Opera star Kristina Mkhitaryan: ‘I’m so lucky. I get to die all over the world’

As she returns to Covent Garden in Eugene Onegin, the soprano talks about discovering opera aged seven and why nothing beats a tragic climax

Kristina Mkhitaryan is starring in a new Covent Garden production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin
Kristina Mkhitaryan is starring in a new Covent Garden production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin Andrew Crowley

“I love, love, love to die on stage,” says Kristina Mkhitaryan, swooning dramatically from side to side and clunking her ebony curls down on to the table between us, then bobbing up with a grin. At 37, the Russian soprano who has wowed critics with the “dark beauty”, “pearl drop trills” and “seismic eruptions” of her voice has the beguiling demeanour of both an old soul and a playful child. 

Although she lives in Moscow with her geologist husband and their two small children, she has made regular appearances at the Royal Opera House since her 2017/18 season debut as Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen. When we meet backstage there, she’s initially businesslike in a crisp, grey suit but gets giddy the moment she begins to relive her favourite stage deaths.

“As Mimì [in La bohème],” she sighs, “the moment is going down, down, down, on that one note into her ending.” And as Violetta in La traviata? “It’s reaching up to God from a woman who started Act I with a voice like champagne. By the end, she has lost that grand life and so I must lose my grand voice. All the technique and big sound I have studied must go until I am just breathing there on that stage…” she clutches her hands to her chest, closes her eyes and inhales in staccato snatches. “Those women’s last breaths should be felt in the bodies in the audience. It’s always – ahhh! – magic.”

It is Violetta that was Mkhitaryan’s calling card. Reviewing her performance at Glyndebourne in 2017, The Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen drew comparisons with Anna Netrebko and praised her musical imagination. He wrote: “In the first act she sparkles gamely through the diamantine coloratura, in the second she rises to noble moral grandeur, and in the third, she sinks to a poignant dying fall.”

Mkhitaryan is in London to discuss her lead role in a new Covent Garden production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Tatyana is a romantic, bookish girl who naively throws herself at the hero in the first act, only to be rejected in a rather patronising way. “I like strong women, and my first idea of Tatyana was as this too sweet-sweet girl…” she strikes a comically angelic pose and makes a sickly little sigh, then screws up her face in disgust. “But then I thought about how strong she becomes by the end of the story. She becomes a woman who says ‘No’ to the man she loves, and that is very powerful.”

The “cool, modern” production of American director Ted Huffman also freed Mkhitaryan “to feel the emotion in a more natural way. 

Big emotions: Kristina Mkhitaryan as Micaela in the Royal Opera's Carmen in 2018
Big emotions: Kristina Mkhitaryan as Micaela in the Royal Opera’s Carmen in 2018 Alastair Muir

“Opera is already not a natural way of expressing yourself,” she explains. “So I am always trying to make my singing more naturalistic.” She compares this to the way traditional Shakespearean actors declaim the verse while most modern performers aim to make the lines more conversational. “You have to sing the lines not like: ‘Oooh-wah! I’m an operah singah’ but like ‘I am a normal girl with feelings big enough for an opera house,’” she explains.

Her co-star – Canadian baritone Gordon Bintner in the title role – praises the way Mkhitaryan infuses each line of Pushkin’s 1833 novel with “inspiring passion”. But working with non-Russian speakers has made her aware of “how difficult our language can be. We have a lot of sounds like: ‘TKsss!’, ‘Pttshh!’, ‘Kthzz!’” She camps up the hiss and crunch of the consonants like a malfunctioning steam engine.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine back in February 2022, some cultural commentators called for a boycott of Russian artists and the music of long-dead Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky. However, she sidesteps questions about politics to stress that: “My singing, Tchaikovsky’s music, all opera is all about love. Not just the love between the man and woman characters on stage. But love of music, love of the world, love for humanity, and this love should not be stopped… it means…” she runs out of English words, makes a heart shape with her fingers and holds it out towards me like a gift. “It is this love I felt when I first started singing at the age of three and I had no idea of this career…”

Opera is indeed an unlikely career for the child of a single mother, born in the south-Russian port city of Novorossiysk. “It’s a beautiful place, Novorossiysk,” says Mkhitaryan. “Sunny and by the seaside. More like your English idea of Italy than of cold Russia! But there is no opera house there or for miles.” 

Calling card: Mkhitaryan as Violetta in Glyndebourne's La traviata in 2017
Calling card: Mkhitaryan as Violetta in Glyndebourne’s La traviata in 2017 Robbie Jack

Opera wasn’t played in the home where she and her elder brother lived with their dressmaker mother and grandparents.” Her estranged Armenian father left the family when she was a baby, but she says she inherited her love of singing and her striking dark looks from him. “I was always different-looking, not your classic Russian blonde.” 

“I was singing from the age of three,” says Mkhitaryan, “At seven, I first heard opera music when a concert by [Spanish soprano] Montserrat Caballé came on TV. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard – like: WOW. I said ‘Mama! I would like to sing like this woman!’” She shrugs, aware that the sound isn’t for everyone. “So many people find opera loud and boring. To me, from that first moment, it was my life.”

By chance, an opera singer had just moved to Novorossiysk. “She was an Armenian fleeing a dangerous situation in Baku. She went to Moscow looking for a job and they gave her an apartment in my town and suggested she start a class there.” The diva was shocked when Mkhitaryan’s mother appeared on her doorstep with such a young girl. “She said seven was too early for this kind of music and that she had no idea what to do with babies,” recalls Mkhitaryan. “But I started singing O sole mio – with my voice that was not like a baby. She said: ‘Oh! OK. This is a different matter. We shall try.’”

Within a few years, Mkhitaryan had won all the competitions in the region and, at 12, was offered a place to study at the Galina Vishnevskaya Theatre Studio Moscow. She later became a member of the Bolshoi Theatre’s Young Artist Programme.

'So many people find opera loud and boring. To me, from that first moment, it was my life'
‘So many people find opera loud and boring. To me, from that first moment, it was my life’ 2024 Ian Hippolyte

“The move was very difficult at first for my mum,” she says. “She had to leave her home, her parents and my brother behind. He is very clever – a physicist now in Moscow, full of ideas about the cosmos – so he had to stay behind to finish school. My mum found work in Moscow, but it was lonely.” 

Little Mkhitaryan had a two-hour commute to school which began at 8am. “I would come home late in the dark and my mum was always there waiting at the bus station for me. She made all my costumes and sacrificed a lot so I could make the best of my talent.” 

The singer smiles, softly. “I would do the same for my own babies. My son is three and my daughter is two. She is already singing and sits with me when I rehearse. Obviously she can’t make the right sounds yet. But she listens very seriously and she copies the shapes I make with my mouth – it is wonderful.” 

This season, in addition to playing Tatyana, she’ll be singing Rachmaninov’s The Bells with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, appearing as Massenet’s Manon for Vienna State Opera and returning to the role of  Mimì for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Is she looking forward to all that dying again? “Oh yes!” she says, clapping her hands in delight. “I am so lucky. I get to die all over the world now!” 


Eugene Onegin is in rep at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 from Sept 24-Oct 10; rbo.org.uk