A Soprano Comes Home
When I reach Corinne Winters over Zoom to talk about her career and her upcoming HGO debut in Il trittico, we both have to laugh—at the simple joy of seeing one another, and our shared amazement at the full-circle moment that’s brought us here.
We both remember it like it was yesterday: the two of us were young artists together at a summer festival, fast friends and roommates confiding our operatic dreams, when one day, something unexpected happened. Midway through the festival’s La bohème run, the soprano performing Mimì got sick. Suddenly, the cover—Corinne—found herself stepping into rehearsals, commanding the role that would become her signature.
It wasn’t just her talent, I tell her, that blew me away that summer. It was also her bravery. But most of all, it was this otherworldly quality she had—the way she revealed herself to be a vessel for Puccini’s sublime music. She seemed to tap into it, so that it poured from her like light.
Corinne nods in recognition. “I have a prayer, or a mantra, that I say every time before leaving the dressing room, which is, I leave my ego here, and I’m going out. Ego, you stay here, and I’m going out to be a channel for the music.”
Seeing her first Mimì at the festival, I had no doubt that she was doing what she was born to do. And the whole world saw that too earlier this year, when Corinne bowed at the Metropolitan Opera as Mimì and—of course—triumphed, giving what New York Classical Review called “a star-making performance.”
The truth is, Corinne has been a star since her 2013 English National Opera debut as Violetta in La traviata. “When I made my debut at ENO and was heard by Europe, they all embraced me immediately,” Winters remembers. “I didn’t have to fight for anything. And I’ve just always been of the belief—in life and in career—that when effort is met by an open door, that’s the right place for you.”
Originally from Maryland, Corinne went on to build her career abroad, performing major roles with the great European houses, exploring her Ukrainian heritage, delving into the Slavic repertoire, collaborating with visionary directors like Barrie Kosky and Dmitri Tcherniakov—and growing into the exact artist she was destined to become. As Opera News recently wrote: “Any account of current European operatic stardom would foreground the soprano Corinne Winters.”
Now Corinne, who resides in Paris, is making her triumphant return to the States for a series of bucket-list engagements including the three leading women across each piece of Puccini’s Il trittico, as she makes her long-awaited HGO debut.
“It’s a huge dream fulfilled,” she says. “To come back, and for my U.S. contracts to be Mimì at the Met, a full Trittico in Houston, and Four Last Songs with the Chicago Symphony—it’s like, this is it. I’m only coming back to the States for my absolute dreams that I will remember on my deathbed. And that’s pretty damn cool.”
Corinne is excited that HGO is mounting Trittico’s three panels together, as Puccini intended. Gianni Schicchi, she says, is the perfect antidote to the heaviness of Il tabarro and Suor Angelica. “You go through all this pain, and then it’s like, life is one big joke. Schicchi is fun, and just youthful and joyful, and an amazing and much-needed button on the end of the evening. And I love the fact that you walk on stage as a completely different woman in each of those acts,” she says.
Giorgetta, Angelica, and Lauretta: it is no small achievement to perform all three in one outing. Corinne’s family will be there for this milestone moment, she shares, cheering her on inside the Brown Theater as she joins the elite group of great U.S. sopranos, led by Teresa Stratas and Patricia Racette, who have pulled off the same demanding feat.
“There aren’t many people who have done it,” she says. “And to perform these roles in America, at this amazing theater, with Patrick Summers in his last full season, and all these other amazing artists doing multiple roles—it’s going to be something special.”
I couldn’t agree more.
