It’s a temptation to think of the “original” voice (which is to say, the beginning-of-career voice) as the “true” voice. But that’s almost never the case. Everything that’s ever happened to even a young, lightly trained voice has affected it. When a young singer of freshness, freedom, and executional brilliance emerges, we understandably think of what we hear as the “natural,” “unspoiled” instrument. But in Netrebko’s case, the voice I heard sailing and bouncing through Lyudmilla’s Cavatina and its moderately paced cabaletta had already been through training at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, her “discovery” and subsequent mentoring by Valery Gergiev and the musical preparation staff at the Kirov, her Kirov and San Francisco debuts, and further mentoring in the latter company’s Merola Program. All this input, or any single ingredient of it, may or may not have been in accordance with her “true” voice—the voice of her individual capacities brought to their ideal development—but in any event did not impede her great success.

If you listen to Netrebko’s Lyudmilla, I’m sure you’ll like it, and I’m sure you liked it even more if you saw it, since the combination of her physical beauty, animated personality, and emotive energy would have put the performance over even if less well sung. But the singing itself had great beauty and elasticity, and popped up to my high-and-far seat with the distance-canceling presence that is one of the great joys of operatic engagement. I also noted that, as high sopranos go, her voice had more body and roundness and, at times, touches of a darker shade, than most. (These qualities are more prominent on the contemporaneous recording than they were in the theatre.) During that same Kirov stand in 1998, she was a winning Louisa in Prokofiev’s magical Betrothal in a Monastery—a much less flashy role than Lyudmilla, but one that showed her ease and freedom with a more modern style of operatic acting.

In her first Met assignment, she was a moving Natasha (War and Peace), though I recall thinking that she had already opted for a darker, chubbier vocal set, and was at moments pushing through it. In her subsequent appearances here that I’ve attended, she has worked through a series of major challenges of the Western repertory—Gilda, the Puritani Elvira, Norina, Lucia, Manon, Lady Macbeth—^(I)with varying degrees of success by the strictest artistic standards (audiences always respond), her skills sometimes not perfectly matched with the assignments, her emotional commitment sometimes betrayed by misguided direction, but her special vocal, temperamental, and histrionic gifts always evident. Yet always, the thought: if this voice is going to stay with its “original” indicated type, it needs a clearer center and keener intonational purity, a touch more alacrity, to be quite in the very highest class. The Sutherland solution is not available to her. And if she is going to try to adapt to heavier repertory, she needs to access her full potential calibration by opening up a stronger chest connection, then solving the balance problems that arise from doing so.