Angela Prays For Rolando, Has Peter Gelb On His Knees

Busy promoting her Butterfly CD -- an opera that she, unable to sing on stage due to her evident vocal limitations, had to record in a studio costing her corporate employers a pretty significant bunch of money, with a little help from Accademia di Santa Cecilia -- Angela Gheorghiu allowed some tasty morsels of truth to slip through her long interview with the Independent's Jessica Duchen. Jess publishes today on her blog the "director's cut" of the interview -- the full unedited transcript of the chat with the Romanian soprano.

Not only Gheorghiu -- a woman with an appalling record of cancellations and even high-profile firings, a woman who married a onetime fine tenor who, after being literally booed off la Scala's stage and after many other humiliations is now the sad human pinata of backstage opera jokes -- takes the low road in mocking Rolando Villazon's evident vocal difficulties:

I sing with Rolando I hope everything goes fine [crosses self]

But she also tells a tasty anecdote re: the abasement of poor Peter Gelb's pride:

And we finished out La Rondine at the Met, the premiere was for new year’s day, it was on HD in cinemas all over the world, it was a huge success, but I was suffering because I was very ill! Oh, I was suffering, I was completely kaput! And I took some medicines and everybody around me they helped me, mostly Peter Gelb the director, he said 'whatever happens on stage, there are thousands of people they bought their tickets to see you in Rondine, oh, it’s a disaster, and if something happens I will come immediately and saying to everybody you are the best and we must be with you and you must come again and again and do everything you want, but COME HERE and put on your wig and your costume!' And with all this support I was willing and I said OK, but it was very hard. If you do something badly for an audience at the Met & it’s not just at the Met it’s all over the world...Finally we are human beings. But it was a hard moment for me.

It's like a Romanian Molly Bloom's soliloquy, with gags.