Anja Silja: Where her career started

The Seglerheim in Kladow 1959

The memory begins on the army road. "On the left side of the green strip was the tram," says Anja Silja. She sits in the passenger seat and tries not to show that she is slowing down and accelerating as we meander across the Havel Bridge to the west. "With this train, my grandfather and I always drove to the opera." It was a gigantic adventure that lasted until late into the night. From Groß Glienicke to the city center it was far, half a world trip for a little girl from the Havelland.

"Aida" was the first opera, Anja Silja still knows. She was nine years old then one year from her child prodigy career. The, as spectacular as it was, is long history, replaced by the longest stage career of an opera singer ever.

59 years have passed and Anja Silja does not stop to stop. "That's what I've learned, why should I leave it while I still can?" She can do it. Her voice has become even more feminine over the years. The goose bumps you get while listening have remained the same.

We are on the way to where it all started. At the beginning of August 1950 it was in the old sailing home in Berlin-Kladow. There, a brisk walk away from the house of the grandparents, where she grew up, Anja Silja stood on a tiny stage as a ten-year-old and sang her first concert, in white organza dress, with a bow in her hair. "It was definitely wrong, my loops were always wrong," she says. At that time, she had no idea where this would lead. "I've never been ambitious, I just wanted to sing, it got carried away like in a frenzy."

At her first big concert Anja Silja was eleven

I never decided to become a singer, I was just one.

She was eleven at her first major concert in the Hamburger Musikhalle, arias and classical songs over three and a half octaves. It was a sensation. Eight years later, she plunged into Bayreuth as Senta into the sea. Just under 20, slender, a scandal. She was just as old as Wagner's tragic Dutch heroine, wore a miniskirt - then a hand's breadth above the knee - and drove fast cars. Then there was Wieland Wagner, grandson of composers, festival director, director, who de facto left his family for the young soprano. The community on the Green Hill was fascinated, shocked and enthusiastic.

In Anja Silja's memory, the details blur. "It was all so much that it was just," she tries to describe it. "But what exactly was it that I missed, somehow, like, as if I had not been there, that's a pity, of course." She did not think much during those years. Only traded. No wonder, with the stint. More than 30 productions in six years: Wagner Brünnhilde, Venus, Isolde, Strauss' Elektra and Salome; Bergs Marie and Lulu. And in between the private drama Anja and Wieland. Singer and mentor. Muse and director. Isolde and Tristan. Then suddenly Wieland was dead. Then Anja Silja was 26 and thought her life was over.

60 years ago, Anja Silja made her first big appearance at Berliner Wannsee, today she is world famous.

We turn off the Heerstraße south, to Gatow. "There was a snack bar on the corner, so if my grandfather bought me a sausage there, that would be the greatest thing for me," recalls Anja Silja. "The bus we had to go on with went only every two hours, we stood at the stops forever." We drive past the old military airport, white barracks buildings in rank and file. At the back of the tarmac, after the war, there was often a small, straw-colored girl with scrawny knees watching the English military machines. For hours. "That was the big wide world for me," says Anja Silja. She also sang in the tennis club Rot-Weiss next door. One big thing was that time when the fine company met there. There was applause for the singing child, a warm meal and a few marks' salary.

We are nearly there. "There, on the corner of the 'Old Village Jug', my grandfather bought ice cream when I was floor-hungry," says Anja Silja as she drives by. "Since then I know that you have to eat ice cream then." Often she did not need that knowledge. She is rarely ill. Probably because she does not pamper herself, she says. Even now the singer climbs out of the car despite the cold without a scarf. Ice floats on the Wannsee, ducks balance over the floes. Opera star attitudes such as white scarves around the mouth and nose or throat sweets are foreign to Anja Silja. "I never have to sing," she says. "I go, change and sing."

She does that as long as she can think. "I never decided to become a singer, I was just one," she says.When she was six years old, her grandfather, portrait painter, amateur singer and Wagnerian, began giving her singing lessons. Every day for half an hour. "It was not until I was 22 - arguably the most thorough vocal training in the world, that's probably why I still sing," says Anja Silja. She only went to school for the first year, then never again. "My grandfather thought I would not go there." The school, said Aders van Rejn, would deprive his granddaughter of her falseness, making her conform to a norm. So he taught her everything she needed to know: arithmetic, reading, writing, history, Greek mythology. And of course Wagner.

Anja Silja memorized Wagner early on

On this stage, Anja Silja sang the "Frühlingsstimmenwalzer" by Johann Strauß as a little girl.

By the age of ten, Anja Silja could memorize all Wagner roles, not just those of women. It all sounds like drill and coercion, but it was not like that, assures Anja Silja. "I had a wonderful childhood, very free and without constraints, I could do everything, was allowed to do everything, and even when the concerts started later, I loved that, it was exciting, and I was always kind of important Not?" Worried critics realized that she was going to ruin her voice, all those heavy games and so early. "Unfortunately, they are already dead, so I can not prove to them how wrong they were," says Anja Silja happily and squeaks. It starts at high altitude, slips deep into your throat and ends high up. That makes them every now and then, just like that. Just to see if the voice is still there. Is she.

In the old Seglerheim on the Imchenallee nothing is like it used to be.

"Everything used to be different": the former sailing home is today an Italian restaurant.

The house, a hotel, is blocked for the winter. The hall where Anja Silja was allowed to give her first concert is no longer there. In the entrance hall hang old photos. Sepia-toned, the hall and stage seem larger than in Anja Silja's memory. "They did readings or accordion concerts there," she says.

