Aušrinė Stundytė is an opera star — a soprano from Lithuania. More specifically, she is a dramatic soprano, meaning she sings such roles as Salome and Elektra. (Those are the title characters of two Strauss operas.) A magnificent singing actress, she is. Stundytė is my latest guest on Q&A, here. She sang at the Salzburg Festival last month, and we sat down before an audience of the Salzburg Festival Society.
This was in Schloss Leopoldskron, familiar to fans of The Sound of Music, for the schloss is a setting of the movie. Max Reinhardt, the theater director, once owned the place. Stundytė and I talked in his library, with a picture of him nearby.
Stundytė was born in the Soviet Union in 1976 — meaning she was either 13 or 14 when her country, Lithuania, declared independence from Moscow. I ask her, “Did you and your family speak Lithuanian at home?” I will paraphrase her answer (but closely):
Oh, yes. We didn’t have many Russians in Lithuania — it was maybe 5 percent. So, the mentality was completely ours. We encountered the Russian language only through television. They had six channels, and we had only one. So, of course, we watched a lot of Russian TV.
She has vivid memories of independence. But she gives you a “backstory,” too.
I think it’s important for a person to develop strong and beautiful ideals. I didn’t know the reality of Communism, but the ideology of Communism is actually very nice. So, I was a strong believer. I dreamed of nothing else: just to be a real Communist, and to die for Communist ideals. Movies about World War II were very popular. You had to be willing to die for your beliefs, and I was. So, I was “red.”
A particular day, I will never forget. My history teacher was a true pedagogue, an amazing, amazing teacher. On this day, she came to class with a very strange look on her face. She said, “Children, everything we learned here is not true. Now we will learn other things.”
I can never forget that moment. Everything was crushed. Whatever you had believed, whatever had been built up in your moral pyramid — your values, your dreams — was wiped out. So, that made me very sick. And you had to wonder, “What can I trust?”
After such an experience, you can’t trust anybody or anything without checking and double-checking and triple-checking.
My sister is seven years younger than I. She did not develop the idealism that I did. She belongs to the generation that I call the “dead-eyes generation.”
I think it was beautiful that I believed in something, and it was very sobering, and good, to lose it.
Again, Aušrinė Stundytė was either 13 or 14 when all this transpired.
Though she became a soprano — a famous one — she was an alto in her children’s choir. She tells an amusing tale:
I always wanted to do solo things, and in this choir the soloists were always sopranos. So, I decided to become a soprano.
Every summer, I went to my grandmother’s. She lived in a small village with just five houses that were occupied. If you go outside the village, maybe five kilometers, there is absolutely nobody around. So, every evening, I would ride my bike out there.
And I always sang the same song — the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria — as high as I could. I tried to, you know: squeeze my voice higher.
After summer vacation, when you returned to the choir, they always checked your voice. After my screaming summer, they checked and said, “Ah, you’re a soprano now.”
So I changed my voice.
Eventually, she studied with the soprano Irena Milkevičiūtė. She was a great teacher, Stundytė says, and she had been a great singer. She would have been a big name, says Stundytė, if she had not had her career in Soviet times — a big name throughout the world. Milkevičiūtė was like a mother to all her students, Stundytė says.
She is the actual mother of Asmik Grigorian, who is another big star, a big soprano star. Stundytė and Grigorian learned from the same person.
I can’t help thinking of Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. Each was secretary of state, a few years apart. One of Rice’s most important teachers was Josef Korbel, an exiled Czech diplomat — who was Albright’s father.
Aušrinė Stundytė sings in many languages. I toted them up: Lithuanian, Russian, German, Italian, French, English, Czech, Hungarian. Have I missed any? Yes, Stundytė answers: Basque. Basque! Was it hard to learn? Very, she says. “Even worse than Hungarian” (a notoriously difficult language).
I ask whether she listens to any popular music. “Yes,” she says, “but I prefer jazz.” I have to ask her: “What do you think of Ella” (Fitzgerald)? Stundytė answers, “She’s a Callas.”
An inspired answer. Anyway, this is a very interesting, gifted lady, Ms. Stundytė. Again, our Q&A is here.