Opera Star Adam Plachetka’s Rise to International Fame and the Challenges Ahead

He recently sang at the Vienna State Opera, in a month he will debut at the National Theater in Prague, and then he will finish the season at La Scala in Milan. Bass-baritone Adam Plachetka has been traversing the world and the Czech opera scene for 20 years.

“Thanks to the pandemic and I had to stop for the first time in my adult life, my values ​​changed: I try to have more time for home and family. It doesn’t always work out, but that’s why I’m grateful for the Year of Czech Music, because I can be around almost all the time,” said Adam Plachetka in an interview is part of the Seznam Zpráv project A gallery of personalities.

“For the first time in my life, I have a year when I focus exclusively on Czech music. So far it has been more Mozart or bel canto.’

The bicentenary of the birth of Bedřich Smetana and the associated Czech Music Year gave Adam Plachetka many opportunities to sing the Czech repertoire. In May, he appears in the role of Alderman Kalina in the premiere of the opera Tajemstvi at the National Theatre, then Libuše awaits him with the Czech Philharmonic, in the autumn he continues with the fox Janáček Bystrouska in Brno and then Vecí Makropulos with the same author in Berlin.

In the meantime, he confirmed the career of a renowned singer in Vienna, and this June he will perform Mozart’s Requiem at La Scala in Milan. In addition, Adam Plachetka, whose diary is planned for three years ahead, is preparing intensively for the celebration of his 40th birthday, which will fall on January 2025 and he decided to spend with his fans in the O2 Prague arena.

Doesn’t the opera singer feel pressured to fill the hall?

“It’s a bit stressful,” Plachetka replied, “because the behavior of the audience has changed a lot since the pandemic. Today, more tickets are bought at the last minute. Everything is different than before. Expectations are high and we hope everything goes well.”

Plachetka wants to continue his concert since January 2020, when he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday and when many viewers wrote him messages that he took them to listen to music classical and that he bought tickets to, for example, the National Theatre. “But in a couple of months, the pandemic came and none of the things where these people could come happened. I thought to myself that we should try it one more time, maybe we would open a new, nice scene for someone.’

With big concerts like that, where he sings operatic and musical arias, he wants to save money, he says he will only do two or three at the most in his life. “After all, the center of gravity of what I do is somewhere else.”

Adam Plachetka’s operatic career, which includes the Metropolitan Opera in New York and London’s Royal Opera in Covent Garden, has spanned nearly 20 years. At the same time – as he himself says – at the beginning of his operatic singing, while he was still at the Prague Conservatory, he was “completely useless”.

“I was very self-confident at the time, I did not prepare for the exams in any way. And when they brought me unprepared, I took it to mean that I must be an extraordinary talent. And after five or six years, I found out that they took me as the last one to count, because there weren’t enough guys at the time and I was just going into their shop,” he recalls in an interview.

Today, he has six dozen operatic roles, mostly in Mozart’s operas. However, as he gets older, he is going to move into more difficult pieces, where several roles are written for deep male voices.

“The voice is changing. I do Mozart less now than I used to. I sing baroque more as a hobby, although I did it almost exclusively at the beginning. There are other roles or styles that start to suit me better. So there is no reason not to listen to that voice and move elsewhere. My vocal range is negative or some elders of the family, so I have no place to run in this and I don’t see the end of the road yet, that I should say goodbye to that voice slowly,” says Adam Plachetka in an open confession.

How will he deal with the ideas of some conductors who, when conducting operas, bet on a modern concept and make singers, for example, use a chainsaw instead of a pocket knife as a prop in her Shepherd?

“I think, on the one hand, we shouldn’t live in an outdoor museum, we have to look for some current topics and somehow bring these works more closer to the times. But it would be more natural to write new works and refer to what is happening now, than to adapt Giovanni according to the Trump campaign or something like that,” replied Plachetka. “It’s just that representation is good modern is great for me and I like to take part in finding new ways of working, but it must not be the director’s excuse: I couldn’t do it in a nice classic way, and so I would rather do that in an awesome and modern way.”

How did he himself get to know the situation when the audience at the National Theater brought him forward at the performance of Smetanov Dalibor, in which it was as if King Vladislav entered the pool rain with only loincloths? What was the key moment that helped launch his international career? And is his strong figure his advantage when he sings?

You can listen to the interview with Adam Plachetka in the audio version at the beginning of the article – we will publish the transcript and video recording of the entire interview on Saturday.