Super soprano

She's only 26, but Tara Erraught, who grew up in Portmarnock, is a rising star of the opera world – and there's even an opera being written for her. She talks to DEREK SCALLY

ANYONE EXPECTING Tara Erraught to be an opera diva will be disappointed. Not because the 26 year-old mezzo-soprano doesn’t have the voice, acting talent or looks – she has all that in spades.

The rising Irish star of the opera world is far too engaging or personable to develop a prickly diva attitude. Last year she found herself in the classic star-is-born scenario: star gets sick, plucky ingenue is pushed into the spotlight and triumphs. But more on that later.

Music was always part of Erraught’s life, growing up in Portmarnock and, from the age of 10, in her mother’s home of Ravensdale near Dundalk. Not just violin, piano and singing lessons, but perfoming, too. “We were quite heavily involved in the feis. I’d say I was a feis addict,” she says in lilting Louth vowels. The circuit took her every year from Dublin to Warrenpoint, Newry, Portadown, Ballymena and Sligo.

“I realised as a singer that once you told a good story with the songs, you’d get on,” she says. “I also realised early on that, if I forgot song words, I was brave enough that I would just make them up.”

The feis experience was the making of her as a performer, she says, along with two “incredible” teachers. The first was Geraldine McGee who, she says, exposed her at the right age to the right music, and important lessons in the art of performing.

“Geraldine instilled in me the importance of story-telling, remembering that you don’t sing for yourself but the audience,” she says. “No matter how nervous you are, it doesn’t matter because you are doing something for other people, something they couldn’t do.”

She moved to Dublin to study at the Royal Irish Academy of Music with Dr Veronica “Ronnie” Dunne, a teacher whose reputation preceded her. “Before I started studying people told me she was wicked,” she recalls. “I had to laugh because Ronnie really could eff and blind and throw a score at you if you’re not doing your work. But if you can’t survive Ronnie, you won’t survive the opera industry.”

Her first big break came at 20, when Dunne suggested she enter her eponymous international singing competition. Despite her teacher’s warnings to cut back on working and socialising ahead of the event, Erraught still slipped away in the evenings to work as an usher at the National Concert Hall. Until Dunne showed up one evening and dragged her out in her uniform, saying unprintable things.

Dunne locked the disobedient student in her own house for two weeks, feeding her, forbidding her to talk and forcing her to practice every day with a pianist. To everyone’s surprise, including her own, Erraught got to the final round in the competition, winning best Irish singer and second overall.

The offers came in and Erraught began studying at the Bayerische Staatsoper’s opera studio in Munich. At just 22, she was their youngest student, and had to fly back and forth to finish her final year in Dublin.

Further coaching and performing in one of the world’s leading opera houses drove home to her the high demands of German audiences: strong singing and convincing acting. On top of that, the young singer had to come to grips with the notorious German “Regietheater” tradition, where directors can have their performers swinging from chandeliers, peeing onstage or stripping naked.

“In one performance I had to gut a deer and rub the intestines all over myself,” she recalls. “After the premiere, the animal rights people got so bad we used a plastic deer with pigs’ guts inside. They really stank.”

Graduates from the Munich studio usually take on smaller roles in the big house, but not Erraught. She took on bigger roles, including an acclaimed premiere preformance in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Then, at the end of March last year, fate came knocking.

Vesselina Kasarova, the star of Munich’s next premiere – Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi – had fallen ill. Could Tara learn the role of Romeo? Erraught agreed, then heard the star had recovered and shelved the score. Then, three days before the premiere, the star had a relapse and Erraught was asked to go for the premiere. She learned the role at night, rehearsed by day, donned the Christian Lacroix costume and went on. “I’d heard the applause and knew it had come off, but when the curtain came down I still had to sit on the stage floor to calm down,” she said. “I arrived at the premiere party all dolled up, found a table and fell asleep. I hadn’t slept in a week. Someone put me in a taxi and sent me home.” When she woke up, the reviews were in, celebrating the Irish “sensation”.

“The night before that performance I didn’t really know what was coming, now I can tell you where I will be to the end of 2015,” she says.

Though still on contract with Munich, they have allowed her accept engagements from New York to Vienna. An opera is currently being written for her, with the promising title of The Harlot’s Progress. Despite regular return trips to Ireland, she is always shocked at how many schoolfriends have left for England, particularly singing colleagues. “If people could just look past England to Europe and realise there is work here,” she says, pointing to Germany’s network of state opera houses offering opportunities and steady employment. “Germany is really not that far, just two hours, there’s shedloads of work and open doors regardless of where you come from,” she says. “With the option of firm work contracts, I don’t think people realise how stable an opera singer’s job can be.”

Erraught has never forgotten where she comes from, arranging Dublin master classes with the top-drawer conductors and singers that are now her work colleagues. “I don’t think you should start giving something back when you retire, but that you give as much as you can as you go,” she says. “I’ve been so lucky that it’s important for me that, whatever opportunities I have, I give back.”