Soprano Veronica Anușca will perform the title role in the opera "Lucia di Lamermoor", on Wednesday, the 12^th of March 2025, at the Bucharest National Opera.

Ms. Veronica Anușca, you will perform the title role in Gaetano Donizetti's opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" at the Bucharest National Opera, the next performance will take place on Wednesday, the 12^th of March 2025. What aspects did you have in mind in building the role of Lucia in collaboration with director Andrei Șerban?

I considered the vision of Andrei Șerban, which I could not ignore, even if the role involves a very heavy belcanto score. I had to incorporate into the character the family drama, the drama that the role implies and the way Lucia is always forced to choose and accept what others want and not what she would like.

As well as being a very demanding role in terms of the vocal score and the dramatic implications, the directing also demands you physically.

It's an extraordinarily difficult role, I would say the most difficult role I've played in my career so far. I've been on the opera stage for almost 15 years, and I've never been confronted with a role that has demanded so much of me in terms of stage movement. However, I really enjoy it. I prepare very conscientiously every time, and by that, I mean the physical preparation, I even have to do some serious gym work before a performance of Lucia di Lamermoor. I would like the audience to know that I have prepared extraordinarily, physically, as well as in other aspects, and what's more, Andrei Șerban has considered our possibilities. He never made us do anything that we couldn't do comfortably. Even if people say he took us to extremes, it's not true, he didn't take us to any extremes. We chose to respond in the affirmative to the proposals he made, because he helped us to step out of our comfort zone and give something of ourselves on stage that we could not have achieved normally. This is the reality. I, for the stage play I do when I play Lucia, I can say that I have been ready since I was a child. I swung on the swing made by my father in the meadows in the mountains of Neamț County and, yes, I experienced the adrenaline rush as a child. For me, it is a pleasure and a joy to be on that swing, which everyone says is terribly hard, but for me that is the simplest, most beautiful and most relaxing part of the opera, I would say. It's harder to go from point A to point B and do that continuously, the whole opera, that's harder. But being on the swing, that's not hard. I can say the same thing about climbing and beam; I have seven years of rhythmic gymnastics as a child and I'm somewhat comfortable on it because I've trained. If I wasn't, I probably wouldn't have gotten into Andrei Serban's Lucia. So, no, Andrei Șerban is not a terrorist. We accepted these challenges.

How do you see the challenge of always bringing something new to a role you've played before?

This is not necessarily a challenge, because we as artists are trained from a young age to improve, always to be better than we were last time and we are never fully satisfied with our performances, we always find something that didn't go well, there is always something that we didn't like or something that could have been better and then it's not hard to bring something new, because that's what we want, to be always better and more convincing on stage.

What aspects do you consider when preparing a character?

To be as real as possible. I want the character I play to be a part of me. Every time I try to bring out an aspect of who I am. It's often difficult. As for the role of Lucia, the biggest challenge came from the director Andrei Șerban who brought to the surface some aspects of who I am that were very hidden in me, for example, I was never a victim, I was always a winner, I always fought and I never gave in, I did not accept the psychological games of those around me, I went and did what I wanted. Well, with this character I can't be a winner, I'm constrained by the score and the director's vision to act in a certain way and that's a huge challenge.

How did audiences receive Lucia's performance? I know it premiered in 2017, but was then revived in 2021 with a few directorial changes.

Indeed, some in the audience already knew what it was all about and then, having prepared from home, they were pleasantly surprised to see that this production could be staged in our country at the level at which it was staged at the Paris Opera. The second reason was that those who didn't know the subject matter and the specifics of this production, those who were expecting a Donizettian opera involving belcanto, beautiful costumes, quiet action on stage, were in for a big shock to see that this was not the performance they were attending. There were friends, loved ones and those who knew us and told us that they were stressed from start to finish for our safety and couldn't actually enjoy the music, but there were others who needed this dose of adrenaline and who really enjoyed it and for whom it was a release. To experience all that adrenaline is like being on a roller coaster. So it can convey a lot of feelings.