Anna Netrebko

Anna Netrebko: The Voice That Darkened

Before she sang a note on the Mariinsky stage, Anna Netrebko cleaned its floors. She was a conservatory student in Leningrad, mopping the house where Chaliapin had sung, when the conductor Valery Gergiev noticed her and took her on as a pupil. Nine years later she stood at the Salzburg Festival as Donna Anna under Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the international opera world decided it had found the singer it had been waiting for. The two decades that followed made her the most famous soprano alive — and, after February 2022, one of the most contested.

A Cossack Childhood and a Conservatory Education

Netrebko was born on 18 September 1971 in Krasnodar, in the Russian south, into a family of Kuban Cossack descent. Her formal training took place at the Leningrad State Conservatory named for Rimsky-Korsakov, from which she graduated in 1991 — the year the city reverted to the name St Petersburg and the country she had been born in ceased to exist. Her apprenticeship was therefore double: the rigorous Russian conservatory method on one side, and on the other the practical education of a young woman working inside the Mariinsky Theatre in the most unstable period of its modern history.

Gergiev's patronage was decisive. He became her vocal mentor as well as her conductor, and it was he who put her in front of an audience. In 1994, aged twenty-two, she made her role debut at the Mariinsky as Susanna in Mozart's *Le nozze di Figaro*, and on the strength of it was taken into the company's ensemble. The choice of role is worth noting: Susanna is a soubrette, quick and light, a part for a voice with agility rather than weight. Netrebko began at the opposite end of the spectrum from where she would end up.

Salzburg, and the Making of a Star

Her American debut came early — San Francisco Opera in 1995 — but the year that made her was 2002. In February she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time, in Prokofiev's *War and Peace*, a Russian repertory piece that played to her native strengths. Then came the Salzburg Festival, where she sang Donna Anna in *Don Giovanni* under Harnoncourt, one of the most exacting musicians of the period. The success was immediate and total.

The consequences arrived quickly. In 2003 Deutsche Grammophon signed her as an exclusive artist, a commitment the label reserves for a handful of performers per generation, and the recordings began: complete operas, recital albums, the apparatus of a career built for the international market rather than a single house. Germany gave her a BAMBI award in 2006. In 2007 *Time* magazine placed her on its Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world — an unusual distinction for a classical singer and a fair measure of how far past the opera public her fame had spread. Russia named her a People's Artist in 2008.

The Turn Toward Weight

The most interesting thing about Netrebko's career is that she did not stay where she started. Her early identity was built on lyric and coloratura roles — Mozart, the bel canto repertoire, parts that reward brightness and flexibility. From around 2016 she moved deliberately into heavier nineteenth-century Romantic and verismo territory: Leonora in *Il trovatore*, Lady Macbeth in Verdi's *Macbeth*, the title role in *Aida*. Her album *Verismo* appeared in 2016; *Amata dalle tenebre* — "beloved of the darkness" — followed in 2021.

The voice itself changed with the repertoire, acquiring what her own label describes as richer, darker tones, and what *Encyclopaedia Britannica* calls a dark, lustrous instrument matched to compelling dramatic interpretation and considerable stage presence. Role debuts kept coming well into her fifties: Turandot, Tosca, Elsa in *Lohengrin*, Abigaille in *Nabucco* in 2023. At the Metropolitan Opera alone she has sung more than twenty roles. Few sopranos manage one such transition; making it while retaining a mass audience is rarer still.

2022 and After

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Netrebko issued a series of statements that were read as contradictory: she opposed the war while objecting to what she characterised as compelled political declaration, and subsequently distanced herself from Vladimir Putin. The Metropolitan Opera removed her from scheduled productions of *Turandot* and *Don Carlos*, replacing her with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska. The dispute went to arbitration; in March 2023 an arbitrator ordered the Met to pay her more than $200,000 for cancelled performances while assessing a $30,000 penalty in connection with statements the arbitrator described as "highly inappropriate."

A separate controversy followed in July 2022, when she performed *Aida* in blackface at the Arena di Verona, seven years after the Metropolitan Opera had pledged to abandon the practice. The American soprano Angel Blue cancelled her own *La traviata* performances at the festival in protest.

The Private Ledger

Netrebko took Austrian citizenship in 2006 and has kept homes in Vienna, St Petersburg and New York — a distribution that describes her professional life as accurately as any biography. She was long partnered with the Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, with whom she had a son, Tiago, born in 2008. In 2015 she married the Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazov; their separation was announced in June 2024. Vienna made her a Kammersängerin in 2017, the same year she took an International Opera Award. Her shelf also holds eleven ECHO KLASSIK prizes and, in 2020, the Polar Music Prize.

Why Anna Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Netrebko for a physical and interpretive gift rather than an intellectual one, and honesty requires saying so. What she possesses is an instrument of unusual colour — Britannica's "dark lustrous voice" — combined with a stage temperament that reads from the back of a four-thousand-seat house. Neither of those is thinking; both are closer to athletic and dramatic talent operating at the limit of what a human body can do.

Where a case for genuine artistic intelligence can be made is in the repertoire transition. Voices change with age whether singers want them to or not, and most sopranos either resist the change and lose the top, or misjudge the new weight and burn out. Netrebko read her own instrument accurately, chose Verdi and verismo over the Mozart and bel canto that had made her, and rebuilt a career on the new terms — debuting Turandot, Tosca and Abigaille in her fifties. That is a judgement call requiring self-knowledge most performers lack.

The counter-case is substantial. Institutional recognition — the Time 100, the Polar Music Prize, eleven ECHO KLASSIK awards — measures fame and marketability as much as artistry, and Deutsche Grammophon's investment was a commercial bet as well as an aesthetic one. Since 2022 her reputation has been genuinely contested rather than merely debated, on grounds both political and, after Verona, ethical. "Genius" is not the word most careful critics reach for. "Star" is, and that is a different claim.

Legacy

Netrebko's significance is partly musical and partly structural: she demonstrated that a classical singer could still command the attention normally reserved for popular performers, and she did it without confining herself to the roles that first made her famous. Whether that achievement survives the controversies of the 2020s intact is a question her own generation will not settle.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Mariinsky Theatre
• Educated at Saint Petersburg Conservatory
• Worked as opera singer, actor and recording artist