From: ablang@usa.com   
      
   La Bellissima   
   Anna Netrebko cleaned toilets as a student to make ends meet. Now she is   
   a diva to die for.   
   by Peter Pomerantsev  | September 25, 2011 10:00 AM EDT   
      
   “Lots of opera singers are just boring. Bo-o-o-ring. C’mon: get a life!   
   Be more extra—extra—”   
      
   The world’s most famous soprano, Anna Netrebko, can’t find the right   
   word. This is a rarity.   
      
   Extravagant? Extroverted? Is this what most opera singers lack? They’re   
   qualities Netrebko has in abundance, part of what helps her records, in   
   Germany and Austria at least, outsell Beyoncé, led Musical America to   
   name her Musician of the Year in 2008, lifted her into Playboy’s list of   
   “sexiest babes in classical music,” and have made her that most unique   
   of creatures: an opera singer with pop-star status.   
      
   But maybe another word is better, one that Netrebko loves to use:   
   razzle-dazzle. Or as she put it in her distinctly Russian English,   
   “RRRaazzzelll-Dazzzzelll”: rolling the R’s, prolonging the Z’s,   
   deepening the vowels. She makes the corny term sound like a sorcerer’s   
   incantation.   
      
   Netrebko discusses the virtues of razzle-dazzle on the terrace of an   
   Alpine castle, encircled by Sound of Music mountains and dark forests,   
   perched above a Technicolor turquoise lake. The castle has been   
   converted into a luxury hotel, frequented by Arab sheiks and posh   
   German-Austrians. As I order a drink, she grabs my hand and whispers:   
   “Be careful what you order. Last night I come to have some drinks,   
   relax. I order schnapps. They bring this tiny thing. Tiny! I tell them,   
   ‘That’s not a drink! Bring me a double!’ They bring me a double. Tiny! I   
   say, ‘Bring me a triple.’ Finally: a normal drink. Then they bring the   
   bill: 150 euro! For a schnapps! It’s just vodka!”   
   Anna Netrebko   
      
   In 2005, Netrebko sang, and flirted, her way to international stardom as   
   Verdi’s Violetta., Christopher Anderson / Magnum for Newsweek   
      
   Netrebko’s speech pushes against the limits of punctuation, cadences of   
   “!!!,” “?!,” “???!!!!,” the full range of Facebook emoticons. An elegant   
   little Austrian girl comes to ask for an autograph. Netrebko is   
   delighted: “F--k me,” she says giggling, “I’m famous!”   
      
   In her adopted Austria and neighboring Germany, Netrebko is recognized   
   everywhere she goes. She is known not only for her arias, but also as   
   the sultry, dark-haired star of shampoo ads. She spent the previous day   
   sweltering in minks during a Vienna heat wave for a fur-coat   
   advertisement. “They pay in furs. But I did it for the photos. They   
   promised there would be lovely photos of me all over town!”   
      
   The highly photogenic Netrebko—who, on Sept. 26, will perform the title   
   role in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at New York’s Metropolitan Opera—has   
   destroyed the stereotype of sopranos as clunky matrons. “For a long   
   time, people said it’s better to look at me than to listen to me,” she   
   says, not unhappily. The performance that turned her into a pinup was as   
   the courtesan Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata at the 2005 Salzburg   
   Festival. Dressed in a plunging, high-hemmed red satin dress, she   
   crossed and kicked her high-heeled legs, bit at her little finger, and   
   threw lusty glances at the audience and the whole Austrian nation,   
   watching live on national television.   
      
   Soon after, Austria made her a citizen, though she speaks no German, a   
   key criterion for citizenship. She seems taken aback, though grateful,   
   for the adulation the xeno-skeptic Austrians show her. “I’ve understood   
   that once they love you, they’re very loyal ... and Vienna’s great—just   
   an hour’s flight and you can be anywhere in Europe!”   
      
   Netrebko flies a lot, between homes in Vienna, New York, and St.   
   Petersburg, and to 60 sold-out performances a year, making her the most   
   in-demand soprano in the world. She tries to take her 3-year-old son,   
   Tiago, with her wherever she goes, grabbing every opportunity to see her   
   partner, Erwin Schrott, a Uruguayan bass-baritone with Hollywood looks,   
   famous for playing the great seducer Don Giovanni. Netrebko and Schrott   
   are the Brangelina of opera.   
      
   Netrebko never wanted to become an opera singer: “I start to study opera   
   because it was a little less competition than to be an actress. What I   
   really wanted to do was sing in Moscow musicals.” But for a provincial   
   girl there was little chance to win a place at a top Moscow drama   
   school. “It was impossible. Impossible! Without influential connections   
   or a special understanding with the teachers and directors ...”   
      
   Special understanding? I ask.   
      
   “You know: to sleep with them!”   
      
   To the Russian ear, Netrebko is immediately provincial, her speech full   
   of the singsong vowels and intonations of the Krasnodar region of   
   southern Russia. It’s an accent that’s the butt of jokes in the Big   
   City, and she was teased for it when she came up to study in St.   
   Petersburg. So much about her character, tastes, and even voice are   
   defined by Krasnodar, a cultural opposite to the snowy wastes and deep   
   depression usually associated with Russia. It’s a region of gaudy   
   emerald and vermilion shawls, where borscht is transformed from the   
   cabbage-y gruel of the northern climes to a sunset color cooked with a   
   rich stock of goose and the local sweet tomatoes. “I’m from that   
   country: I like colors. I like blings. The more, the better.”   
      
   Krasnodar is Russia’s wine region, and Netrebko grew up sipping sweet   
   reds from her geologist father’s small vineyard, falling out of trees,   
   and playing out scenes and songs from the Soviet Union’s favorite movie   
   genre, Bollywood. India, a Cold War friend, provided Russians with a   
   cinematic dose of brightness and joy. On the terrace of the Alpine   
   castle, the most famous soprano in the world puts her hands together,   
   wiggles her head from side to side, and sings a quick burst from a   
   Bollywood film.   
      
   In a country famous for gorgeous women, Krasnodar is famous for having   
   the very best. Here, Cossacks, Armenians, Jews, Adygeans, Gypsies, and   
   Slavs have killed and copulated to produce a harvest of Sophia Loren   
   look-alikes: Netrebko’s beauty is typical. “Nobody ever looked at me in   
   Krasnodar. I’m not in the taste of the men there at all.” Southern men   
   yearn for blonde Siberian waifs. “People were ignoring me. Here I become   
   a real beauty.”   
      
   Krasnodar is the place where Russia stands on tiptoe to touch the   
   Mediterranean, it’s Russia’s inner Italy. This partly explains the   
   adoration the Teutons have for Netrebko. Ever since Goethe’s Italian   
   Journey, German-speaking civilization has pined for Italy, that brunette   
   land beyond the Alps. Netrebko is Germany’s and Austria’s ersatz   
   Italian, one who has agreed to dwell among them. (One could hardly   
   imagine a Pavarotti moving to Düsseldorf.)   
      
   In her native Russia, Netrebko’s image is less idealized. The very   
   qualities that would endear her to a Western public, the mixture of   
   classical talent and reality-TV attitude, make her irritating: “From   
      
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