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The flexible vocal chords and iron will of Sona Cervena.

Article Excerpt
Sona Cervena is a versatile artist with an unusual breadth of creative interests and talent in several fields and genres--not just opera singing, which has been her domain for most of her theatrical career, but drama acting and work with the spoken word as well. Yet all her activities have the same common denominator: music. After a dazzling operatic career, during which she worked all over the world with directors, conductors and singers who are today legends of the cultural history the 20th century, she returned to the Czech Republic following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Here she has been continuing her artistic activities with astonishing vitality not only in National Theatre productions but also in film, plays, and projects that interest her inside and outside Prague, and always with remarkable results that deploy her lifelong professional experience to excellent effect.

BUT ABOVE ALL SONA CERVENA IS A FASCINATING PERSON. A MEETING WITH HER, WHETHER ON OR OFFSTAGE, IS ALWAYS AN EXCITING, INSPIRING AND ENRICHING EXPERIENCE, CONFIRMING THE AUTHENTICITY AND INTEGRITY OF HER ART. WE FEEL IT IN EVERY WORD OF THE INTERVIEW THAT SHE HAS GIVEN US.

There have been plenty of published interviews with you, and you have published a small book of memoirs. It might look as if your artistic career has already been mapped in detail and there are no longer many questions left to ask you. But of course your memories and above all your experiences in life can hardly all befitted into one little book, and in any case you are still an active artist and so are still adding to them. With your kind permission, might we consider what you haven't yet said and what has not been published yet?

If you mention memory--I don't have one at all. I'm like a computer, and everything I don't need I erase. That's why I'm quite good at learning texts by heart. Secondly I'm not a communicative person. I don't like talking about myself and I don't like to take myself seriously. I've already said everything I wanted to say at some point and somewhere. I've a sister who is quite grumpy and severe, and she's always criticising me, saying, "that interview with you was boring, you've already said it all". I answer that I've only lived one life and I talk about that.

And so if you want to hear some new moments, memories, experiences, you'll have to dig them out of me.

Well then ... What was the key moment that once set you off and sent you on an artistic course that led to the dazzling career you are still continuing?

It was definitely my father and my childhood, where there was a lot of talk about music, and amateur music-making. It was there that the seed was sown in me. But most probably it actually happened because God gave me the two things that were the most important for my career--flexible vocal chords and an iron will. If it's the other way round it's a catastrophe. Rigid vocal chords and a pliable will? You won't get anywhere with that. But I'm grateful for the combination and also for the fact that I kept going with it, because it is a tough road.

For over fifty years you have been moving ill the exclusive environment of high art throughout Europe and America--or to put it better you are an active part of that world. How has it actually changed in the period of your career? What had a direct impact on you, what did you perceive as important, or what has had a practical effect on your life?

We won't talk about the two occupations that hit my life, of course [the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and the invasion by the Warsaw Pact forces in 1968- editor's note]. But what has changed (though not exactly in your philosophical sense of the term) is that in my younger years or during my career not every production was filmed, there was no video, and television wasn't making such a splash in pictures and colours. What we created and achieved vanished. Today's singers and today's world full of pictures has the great advantage of being able to map everything. That's wonderful, maybe the only thing I envy them.

How much of a view of the surrounding world did you get from your world of rehearsal rooms, stages and hotels? Does all artist with a career like yours have any time or opportunity to...

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