The criteria for the Birgit Nilsson Prize are nothing if not stringent. The winner, the guidelines stipulate, has to be an artist with a decades-long position at the very top of their profession, as well as an unimpeachable reputation for reliability and putting the composer first. This year, in the 100th anniversary of the great Swedish soprano’s birth, it had already been made known that the $1m prize was to go to a singer again – the previous winners had been Plácido Domingo, Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic. Anyone compiling their own mental shortlist of possible candidates will likely have come up with a list that was, if not short, then hardly long.
It is also likely to have included one singer who not only ticks all the boxes – to say the least – but whose win, announced at a press conference on 15 May, could hardly seem more apt. Nina Stemme: a Swedish soprano whose current reputation is built on peerless performances of precisely those heroic roles that Nilsson herself was peerless in: Strauss’s Elektra, Wagner’s Isolde and Brünnhilde. When I meet Stemme in Stockholm, the first of a half-dozen interviewers lined up for the day, she’s warm, friendly and down-to-earth – there’s charisma and an underlying sense of steely determination, but otherwise she is, in the best possible sense, strikingly normal. Rarely, I think to myself, can there have been larger gulf between the person I’m interviewing and the artist who’s been at the heart of several of my most memorable musical experiences: as the goddess-like Brünnhilde delivering her final scene from high up behind the orchestra in Daniel Barenboim’s Proms Ring five years ago, or the deeply complex and compelling Kundry with Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic little over a month ago.
Her down-to-earth professionalism is something that she also shares with the famously no-nonsense Nilsson. I feel I have to begin, then, by asking about the comparisons, as unhelpful as they are inescapable, between Stemme and her great forebear. She gives a slight sigh. “I will carry on being myself,” she replies, “and doing what I believe in. Each generation has its own ideas for an opera singer, for a music drama story-teller, so it’s not up to me. If people want to compare, OK, but how can they? I think this is the paradox about opera, that the audience, journalists, everyone needs this comparison factor all the time instead of enjoying the moment, and trying to make that best of the moment. It’s like a flower – you have it there and then it fades away.”
She’s quick to point out, too, that when she was growing up she was heading in a different direction. “Nilsson was of course iconic, and maybe I almost feared her voice a little bit, because it was so impressive, even when we heard it on the radio. But I was a lyric soprano, having also sung mezzo soprano a little bit as well in my training. And she was just finishing her career when I got interested at all in opera, so that was a pity.” Stemme did meet Nilsson, but, in a way that seems typical of her, never sought to impose herself. “I just felt that everyone wanted to get to her and try get a piece of her, and I didn’t want to do that. I liked her as a person, and she was very respectful and friendly, and I was almost shocked how she saw you just as a colleague. And she never tried to give you any advice unless you asked for it. Or if she felt it was really needed, then it would come as an aside – very clever!”
This is a collegial attitude that Stemme herself seems to have inherited, and she talks fondly about her four years in the ensemble at Cologne. Though she speaks of singers sometimes getting lost in ensembles in larger houses – she turned down a contract to join the Vienna State Opera – she found the experience of learning from more experienced colleagues invaluable. The Cologne experience also allowed her to expand her repertoire while keeping a hold on more lyrical roles. By this time, too, she had already had the experience of winning Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, as well being a finalist in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. “I’m still very happy I didn’t win,” she says of the latter, “because I wasn’t there; it was too much repertoire for me to cover.” She’s grateful for both competitions, though: “I was able to make music with an orchestra, which I’d barely done before, and it put my name on the map.”