NINA STEMME TAKES ON HER BIGGEST MET OPERA ASSIGNMENT YET

By MICHAEL COOPER

Nina Stemme, the Swedish dramatic soprano, is singing Isolde, perhaps her greatest role, in a new production of “Tristan und Isolde” that will open the new Metropolitan Opera season. CreditSasha Arutyunova for The New York Times

For a certain kind of New Yorker, whose Manhattan-centrism comes with the expectation that the Big Apple should naturally be a magnet for the best of everything, the long absences of Nina Stemme, the great Swedish dramatic soprano, were somewhat puzzling.

And for those who love the operas of Wagner and Strauss — and who can go for years without hearing good, let alone great, performances of their most difficult roles — they were excruciating.

But the drought is finally over. Ms. Stemme, 53, who has carefully plotted her career at her own pace, has finally returned. Singing the title role in a harrowing Patrice Chéreau production of Strauss’s “Elektra” in the spring, she has already appeared more at the Metropolitan Opera this year than she had previously in her entire career.

Now she is about to take on her biggest Met assignment yet: singing Isolde, perhaps her signature role, in a psychologically dark new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” that will open the new season on Monday, Sept. 26, conducted by Simon Rattle and directed by Mariusz Trelinski.

How does Ms. Stemme, whose rich voice and ability to launch clear, powerful high notes has made her the world’s reigning Isolde, tackle the part, one of the longest and most daunting in opera? Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano who owned Isolde during the second half of the 20th century, and who once helped the young Ms. Stemme, said that her secret was comfortable shoes. Ms. Stemme has her own strategy: a backstage yoga mat.

“It takes every cell of your body,” Ms. Stemme said of singing Isolde, which she will do for the 100th time on Oct. 27 at the Met. So she explained that she does “a little bit of yoga” in her dressing room after the first two acts “to de-stress,” before returning in the third to sing the otherworldly, climactic “Liebestod” that ends the opera nearly five hours after its start.

Before this year, Ms. Stemme’s New York appearances were so few and far between that she had become something of an unattainable cult figure to the city’s operagoers, who needed either recordings or airplane tickets to hear her as she evolved from an essentially lyric soprano into the rare singer to excel in opera’s heaviest, most punishing roles.

This was partly because Ms. Stemme concentrated her career in Europe, where she and her husband, the stage designer Bengt Gomer, were raising three children: Even Brünnhildes and Elektras must navigate a work-life balance. Having a family was a priority from the beginning, she said, and it was one of the factors that led her to turn down a contract with the prestigious Vienna State Opera early in her career in favor of one with the smaller Cologne Opera.

 “When I turned 50, I thought, my voice might be gone,” recalled Ms. Stemme, a deliberate, thoughtful artist who studied business before deciding to sing. “And what would be the most important thing to look back at? A huge career or a family? That answer was easy.”

But her long absence also came about partly because the Met was apparently slow to offer her the right parts early on. After she made her Met debut in 2000 singing Senta in Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” her only other engagement with the company before this year came in 2010, when she sang the title role in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.” Since then, she has sung with other American companies, including in San Francisco,Houston and Washington.

Ms. Stemme was diplomatic, noting that the more lyric roles she favored early on were easier for the Met to cast. “There were American singers for that here,” she said.

But as her career took off in the heavier Wagner and Strauss repertoire, in which there are never more than a handful of singers capable of doing the roles justice, her absence from New York became conspicuous. The city’s Wagnerites, a passionate, sometimes obsessive lot, began to look on jealously as she sang elsewhere, recalled Nathalie D. Wagner, the president of the Wagner Society of New York.

“Everyone has been saying for years that she should have been engaged much sooner for the big roles at the Met,” she said. The society went en masse to Washington last spring to hear her sing Brünnhilde in the Washington National Opera’s “Ring” cycle and held a reception for her in 2012 when she sang Strauss’s “Salome” in concert with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that he began actively pursuing Ms. Stemme almost as soon as he arrived at the Met in 2006. “I put on a full-court press trying to persuade her to come back,” he recalled in a telephone interview.

But with leading stars booked years in advance, finding the right project at the right time proved difficult. Eventually they struck a kind of package deal. Ms. Stemme agreed to star in the high-profile “Elektra” earlier this year, the new “Tristan,” and, as a bonus, a run of performances last winter as Puccini’s Turandot. All three operas were slated for inclusion in the Met’s popular “Live in HD” program, which broadcasts to cinemas around the world.

“This is my main repertoire, and what I can do the best,” Ms. Stemme said.

Even so, Isolde was not a role she initially expected to sing. When she was first offered the chance to perform it at the Glyndebourne Festival in England in 2003, she recalled, “I thought they were joking.”

So she turned to Ms. Nilsson, who had given Ms. Stemme a scholarship earlier in her career. To her surprise, the veteran soprano said she would be happy to work on it with her.

“And I never felt ready,” Ms. Stemme said, a bit ruefully, of passing up that chance at the part, and at studying it with one of its classic exponents. “I think I’m still like that. But nowadays I see that as a good thing. You’re never ready with these gigantic roles.”

Ready or not, she went on to sing Isolde in leading opera houses around the world and to make several recordings of it, including one opposite the Tristan of Plácido Domingo on a luxuriously cast studio recordingconducted by Antonio Pappano. Her take on the role has grown definitive enough for the Met to decide to open its season with “Tristan” for the first time since 1937 — when it starred another great Scandinavian Isolde, the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, and Lauritz Melchior.

Now that Ms. Stemme has scaled some of opera’s toughest heights, she wants to inhabit them more. “I still have things I want to tell with Brünnhilde, Isolde and Elektra,” she said. But she is also adding parts, singing her first Kundry in Wagner’s “Parsifal” this spring at the Vienna State Opera, and, in a few years, the Dyer’s Wife in Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”

As for New York, Ms. Stemme said that while she would be busy in Europe for the next couple of seasons, she and Mr. Gelb were discussing future Met projects.

“I know that it will happen,” she said.

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