You can take the opera singer out of Dundalk, but you can’t take Dundalk out of the opera singer. Although Tara Erraught has spent the past eight years at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich, she still peppers her conversation with phrases such as “bejay” and “Oh sweet baby Jesus, let me tell you”. Roses on the dressing room table? Not quite: she recently tweeted her delight about a fan’s gift of a two-litre double pack of Club Orange.
As if you couldn’t already tell, mezzo- soprano Erraught (29) is probably the bubbliest, most down-to-earth rising star of the European opera scene you are likely to meet. When we talk, she has just arrived in Søndeborg, Denmark – or “the back arse of nowhere”, as she puts it – to make her debut with the South Denmark Philharmonic.
Her happy-go-lucky attitude has come in useful over the past year, when a review of her performance as Octavian in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne went viral for all the wrong reasons, and not through any fault of her own. Several reviews focused on her appearance rather than her performance, meanly describing her as "dumpy of stature", "stocky" and "a chubby bundle of puppy fat", and spawned reams of subsequent reaction pieces on body-shaming on both sides of the Atlantic.
A year later, she is pragmatic about the whole thing.
“Looking at it now, a year on, it certainly didn’t do me any harm. The amount of people on my social media trebled. The amount of people that come and see me now and say, ‘Oh, I just came to check you out because I read that stuff’ . . . It did more good than it did harm, which is probably a terrible thing to admit,” she says, laughing.
“But I was taught right from the beginning: you never, never look at a review until the run of the show is finished. I have a good enough team that the day the reviews came out, they said, ‘Turn everything off’. So I did; phone, computer, everything off. I went to Brighton for the day and missed it, and I went and did the second show, still not having read anything. People were looking at me a bit like ‘Ehhhh . . . so . . . everything’s fine?’ I was like ‘Um, yeah . . . everything all right with you?’ ”
Such judgment based on physicality is not unique to the world of opera, she says. "I think it's a very interesting thing to bring up. I think it happens in every industry, regardless, but I certainly don't think it's something that gets in my way of working," she says. "One thing that I will say is that all singers have got to be fit. For example, I'd be well-known for singing Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, and when you're singing the role of a six- or seven-year-old boy, you're running around on stage for the first 45 minutes. Look, in life, people are going to pick on women for this, that and the other, so you just have to be confident. And if you're not confident, you've got to fix that within yourself."
Youth orchestra
Erraught’s own journey into the world of opera was not quite a case of following in the family’s footsteps. Both of her parents are chefs, but after she joined the youth orchestra in Dulargy National School, singing soon became a passion. “There isn’t a word of Neil Diamond that I don’t know,” she laughs. Before her 10th birthday, she began singing lessons with Dundalk-based voice coach Geraldine McGee, which gave her a taste for entering Feis Ceoils around Ireland.
“I had been going to the Feis with the violin and I hated it, let me tell you, but when I went with the singing, I thought: oh Jesus, this is a bit like cocaine,” she says, laughing. “It was totally addictive. My poor parents had to drive me the length and breadth of the country because I became a Feis addict.”
When she discovered opera on a family holiday to Italy, she “just didn’t want to do anything else. I couldn’t understand why I had to go to school, or why they were sending me on the bus every day.”
Entering the Royal Irish Academy under the tutelage of Veronica Dunne, she balanced her studies with a job as an usherette at the National Concert Hall, the same venue where she was encouraged to jettison the Feis for a year to enter Dunne’s renowned International Singing Competition. “Ronnie kept saying to me, ‘Now, listen, lovie, you’re only going to sing in the first round. You’re going to get knocked out because there are a lot more experienced singers than you in it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ ”
Still only 20 at the time, Erraught came second in the competition. “You can’t imagine the atmosphere, because most of the people would have known me from having the craic at the door and showing people to their seats,” she chuckles. “Talk about buzzing and nearly wetting myself at the same time.”
Opera offers
Her success in the competition was followed by numerous offers from opera studios including La Scala. She chose the Bayerische Staatsoper – despite being mid-degree in Dublin with not a word of German.
Eight years later, it has worked out well; in 2011 her big break came when she took on the role of Romeo with just five days’ notice. “I called Ronnie, my mam and my manager and they were all behind me,” she says. “I mean, I’m not curing cancer or doing open heart surgery, right? No one’s going to die if I make a mistake. The only thing I can do is try to make a nice evening for people.
“And between you, me and the wall, I was well used to learning things at the last minute; learning words of songs on the way to Feis in the back of the car. So I kind of thought, Well, if one song’s learnable, so are three hours of an opera.”
It sounds like Erraught has responded to last year’s controversy in the best way possible, proving her critics wrong and winning bigger and better roles.
This year has been her first proper Irish season, and she is particularly looking forward, as she always does, to returning to the National Concert Hall, where ushers and usherettes will now show people to their seats to hear her sing.
In the coming months she plans to spend more time in the US, take on her first-ever stage production at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in April and make her debut in Tokyo.
“It’s going to be so awesome just to see what the people are like,” she says, the excitement barely contained in her voice. “You always sing the first 30 seconds of any performance and you think, okay, how am I doing? What’s the atmosphere like? Are they awake? Are they bored? Are they sleeping? Are they leaving?” she says. “It’s terrifying, but it’s awesome. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
- Tara Erraught, accompanied by Dearbhla Collins, performs a matinee recital of work by Dvorak, Brahms, Wolf and more, at the National Concert Hall on November 1st
