Actress and Opera Singer Soňa Červená Dies at the Age of 97: A Tribute to Her Extraordinary Career

The pathetic opera diva created over 110 roles on four continents and was friends with Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. With a dark soft mezzo-soprano to alto, she gave extraordinary performances in the operas of Richard Wagner and Leoš Janáček. However, her most famous role was Carmen. In the production of the conductor Herbert Kegel, she sang on the world’s leading stages more than one hundred and fifty times.

“For us, the fate of an outstanding world-class singer and actress is an image of the fate of Czech culture, whose talents were often used abroad, because they did not have enough freedom at home. The last three decades of Sonia Červená’s career took place already in the free Czech Republic,” reminds Jan Burian, director of the Prague National theatres. The singer brought in the renowned American director Robert Wilson, in whose project called 1914 she sang. “She also succeeded in an opera production about the martyred priest Toufar. Soňa Červená is a reminder for us of how important it is not only to have talent, but also to have an open society in which she was happy,” adds Burian.

Last September 29, shortly after her 97th birthday, Červená performed on the occasion of the presidency of the Czech Republic in the Council of the European Union in Rome’s Lateran Basilica in the oratorio of Jan Zástěra St. Ludmila as a soloist in the part of the saint. It was her last public appearance.

In addition to singing, Červená applied herself as an actress. She played the main role in Čapkov’s Vec Makropulos and the character of Dr. Milady Horáková in Březinov Tomorrow will be… The audience also knew her as Frau König from the film directed by Jan Hřebejk Pupendo.

She was active until the last few years. At the age of ninety-three, Soňa Červená began playing and singing once a month in a composed evening, during which she was accompanied by the pianist Karel Košárek at the Ungelt Theater in Prague. It reminded her of the Červená sedma cabaret, which her father Jiří Červený founded in Prague before the First World War.

“Several times the listeners recall memories of Hana Hegerová: detailed mimicry and gestural precision, economy, matter-of-factness, gentle humor and eroticism with the power of a meadow breeze – the two great ladies of Czech art are similar in all these ways. Červená also brings her unique and admirable relationship to the performance to the history of the genre,” critic Jiří Černý wrote about the production.

The singer and actress did not like to look back. “I’m attracted to everything new. Every night I’m somewhere. I’m such a bird of prey,” she said some time ago. “I live in my private exile, and the more solitude I can investigate for myself, the happier I am. Yes, the greatest luxury is to be alone, in my own company,” she wrote in 2017 in the book Missing is banished, in which she recapitulated life after ninety and her opera career in the world.

“I try to say no to requests for interviews for ‘elite’ magazines, TV forums and round tables, photo sessions, banquets, and not to answer the most common question: ‘How do you stay so fit in your old age? Tell us your recipe!’ “Anything I would answer would be blasphemy. Curiosity, joy, desire – yes, I feel it endlessly. But at the same time, I know that it is not a ‘recipe’, that every new day is a gift,” she said.

She believed in opera until her last years. “It’s not a surviving but a prestigious genre,” she said in a debate at the Colors of Ostrava festival when asked if opera is a surviving genre. “It’s exactly the same as asking if the fashion of skirts has passed. I think it’s not and that women will return to skirts. I may not experience it anymore, but you’re young, so trust me: you’ll wear skirts,” declared Červená to an audience in which dozens of listeners several generations younger sat.

“Opera has an orchestral, directorial and architectural component, it combines singing and acting. It is the most perfect of all arts and our nation has a great tradition in it,” added the singer.

The daughter of the well-known writer and comedian Jiří Červený, whose great-grandfather was the famous Hradec Králové manufacturer and inventor of brass musical instruments Václav František Červený, was born in 1925 in Prague. She started at the Osvobozené divadlo, where after the Second World War she was the first Duck in the musical Divotvorný hrnec Voskovec and Werich. “Jiří Voskovec was a director, and an excellent one, he was the head of everything, while Jan Werich was the heart, a clown in the highest sense of the word,” she recalled.

She also starred in a movie, for example in the comedy The Last of the Mohicans with Jaroslav Marvan. She performed in the Karlín theater with Oldřich Nový and Vlasta Burian, recorded gramophone records, and gave concerts with Karel Vlach’s orchestra. And she also studied privately, in classical singing with Professor Robert Rosner, in acting with Lydia Wegenerová.

