When the soprano Elza van den Heever was hired to sing the role of the Empress in Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, she was elated. It was a dream role — the kind that could cement her reputation as a leading singer.
But van den Heever was also nervous. She has struggled with dyslexia since her childhood, in South Africa. And “Frau” is one of opera’s most daunting works, not least because of its dense libretto.
“I just sort of assumed in life that I would never be able to sing this kind of complicated music,” she said. “I knew this would be my Mount Everest.”
For three years, van den Heever followed a rigorous routine, learning the “Frau” music five to 12 measures at a time and studying the text “as if I were a toddler learning a new language,” she said.
Then the pandemic hit, and the Met’s revival of “Frau” was called off.
“I was devastated,” she said, “100-percent gutted.”
Finally, van den Heever is getting her moment. “Frau” was rescheduled, and is now onstage at the Met through Dec. 19. Van den Heever has won praise for her shimmering voice and seamless virtuosity, and this run of “Frau” has been hailed by critics as a must-see opera.
Van den Heever, 45, who lives in France, has vaulted to the heights of the opera world with intensely emotional performances in Strauss’s “Elektra,” “Salome,” and in other works that reflect unusual versatility, like Handel’s “Rodelinda,” Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Berg’s “Wozzeck.”
Offstage, she has grappled with the complexities of dyslexia. Scores often look like a “sea of black” to her, she said. She sometimes struggles to understand changes in tempo and key on the page; “I have to figure it out like a math problem,” she said. And she cannot sight read — a fact that she once hid, worried it might hurt her career.
Still, she no longer sees dyslexia as a hindrance — just a different way of learning. Van den Heever color-codes her scores and structures her schedule so that she can spend years preparing for each role.
“A dyslexic brain makes you think outside the box in a weird way,” she said. “I don’t look at it as a handicap anymore.”
The conductor Simone Young, a frequent collaborator, said that van den Heever’s intense preparation had helped make her a leading lyric soprano, with enough time to “learn every nuance, every shading of each word.”
Van den Heever, Young added, also has a steely determination. “She has this incredible beauty and calm, but there’s a fragility there and a vulnerability there that just draws you in,” Young said. “She’s her own toughest critic, and she works herself very hard. But when she comes out to perform, it’s beautiful and it’s honest, which is why it’s just so overwhelming sometimes.”
A triplet born to an actress and a filmmaker in Johannesburg, van den Heever aspired to be a chef. But when friends and neighbors heard her sing in school choirs, they were stunned.
“They would say, ‘My God, she has to sing,’” van den Heever recalled.
She began to take voice lessons when she was 16, but still had culinary dreams. Her teacher told her that she could always cook, but she would not always be able to sing.
When she was 18, van den Heever enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and started her career as a mezzo-soprano. She began transitioning to soprano roles at 25, after the veteran mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick told her at an audition, “You are going to be a dramatic soprano.”
Van den Heever, who felt in her bones that she was a mezzo, was in disbelief. Zajick, sitting at a piano, warmed her up to a high G.
“The tears just spewed out of eyeballs,” van den Heever said. “I was so shocked and so stunned by this discovery that I had actual high notes.”
Van den Heever performed her first soprano role — Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”— a few years later, in 2007, at San Francisco Opera. Soon, she had invitations from top opera companies, including Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Bavarian State Opera. She made her Met debut in 2012, as Queen Elizabeth I in a new production of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.”
Christine Goerke, a fellow soprano and van den Heever’s colleague in a revival of “Elektra” at the Met in 2018, said that when she heard van den Heever as Elizabeth, “I was absolutely blown away by her astounding ability to inhabit a character, both vocally and dramatically.” She added: “It’s rare to meet someone who is so willing to throw their entire self — mind, heart and soul — into the character that they become onstage.”
As van den Heever’s career took off, she was largely successful in managing her dyslexia, relying on muscle memory, diligence and creativity. She focuses first on learning the pitches, fragment by fragment. Then she adds the words. Sometimes, mastering five measures can take an entire day.
At times, she has run into trouble. While rehearsing a new work in 2006, with the conductor Kent Nagano in San Francisco, she panicked when she learned there had been last-minute changes to the score.
”I kind of had a heart attack,” she said. “It was like the worst thing that ever happened.”
In 2022, van den Heever went public with her struggle, and said that she didn’t want other musicians with dyslexia to feel they could not succeed.
“Here is the thing: I am dyslexic,” she wrote on Instagram. “It’s not a secret, but I remain to this day embarrassed about it as it affects my interaction with my profession. I’m a professional musician who has real trouble learning music, let alone difficult music. I go through life feeling like a total fraud.”
Her repertoire at the Met would say otherwise. After “Frau,” she will be back on the company’s stage to star in “Salome,” another signature Strauss work.
“She’s getting the adulation from the audiences and from backstage that she deserves,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “She’s nailed it.”
Despite the pressures of a singer’s career, van den Heever has found time to return to cooking. During the pandemic, she started baking opera-themed cakes, like a “Salome”-inspired vanilla buttercream cake in the shape of John the Baptist’s head.
At the Met’s annual bake-off this month, she won best in show with a replica of Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a conceptual artwork made of a banana taped to a wall, which recently sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million. Her version was a banana and peanut praline cake with toasted Swiss meringue buttercream.
Cooking and baking, van den Heever said, provided an escape after long rehearsal days.
“There is nothing that gives me more pleasure,” she said. “Except maybe singing.”
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