The child Anja sang there the "Frühlingsstimmenwalzer" by Strauß, Johann. The pagenarie from Meyerbeer's Huguenots and songs by Schubert and Brahms. With a voice like a big one. With eyes closed, one would not believe that a child sang there, wrote critics incredulously. Anja Silja did not know such reverence for herself even then. "At 'Ave Maria' I got so tangled up in the Seglerheim that I broke off in the middle of the 'O Jungfrau, calling a virgin' and said, 'Such a shit, I'll start all over again'," she says. "The people in the hall laughed out loud, because everything was so sacred."

The neighbors of the small marina are empty, the boats are mothballed until spring. A group of thick-clad older ladies marches past us into the little pizzeria next door. "They look old enough, they could know me from before", jokes Anja Silja. "La Riviera" stands on the small wooden hut, which is crouched next to the white sailing home. Inside, the fire crackles in the stove. Big whispering at the ladies table, then applause patters. "As long as I can remember you are my idol," said a brave man with black hair. "We are a vintage!" She has been to her concerts over and over again, in Hamburg, Frankfurt, even in Cleveland, Ohio. She had never been to Bayreuth. "I was too young then." Anja Silja tricks, looks up at her and laughs.

"Probably I was too." She tells the women's meal: "We are here because I gave my first concert 59 years ago next door!" The ladies, all former colleagues at a school in Spandau, look in disbelief. "Who knows what would have happened to my career, I would have just started today," Anja Silja thinks about coke and pizza. "Surely I would have participated in such a casting show and would have been millionaire at the age of 14. Or maybe not, my grandfather rejected all Hollywood offers for me at the time, and his dream was to sing in Bayreuth." After Wieland Wagner's death she never sang there again. In Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Geneva, Bologna, London, Zurich, Brussels, Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris, Chicago, New York, Hamburg ...

A legend is her, Anja Silja often has to read about herself.

The word does not like her. That sounds like standstill and "best of" plates. "You always have to do something new," she says. She is rarely bored. Even after such a long stage life there are houses she has never played before. Like the Komische Oper in Berlin. There she sings the Countess in Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades". Then there are the recitals that she just discovered for herself. For someone, whose interpretation of the figure is much more important than mere singing, it must feel strangely nude, all alone and without a role on stage.

At the premiere of Leos Janácek's opera "Jenufa" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (2002).

We break up.Over there, in Sakrow, on the other side of the Wannsee, the conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi grew up, Anja's later husband and father of her three children. "Is not that funny?" Asks Anja Silja. They would have been able to pass each other then, but Christoph, eleven years older, would never have noticed her little thing. This came later, when the conductor and singer fell in love with Munich. It was dangerous in 1968, he had stated at the very beginning of their relationship. "Your men are always dying!" Right. Her two great loves died early: first Wieland Wagner, then the conductor André Cluytens, whose Parisian house Anja Silja belongs today. She never forgot them both and often still thinks about what they would say to this or that. Nevertheless, Christoph von Dohnanyi dared. Anja Silja is even more. Finally, the man came in a pack of three, with two teenage children. While he was making a career, Anja Silja paused. "After the birth of my three children, my performances became more and more sporadic, it just did not fit together, and when I went to Cleveland with Christoph in 1984, it did not exist at all as a singer," she says. "That only started after the separation from Christoph, 1989 at the festival in Glyndebourne."

That's 20 years ago now. By the end of 2010 Anja Silja is fully booked. Leipzig, Milan, Vienna, Toulouse are there and a few more cities you can not think of. There she sings "Pique Dame", Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" and "Erwartung" and of course Janácek, after Wagner her great musical love. The sexton in "Jenufa" is one of her great character roles.

In the past, Anja Silja always knew three years in advance when to sing something.

Not any longer longer. "What do I know about what's going to happen to me and my voice in two years?" She says. "Finally, I'll be 70 next year." We get into the car and head south, to where Anja Silja spent the first ten years of her life. The neighborhood is not spectacular:

Detached houses, permanent campsites on the lakeside and lots and lots of forest. "That was my way to school, the one year I went there," she says. "I always found it a bit scary between the trees." At night, she often dreamed of dragons and witches. "And always, when I hear little owls, I have to think of this way." The tiny house the grandparents had rented on the waterfront 37 is no longer standing. But the large gardens on the other side of the road, over which Anja Silja once ran to the lake, still exist. "In winter you could skate, with skids that you screwed under your shoes, and I often lost the key to unscrewing." And the old shop is still standing, up at the maritime parade, where grocer Völzke always took the potatoes out of the garage, so that the child Anja could drag them home.

Of all the characters that Anja Silja has played, she feels most connected to Emilia Marty, the opera diva from Janácek's "The Makropulous Case," which, after 300 years of eternal life, finally wants to die. She has sung the part 60, 70 times. "Emilia Marty has to create herself over and over again," says Anja Silja. "So many stations!

And that's what I had: there was the child prodigy, the time with Wieland, André, my marriage and the children and the time now. "But while Emilia Marty sees no sense in living at the end of the opera, Anja Silja sprays with energy "It's old when you can not think of anything," she says as we get back in. The birch avenue on the Seekorso looks very Russian in the winter light. "That suits you," says Anja Silja wonderfully sad songs by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky - in Russian. "That's something new for me."

Anja Silja: Wagner - Lohengrin, 'Elsa's Dream' (April 2024).