re not planning the second child immediately.

Well, I’m actually due in November, which we’ve only just announced officially. It’s going to make life even more complicated, which is going to be very interesting.

Wow! Do you know if this is going to be a boy or a girl?

We don’t. We won’t find out. We like the surprise.

Did the birth of your child and your relationship (which was going on before you had the child and got married) affect your choice of music for the upcoming recital?

To be honest, not much. Certainly the theme of love is everywhere, every day, with everyone. But I wouldn’t say that my personal life has particularly inspired this program.

But having said that, there are obviously moments I can relate to from past experience. Certainly, the actual story is quite separate from my life as it is now. The story is one of heartbreak, pain, and emotion; that’s something I’ve luckily managed to stay clear of for quite a while now.

The recital program tries to create a narrative. If one were to read the translations as a monologue, that would tell the story very, very clearly. I think of it as a one-woman show, or a dramatic monologue set to music. We begin by meeting this young girl, who is waiting for something exciting to happen in her life. She dreams of love and what she thinks it is all about, and expresses rather idealistic views of how it is going to be.

She’s a peasant girl, so there are songs that are very outdoorsy and down-to-earth. Perhaps she dreams above her station. She does end up meeting someone who she falls in love with very quickly, and I think really puts on a pedestal.

The relationship is somewhat successful, and they get married. But she does express her doubts the night before the wedding, when she wonders if he’s the right person or the feelings really are love, or whether it’s lust.

Then, we’re introduced to her mother through a few of the songs where the mother comments on her relationship. It’s clear that the mother doesn’t quite approve of her choice of husband.

Next there’s Brahms’ Am Sonntag Morgen, when she suddenly discovers that he’s been unfaithful. That’s really the beginning of the slow, downward spiral of her trust and love, and her trying to come to terms with loving the person that doesn’t want to be with her anymore.

We end where she tries to come to terms with their reality. There are many songs where you can tell that this is just going round and round. She’s not able to see the light; she’s not able to move forward, in any way, from her pain. She has moments of almost madness, where she vows to burn down the man’s house and get her revenge. Then she has moments of calm, when she looks back and is able to enjoy the memories of the past.

The song before the end, she tells herself that whether he loves her or not — we presume by this point that he doesn’t — she will walk with him. She will still want him to be a part of her life. This is rather an innocent view, I guess, in that she still holds a candle for him.

We end with the same song with which I begin the recital, William Bolcom’s Waitin. She starts the whole cycle again, but now with more understanding of what love means, having been through that process. Perhaps there’s a little bit of hope for the future, hope that the next time around won’t be so difficult.

I just received EMI’s DVD of the Glyndebourne Don Giovanni in which you play Donna Elvira. The girl on your CD may have come around, but Donna Elvira remains a sex-and love-addict.

Yeah, but she’s also a pain addict! She really keeps throwing herself back into the lion’s den. That’s something certainly the character in this recital does to a certain extent, in that she keep overanalyzing what’s happened, and she wants to talk about it; she wants him to understand her feelings, and he’s not remotely interested. It’s interesting how these operatic characters inform song recitals, as well as the songs in many operas.

Did you sketch out this scenario in your head, or did you look at songs that attracted you and begin to discover the scenario?

I sort of discovered it as I went along. What I found difficult was that I decided all the songs had to be in the first person. It had to be a monologue, in her point of view. Many of the poems are written from the point of view of the man. Many of the great songs I could not use for that reason, because I really tried very hard to stick with songs that seemed to be coming from a female perspective and were written in the first person.

It’s unique to find a recital where the inspiration comes from the words rather than the music.

Absolutely. Songs are all about the words. Most of the time, the words came before the music. The majority of the time, the music enhances the words and makes them into something even more brilliant than they were before. This is what attracted me to singing recitals in the first place: the poems, and getting to explore the language.

The recital has been altered by one of two songs from the CD. It was very difficult to decide to stop playing hundreds and hundreds of songs that would work in a program like this.

What do you have coming up?

I’m going to have to take a very early maternity leave, I think. I’m supposed to sing the Governess at Glyndebourne in November, but a seven-months-pregnant Governess is not something I think anyone wants to see!

I’m just trying to plan my next recording now. I think it won’t be for a while, but I’m hoping it will include some Mozart. We’re in discussion, trying to get programs finalized.

I’ll be back at Covent Garden next February/March doing Mozart. I’ll be doing Figaro Countesses in London and Munich, concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic singing Fauré and Berio. That will be an interesting one. I am also developing a new recital program that I think will be more of a straightforward, traditional-style recital.

No doubt, next year will be even busier than this year, because a lot of my work is going to have to go. You can’t travel, and all of these things. But there will be lots of Mozart.

Does pregnancy affect your breathing or your voice?

I never had that much of a problem first time around. By the very last weeks, it’s difficult to breathe, it’s difficult to eat, it’s difficult to do anything. But you just have to breathe a bit more often. That’s all, really.

After the pregnancy, it took me a year to get back to where I had left off. I think my voice is now a little larger and fuller, but not a lot.

But there’s no way to know if that’s a result of giving birth, or of simply being a year older.

Well, that’s the thing; it’s very difficult to tell, isn’t it? And the voice is changing all the time, for various reasons. That’s what’s so interesting about it. But it’s also quite scary, because it’s constantly moving, and you have to move with it and go with what it chooses.