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fromClaus-Jürgen Göpfert
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conclude
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Ingrid El Sigai: The soprano, theater maker and speaker loves diversity.
November is working hard on its bad image this lunchtime. Low-hanging, gray wisps of cloud cover the tops of the bank towers. Ingrid El Sigai comes to the agreed meeting point on the museum bank with a scooter. For seven years, the practical vehicle has been helping her to get around Frankfurt’s constantly congested streets. Movement, constant change and a wide variety of challenges shape the life of the soprano. Because she is not only present at the festivals of classical music and in theaters, but she also works as a spokesperson for HR, ZDF, 3sat, Arte and others. Heads a musical theater for children, the “Kleine Bühne Bad Homburg”, is familiar to an audience of millions as the Saturday lottery fair from the television screen. “I love diversity,” the 54-year-old says casually during the hours we met.
At no point in her life has the Heidelberg native firmly committed to just one profession. “Every day is different for me, that’s exciting.” Over time, she has created a network, switching between genres seemingly effortlessly. And now the corona pandemic is bringing the indefatigable to an abrupt standstill. Or not? “When the second lockdown came, I had a real mental sag for a few days,” she admits. Apparently no more opportunities to perform, no chance to be reflected in the reactions of an audience. In the meantime she has also reinterpreted this “need”, as she calls it, as a virtue. Sing in front of people on the grounds of old people’s homes, only accompanied by a keyboard player. She immediately won the Lord Mayor of Bad Homburg, Alexander Hetjes (CDU), as patron for the tour, which includes 40 stations in the Rhine-Main area until December. The encounter with the elderly touches and moves the artist. She sings old folk songs with them, such as “Thoughts are free” or “No beautiful country”. Dance with them. See how the old suddenly burst into tears. How demented people remember and sing along to the songs of their youth. Feel the loneliness, see the very different accommodation in the homes. “Those who have a lot of money can afford good care, but if you are poor, old age is even worse for you.” El Sigai speaks bluntly and gets to the point without much ado.
We equip ourselves with one of the permanent identifiers of the Corona period, the filled coffee mug, and find a place in the museum park for an undisturbed conversation. El Sigai’s father is an Egyptian-born surgeon who came to Germany as a young man to study. Her German mother fought for this relationship and pushed it through against considerable resistance. “She stole her passport at home, ran off to Italy with my father, they took the ferry from Genoa to Egypt, and there they got married.”
Daughter Ingrid was quite an outsider at high school. She was not interested in rock music like everyone else, but in classical opera. With a school friend whose mother was an opera singer and whose father was on stage as an actor, she sang duets from operas, such as the letter duet from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”. “My schoolmates laughed at me all the time.” But the youngster was magically drawn to classical singing. She studied solo singing at the music academies in Würzburg and Frankfurt, and took private lessons with the legendary soprano Hildegard Zadek. Her parents reacted “pretty cool”.
To person:
Ingrid El Sigai, born on February 17, 1966 in Heidelberg, studied musicology at the Frankfurt Goethe University, solo singing at the music academies in Frankfurt and Würzburg. She was a student of the soprano Hilde Zadek.
El Sigai performs at music festivals, plays at the Frankfurt Chamber Opera and the Stalburg Theater and has realized his own music productions.
Since 2006 she is a lecturer at the Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt, and since 2011 artistic director of the Small Opera Bad Homburg. (jg)
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Before the second lockdown, El Sigai was on stage for the Frankfurt Chamber Opera in Palmengarten in mid-August, singing the title role in “Lola Blau” by the Austrian composer Georg Kreisler. A challenging game, an almost two-hour show of strength, which she mastered brilliantly and with which she repeatedly applauded the audience. The story of the singer Lola Blau, who had to go into exile in 1938 after the occupation of Austria by the Germans, is “an incredibly great piece,” she says simply. And speaks enthusiastically of Kreisler’s “settlement” with Austria. He and his parents had to emigrate to the United States at the age of 16, and the Jewish family was persecuted. “After the Nazi era, he fought for a long time to regain Austrian citizenship, but did not get it.” During her performance, El Sigai dominated the stage of the concert shell in the Palmengarten, for which she initially had “great respect” because of its dimensions. would have. For her, the role of Lola Blau is also an example of how the boundaries between light and serious music, i.e. entertaining and serious music, are blurring. “I don’t care about this separation,” she says curtly. The singer also does not want to join the choir of free artists who feel degraded by the renewed closure of the theaters due to the corona pandemic. Certainly the decision of the politicians to classify the opera as a leisure activity is “unfortunate”. But they do not believe that this is done out of disregard, rather out of ignorance. In fact, something must be done to reduce the number of infections.
The artist seems serious at this point. Forced inaction is a difficult subject for them. Usually she doesn’t even take a vacation. “I don’t allow myself the time to do it,” she says openly, and adds: “I feel guilty about myself.” Since 2011 she has also been artistic director of the “Little Opera” in Bad Homburg, Opera Fabrics wants to make it accessible to children. Again and again she is on stage there, most recently in September as Pinocchio. Is it even possible to calm down? She can also do idleness, she says defiantly. Then cook them or invite friends. But after a while she gets bored.
She has just written two plays for children. Does it take iron self-discipline to live like this? The theater maker hesitates at the word. “It’s an addiction,” she then says and laughs: “As an artist, you always have a blast!” She believes that coincidences also control her life. In 1998, for example, the ARD was urgently looking for a successor to the blonde television lottery fair Karin Tietze-Ludwig, who was retiring. For many, the drawing of the lottery numbers is still a high mass for television. El Sigai took part in auditions. “They were looking for a blonde,” she says with a laugh. In the end, the blonde Franziska Reichenbacher became the new lottery fairy, while the black-haired El Sigai is her vacation replacement.
The gray sky over the Museumsufer does not want to give way. We wait in vain for the warming sun. The soprano speaks of the great operatic roles, in Verdi for example, for which she is not vocally suitable. But she likes the sadness, the melancholy, the sadness that often emanates from these arias. “I am a melancholy person sometimes,” she says. If you learn to direct these moods, “then the melancholy cannot harm you”. The artist knows self-doubt. Again and again, sometimes during the performance, she gets the feeling: “You have screwed that up.” In contrast, she sets “the great moments” of success, in which one “becomes one” with oneself and the audience. But that doesn’t happen so often.
Ingrid El Sigai says all of this almost ready to print, with many years of experience as a speaker on radio and television. With her dark and somewhat rough voice, she has even refined telephone hotlines, for example for Deutsche Bahn. For her, all of this is part of her independence, which she definitely does not want to give up.
She wants to remain a free singer, a free artist. At the same time, she is aware that her artistic world will no longer be the same after the corona pandemic. “The theater is currently changing completely,” she says, citing as an example the oval stage structure that was built in the Frankfurt Künstlerhaus Mousonturm as a reaction to Corona. A theater building within a theater building, “great” in their eyes.
The coffee mugs are empty. The next gig in a nursing home is due in two days.
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