Ermonela Jaho

Learning and practising technique is one thing, says the Albanian soprano, but the key to a great performance is understanding what your character is going through – and being able to express it.

- James Naughtie

‘When I have to cry, I do cry. For sure. If I have to scream, I scream for real.’ Ermonela Jaho speaks of the stage as if it’s the one place where you are compelled never to deceive. All the artifice and artistry and the technical preparations count for little, she says, without genuine emotion.

We’re sitting in the Royal Opera House, where she returns in March to sing Cio-CioSan in Puccini’s Madam Butterfly. From the beginning of our conversation she speaks about opera as an emotional outlet that’s only truly satisfying when a singer forgets about all the patient work that has led up to the performance and finds, by a process that she describes as mysterious and exciting, the truth about a character’s feelings.

This means that she can talk about music in terms that might sound a touch fake coming from someone else. From her, it has the ring of truth. ‘Music is the language of our souls. It’s why we need the theatre – to get a kind of connection between the artist and the public, and I think it is a kind of catharsis for our souls. To reach that state you have to go beyond the notes and the techniques – they are like tools that we need to reach the deepest places. The notes only take you so far.’

But I shouldn’t give the impression that although she talks, naturally, in such terms, she exists on some elevated plane where only dreamy talk will do. Not at all. She is vivacious, warm and funny, and happy to discuss the strangeness of a singer’s life.

Like, for example, her first performance with the Royal Opera. It was in 2008. Russian soprano Anna Netrebko was ill (a problem with which Covent Garden has had to cope more often than it would like) and Jaho was scrambled from New York to sing Violetta in Verdi’s