I have to admit I don't really know much about opera but I have been to Covent Garden and enjoyed myself thoroughly. And it seems to me that if you're big in opera - literally - the world's your oyster - because doesn't that make you a better singer?
Or, maybe not. According to The Sunday Times, the Royal Opera House felt that the American soprano, Deborah Voigt was too fat for her costume so they sacked her! Apparently, she "tipped the scales at about 25 stone at her zenith".
Anyway, "four years later Voigt, 47, is finally back at Covent Garden – indeed, she is singing Ariadne in the same production, but this time she is nine stone lighter. Yes, the furore was humiliating; yes, it was public; but she has calmed down somewhat. “I was not appropriate for the production,” she admits now.
"Furthermore, the sacking gave her an unexpected window of free time, plus a big, fat cheque from the (publicly subsidised) opera house. So she filled the gap in her schedule and used British taxpayers’ money to undergo a gastric bypass operation.
"Privately, she was desperate.
“I didn’t need the Royal Opera House to tell me I was obese,” she says. “I don’t like to say how much I weighed at the time, but I was well over 300lb [21st 6lb]. I had enough energy to get through a performance, but not enough to get through the next day.
“I was fatigued walking across the street. I was winded walking upstairs. The irony is that I had already made inquiries with doctors. And so, because the opera house honoured its contract, we could say Covent Garden paid for [the operation].”
"It was the final salvo in a battle with her weight that had been going on since she was a child.
"Eating for solace led to food addiction, which the peripatetic nature of her profession does little to quell. “You eat because you are happy, because you are sad, because you are travelling alone 10 months of the year, because you have an entire evening to kill and because a salad is not as fulfilling as a plate of chips.”
The knowledge that chips are a bad food option, which might stop most people from devouring a plateful, has no effect on her, she says. “I have a guilt mechanism, but that kicks in after I’ve eaten them, not before. Mine is a compulsion to eat. So I will have the chips, or the extra glass of wine, and then feel guilty about it.
“What I am working on, and will work on for the rest of my life, is developing a memory of that guilt. I don’t stop and think, ‘How will I feel after-wards?’ I just think, ‘I am going to satisfy myself. I am going to eat this and enjoy it, and it will make me feel better.’ And it’s very hard to break that pattern.”
The gastric bypass, she says, was “the best means to an end. But it was the last means to an end as well”.
“The gastric bypass is a tool; it’s not a cure,” Voigt says. “I am addicted to food, and always will be. I’ve just put on about 15lb [more than a stone], and it’s driving me nuts. I’d like to be a size 10 or 12, not a 14 to 16, but I have to be realistic..."
Fascinating.
Comments