'Opera is to touch the soul of another'

Romanian diva Angela Gheorghiu is back to reprise the La Bohème role she has sung hundreds of times yet, she believes, changes with every performance

- Stuart Jeffries

'I like to say," says Angela Gheorghiu confidentially, "that the fairies visited me when I was born and gave me what I needed to be an artist." This visit took place 58 years ago in a town called Adjud, when little Angela became first child to a seamstress mother and train driver father. Her parents must have been surprised since in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, fairies, like political dissent, did not officially exist.

Even fairies could not have foreseen how Gheorghiu would turn out. The woman sharing a sofa with me in the Royal Opera House is one of the world's leading sopranos. She is back in her beloved London to sing Mimi in Puccini's La Bohème. She has sung Mimi, she reckons, several hundred times since her professional debut in the role at the Romanian National Opera in 1990. She is also promoting an album of Puccini's songs, called A Te (To You). It's a recording that shows, Gheorghiu tells me, that her voice "remains as fresh as ever".