Alice Coote: Maybe more young singers will want to just stay home

Alice Coote: Maybe more young singers will want to just stay home

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norman lebrecht

February 10, 2022

The English mezzo-soprano, in a challenging interview with VAN magazine, thinks that Covid may have changed artist lifestyles forever:

I suspect that it’s going to change anyway after this pandemic. Even young singers have said to me, “I don’t know if I want this life.” Maybe more people will want to just stay home, and it will be structured around people staying at their opera houses. I don’t know if there’s going to be quite the same circulation and air travel. I’m lying in bed at night thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve got to book six flights in the next two weeks to get back and forth to my family. How do I feel about that ethically? Can I justify that?”

How do you do clean opera? I’m sure there’s a way. Maybe there will be better work because of it: Maybe less rushing around might create some deeper, immersive work. 

She also talks frankly aboutwomen’s rights and gender fluidity:

My brother is transgender, don’t get me wrong. He’s been through hell, but he’s going on an amazing journey right now. I’m completely open to everything. I don’t know after all these years of playing men and women who I really am. I have questioned myself: What part of me is the male part of me, what part of me is the female part of me? What is truly me?

I’m getting off the [opera], but you’re not allowed to say anything to do with anything at all. Everything has to be so completely politically correct, except about women’s rights. We are still absolutely in a second-class position in every walk of life. We still have to pretend to be other than we are every day, and we still accept that every day. I’ve been doing it all morning. I’ve been doing Alice the female. We don’t have that innate power to be who we are. I’ve learned that from playing men. 

Wow.

Read on here.

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