“My mother never made peace with her past,” says Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho. “But with this role, I now understand her tears, her words of pain. It’s fate that I should sing it.”The part she’s preparing is Zazà, the title role in the ultra-melodic 1900 opera of the same name by Ruggero Leoncavallo, best known for his barnstorming bloodbath “Pagliacci.” She sings it at the Barbican on November 27, and a much-anticipated recording on the Opera Rara label will be released too.It won’t be the first time that Jaho helps a rarely-performed piece get back into mainstream repertory. She shot to operatic stardom when she sang the title role in Puccini’s neglected “Suor Angelica” at the Royal Opera in 2011. Her performance as a nun devastated by the death of her illegitimate child was one of the stand-out events of the year, and her vocal intensity, dramatic suffering, and haunting dignity were searing to the point of rawness. Fortunately for anyone kicking themselves for having missed it, Jaho repeats the role (as part of Puccini’s “Il trittico”) back at the Royal Opera in February 2016.But back to “Zazà”. When I Skype Jaho at her home in New York to chat about the performance, the singer turns out to be funny, passionate, and very open. She laughs a lot, and talks twenty to the dozen. In the opera, Zazà is also a lively and exuberant singer, but she sacrifices her happiness by giving up her lover when she discovers he has a wife and child. Zazà’s own childhood was wretched, and she can’t bear to destroy another’s. Why does Jaho relate the role so closely to her own mother’s life?“My mother was abandoned by her own parents towards the end of the war, and was brought up by her grandmother. It was a hard reality of life in Albania. She wasn’t sent to school until she was 11 – and then she wanted to be a singer, and even won a competition, but was forced to work instead. She felt totally abandoned, and she never made peace with that.”Is she channelling her mother’s experience when she rehearses Zazà, then? “It’s extraordinary. When I was little, I would see her crying, but not understand why. Now I recognise her words in this libretto: they’re so true, so real. People have dismissed the opera as sentimental and melodramatic, but actually it’s about something very honest and true, something we can all relate to.”Jaho’s mother died a few months before she sang “Angelica” at the Royal Opera, and the experience fed into her unforgettable performance. “I couldn’t cry when she died. I loved her very much, and I’m not a cold person – I think it was a kind of trauma. But then I sang “Suor Angelica,” and from the moment when Angelica is told that her son is dead, I was crying for real. I took that pain, and released it on stage. It was like I was completely detached from the world, haunted... Ah, now I’m being odd!” she hoots. “But it was a kind of magic.”Jaho’s mother never came to hear her sing, she tells me. “I felt rejected, and even angry that she would never come. But everything needs time, and now, day after day, I understand. It was too much for her. But what my mother wasn’t able to do with her dream, I realize through my voice, through my soul.”Extraordinarily for someone so gregarious and open, Jaho reveals that she was crippled by shyness as a child. “Life was hard in Albania, and when I saw my parents struggling, I felt guilty about telling them any of my own problems. I kept it all in. But one day, when I was about 6, my father saw me singing in my room: and I can’t explain it, but it was only when I was singing that I felt like a normal child, felt free. It was my “un-shy”. So he encouraged me to sing, and then I found my best friend – my voice.”At the age of 14, Jaho went to her first opera, a performance of “La traviata” in Albanian. “It was like feeling love from the first note. And I thought, I’m going to die if I don’t sing Violetta once in my life. That was when I really began to be an opera singer.” Violetta has since become one of Jaho’s signature roles, which she has sung more than two hundred times. “But every time I do it, I try to find new vocal colours, new gestures, new movements to express these emotions. Never to be boring.”It becomes clearer and clearer that what drives Jaho is a search for dramatic honesty rather than beauty of sound. “No, my career is not about the voice. OK, you need a certain voice to make a success in opera, but for me it comes down to what you do with it. It’s how you express the beauty and pain of life with truth, with honesty, with your whole soul. It’s the key; it’s what I struggle with every day.”I suggest that if anyone can rescue “Zazà” from its undeserved neglect, it is her. Her connection to the work sounds so strong, and so emotional. “I’ll do my best,” she says. “It’s a big responsibility, but I’ll never give up searching for believability, and for truth.”“Zazà” is at the Barbican on November 27, and a recording will be released on Opera Rara.“Il trittico” is in repertory at the Royal Opera from 25 February, 2016
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