\n<\/p>\n
Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.<\/p>\n
It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.<\/p>\n
She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her<\/a> \u201cwithout doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.\u201d Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s general manager, recently said: \u201cShe was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn\u2019t tackle.\u201d<\/p>\n Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet\u2019s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production<\/a> at the Met.<\/p>\n Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year\u2019s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt is a nightmare, a total nightmare,\u201d she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. \u201cI\u2019ve had two years of nightmare at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby \u2014 her voice, she said, came out \u201cscratchy and strange\u201d \u2014 but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky\u2019s \u201cKhovanshchina,\u201d which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later \u2014 months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the worst decision of my life,\u201d she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband \u2014 who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.<\/p>\n \u201cYou start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,\u201d she said. \u201cOf breath, of body. Everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Her husband spoke softly. \u201cShe was my lioness,\u201d he said. \u201cI am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.\u201d<\/p>\n A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS<\/strong>, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche \u2014 of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been \u201cfixed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,\u201d said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. \u201cIt\u2019s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Maria Callas couldn\u2019t undo her instrument\u2019s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote<\/a>, \u201cThere is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open<\/a> about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villaz\u00f3n<\/a>, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,\u201d Rachvelishvili said. \u201cI just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.\u201d<\/p>\n THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE<\/strong> \u2014 she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory \u2014 Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.<\/p>\n \u201cI sang Carmen for so many years because I didn\u2019t have easy high notes,\u201d she said. \u201cI took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi\u2019s \u201cIl Trovatore\u201d with startling refinement<\/a> in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea\u2019s \u201cAdriana Lecouvreur\u201d early in 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi\u2019s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in \u201cLes Troyens,\u201d \u201cWerther,\u201d \u201cLa Favorite\u201d and \u201cLa Gioconda\u201d were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner\u2019s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde \u2014 the province of big-voiced sopranos \u2014 might be possible.<\/p>\n Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.<\/p>\n Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert \u201cAida\u201d in Italy that summer, \u201cShe was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he added, \u201cyou could feel, here and there, the great singer.\u201d<\/p>\n