Anastasia Stratakis was born To Greek immigrants from Crete on her parent’s dining room table in Toronto, Canada. Her father, who had been a barefoot shepherd in Crete, suffered from manic-depression. She once said, “We lived a lifetime of emotions every day, always in dread and panic of what might happen next.” The family lived in near-poverty but there was always singing and dancing in the home. When she was four years old she was stricken with tuberculosis and nearly died. This later caused her severe respiratory problems, often forcing her to cancel performances. “It’s weird to have something choose you that demands you use your lungs and breath, when most of my life I spent struggling to use my lungs and breath.” Her father’s small restaurant made very little money but her parents managed to save enough money to buy a piano and pay a teacher to give Teresa’s older sister lessons. Teresa was a superb mimic and, at the age of two, absorbed her sister’s lessons by listening and soon could play simple melodies. As a teenager Teresa sang popular songs in her father’s restaurant, in local nightclubs, and sang Greek songs on radio. The Metropolitan Opera was on tour in Toronto, and for her 16th birthday, Teresa and her brother were given a tickets to see “La Traviata.” She later said that seeing her first opera “overwhelmed” her with the concept of what the human voice could do. She decided to become an opera singer. She had never studied voice and had seen only that one opera performance, but she auditioned for the Royal College of Music in Toronto singing Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Her talent was so obvious that she was immediately admitted and studied for three years on a scholarship. Irene Jessner, whom she credited somewhat inaccurately as her first and only singing teacher, taught her that “singing is a natural thing and the voice can express emotions that no words can.” She made her debut in 1958 with the Canadian Opera as Mimì in La Boheme. And her Mimi did something exceeding rare in the world of opera. She actually communicated with her Rodolfo. She sang, and beautifully, but she was really talking – and explaining to him just who she was and what she felt. She wasn’t an opera singer performing an aria, she was a real person singing the words that just happened to come to her mind. And you can’t take your eyes off of her. ................................................................................................................................... “I make my own dresses; I never go to the hairdresser; I never go to parties,” she said. “With my background I find it very hard to justify the privileged life I have. It takes all my energy to do this very elitist thing. So why don’t I channel these energies and be something like Mother Teresa? Mother Teresa’s really doing something that matters with her life,” she says. “I’m just trying to justify mine.” She felt so strongly about it that in 1981 she put her opera career on hold and backpacked alone through India, traveling to Calcutta where she met Mother Teresa and spent the next several years with her helping the terminally ill. She left occasionally to make films or recordings, explaining that giving Mother Teresa the income from just one concert or film, could be of more value than a year of her volunteer work. “I’ve never planned a career – I hate that word – and sat down with advisers to think, ‘Oh, I should do that role, I should sing this,’ because I’ve been too busy living life … I don’t approach roles like other people, I become the person. My job, what I do, is to inform on the human condition … I have come and gone, cancelled everything, gone away, done other things. We only live once. Why would I only live it as an opera singer?” She returned to opera in 1988, creating the role of Marie Antoinette in Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles” at the Metropolitan. Her voice had deteriorated somewhat, which some attributed to the demanding roles she was singing, such as Salome and Lulu, but her performances never lost their dramatic focus and intensity. Critic Ethan Morrden wrote: “Stratas is exceptional; she likes what she likes. Most divas want to like what the public likes.” She recorded the role of Julie in Kern and Hammerstein’s musical “Show Boat” which was the first complete recording of the original score, with all of Hammerstein uncensored lyrics. She appeared on Broadway starring in “Rags.” She received rave reviews but the show closed after only four performances. Her films include “Salome,” Franco Zefferelli’s productions of “La Boheme,” “Pagliacci,” and “La Traviata”, the latter two also starring Placido Domingo.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 13:38:12 +0000