Watch Montserrat Caballé in a 1971 conversation with Bernard Levin as they discuss the first moment she knew she would be an opera singer; early rejections auditioning in Italy; debuting at Glyndebourne by learning the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier over the course of 20 days; stepping in for Marilyn Horne to make her New York debut singing in Lucrezia Borgia; why she sang the bel canto repertoire; and the demands of scheduling performances four years in advance. Bonus studio performances of arias from Tannhäuser, Le Nozze di Figaro, Lucrezia Borgia, Norma, and Il Trovatore, are sprinkled throughout the interview. Watch the entire 72-minute clip after the jump.
Interviewer Sarah Montague sets out to skewer Thomas Hampson as if he were the nearest Capulet in a 100 mile radius. As she stretches the boundaries of HARDTalk to border on ATTACK-with-random-surveys-and-loose-facts, she manages to coax the baritone into one of his best roles to date: extraordinarily intelligent wordsmith. Here we have a opera singer who has not only a complete mastery of the English language, but knows how to calmly engage in oral debate. He seems a bit surprised at some of the questions (or perhaps it was just the tone of the delivery he was reacting to....), so it seems he wasn't warned in advance to prepare talking points.
