‘I’m good at doing pain’: soprano Ausrine Stundyte on trauma, adrenaline and playing a 300-year-old woman

As she prepares to star in Janáček’s The Makropulos Case for the Royal Opera, the great singer explains that she does not play ‘the happy, jumping, sexy lady’Ausrine Stundyte has been in the room for just over two minutes when she looks me in the eye and declares: “I am totally not a feminist.” I am slightly taken aback. Moments earlier, I had been watching the Lithuanian soprano rehearse Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case, which the Royal Opera is staging for the first time this autumn, in a new production by Katie Mitchell. Stundyte takes the work’s central role – and Mitchell is a director famous for her explicitly feminist approach.Stundyte, it turns out, has also surprised herself. A few days after we speak, she emails a clarification: she isn’t against women’s rights. But it bothers her, she explains, when “women see men as the problem and themselves as victims. When you put yourself in the role of a victim, you give away your own power.” Continue reading...

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