‘I’m good at taking pain’: Soprano Osren Stundet talks trauma, adrenaline and plays a 300-year-old woman | Opera

AOsrin Stundit had been in the room for just over two minutes when she looked me in the eye and declared: “I’m not a feminist at all.” I’m a little surprised. Moments ago, I was watching the Lithuanian soprano rehearse Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case, which the Royal Opera is premiering this fall, in a new production by Katie Mitchell. Stundyte takes the central role in the work – and Mitchell is a director known for her explicitly feminist approach.

Stundyte seems to have surprised herself as well. A few days after we talked, she sent an email clarifying: She’s not against women’s rights. But she explains that it bothers her when “women see men as the problem and themselves as victims. When you put yourself in the victim role, you give up your own power.”

This is unexpectedly relevant. Standit and I met immediately after Mitchell told The Times: “I am ending my opera career because of misogyny.” While the industry’s social media fuels the hype, Stundyte is unemotional. I ask her if she agrees that misogyny is still a problem in opera. “My personal feeling is that nowadays, especially after #MeToo, women have a very nice environment to live and work in. I personally have nothing but good experiences.”

The atmosphere at that morning’s rehearsal certainly seemed a far cry from the systemic sexism that Mitchell reported experiencing. Here, in fact, was an alternative model of power dynamics in the practice room. Commander Jacob Harsha was in the pit, but Mitchell was unequivocally in charge. Her interventions were mainly periodic questions – “Jacob, was that okay for you with the vomiting?” -And cheerful encouragement. Jokes and compliments are interspersed amid slight adjustments made to technical details and timing of stage action while Mitchell’s references shift fluently between dramatic and musical references.

Stundyte spent some of the rehearsals sprawled out on a double bed in her character’s bedroom while a problem was worked out elsewhere. “Polishing the details is a little boring,” she admits. “There’s a lot of repetition and less technical input. But I’m quite relaxed, and you know you have to work hard.”

Never had there been such painstaking preparations ahead of Stundyte’s Royal Opera debut in January 2024, when she took over the title role in Strauss’s Elektra at very short notice, replacing ailing star Nina Stemme. Standet was at her home in Belgium on the fifth day of a week-long fast – “you couldn’t have planned for worse” – when she received a phone call asking her to come to London. “I’m starting to eat,” she reassured me, adding that not least because she wasn’t expecting anything like this, she’d gotten a good night’s sleep before taking to the stage as one of the most complex and challenging characters in opera.

Tim Ashley of The Guardian was among those who admired Stundyte’s “remarkable” performance. The intensity had burned her even at Janacek’s rehearsal that morning. Stundyte has always admired singing actors more than those who sing beautifully but do not act. “If you really want to sing perfectly, it is impossible to act well, so you have to compromise. But for me, acting is always something more interesting. If I have to sing beautifully and have to stop acting – that, for me, is torture.”

I suggest that the role of Stundyte in The Makropulos Case must have presented special challenges for her in terms of acting: Emilia Marti is over 300 years old and has literally lived multiple lives, thanks to an elixir of immortality given to her by her father in the 16th century. Stundyte is unfazed. “I don’t know how it is with you, but when I turned 30, it was a crisis. When I turned 40, it was a crisis. Now I’m going to be fifty soon, and it’s a crisis again. This time it’s a crisis because I’ve achieved all my dreams. I’m really so grateful for life and fate that I got everything I ever wanted, but now I’m, like, empty. Like a little jellyfish.” Jellyfish? “All this harmony, peace and happiness is wonderful, but I miss those adrenaline kicks because they used to give me huge extra strength.”

She has no patience with anyone chasing immortality in real life today. “How can your life be so wonderful that you can’t stop it? People are just afraid of death, you know. But I’m not. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be wonderful. I’ve known this since I was a kid.”

Stundyte’s existential optimism provides a stark contrast to her operatic roles. “My type is not the happy, sweet, blonde, bouncy, sexy lady,” she says with a smile. Not really: from Strauss’s “Electra” and “Salome” to Katerina Ismayilova in Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, Janacek’s “Cata Kabanova” and beyond, Stonedit specializes in the heaviest and darkest characters in opera. “I was very depressed and very unhappy, especially in my teenage years. This unbelievable pain – I still remember it.” She stops. “Maybe it’s still somewhere inside me, and I can reconnect with it and remember it very easily. So I’m good at pain management.”

Do you find these roles really cathartic? “I wish theater therapy was more widespread,” she says with surprising enthusiasm. “But being in this profession, you’re forced to work on your own stuff. So I think I’m pretty good now! I’m clearing myself of a lot of baggage.” Still, Standett insists on the importance of her difficult past. “If you never face danger, if you never feel pain, if you never get hurt, how can you make opera believable?”