After February 1948, however, her family was declared hostile to the communist regime. Her husband, the owner of a chocolate factory, fled across the border illegally because he was a so-called class enemy. “He had no choice but to run away. He wanted me to leave with him, but I was already in love with the theater. We never saw each other again,” recalled Soňa Červená. In addition, her mother died under unclear circumstances after police interrogation.

In 1951, somewhat surprisingly, the singer left for a seven-year engagement at the Brno Opera with the boss Zdenek Chalabala. From Brno, she moved to Germany in 1958, to the Berlin State Opera, where she was engaged until January 1962. At that time, Soňa Červená emigrated through the last open crossing from East Berlin to West Germany after the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Soňa Červená in 2016 during the debate at the Colors of Ostrava festival. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň

Her home stage then became the opera in Frankfurt am Main, from where she continued her career at most important European and overseas opera stages and festivals. She performed in La Scala in Milan, in the Grand Opera in Paris, in Barcelona, ​​at festivals in Glyndebourne, Wexford and Edinburgh, as well as on a number of American stages. She sang for 11 seasons at the San Francisco Opera, appearing seven times in Bayreuth. “I forbade myself to miss it then, but I indulged my longing for my Vltava and my Czech language,” she said about emigration.

In addition to her role in Carmen, she became famous as Countess Geschwitz in Berg’s Lulu and Gluck’s Orpheus, for which she received the title of chamber singer in Berlin in 1961. The same title was also awarded to her by Frankfurt am Main in 1987 for her excellent performance and long-term representation.

She also established herself as an excellent singer of Handel, Gluck and Wagner, but gravitated towards the music of the 20th century. The connection of her voice with the works of Leoš Janáček was particularly significant, especially in Her Shepherdess, Káta Kabanová or the cycle of songs Zápisník zmízéleho. She taught soloists Janáček Czech and also translated Janáček’s works into German and French so that singers who sing them phonetically in Czech would know what they were talking about. From 1989, she worked at the Thalia theater in Hamburg.

“I thought that no one would recognize me here. But people accepted me with open arms. I was surprised to find that people not only from my generation remember me, but also younger people,” she said after returning to her homeland in 1989.

Soňa Červená in the 1914 production directed by Robert Wilson at the National Theater in Prague. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba

Later, she also collaborated with musicians Tom Waits and Lou Reed, but mainly devoted herself to drama and opera in the Czech Republic.

She appeared on the boards of the Prague National Theater for the first time in 2002 in Janáček’s opera Osud, in Hradec Klicper’s Theater she played the main role in Durrenmatt’s play The Return of the Old Lady, for the Kolowrat Theater in 2008 she staged the character of Milada Horáková in the musical dramatic fresco Tomorrow will come… In 2010 she performed in the production of Čapko’s play The Makropulos Affair, prepared by the American director and artist Robert Wilson. In 2013, she played in the opera Toufar at the Kolowrat Theater.

At the same time, the singer was one of the personalities to whom the justice system complied in 2010 in the matter of deletion from the list of collaborators of the StB. She had a personal relationship with Soňa Červená since the 1950s, appearing in it under the pseudonym Fialová. According to some sources, the East German Stasi tried unsuccessfully to get her to cooperate. But Červená denied this and repeatedly stated that she emigrated precisely because of pressure from the StB. “I couldn’t live or sing in unfreedom. And I didn’t want to be laughed at by State Security. That’s why I emigrated with a heavy heart and lived – and sang – for thirty years abroad,” she once said about it.

In 2004, she received the Thália prize as a special award from the college, in 2011, the Artis Bohemiae Amicis medal from the hands of the Minister of Culture, and on October 28, 2013, President Miloš Zeman awarded her the Medal of Merit. On the occasion of her ninetieth birthday in 2015, the then Minister of Culture Daniel Herman from the KDU-ČSL awarded her the title of Lady of Czech Culture.

Four years ago, the singer received a certificate for the naming of planet No. 26897, which now bears the name Červená. In January 2019, she received the Classic Prague Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Smetana Hall of the Prague Municipal House.

Her colorful life was recorded in 2017 in the documentary Red by director Olga Sommerová. In addition to all this, Soňa Červená wrote the memorial books Stýskání zázáno and Stýskání zazehnáno, as well as the publication Můj Václav, in which she followed the life of her great-grandfather and his company in Hradec Králové.

Video: I fear the return of totality, Soňa Červená said