Interview: Cheryl Barker & Peter Coleman-Wright, Arabella
Alexandra Coghlan meets the real life husband and wife singing Arabella
Husband and wife opera singers keen to attract new listeners
“It was a joy to stab Peter each night!” insists the laughing woman across the table from me, discussing her husband of more than 20 years while he sits in smiling agreement beside her. Not perhaps the most conventional expression of marital devotion, but far from being some sadistic private ritual, this nightly practice represents just another day at the office for Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright.
The life of an opera singer is unusual at the best of times, but when you are married to a co-star it can verge on the surreal. With international operatic careers that have progressed in parallel since their first encounter in a school musical, these two Australian singers have found themselves in the privileged position of playing opposite one another in opera houses across the world.
While it was a 2002 production of Tosca that required the regular stabbings, their latest mutual outing, as lovers Arabella and Mandryka in Richard Strauss’s Arabella at the Sydney Opera House, sees them united in rather less hostile fashion. “This time it’s a joy to go home with your leading man,” explains Barker, “which doesn’t happen too often as usually the baritone is the bad guy! I look at him and I fall in love all over again. But my heart does break for him in this opera, I have to keep reminding myself that we are just characters and that it’s not really him with those tears in his eyes.”
Opera Australia’s current production of Arabella is the first time that Strauss’s lushly complex opera has ever been staged in this country, and promises a visual spectacle every bit as romantic as the music. “Everything’s going to be total elegant Vienna of the 1860s, with sumptuous costumes”, says Coleman-Wright. “It’ll be very gorgeous to look at. There’s snow in the first act, and a panorama with the city lights in the second.”
Despite growing audiences, and the overwhelming success of recent productions at the Opera House, both singers are still passionately keen to attract listeners that extend beyond the “musical mink”. “How many times do you hear a person say, ‘I can’t stand opera’ and so you ask which ones they’ve seen and you hear, ‘Oh no, I’ve never actually been to see one,’” Coleman-Wright says. “It’s that that I would love to break.”
