Hasmik Papian

Hasmik Papian: The Most Talked-About Norma in the World

On 12 November 2007 an Armenian soprano walked onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to sing Norma for the first time in that house, the opening night of four performances that autumn, alongside Dolora Zajick, Franco Farina and Vitalij Kowaljow. Playbill introduced her as "the most talked-about Norma in the world today." It had taken fourteen years to get there from the performance in Warsaw that made her name — and rather longer from the violin she had been given at the age of five.

A Violinist First

Hasmik Papian (Հասմիկ Պապյան) was born in Yerevan, then the capital of Soviet Armenia. She began the violin at five and trained seriously enough to graduate from Yerevan's Komitas academy as a violinist — and, simultaneously, as a singer. The redirection came from Tatevik Sazandaryan, the head of the vocal department, who heard her sing and pushed her towards a voice career. Papian made her operatic debut at the Armenian National Opera.

That double training is not incidental. String players learn intonation as a continuous adjustment rather than a fixed set of pitches, and singers who arrive from instruments tend to bring an unusually exact ear with them. It is the technical foundation of everything critics later praised in her.

Vienna, Warsaw, Bonn

Her international career opened in 1990 when she won the Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna. The breakthrough came in 1993, singing Norma at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw — a performance that produced a contract with Opera Bonn for *La traviata*, *Don Giovanni* and *Carmen*. In 1995 she sang her first Tosca at the Vienna State Opera.

From there the house list became formidable: the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall in New York, San Francisco Opera, La Scala in Milan, the Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Vienna State Opera, the Mariinsky in St Petersburg and the Berlin State Opera. She worked with Riccardo Muti, Valery Gergiev and Plácido Domingo.

Norma, Everywhere

Bellini's Druid priestess became the role her career was organised around. She sang it at the Vienna State Opera, Netherlands Opera, Washington National Opera, and in Detroit, Denver, Baltimore, Warsaw, Turin, Marseilles and Montreal before the Met. Around it she built a Verdi repertoire of twelve roles — Leonora, Aida, Desdemona, Abigaille among them — and in 2009 added Elizabeth I in Donizetti's *Roberto Devereux*.

The critical response consistently located her strength in technique. Kyle MacMillan of the *Denver Post* singled out her handling of "the two-octave leaps, devilishly intricate ornamentations" the role demands. Philip Kennicott of the *Washington Post* wrote: "Her singing is gorgeous. The coloratura display was accurate and on pitch, and well woven into the larger, lyrical fabric of the role." That last clause is the compliment that matters most — not that she executed the ornaments, but that they sounded like part of the music rather than a display inserted into it.

Armenia

Papian has remained closely identified with Armenian music and Armenian causes. She performs the repertoire of Komitas, the priest-ethnomusicologist who collected and arranged Armenian folk song before the genocide destroyed the culture that produced it, and in 2006 released a Super Audio CD of 36 Komitas songs — including nine settings of German poetry recorded for the first time. She has given benefit concerts for the Armenian Relief Society of Lebanon, UNICEF, the Mammography Center of Yerevan and genocide commemorations.

Armenia has honoured her in kind: People's Artist in 2004, the Order of Saint Mesrop Mashtots the same year, the Order of Saint Sahag and Saint Mesrob in 2005, and the title Cultural Ambassador of Armenia for the World, also in 2005.

Why Hasmik Is Called a Genius

The claim, when it is made about Papian, rests on one thing: Norma. It is worth explaining why that is a serious claim rather than a puff.

*Norma* is generally held to be the hardest role written for soprano, because it requires two incompatible things at once. The dramatic weight of the part — a high priestess betrayed, contemplating the murder of her children — needs a large, dark voice that can carry over a full orchestra. The music Bellini wrote for her needs bel canto agility: long-breathed legato lines, exact coloratura, the two-octave intervals MacMillan mentions. Big voices are usually clumsy in fioritura; agile voices are usually too small for the drama. The number of sopranos in any generation who possess both is in the low single figures, which is why the role goes unperformed for years at a time and why houses build seasons around whoever can sing it.

Papian's particular version of the solution is technical rather than temperamental. Kennicott's phrase — accurate, on pitch, and woven into the lyrical fabric — describes a singer who solved the coloratura problem by refusing to treat it as a separate event. The violin training is the plausible source: an ear trained on a fretless string instrument hears the interval before it sings it. This is genius in the sense of extreme, hard-won technical mastery of a near-impossible physical task, not in the sense of originality; Papian did not reinvent Norma, she executed it.

The honest counter-case is scale. She was never a household name of the order of Callas or Sutherland, the sopranos against whom every Norma is measured. Her recorded legacy is thin for a career of this length — the Komitas disc is the item most often cited, and it is a specialist release. Her career was concentrated in one role and one composer's orbit, and some of her Armenian honours reward national representation as much as singing. A soprano who conquers the hardest role in the repertoire without leaving a definitive recording of it occupies an odd place in history.

Legacy

Papian belongs to a small category: singers whose reputation lives in the memory of the houses that hired them rather than in a discography. For roughly two decades she was the answer when an opera company decided to stage *Norma* and needed someone who could actually sing it. Alongside that she did something narrower and arguably more lasting — taking Komitas's songs, including nine that had never been recorded, into the international concert repertoire, and lending an internationally recognised voice to a culture that had come close to losing its own. A violinist from Yerevan became, for a while, the world's Norma.

Achievements

• Instruments: violin and voice
• Genres: opera