Derek Scallymeets two of our finest exports, the sopranos Sinéad Mulhern and Fionnuala McCarthy, who are stars of German opera
Sinéad Mulhern lies on the ground, coughing desperately into a bloody handkerchief. She isn't supposed to exert herself because of her bad heart, and she is strictly forbidden from singing. But she does sing, her voice soaring before it stops short and she falls to the ground.
Seconds later Mulhern leaps up and heads off into the wings of the Komischer Oper, beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It's break time in rehearsals for The Tales of Hoffmann.
At the premiere, days later, she wins over critics and audiences as Antonia with her gorgeous lyric soprano and, unusually for an opera singer, her equally strong acting ability. "For me opera's not just about singing, it's about having acting moments, too," she says. "I think my voice has come up to the level of my acting only in the past two years."
Across town, the Irish-born soprano Fionnuala McCarthy has been a star at the Deutsche Oper for a decade. Last year she ascended into opera heaven with her debut at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. The two women are the city's soprano stars, although, being Irish, they're also self- deprecating divas.
Mulhern was born in Dublin. After a musical childhood of Billie Barrie and Irish dancing lessons, she emigrated with her parents and two sisters to New York when she was 14.
She performed in high-school musicals before someone suggested her voice was more suited to opera and gave her a cassette of arias. As the end of high school loomed she applied to study at the Juilliard school of music in New York, preparing for her audition by listening to a few library CDs.
"I didn't read music and hadn't a breeze, really. A man in the audition said: 'Oh, your German is wonderful.' I didn't speak a word of German. I must have borrowed the right recordings," she says. She beat 400 others to win a place at the famous school, then furthered her training at Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, and in Paris.
Now married to a Frenchman, and with twin two-year-old girls, she took up a permanent position nearly five years ago at the Komische Oper, where all productions are sung in German. "I never fail to be amazed when people understand and respond to every word," she says. "German doesn't work so well with Rossini and Bellini, though - all those hard consonants."
Her career was progressing nicely when it moved up a gear with an unexpected phone call one evening last April, as she prepared dinner for friends. It was the Staatsoper in Vienna: could she replace a sick singer in a performance of Janacek's Jenufa the following evening?
"It's a role I'd sung at the Komischer, so I said yes. Then I went on making my creme brulee and went to bed at 2am," she says. "I got the 7am flight, by 9am I was being measured for my costume, then we had a run-through and that night I went on. It was one of those things that you dream will happen but where you think it'll happen to someone else."
She sang and acted up a storm, leaving the rest of the cast looking like wooden soldiers. Outside the stage door a legion of new Sinéad Mulhern fans gathered for her autograph, whispering that she was going to be invited back. She was, and will return to Vienna next season in La Bohème and The Marriage of Figaro.
Her dream year ended in Stuttgart in October, singing the national anthem at the soccer match against Germany. "Forget opera, for my father that was the crowning moment of my career."
Fionnuala McCarthy never planned on getting into opera, either. "The first opera I saw was Madame Butterfly, and I remember thinking, oh, God, this is so affected," she says, sitting in the canteen of the Deutsche Oper between rehearsals for Arabella.
Like Mulhern, McCarthy, who was born in Newry, Co Down, grew up in a musical household. Her mother was a feis singer, and her uncles were jazz musicians. When she was seven the family moved to Zambia and then South Africa, where she studied piano, cello and singing.
She moved to Germany to continue her music studies, got her her first break in Mannheim and then moved on to Düsseldorf, where, she says, she "sang everything". After guesting at the Komischer Oper she moved across town in 1994 to the Deutsche Oper, which is still her home after 12 seasons. Her career reached new heights last year, too, when she performed in a new production of the four-opera, 14-hour Ring of the Nibelungs in Bayreuth.
She'd had her Wagnerian baptism of fire years earlier, filling in for a sick singer. "I didn't know what the Ring cycle was about. We didn't have a chance to rehearse, and someone just told me backstage: 'You've got to take the ring from Hagen.' I wanted to ask who Hagen was, but suddenly there was dry ice everywhere and I was onstage," she says. "Somehow I got through the performance."
At the Bayreuth auditions in 2005 she was approached by an assistant of the production, at that point headed by the film director Lars von Trier. "She said: 'If you get this, you know you'll have to go naked; it's Lars's concept'," says McCarthy. With a heavy heart she agreed. She met von Trier a few weeks later.
"I was expecting some little pervert, but he was very nice as he explained his concept: us lying naked on the stage, projected on to a big screen onstage as we made erotic hand movements," she says. "I thought to myself: But I've had a Caesarean . . ."
A few weeks later word came that von Trier had walked out, and McCarthy got to keep her clothes on. "My tip is: Don't refuse to go naked, as it may never happen," she says with a laugh.
She had a memorable four months in the Bayreuth bubble last summer with two octogenerians: the festival's half-deaf director, Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of the composer, and the replacement director Tankred Dorst, a grand man of German literature but a theatre novice. The two men pulled together a respectable Ring cycle in record time, and, rather than go naked, McCarthy and the two other Rhine Daughters appeared as singing pink anemones.
Behind the surface glamour of a permanent job at an opera house is a daily juggling act, says McCarthy, between irregular rehearsal schedules and raising two boys, aged 10 and eight. "Success is great, and being on stage and getting applause is like a drug, but I'm so much happier; I have my children, I've got something outside opera."
Mulhern agrees, saying that family takes precedence over career, particularly as opera administrations make it difficult to combine both. "It's no different to women in the business world," she says. "Go ahead and have children, just don't talk about it or ask for rehearsals to be moved."
Despite decades out of Ireland, both singers have retained their Irish talent for self-deprecation, laughing and joking about their work and deflating diva attacks long before they happen. Meeting them, it seems that an Irish opera diva is, happily, a contradiction in terms.
Change is sweeping the German world in which they work, offstage and on, as subsidy cuts force houses to save money. Steady opera jobs, already a distant memory in other countries, are now becoming less common in Germany, too, while young singers from central and eastern Europe are driving down salaries. Still, even in belt-tightening mode, Germany remains an opera paradise and the best place for young singers to start out. "Germans are just a very cultured people," says McCarthy. "They have a love of culture and respect for art and are willing to spend money on it."
In Berlin alone, a city with a population of 3.4 million and debts of more than €60 billion, the city government spends more than €100 million a year subsidising orchestras, three opera houses and a ballet.
Back in Ireland, opera is kept in quarantine, with visiting rights restricted to Opera Ireland's annual season, the Wexford festival and overpriced, overblown spectacles. Ireland has transformed itself in the past decade, yet people cling to the same old anti-opera arguments: the country is too small, there's no tradition or audience for opera, and why should the taxpayer subsidise an elite art form anyway?
"Opera's just a part of life in Germany," says Mulhern. "In Ireland there's so little opera put on that, when there is any, the ticket prices are so ridiculous it puts it out of reach of people."
It's a vicious circle: the lack of subsidies has made opera elitist, which turns off the average Irish person and, in turn, makes opera considered inappropriate for subsidies. And on it goes, meaning that opera remains a foreign, feared form of theatre and, a decade after Ireland went from an emigration to an immigration country, our opera singers are still being trained for export.